My Surprise: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, Depicts a Utopia
I found Brave New World to be a boring book, anything but a page-turner. I can’t imaginge very many people have read the whole thing — and am sure that most who have did it because it was required reading in some class. I have to say that, as a book, its brevity is its best feature.
The title of the book, though, has become a meme for a dystopian society. To my mind, life as depicted in the fictional society of the book is the opposite of that.
It is true that in the book the nuclear family has been eliminated. All people are the product of artificial insemination.
It is also the case that in the book people are created to fill certain economic niches. There is no unemployment or poverty. “Class” is a matter of different levels of responsibility more than material well-being. To ensure they are content with their lots in life people are brainwashed by being required, as children, to listen while they sleep to tapes extolling the virtues of their performative class. While those tapes also teach the sleeping babes to disdain all other classes (so they won’t be tempted to think they might like being in some other class better), they are all taught at the same time to appreciate the contributions of all other classes to the well-being of all.
The primary goal of society is to elimiate anxiety. To that end, people are expected to do their assigned jobs competently, but no more than that. They are encouraged to think almost constantly about what they will do with their time off — much of which is spent enjoying guilt-free sex. To be clear, this isn’t a misogynistic fantasy of sexual exploitation of women by men: women are in full control of their sex lives just like men are. [Homosexuality is not directly addressed, but its acceptance is implied.] Besides sex, among other forms of free entertainment there is free transporation available to go to any place on the planet anyone would like to visit.
For those times when even sex isn’t enough to assuage sufficiently any hint of discontent, there is “Soma.” It is a drug in the form of a pill, freely available and heartily encouraged by the authorities, that seems to be a non-addictive version of opium.
As far as I am concerned, the one negative aspect of this society is the attitude it foments towards aboriginal people. They are kept on reservations for purposes of entertainment for ‘civilized’ people. People can go and see what ‘savages’ look like, live like, and act like.
Events lead to one ‘savage’ coming to live in civilization. His intrinsic free-will individualism is a source of wonder for the civilized people. He does eventually commit suicide.
The people created to be in charge and to keep society running smoothly must be on the lookout for people who insist on being an indivdualists, people who somehow (due proably to some malfunction in their insemination/incubation) become convinced that people should be allowed to think for themsleves, make all of their own choices in life, and make more of life than seeking pleasure and contentment. The hero of the book is of course such a person. He is inpsired by the ‘savage’ to act at long last on his convictions. Needless to say, he runs afoul of the authorities.
That is where I thought the book would finally turn dark in a political way. Did something as horrible — or worse — than what Winston faced (literally) in George Orwell’s 1984 await him?
After a long, pleasant, reasonable conversation in which our hero seeks to no avail to convince the man in charge of how bad and wrong the Brave New World is, he is offered the opportunity to choose an island on which to live. Those islands are where people who insist on being individualistic are sent. There, they live free, full lives as materially sufficient as those of the people in the sanctioned society, negotiating life with other indivdualists, enduring all of the discontent and friction that goes with it. In other words, they are simpy given their wish, with no punishment attached — though for people in the society of the Brave New World that would be seen as a stupidly difficult life to choose.