Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Blackstone Publishing
Fiction, Literary Fiction/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: In the centuries since the Nine Years War ended the old, chaotic, wasteful ways, the world has thrived under a new World Order: inspired by the visionary Henry Ford, every aspect of human life, from conception to death, is carefully controlled and curated like parts on an assembly line. No longer must people strive or suffer or trouble themselves to think or worry; now, everyone knows their exact place and role, from the barely-human Epsilon menial workers to the Alpha scientists and controllers of civilization. Archaic concepts like "love" and "family" and "faith" have been relegated to the past, and the past relegated to oblivion, while any frustration or discomfort is easily dealt with via the omnipresent drug soma. Only in isolated islands and fenced off Savage Reservations do any humans follow the ancient ways, with their disorganized filth and outdated morals, rightly feared and derided by any enlightened mind. But even in paradise, there are those who are unhappy, even if they can't always identify how or why, let alone what to do about it. When the malcontent Bernard and his female companion Lenina visit a Reservation, they encounter John, a unique child of two worlds... an encounter that cannot lead anywhere but tragedy.

REVIEW: First published in 1932, Aldous Huxley's classic depiction of a society entirely subsumed by shallow consumerism and stripped of all pursuit of truth and meaning still resonates today, though some parts inevitably show their age. In Huxley's future, Henry Ford's assembly line, the way it reduced workers from skilled craftsmen to mere interchangeable cogs in a larger machine, was the first step on the road to a dystopian world government (which looks like a utopia from within), to the point where, when religion itself was erased along with other traces of the "irrelevant" past, "Fordism" filled the void... for the masses, at least. The controllers still have access to forbidden materials and ideas, the better to fine-tune the ongoing manipulation and infantilization of the masses; even the Alphas are subject to propaganda and subliminal messaging proscribing their thoughts and habits, while anyone at any level who shows signs of rejecting their programming is either shipped off to remote islands where they can't infect others with the sin of individualism or executed (though of course it's phrased more politely, for all that citizens are desensitized to death from an early age).
This is a world and story populated pretty much exclusively with emotionally stunted, immature people, the inevitable end results of a system so vast and monstrous that they don't even recognize how they've been psychologically and intellectually mutilated; as a result, the characters aren't exactly pleasant to spend time around, even as they all seem to recognize on some level that something isn't quite right with themselves or with society at large. Bernard, whose oddities many attribute to some unfortunately incident in his gestation (all done artificially; the concept of natural conception and birth, like some animal, is utterly repugnant, and the word "mother" is perhaps the greatest, foulest profanity one can utter), feels discontented and drawn to risks and isolation. Lenina flirts with the dangerous idea of only having one partner; in a society where people are expected to freely sleep around, forming any manner of exclusive emotional attachment is considered a perversion. Bernard's sometimes-friend Helmholtz, a slogan writer for propaganda and government programming, wrestles with strange yearnings that he literally has no words for, those ideas - like all art and poetry and anything that speaks to deeper, truer human experiences - having been excised from their lives and vocabularies. But the most tragically mutilated person of all is the young man John. His mother was a Beta who got lost on a vacation to the Savage Reservation while scandalously (and unknowingly) carrying the child of her Alpha partner; the boy is born among the "Savages", but - raised by a disliked mother who yearns constantly for the comforts of soma and the World Order and has no clue how to bring up a child, rejected by the locals for being an outsider (and because of the trouble his mother causes) - does not belong among them, for all that he's absorbed their habits and spirituality alongside the stories his mother told of the "heaven" beyond the Reservation. For selfish reasons (nobody in the World Order ever acts for anything but selfish reasons), Bernard arranges to return John and his mother to London... but even before departure, the writing is on the wall. John understands pain and longing and sorrow and all other manner of forbidden notions, learning to read via a tattered copy of Shakespeare found on the Reservation (Huxley quotes rather extensively from Shakespeare), his ideas of love twisted by a mother who, as a World Order citizen, has no concept of the term and didn't grasp what her son needed from her. It goes without saying that things do not go well when he gets to London and finally sees the truth with his own eyes.
This being more of a conceptual fable than anything else, it tends to wander and meander, bogging down in details of the false utopia of the World Order and, later, in the ways of the "Savages" on the Reservation; there are some iffy racial and cultural things going on here, and the less said about women's roles and character depictions in either culture, the better, though again the whole book is best considered in the light of allegory, not straight-up fiction. Here is where the tale shows its age the most, though it also is telling that, at the time it was written, the idea that those in power would seek not to simply rewrite and literally reshape humans to serve them but potentially eliminate most of them as unnecessary (automation and "artificial intelligence" doing all the tasks for anyone under Beta, or even under Alpha, by Huxley's World Order standards) did not occur, or was not considered a likely enough avenue to explore. Eventually, all the bogging down stops the story dead in its tracks as John confronts the Controller for Western Europe, allowing Huxley to basically talk directly to his audience about the problems the World Order thought it was solving (at least at first; if there ever were good intentions behind the rise of the Fordian concepts in the wake of the devastating Nine Years War, those were long ago subsumed by the bottomless pit of power-lust and sheer greed and the machinery eating its own tail as programmed and psychologically proscribed Alphas took over leadership roles and the perpetuation of the Order) and the rebuttals pointing out the unacceptably high cost for the stability such a system promises, the stripping away of all basic human drives and needs and all things that make life truly worth living in service to shallow wants and childish whims - wants and whims that aren't even one's own, but programmed into society at every level by higher powers. The final parts just draw out the inevitable ending; I don't deal in spoilers, but this is a classic cautionary tale, so don't expect sunshine and rainbows. In any event, this is another classic that I've meant to get to for some time. I'm glad I finally read it, but I don't expect to revisit it any time soon, especially not while I'm living in a futuristic dystopia myself.

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