Brave New World
- Jul 16, 2022
- 3 min read
★★★☆☆
My mother loved old movies. When I was in high school bumming around the house, or when I’d come home from college for the holidays, she’d ask me to watch with her. For no other reason than because I was an intractable youth, I was never very interested but usually humored her just the same. All these decades later, I don’t recall any of the titles, but I do recall her irritating, if endearing, habit of pestering me at crucial moments to make sure I was paying attention. Somehow every moment was crucial so I got pestered constantly—even though I was already paying attention and had been the whole time!
Mothers … What can you do?
I kept watching those old classics, still do actually, and I’d say that they’re more often misses than hits. Too often they’re too much a product of their time, and, as a consequence feel not just old but old-fashioned. Science fiction is, I think, more susceptible to this than any other genre. Sci-fi is by its very nature predictive: here is what technology and society will be like in some distant future. The more it emphasizes the former, the more likely it is to become dated, often comically so. The more it focuses on the latter, the greater the chance it can maintain relevance even as its technological predictions falter.
All of which brings me to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It was published in 1932, seventeen years before George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the two dystopian worlds could not be more divergent. Whereas Orwell gave us a brutally authoritarian police state, Big Brother, to control and suppress, Huxley offered a global utopia, the World State, in which, due to genetic engineering, social conditioning, and government-sanctioned drugs, the citizenry are productive, content, unquestioning consumers without messy emotions or attachments. Here’s a snippet of my five-star review of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I read in 2017, “… the dystopian future Orwell paints is probably—no, not probably, definitely—the bleakest, most brutal, most unforgiving novel I’ve ever read.”
In contrast, Brave New World feels positively benign. After all, what’s so bad about a future in which everybody’s comfortable? The thing is—spoiler alert—not everybody is. It turns out a lot of people aren’t, though we don’t realize the true scale until the end. Why aren’t they? Because, as we learn from our protagonist, a “savage” who was brought back to the civilized world from one of the few remaining reservations where the old unenlightened ways continue, “What you need is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here. … I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” There can be no light without darkness, no pleasure without pain, no beauty without ugliness, no virtue without sin—and, yes, no happiness without despair. To live, and live fully, is to experience it all, the good with the bad. In Brave New World, Huxley created a solid piece of social satire, but, now ninety years on, it was a bit too much like most of those old movies I used to watch with my mom: more old-fashioned than old.
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