Huxley, Aldous

(1894–1963)



English novelist and essayist, author of Brave New World (1932).
Huxley came from a family of great distinction in science. The title of his dystopia is taken from Shakespeare. In The Tempest, Miranda, who has been living on the island with her father, Prospero, and lacks experience of other humans, confronts the shipwrecked Italian noblemen and exclaims:

• How many goodly creatures are there here!
  
• How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
  
• That has such people in’t!
  

Prospero, who knows more about them and about the world generally, confines himself to saying, “’Tis new to thee.”
While Huxley’s satire and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four have sometimes been coupled, and both owe a debt to Zamyatin’s We, they are not really much alike. Both authors push contemporary tendencies to extremes, not forecasting that those extremes will be reached but imagining the results if they were. They are not, however, the same tendencies, and the imagined results are very different. Orwell is thinking chiefly of Communism, still aggressive and formidable in his time. Huxley is thinking of mass production, with its consequences in consumerism, and also of psychological conditioning, as developed by Pavlov and the behaviorists. The fictional 1984 is quite simply hideous: the Revolution has not delivered the goods, most of the population is worse off, and the almighty Party maintains its own power by perpetual falsification and the suppression of dissent. Huxley’s Brave New World, in the twenty-sixth century, most certainly has delivered the goods. Science and technology have created peace, welfare, and stability. The goals of material progress have been achieved—but through universal shallowness. Everybody is happy because everybody has been cut down below humanity and deprived (in theory, at least) of all that is unsettling.
The essential secret is to catch human beings at their inception. The normal method of starting them has been abolished or virtually so. Marriage and all such partnerships have gone, the words mother and father have become indecent, nothing remains in that respect but promiscuous and sterile sex. Embryos are formed in state hatcheries. By varying the supply of oxygen, individuals are produced with different capacities. Each embryo is put in a jar on a conveyor. As it moves along, it is given various inoculations that have lifelong effects, so that most diseases have disappeared. After infants are “decanted,” they are conditioned to like the kind of life for which the State destines them.
Society is divided into five castes defined by Greek letters, from Alphas down to Epsilons. Epsilons are semimoronic and do the simple and menial jobs, enjoying them, and are programmed to want nothing else. For instance, an Epsilon working an elevator finds all life’s pleasure in going up the shaft and then going down again. There are social and functional gradations, with the Alphas at the top of the heap. These are comparatively free but still conditioned to do their allotted work and enjoy being Alphas (as Betas are conditioned to enjoy being Betas and so forth). Even moods of depression are provided for by a perfect hallucinatory drug, soma; the slogan that has been built into all its users is “One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments.” The religious impulse is satisfied by a synthetic cult of Our Ford, the deified inventor of mass production. As a result of all this, contentment of a sort is normal. The horrors of Nineteen Eighty-Four are not needed. Life is generally comfortable, and there is no dissent to suppress. But humanity has been reduced to fit the system. Not only such things as love and

parenthood but the more profound passions and all the richer manifestations of culture have vanished.
There is not much story. In the Brave New World, wild territories are allowed to exist as vacation reserves, and in one of these, a young

man is discovered who was born and grew up there and has never been “processed”; he is a sort of “noble savage.” Brought to England as a curiosity, he revolts against civilization and eventually commits suicide.
In a brief later discussion, Brave New World Revisited, Huxley expressed a fear that his vision might be closer to realization than he thought at the time of writing.