Aldous Huxley - Brave New World Revisited

Brave New World Revisited

Copyright 1958 by Aldous Huxley
Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright
2000 by RosettaBooks, LLC

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First electronic edition published 2000 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN 0-7953-0016-6

Being something of a prophet can be a grim responsibility. In Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays published in 1958, Aldous Huxley re-examines the issues and concerns that inspired him to write the novel Brave New World some 27 years earlier. What had come to pass, especially in wake of World War II at the height of the Cold War, disturbed Huxley. He saw an overpopulated world that had gravitated toward his dark vision, in which freedom and individualism were willingly exchanged for sensory pleasure and endless consumption, making order out of chaos a world in which people were, as the philosopher Neil Postman suggested, amusing ourselves to death.

Aldous Huxley (18941963) came by his despair honestly. He remains one of the most interesting figures English literature produced in the early 20th century. His early work bespoke his origins, as the well-bred son of one of Englands most distinctive families (his grandfather helped realize Darwins theory of evolution and his great-uncle was Matthew Arnold). But Huxleys clever, stinging satires of English intellectual life (Crome Yellow, Antic Hay) quickly gave way to a new seriousness with the publication of Brave New World. A vision problem had kept him from pursuing a career in medicine, and maturity brought about in him a spiritual restlessness that was encouraged by his friend D.H. Lawrence. For the remainder of his life much of it spent in southern California Aldous Huxley explored political and philosophical issues in his essays and his novels of ideas. Brave New World Revisited reflects the fierce intelligence and clear-eyed perception that informed the best of Huxleys work. It is an invaluable, its-later-than-you-think reality check for every reader of the novel Brave New World.

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In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren. I forget the exact date of the events recorded in Brave New World; but it was somewhere in the sixth or seventh century A.F. (After Ford). We who were living in the second quarter of the twentieth century A.D.were the inhabitants, admittedly, of a gruesome kind of universe; but the nightmare of those depression years was radically different from the nightmare of the future, described in Brave New World. Ours was a nightmare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. In the process of passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative.

Twenty-seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning. In the West, it is true, individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those countries that have a tradition of democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane. In the rest of the world freedom for individuals has already gone, or is manifestly about to go. The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.

George Orwells 1984 was a magnified projection into the future of a present that 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 1931 systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had become in 1948, and the future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell. In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia and recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwells book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybodys predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984.

In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behavior in general, and human behavior in particular, it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effective, in the long run, than control through the reinforcement of desirable behavior by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children. Punishment temporarily puts a stop to undesirable behavior, but does not permanently reduce the victims tendency to indulge in it. Moreover, the psycho-physical by-products of punishment may be just as undesirable as the behavior for which an individual has been punished Psychotherapy is largely concerned with the debilitating or anti-social consequences of past punishments.