If
Orwell’s “1984” is a cautionary tale about
what we in the capitalist West largely
avoided, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” is
largely about what we got — a consumerist,
post-God happyland in which people readily
stave off aging, jet away on exotic vacations
and procreate via test tubes. They have access
to “Feelies” similar to IMAX 3-D movies,
no-strings-attached sex, anti-anxiety pills
and abortion on demand. They also venerate a
dead high-tech genius, saying “Ford help him”
in honor of Henry Ford just as today we
practically murmur “In Jobs We Trust.”
In
many ways the book, which was published 80 years
ago this winter, has become sci-non-fi. It is
still developing, taking on additional richness
according to the times in which we read it.
“Brave
New World” is a satire set in a unified and
peaceful 26th-century “World State” in which a
frustrated London loner named Bernard Marx feels
unease with the serene functionality of the
ingeniously well-ordered society around him.
After a chance encounter on vacation, he brings
to London a Shakespeare-loving “savage” named
John from outside the tech bubble (he grew up
untouched by modernity on an Indian reservation
in New Mexico) who becomes even more distraught
by what has happened to mankind.
The
book isn’t nearly as political or as outspokenly
dire as “1984,” so much so that it’s easy to
picture a young reader saying, “What is supposed
to be so bad about all this?” Unlike in the book
by Orwell (Huxley’s pupil at Eton), in which
independence of mind earns you torture and
brainwashing, Huxley’s freethinkers are
threatened with expulsion to a small island
(Iceland) — but the joke turns out to be that
this isn’t really a punishment because all the
cool artists and original thinkers wind up
together and are much happier in their own
hipster enclave. Iceland: the sixth borough.
Like
Orwell, Huxley can easily be claimed by left as
well as right. Take his jibes at the
blockbuster-y “Feelies” (a play on 1932’s
cutting-edge “talkies”), which in addition to
spectacle also offer scents as well as gadgets
on the armrests to stimulate touch. The Feelies
are a rush of experience meant to provide
shallow diversion for the lowest common
denominator rather than art that elevates, and
if you think Hollywood movies are dumb now, try
not to think about marketplace pressures a few
years hence, when more business is coming from
China than anywhere else.
People
who don’t speak English want explosions, not
exposition.
Huxley
also foresaw a disturbing partnership between
the state and capitalism but didn’t anticipate
how little need for government collusion
sophisticated marketers would need to reorder
society. In “Brave New World,” the state has
suppressed all simple sports because they don’t
require lots of expensive equipment to keep the
economy humming. Instead, it relentlessly hypes
complicated tech-y activities such as
“electromagnetic golf.” A couple of generations
ago, kids might have bought one baseball glove
and one bat that would last for years. Today
they instead spend hundreds of dollars on Xbox
360s and games that quickly become boring and
demand to be replaced with upgraded versions.
Thanks
to subliminal messages repeated thousands of
times in nurseries while kids sleep, the “Brave
New World” characters grow up conditioned to
accept a disposable society in which everyone is
always hungry for the latest thing and simply
discards the old. Huxley would be surprised to
see that no such indoctrination is necessary to
make people throw away an iPhone that was state
of the art three years ago and line up overnight
to get a slightly improved version.
Mustapha
Mond, the “Controller” who serves as the book’s
villain, suppresses old books but perhaps
unnecessarily. Think about how publishing works
in the age of the Kindle and the Nook:
Manufacturers and booksellers no longer have any
incentive to try to get you to buy pre-copyright
books published before 1922. If a fad suddenly
developed for, say, Charles Dickens, there’d be
no money to be made because readers could simply
download his e-books, free, from Project
Gutenberg or some other public-interest site.
Dickens’ bicentennial just passed, by the way:
remember the big marketing push to take
advantage? Neither do I. Amazon won’t be
reserving promotional space on its homepage for
e-books that earn nothing and it’ll be long
before the 26th century when all the classics
fade into what the literary critic Clive James
called “Cultural Amnesia.” Soon the only readers
of these books will be forced ones (i.e.
students) but in the age of Twitter how much
longer will that last?
Surely,
though, Huxley got the class determinism wrong?
He envisioned mass-produced, lab-developed
fetuses being manipulated so that the resulting
babies would possess the ideal intelligence
level for their future jobs -- just enough to
execute, not too much to feel frustrated or
bored.
Again,
even without a central scheme, and five hundred
years ahead of Huxley’s schedule, the outcome is
depressingly familiar. Books like Charles
Murray’s “Coming Apart” have explored how class
differences perpetuate and even harden: today
two Stanford grads meet at Davos or Google,
marry and produce more of same, whereas even a
generation ago the classes mingled more: When
people weren’t as mobile, a male executive was
more likely to have married his neighbor or
secretary. On the other side of the class
divide, now that there’s no particular stigma to
being a single parent, there is a similar
feedback loop. You have kids out of wedlock,
which means you drop out of school, which means
you’re poor, which means your kids follow suit.
Huxley
was onto some notions that have only recently
been developed in cognitive science and
psychology. His characters have all their needs
taken care of, enjoying excellent health,
reasonable work schedules and lots of gadgets
and entertainment. His is a wealthy society.
It’s also a highly collectivist one; cloning has
created large groups of identical people working
side by side.
David
Brooks’s book “The Social Animal” ruminates
about “limerence” or harmony with another
individual or a group. He writes about a soldier
who felt a profound sense of well-being while
doing drill and ceremony in unison with a large
group, about how people in conversation quickly
mimic one another’s mannerisms and even about
how women living in close quarters tend to
synchronize menstrual cycles. We crave
belonging. The citizens of Huxley’s society look
around, see people exactly like themselves, and
feel comfortable and secure. There’s no need for
a crushing totalitarian Big Brother at the top
because at the bottom, everyone feels like
siblings.
Yet
“The Social Animal” also describes how bad we
are at predicting what will make us happy (we
think that if we struck it rich we’d relax on a
desert island -- did Steve Jobs do that?). When
asked to imagine a formula for bliss, Brooks
writes, “people vastly overvalue work, money,
and real estate. They vastly undervalue intimate
bonds and the importance of arduous challenges.”
The
cycle of challenges confronted and mastered, the
flow of meaningful work, has largely been taken
away from Huxley’s world citizens. They face no
significant hurdles: Everyone gets all the sex
they want and (thanks to subliminal training) no
one even fears death. And yet everyone seems to
be popping a lot of stress-relieving soma pills.
People have become like the famous depressed
Central Park polar bear who became listless
because he didn’t have to work to catch his
dinner. One of Huxley’s better jokes is the
chatty dictator Mustapha Mond’s solution to the
abolition of stress: “We’ve made V.P.S.
treatments compulsory.”
V.P.S.?
“Violent
Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We
flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the
complete psychological equivalent of fear and
rage.”
John
the Savage falls for a perky ultramodern girl,
but as she obligingly unzips her clothes for him
he becomes despondent and flees. It’s too easy.
People dropping their pants isn’t love. Compare
the dismal reports you hear from campuses that
meaningless hookup culture and midnight
booty-calling have replaced romance and
courting. Women whose grandmothers marched for
sexual liberation wonder why they can’t find a
man willing to commit. Huxley foresaw that this
soul-hollowing effect would follow from making
sex purely recreational.
In
his climactic encounter with Mond, John the
Savage argues, “I don’t want comfort. I want
God. I want poetry, I want real danger, I want
freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
Replies
Mond, “You’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
Mond
thinks John is being absurd, but think about all
the ways people go out of their way to make
themselves miserable. They run marathons. They
climb Everest. They leave cushy jobs to launch
risky start-ups. Paradoxically, wealth and
security create more and more yearning for
extreme conditions. You didn’t see 20,000 people
lining up to run marathons in the Great
Depression. Life itself was sufficiently
difficult.
Nearly
50 years after he died (the same day as JFK),
Aldous Huxley continues to caution us that a
happyland free of intimate bonds and arduous
challenges is actually a dystopia. He quotes
“King Lear” to explain why our IMAX 3D and
iWhatevers aren’t going to make us happy: “The
gods are just and of our pleasant devices make
instruments to plague us.”