Chapter 23: Brave New World

Oppression by Repressive Tolerance

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) is the fourth dystopian novel to be considered in this series. Its predecessors are Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1905 – 1983), 1984 by George Orwell (1903 – 1950), and Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1911 – 1993). Huxley, Orwell, and Golding were English. Koestler was born in Budapest but was granted British nationality in 1948 and made his home in London from 1953 until his death. Huxley lived in California from 1937 until his death, but he did not give up his British nationality; and his ashes were in interred in England. During the lives of these men, Britain was a nation in decline. One wonders whether that fact exercised an impact on their undertaking these projects.

Of these four men, Huxley alone came from a distinguished family. His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 – 1895), was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” because of his defense of Darwin’s theory of evolution. His brother Julian (1887 – 1975) was a distinguished biologist and the first director of UNESCO. His half brother, Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley (1917 – 2012), was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1963. Aldous Huxley was nominated for the Nobel Prize nine times but never won.

Eric Pape's October 12, 1929, drawing of Aldous Huxley for The Sphere newspaper.

Brave New World was written in 1931 and published the following year.¹ In Brave New World Revisited published in 1958, Huxley observed that “the prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would.”² What are those prophecies? Are they coming true? In Huxley’s novel, “the nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable behavior, by many kinds of nearly non-violent manipulation, both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardization.”³

In Brave New World, a society is described in which every desire is immediately satisfied. There is no shortage of anything. Food, clothing, and shelter are there for all. As for sex, one need merely ask. And one does not have to ask twice. In the words of a commentator, Huxley asserts that “{a]ll you need to do . . . is teach people to love their servitude. The totalitarian rulers. . . do this not by oppressing their citizens but by giving them exactly what they want, or what they think they want – which is basically sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll – and lulling them into complacency. The system entails a certain Trump-like suspicion of science and dismissal of history, but that’s a price, the inhabitants of Huxley’s world happily pay. They don’t mourn their lost liberty; . . . they don’t even know it’s gone.”⁴ They go through life “like a patient etherized upon a table.”⁵

Society in the brave new world is all about efficiency. That is why the world is dominated by the image of Henry Ford. People pray to the Ford and invoke the Ford’s name, while the Lord never appears. “World controller” Mustafa Mond quotes Ford approvingly: “’You all remember . . . that beautiful and inspired saying of our Ford: History is bunk. History,’ he repeated slowly, is bunk.’”⁶

There is no past or future in the brave new world. Only the present. And the present is always palatable thanks to a pill called a “soma” – “an immensely popular drug that appears to combine the best features of Valium and Ecstasy.”⁷

In 1949, Huxley wrote Orwell a letter in which he called 1984 a “fine and profoundly important book.” Nevertheless, Huxley believed that future rulers would understand that “infant conditioning and narco–hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can just as completely be satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience . . . the nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of . . . Brave New World. The change will be brought on as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.”⁸

This is a highly questionable assertion. Since the publication of Brave New World, the peoples of the Earth have not been lulled into a false happiness by distractions. All too many of them have been hammered into a genuine wretchedness by “flogging and kicking” and by fates far worse than those.

Brave New World and 1984 have one important characteristic in common. In the dystopian future both imagine, the individual does not matter. Each individual person’s striving for self – knowledge, for inner peace, and for undertaking good works has no place in the totalitarian regimes these books imagine.

Beyond this, however, these two books sharply diverge. There is all the difference imaginable between killing people with anesthesia masquerading as kindness and killing them through cruelty and torture. In 1958, Huxley wrote, “George Orwell’s 1984 was a magnified projection into the future of a present that had contained Stalinism and an immediate past that had witnessed the flowering of Nazism. Brave New World was written before the rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride. . . . In 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are immortal and circumstances change.”⁹ Orwell feared we would be ruined by what we hate. Huxley believed we would be done in by what we love. Huxley gives us a “picture of mindless bliss and its usefulness to power.”¹⁰

Many people see the future in Brave New World, a future in which we amuse ourselves to death.¹¹ But many people also beg to differ. Tyrants are indeed mortal. However the will to tyranny is not. Stalin and Mao have seen their share of successors.

Considered as a novel rather than as a prediction, Brave New World has its share problems. Huxley’s characters “were no more than puppets to illustrate his points.” The names of those puppets are intentional, but the message of those names could hardly be less clear.

Let us begin with the world controller, Mustafa Mond. Some believe that “Mustafa” is a reference to Mustafa Kemal (1881 – 1938), better known as Ataturk. “Mond” refers to Sir Alfred Mond (1868–1930), a fabulously successful British industrialist of Jewish extraction. T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965) referred to Mond in a poem in 1920.¹² Eliot was an antisemite. There is also in the novel a “somewhat repellent character” named Morgana Rothchild.¹³ What do these names betoken? Does Huxley share Eliot’s antisemitism?

Huxley himself was a man of unresolved contradictions, and these contradictions inhabit Brave New World. He “distained socialism and the idea of equality but gave the name of Bernard Marx to the only dissident in his awful system[.] And why call one of the few spontaneous girls Lenina?” Why name “an oversexed little child” Polly Trotsky?¹⁴

Soon after encountering Morgana Rothschild, we are introduced to a young woman named Clara Deterding.¹⁵ Henri Deterding (1866–1939) was a top executive of the Royal Dutch/Shell petroleum company. How many readers are supposed to know that? What is the reader to make of the name “Benito Hoover?”¹⁶ Is the suggestion that Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), President of the United States from 1929 to 1933, and Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), the fascist Prime Minister of Italy from 1922 to 1943, have something in common? If so, this suggestion is quite inaccurate.

His naming conventions introduce unnecessary confusion to Huxley’s novel. Nevertheless, his vision of a society sleepwalking through life is real enough in some respects to account for the book’s remarkable longevity. And although Huxley did not win a Nobel Prize, he did make it onto the cover of “Sargeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.”¹⁷ Not as odd a choice as one might think. Huxley experimented with LSD.

A Note on the Title

The title “Brave New World” is taken from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” In that play, Miranda, the daughter of the protagonist Prospero, exclaims upon meeting a group of people:

“O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world

That has such people in’t!”¹⁸

Miranda is a magical creature on the magical isle in which she lives with her father and their slave, the monster Caliban. The lines that she speaks are the most famous in the play and among the most well known in all of Shakespeare. They are meant ironically. The people she encounters are the enemies of her father. With his magic powers, Prospero summoned the storm – the tempest – that caused them to be shipwrecked on his island. He responds to Miranda’s ecstatic utterance that though this world may be new to her (“’Tis new to thee!”¹⁹) it is all too well known to him.

Although Miranda may misjudge the people she encounters, it is worth asking if she is really wrong about “mankind” in general. Her exclamation, though naïve, seems pardonable. She “combines the qualities of natural simplicity with breeding and education. Her presence requires us to take seriously the prospect of utopia. She has the gift of wonder. (Her name is derived from the Latin mirari, to wonder, or mirus, wonderful.”)²⁰ Her response to the people she encounters is quite in character.

The phrase “brave new world” is clearly meant ironically by Huxley. There is nothing admirable about the dystopia he describes. Nor in his telling can one “take seriously the prospect of utopia.” Indeed, the only other society presented in the book seems as much a dystopia as the one with which the book principally concerns itself.

In a word, this book is pessimistic. Profoundly so.

1. Original publication – UK: Chatto & Windus, 1932. The quotations in this essay are from the e-book.

2. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, e-book, p. 241.

3. Huxley, Revisited, p. 242.

4. Charles McGrath, “Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World,’” New York Times, February 13, 2017.

5. T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

6. Huxley, World, p. 23.

7. McGrath, “Novel.”

8. “Brave New World: Foreword by Christopher Hitchens,” https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/books/brave-new-world-foreword/

9. Huxley, Revisited, pp. 240-241.

10. Hitchens, “Foreword.”

11. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 2005).

12. Hitchens, “Foreword.”

13. T. S. Eliot, “A Cooking Egg,” https://allpoetry.com/A-Cooking-Egg

14. Hitchens, “Foreword.”

15. Huxley, World, p. 51.

16. Huxley, World, p. 38.

17. Hitchens, “Foreword.”

18. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” Act V, Scene 1.

19. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” Act V, Scene 1.

20. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 63.