Happiness, broadly conceived, is the predominant endeavor of human existence. It is the state we tell ourselves that we fundamentally want yet fail to achieve. It is what progress promises yet fails to deliver. And whether the causes of the failure are out of our control (as in disease, war, poverty, disaster and death) or within our control (as in desire, ambition, envy, ignorance and anger), a narrow logic tells us that eliminating them should result in the greatest possible happiness, “the best of all possible worlds.” Brave New World is an extension of that narrow logic into the year 2540 AD, after war has brutalized humanity into acquiescence and technology has advanced to control human destiny. Perhaps that’s why Aldous Huxley dubbed his 1931 novel a “negative Utopia”—it presents a civilization that has achieved perfection not only by a morbid distortion of nature but by negation, the elimination and suppression of the circumstantial and psychological causes of unhappiness.
Brave New World is basically a fable of the paradox of happiness at the cost liberty. It presents a World State governed by a human-farming industry, the objective of which, according to its anthem, is “Community, Identity, Stability.” As we know from the totalitarian nation states in Huxley’s own time, the human-destiny business was an organizationally demanding and resource-intensive one, and involved entire national economies. In this case, high-tech industry, social engineering and totalitarian government have colluded to design people to fit the specs of a class structure “modeled on the iceberg—eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.” This is the same class structure we have now and one that, according to the Pareto principle, arises naturally in a free-market society. However, the means by which it is maintained in Brave New World are a bit more invasive and pervasive. Emotional bonds, strong passions, desires, clannishness and individuality are rooted out prenatally and suppressed through conditioning. After that, it’s mostly a matter of keeping folks shallow, preoccupied, titillated, gratified and entertained.
Of all the dystopian novels I’ve covered, Brave New World is the most comprehensive and thorough in its portrayal of a future society and the most meticulous in its conception of that society. It is a society that has sacrificed most of its humanity to eradicate the tragic elements of humanity, the whole of civilization for a part of it. People stay young, attractive, contentedly preoccupied and pleasantly distracted until they willingly die at the age of sixty. There is no need or desire for intimacy. Sexual freedom is encouraged. Immediate and meaningless gratification brings no stigma of promiscuity or onus of pregnancy. Vacations of the mind are readily accessible in the drug soma, “Christianity without tears.” All are programmed to shop, recreate and engage in communal rituals that end in orgies. Naming conventions and oaths are derived from the great social-industrial influences of the last several centuries—Ford, Marx, Pavlov, Malthus, Freud, Darwin, Leibniz, et al. Birth control and hormone supplements are integrated into products and fashion. Work, however unnecessary, involves just enough pain to deliver the satisfaction of having labored. And a predestined physique and temperament, reinforced by cognitive conditioning, ensure that designated roles fulfill to the end. It is a world of optimum ends by macabre means. A manufactured world.
The story takes place in Central London, where technological and fashion trends have supplanted our familiar Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian ethical paradigm. Its feel-good pharmacopeia, consumer economy, media distraction, biotechnocracy, positivity propaganda, class predestination, and dopamine and distraction over art and science are all prevalent in our own culture. However, our moral, intellectual and esthetic values have been abolished as a prophylaxis against the impassioned and unstable elements of human existence. What the present-day mob would consider elevated—monogamy, family, art, science and spirituality—is obscene; what the present-day mob would condemn and ridicule, sexual promiscuity for example, is the healthy norm. By this inversion, Brave New World mocks both our high and low culture, putting our present-day distractions and diversions above our moral and esthetic heritage.
The plot of Brave New World differs from that of the typical dystopia in that it is not about a hero who gains awareness of, and revolts against, a totalitarian authority, only to be crucified at the end. It is about an alpha-plus psychologist, Bernard Marx, who, estranged from society and doubted by his peers, defeats his boss and nemesis, wins favor and fame, has a lot of sex, and gets fired, or, specifically, exiled. The catalyst for this dramatic arc is the “savage,” John, and his mother, Linda. Having been impregnated by Bernard’s boss Thomas, Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning for Central London, and abandoned on an Indian reservation in New Mexico, Linda has given birth to John, who has grown up completely out of context, cultured solely in a book of Shakespeare’s plays. Bernard discovers the abandoned mother and son and airlifts them to Central London to meet Thomas, publicly. The ensuing embarrassment and shame cause Thomas to resign. For awhile, John serves as Bernard’s showpiece and popular curiosity. Then, Lenina, Bernard’s primary sexual interest and the object of John’s naive love, affronts John by offering herself sexually. This, combined with the death of John’s mother Linda, pushes John over the edge and causes a public disturbance. Lenina, humiliated and confused by John’s rejection, goes back to her status quo life. Bernard and his talented and successful alpha-plus friend, Helmholtz Watson, are implicated in John’s breakdown and exiled to an island for dissidents. Alienated by the culture of the Brave New World and overcome with sadness and abhorrence, John becomes a self-flagellant and ascetic. At the end of the book, stalked and harassed by the paparazzi, he commits suicide.
Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe, appears throughout the book, to keep a tab on John, Bernard, and Helmholtz. Personifying World-State’s benevolent dominion, he ultimately reveals the rationale and history of World State to Bernard, Helmholtz and John. His character is a common sort in dystopias, a figurehead of the dominant authority. O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four, like Oceania itself, wielded his power via deception, cruelty and destruction. Mustapha Mond, like World State itself, is witty and urbane, and has the patronizing airs of an employer or parent. He doesn’t torture and kill, lie and dissimulate. Rather, he wields his authority benevolently and indirectly. After all, he is an administrator of happiness, comfortable in his role and his power, confident that World State will prevail.
I have read Brave New World several times: at the age of sixteen, thirty-six, and forty-six. At sixteen I was oblivious to its significance; at forty-six its significance was all too obvious; at thirty-six, however, I found the novel both relevant and significant, which makes sense, as that was the age at which Huxley wrote it. At that age, I was struggling as the characters in the book struggle—with a lack of “community, stability, identity.” Like Bernard, I wanted success, acceptance, and importance in a world that appeared neurotic, imbecilic and synthetic. The book’s mordant satire of a completely administrated society so accurately characterized the workplace technocracy that I experienced in my thirties, it spoke to me as a kind of revelation. I recall that I burned through my dog-eared Harper & Row, Perennial Library, 1993 edition in a day.
That reissue of the 1969 edition contains the foreword by Huxley, in which, from the perspective of a man in middle age looking at a work of his youth, addresses what he conceived to be the novel’s artistic shortcomings. The basis of his critique was that the narrative had a limited view. To be philosophically complete, Huxley felt that the story should have offered a truly utopian alternative, “…the possibility of sanity,” to the “idea that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other.” However, I think this limitation, the lack of a viable alternative, is necessary to Brave New World. Were it a more mature, catholic, “philosophically complete” book that included a plausible option to engineered happiness or abject marginalization it wouldn’t have had the same satirical potency. The exaggerated dominion of the World State over human existence and the narrow confines of its status quo gain power by the absence of an alternative. Wisely, instead of revising Brave New World, Huxley revisited it in the book Brave New World Revisited and the novel The Island, which fully presents the truly utopian alternative to this classic dystopian fable.
-Jan DiVincenzo ©2014 Jan DiVincenzo. All rights reserved.