Aldous Huxley’s speculative Brave New World (1931) describes an efficient, peaceful and prosperous future society, seven centuries ‘after Ford’ (Henry Ford), who is revered for the efficiency and standardization he introduced to consumer society. The mass availability of material goods and fulfilment of physical needs brings widespread happiness and contentment to Huxley’s new World State, where consumers know from early childhood that “ending is better than mending” and “the more stitches, the less riches”.
The first character to feel uneasy with this cheerful but enforced abundance is the psychologist Bernard Marx. Although he is an Alpha, the highest and most intelligent of the rigidly defined classes, Marx is physically smaller and weaker than his peers, and this feeds his neuroses and resentment of the State. To impress the perfectly beautiful Lenina Crowne, he flies her to the ‘Savage Reservation’ in New Mexico, one of the few places where people still live primitively; that is, with family, religion and suffering.
There, they meet John the Savage, the son of a world-state woman who was accidentally left behind years earlier. Self-educated through Shakespeare's works, John understands the world through tragedy, sacrifice, love, loyalty, and betrayal, concepts largely extinct in the ultra-processed reality of the world state. On returning to modern London with Bernard and Lenina, John is horrified at its permissiveness and promiscuity, and especially at the use of SoMa, a freely available drug that extinguishes any glimmer of pain or dissatisfaction.
When his mother dies after spending her final days in a SoMa-induced stupor, John openly rebels against society and insists on his rights to freedom, struggle and suffering, even when they lead to pain.
I won’t spoil the ending by telling you how this resolves, but the core questions Huxley poses are already clear: How do physical abundance and contentment relate to human fulfilment? Is a good and happy life one that is free of pain, conflict and suffering, or are love, loyalty and sacrifice necessary for human flourishing? Can a society be unfree even when its citizens freely choose its conveniences and are we more vulnerable to control by fear or by pleasurable frivolity? Is there such a thing as the right to suffer or the right to be unhappy? If there were a pill you could take to extinguish suffering and unhappiness, would you take it?
Brave New World is often compared with and read alongside other great utopias and dystopias. And this is how I read it; immediately after Yevgeny Zamiatin’s We and before George Orwell’s 1984 and washed down with the film Gattaca. In her 2007 introduction to the Vintage Classics edition, Margaret Atwood says Brave New World’s “different and softer form of totalitarianism…hasn’t gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see”. It might be time to look again, she says, at the “totally planned society it describes, in which ‘everybody is happy now’? What sort of happiness is on offer,” she asks,” and what is the price we might pay to achieve it?”
This, of course, is a version of the big question posed by all great utopias and dystopias: What kind of world should we create for ourselves to live in? Depending on your perspective, Huxley’s landmark work of early 20th Century literature is a blueprint or a warning. Or both.
Greg Chandler (Echuca Chapter)