Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (1931)

(Joel Davidson | Home | Books)


Written 17-2-2023
Just having finished Brave New World after reading it for our book club, I am left with mixed feelings. Truth be told, I was expecting to like this book better than 1984, which I read nearly a decade ago in high school and was equally mixed about. But reading through Huxley’s novel makes me like 1984 more than I did before, despite my bias. Both books share the impression of a more amateur style of writing, something which straddles a line between H. G. Wells and a teenage drama novel. For this reason it’s obvious why both of these novels are staples of high school and college curriculums, but, needless to say, they still offer an interesting take on political sci-fi that we’ve all come to know and love and which I’d go on a limb to say is some of the most important fiction written, past or present. That being said I don’t think either of these books are overrated from an ideas point of view. However, the structure, as mentioned, is probably the weakest part, and the biggest compliment I can give is that neither are a struggle to get through, even with their issues.
Brave New World is at least the more strangely structured out of the two books. There is never one main character, events start and end without much preamble, and all this helps present the society from a large variety of perspectives that give a nice interior look at the society. Huxley never harps on a Big Brother type figure and in some ways the absence of such a figure would make you think this was a response to 1984, despite coming out more than a decade before. Overall, Huxley’s world is one so totally benign that it has neutered life’s stresses and tough pills, even when they seem to be fundamental to life. He doesn’t plan to solve these issues or even lay out something even beginning to appear like coherent metaphysics, but he does present an argument for embracing all aspects of life by showing us what a life governed by a polity which tries to guide us away from some of the more difficult ideas and feelings.
I don’t want to write too much since there feels like each portion of the book could merit a lengthy essay and I don’t want to get too into it without actually getting to the bottom of things. Nonetheless, there’s a few parts of the book that are still ringing in my ears after having finished it. First, Huxley seems to advocate for liberalism, but, in his created history, it is liberalism which turns against itself (and what else could it do, we see this in both Huxley’s and our time). He emphasizes here that there’s sort of a slippery slope that one goes down, not all of this happens all at once. There is also mentioned a war which was so awful that people were willing to do anything to stop that from happening. This feels more controversial today than it likely did back then. I know a lot of people that would happily give up any sort of conversation over ambiguities for a safe, straight forward world.
Second, Huxley is known as a drug guy (see Doors of Perception), but he deals with them in a much more tasteful way then I might have expected, although I don’t know if I agree with him. In terms of his tastefulness, he mentions the people on the reservation taking mescaline but it being harsh and sobering after the trip, something which he seems to praise. Soma, the drug of choice for the “civilized” world, on the other hand is made to be perfectly relaxing with no harsh side effects (other than decreasing one’s lifespan, which people are already conditioned to not care about). These two examples of drugs proves a good dichotomy for understanding which might be good and bad about drugs. In the end escapism seems to be one of the main things that Huxley is here to critique, not the drugs themselves. That leads me onto my problem here: he doesn’t seem to want to take up what drugs do to a person beyond escapism. I don’t want to go into too much, but my guess is that folks tripping on Soma for 9+ hours with full visuals might have a slightly different effect than making them docile.
Third, conditioning is given this huge role in Huxley’s universe, I don’t think, however, that I would emphasize conditioning’s role in some of this to the same extent. In fact, as per the conversation between John and the director, I don’t think Huxley thinks that conditioning holds the same height either. There appears to me to be a fine line between reasoning for things and conditioning, which I hope doesn’t sound too cynical. It seems like education and censorship is actually the real culprit. This is maybe somewhat of a language game and maybe I agree with both Brave New World and 1984 here, but I wouldn’t mind some emphasis on the actual issue. There seems to me to be room to misattribute the problem. For example, a class teaching out of a textbook that is censored (like many classrooms do) to call it education or conditioning would both be right in some sense, but it is the lack of knowledge or facts that is concerning.
I could easily write more, since there is a lot going on here. Huxley has no problem throwing all kinds of sci-fi dystopian stuff at you, some of which is interesting and some which is… well… fluff that I don’t know what to do with right now. There’s plenty to dissect but I can’t help feeling somewhat annoyed at the different connections and scaffolding which Huxley decides he needs to set up. No doubt the good way outweighs the bad, but now that I’m thinking more about it there’s a lot of little details which are not great in retrospect but that I’ll probably forget as time distances me from this book.
Thought that I just had: Huxley feels like the brian eno of sci-fi authors. Overflowing with ideas, but, man oh man, I don’t know if I want to listen to music for airports again (although I probably will… See you next time Huxley).