Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [5]
Meanwhile, those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane – and thus still able to read books – are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?
The answer to the first question, for me, is that it stands up very well. It's still as vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I, for one, first read it.
The answer to the second question, Dear Reader, rests with you. Look in the mirror: do you see Lenina Crowne looking back at you, or do you see John the Savage? If you're a human being, you'll be seeing something of both, because we've always wanted things both ways. We wish to be as the careless gods, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having sex and being entertained by the anguish of others. And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe, with John, that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses, and that immediate gratification will never be enough.
It was Huxley's genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity. Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to their uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions. It's these double-sided imaginative abilities that produce masterpieces of speculation such as Brave New World.
To quote The Tempest, source of Huxley's title: 'We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.' He might well have added: and nightmares.
Margaret Atwood, 2007
INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAW
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1932, Brave New World is set in 'this year of stability, A.F. 632' – that is, 632 years after the advent of the American car magnate Henry Ford (1863-1947), whose highly successful Model T (1908-1927) was the first automobile to be manufactured by purely mass-production methods, such as conveyor-belt assembly and specialised labour. Ford is the presiding deity of the World State, a global caste system set up after the double catastrophe of the Nine Years' War and the great Economic Collapse, and his industrial philosophy dominates every aspect of life within it.
The stability of the World State is maintained through a combination of biological engineering and exhaustive conditioning. Its 2,000 million standardised citizens, sharing only 10,000 surnames, have not been born, but 'hatched' to fill their predestined social roles. They are no more than cells in the body politic. In infancy the virtues of passive obedience, material consumption and mindless promiscuity are inculcated upon them by means of hypnopaedia or sleep-teaching. In later life the citizens of the World State are given free handouts of soma, the government-approved dope, and