O wonder!This was a reread for me (why did everyone who saw me with this book say, "Haven't you read that before?") and I suppose since everyone has read it, everyone knows the basic premise of Brave New World: About 600 years from now, after a devastating Nine Years War full of terror and anthrax bombs, a world government is put into place. Through genetic manipulation, the population is engineered to fulfill the tasks of their preordained castes, and through hypnopaedia, the population is conditioned to accept the imposed values of their society. As adults, people are discouraged from solitary pursuits, and as a result of their conditioning, spend leisure time devoted to consumerism, group sport, free sex (including mandatory orgies), 4-D movies called "feelies", and the consumption of soma -- a drug that brightens mood, aids sleep, or enables a mental holiday, depending on dosage. When a "savage" from a New Mexico Indian Reservation is introduced to the totalitarian society, both he and the people that he meets are innately repulsed by the other.
How many godly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,Now, I reread Brave New World at this time because in Liberal Fascism, author Jonah Goldberg warned that this is the future that we're blindly marching towards. And as Goldberg also stated each time he invoked Aldous Huxley, many people read this book and wonder, "What would be so wrong with that?"
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.
The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want; and they never want what they can't get. They're well-off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strong about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma.That doesn't actually sound so bad, but even Huxley himself makes it clear that his vision of the future here is a dystopia, not a utopia, and in Brave New World Revisited -- which he wrote in 1958 and which was included in the edition that I read -- he despaired that his vision was coming true even quicker than he foresaw and hoped to warn society against sleepwalking towards a future of conformity, loss of freedom, and the mindless pursuit of the trivial and degenerate. Huxley's warnings about imminent overpopulation (and, in particular, his predictions about the overbreeding of the wrong sorts of people) -- which is the lynchpin of his argument -- now seems quaintly outdated in the same way that Marx wasn't right about the imminent revolt of the working class, so it's tempting to dismiss all of his fears out of hand.
For contrasting views about what modern writers think of the vision of Brave New World, here's a dissenting viewpoint from The New York Times in 2013 (but it is interesting to read in the comments section that most readers think that this article is off the mark) and an article from The New York Post in 2012 that thinks Huxley was a visionary. To me, putting Brave New World into context like this is far more interesting than simply reading the novel on its own, and insofar as Huxley was considered a great thinker of his time, I think that was his intent (and forgives the less than perfectly literary constructions of his book). Even if Huxley didn't impeccably envision the near future (although Jonah Goldberg and Kyle Smith of The Post might make compelling parallels), Brave New World certainly extrapolates a logical progression from what Huxley identified as the problems of his time, and if they have any resonance with modern readers, we would do well to sit up and take notice.
