Huxley’s Mirror
The Future of Man in the Brave New World
by Vigen Guroian
Over the course of the past century, two modern dystopias captured readers’ imaginations more than any other literary works of their kind. Many read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) as prophecy or admonition that if humankind were not careful, the future might look like one or the other. Of the two, Orwell’s novel seemed the most possible. It depicted a technologically advanced version of the sorts of totalitarian regimes with which the twentieth century was all too familiar. Today, however, Brave New World may be the more relevant. Recent extraordinary advances in biomedicine, biotechnology, and communications that Huxley uncannily anticipated have given it unexpected relevance, over seventy years after it first appeared.
Yet in Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, even Huxley doubted that the reproductive technology that made his imagined world so radically different from anything man had experienced in the past was likely to come very soon. “Babies in bottles and the centralized control of reproduction are not perhaps impossible,” Huxley opined, “but it is quite clear that for a long time to come we shall remain a viviparous species breeding at random.”
Almost a half-century later, “babies in bottles” are not yet on the horizon, but “designer” genes and cloned babies are. Over the past fifty years, mankind has been developing a dizzying array of biotechnologies (e.g., artificial insemination, in-vitro fertilization, and gene-splicing) that if fully implemented or mandated by government would leave increasingly little in human reproduction to chance. Thus, the imminent prospect of cloning a human being, while it may be the most compelling sign of this revolution, is by no means the only step along a well-marked path toward mastery of our genetic makeup. All of this has prompted a number of social critics to return to Brave New World with renewed interest as an admonitory tale.
Here, however, I am less interested in adding to recent speculations about the scientific and technological advances that could cause our society to resemble Brave New World than with some of the moral and theological questions the story itself raises about the wisdom of altering our own nature. In the preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, Huxley explained that his principal purpose was not to write a political novel about the external arrangements of a future society but to describe a revolution inside human nature itself brought about mainly by the biological sciences.
The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science as it affects human individuals. . . . The only scientific advances to be specifically described are those involving the application to human beings of the results of future research in biology, physiology and psychology. It is only by means of the sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changed. The sciences of matter can be applied in such a way that they will destroy life or make the living of it impossibly complex and uncomfortable; but, unless used as instruments by the biologists and psychologists, they can do nothing to modify the natural forms and expressions of life itself. . . . This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.
An Artful Satire
Huxley did not write Brave New World as prophecy. It is, instead, an artful satire in the great English tradition of Thomas More’s Utopia, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Alexander Pope’s Dunciad. Huxley juxtaposes two vastly different future societies. The first, the so-called Brave New World, is a global order that claims to have rid the earth of suffering and perfected the universal human goal of happiness. Liberalism and democracy have been mercifully put to rest. In their place, a regime of social engineers keeps the people happy. These managers are Brave New World’s version of Plato’s philosopher king. Consumption and entertainment conjoin the social mass, and a drug-aided religion of social solidarity supplies cords of concord and fantasies of perpetual bliss.
As one first enters the story, the Brave New World seems to have little resemblance to contemporary society. But quickly it is evident that certain noteworthy characteristics and trends of contemporary society have taken strange and unexpected form. Like other great satirists, Huxley aims to demonstrate that what looks like normality to those immersed in the present may not be so. He wants to remind the reader of values and criteria of judgment that have preserved and enhanced that which is most noble in man. At bottom, Huxley is not only a satirist but, as satirists often are, a humanist as well.
In Brave New World the state employs advanced biological and behavioral sciences to manufacture and control its citizens. And this is certainly our major interest. But Huxley also holds up to scorn and ridicule many other aspects of the contemporary world to which modern people are attracted and in which they often invest a great deal of value. These include consumerism, commodification of the body, recreation and entertainment, and the cult of celebrity.
Vigen Guroian was, until his retirement, Professor of Religious Studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His books include Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination (2002) and The Orthodox Reality: Culture, Theology, and Ethics in the Modern World (Baker Academic, 2018).
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