Brave New World.

• Author: Barr, Bob
• Position: Book review

BRAVE NEW WORLD. By Aldous Huxley. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1932. (Harper Perennial 2005 ed.). Pp. xxi, 340.

INTRODUCTION

Human beings, by their very nature, are not static creatures. Lesser creatures, including man's best friend, the dog, seek stability; they are, in a sense, satisfied with the basic elements of existence. Give a dog enough water to drink, enough food to eat, and sufficient shelter to survive the elements--in other words, provide the canine companion a safe and stable environment--and it will be quite content with the status quo.

Man alone among the creatures of the earth abhors stability. Man alone among the creatures of the earth possesses the ability and the inclination to question, to imagine, to build, to take risks for the sake of advancing some perhaps unarticulated goal; in other words, to achieve. Stability, that is, the status quo, is not among mankind's intrinsic goals. Were it otherwise--were mankind hardwired to remain content with the status quo, to be happy with stability--we would still be hunting with flint-tipped spears, dressed in animal skins. Mankind has traveled to the surface of the moon and explored the infinitesimally small components of an atom, not by being content with the status quo, but by tossing aside the stability and comfort of the status quo in favor of the untried and at-best possible rewards of the unknown.

Probably the best example of man's inquisitive nature, and of the need to constantly look for better and better ways of doing things (even though the status quo may be working fine), is Thomas Edison. Edison, certainly the twentieth century's greatest inventor, experimented ceaselessly, even after creating the particular devices he set out to build. (1) His constant drive and flurries of imagination left many of his younger contemporaries exhausted, mentally and physically. (2) Thomas Edison would not have survived in the dystopian world of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The world Huxley envisioned was not a world comfortable to inventors of any stripe, or to artists, writers, architects, builders, chemists, doctors, physicists, lawyers, or members of any other profession that places a premium on the advancement of skills and the use of imagination, foresight, and risk taking. It is a world in which the only class of person that thrives is the bureaucrat--the government official.

This is so because government, being an unnatural state of affairs for humans--although necessary to a limited extent--has as its goals the polar opposite of man's. Man is inherently pushed by a free spirit to change the world around him and his own self. Government by its very nature seeks to limit and to control; government accomplishes this by fostering a sense of, and value in, stability. (3) In essence, the only thing the government seeks to change is the degree and form of its power.

Our Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the principal authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers respectively, recognized the inherent and inevitable conflict between man and government. (4) The moment of the assertion of American independence vividly evidences this conflict. (5) All those things that account for mankind's ascent from subsistence hunter to harnesser of the atom--imagination, the ability to foresee events, and, most important, the ability and the willingness to risk the comfort of the status quo for the thrill of accomplishing what was theretofore unattainable--are the enemies of government. government, after all, strives for certainty, for uniformity, for control.

This is no different today, in this first decade of the twenty-first century, than it was in the world facing Aldous Huxley in the early years of the third decade of the twentieth century. The names and faces have certainly changed, as have the identities of the threats facing us, but government employs the tools available to it--including the use of force--to constrict, limit, and control those within its jurisdictional reach.

In Part I of this Review, I provide an overview of Brave New World and place it in its proper historical context. In Part II, I explore the parallels between Huxley's World State and post-9/11 America. In Part III, I argue that Brave New World provides prescient warning signs about the dangers of excessive government interference in the economy--warning signs that are of particular importance in the face of the recent economic crisis.

1. Brave New World AND ITS HISTORICAL CONTEXT

   Our Founding Fathers correctly anticipated that our federal government--whether in 1932 or in 2009--would use its power to control and limit both the state governments and the individual citizenry. In response to this, they crafted a governmental structure with built-in checks and balances that would minimize the ability of the federal government to exert control. What they could not possibly have foreseen was the development of technology to control the human body and its mind, which has factored greatly in the expansion of governmental power far, far beyond that which con fronted those geniuses in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. (6)

   Several twentieth-century writers clearly saw what was happening to individual freedom as a result of the government's use of technology. Perhaps most well known among them were Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, all of which vividly demonstrate these dangers. More so than either Orwell or Rand (who are probably both more commonly associated with futuristic, dystopian novels), Huxley foresaw the development and dangerous abuses of technology by government in its perpetual search for ways in which to control its subjects.

   Huxley also understood the power of technology to not only enable government to control the populace, but also as a way to control the human mind. The government in Brave New World repeatedly conditions its citizens to use "soma" and attend the "feelies," to afford them a sense of pleasure. (7) The control mechanisms are designed to render the consumer complacent and intellectually lethargic. Indeed, the government agents in Huxley's satirical utopian world--especially its benign dictator, Mustapha Mond--understood that you attract more bees with honey than with vinegar.

   In other words, by using the power of technology to deliver pleasure and a sense of stability and security to its subjects, the government in Huxley's vision could actually minimize the use of force to coerce the populace; thereby also disguising what it is in fact doing. For example, by making that which was previously frightening--death--appear benign, (8) by conditioning people to the notion that the lifeless human body is (like everything else) a tool for the betterment of society ("making...