Darwin’s Brave New World
Roberto Rivera on the Popular Mind
“The Diane Rhem Show” is one of the keystone programs of my local National Public Radio affiliate. It’s fair to say that Diane Rhem is one of the most influential radio personalities in America. I’d be hard put to name an opinion maker who hasn’t appeared on the show, including Christians like Chuck Colson.
Once a month, Diane has what she calls her “book circle.” Diane and three or four guests discuss a book and invite callers to join in the discussion. Recent circles have discussed Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, and A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.
This month’s book was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The book—published twenty years before George Orwell’s 1984—describes a future society where children are conceived in labs and raised by the state, which conditions them to play their assigned roles and provides them with a drug (called soma) and other sensual pleasures. The society operates on a strict caste system: the population is divided into (in descending order of influence) Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. The state is omnipotent and no one thinks to question either the status quo or his place in it. Literature, art, and philosophy are suppressed.
Participants in the circle discussed the book in the “reader-response” sort of way that is all the rage nowadays. That is, they told us what the book says to them, and had very little to say about what Huxley might have been trying to tell us. One participant quoted a character in the book who says that in this brave new world, “[people] have what they want and they don’t want what they don’t have,” but seemed to be oblivious to the fact that Huxley was being satirical. Another participant speculated on the racial composition of the various castes and wondered aloud whether references to epsilons as “savage” was a way of saying that they were “people of color.”
What was lost on the group was Huxley’s bitter condemnation of the materialistic world in which they lived. He was, as G. K. Chesterton put it, “showing the ugly their own ugliness; even pelting the filthy with samples of their own filth.” In Brave New World he was, “if not on the side of the angels, at least horribly bored with the devils.” The group’s “reader-response” reading suggested that, unlike Huxley, they did not recognize devils when they saw them.
The Irony
It is ironic that someone named Huxley could write this book. Aldous Huxley was the grandson of T. H. Huxley, the nineteenth-century biologist who was nicknamed “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Aside from Darwin, Marx, and Freud, no man is more responsible for the spread of philosophical materialism—the belief that everything around us can be explained by purely material processes—than T. H. Huxley. It was Huxley who defended Darwin against his critics, including those who warned of the moral and cultural consequences of Darwinism.
Of the truth of Darwinism, and its philosophical implications, he was certain. “The doctrine of evolution is no speculation,” he once declared, “but a generalization of certain facts.” This doctrine allowed for no transcendent purpose, for “there is no evidence of the existence of such a being as the God of the theologians” and “The cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends,” moral purpose being “an article of exclusive human manufacture.”
Aldous was also the brother of Julian Huxley, who took Darwinism to its logical political extreme. Julian, one of whose early books (revised and republished near the end of his life) was titled Religion Without Revelation, called for a one-world government and the eugenic “improvement” of the human race—for the sort of world his brother had satirized in Brave New World.
The irony is, of course, that the brave new world Aldous Huxley is protesting against is only possible in a world that takes the other Huxleys seriously. It was grandpa and brother who helped deconstruct human life into so much ova and sperm. It was grandpa and brother who helped convince the world that there is no God, and thus destroyed the basis for ethics and morality. (Remember Dostoyevsky’s maxim, “Without God, everything is permissible.”) It was they who replaced God with a scientific process that humanity—meaning, as C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Abolition of Man, some human beings—could manipulate to produce the future they desired.
Roberto Rivera is a Fellow at the Wilberforce Forum at Prison Fellowship. His work has appeared in Books & Culture, and he is also a regular contributor to the web magazine Boundless. He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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