The Blog of Lone

Here’s a short article I wrote for Helium.com in response to someone else’s terrible analysis of ‘Brave New World’. If you’ve read the book, take a peek and see what you think …

The dystopia future that Huxley depicts in ‘Brave New World’ is one marked by the degeneration of the individual within the social whole, the reduction of the individual to that unit of the economic, the consumer. Physiological and mental conditioning reduce the characters to mere cells of the social organism; programmed with impulses that perpetuate the system. Communication between most characters is restricted to the language of consumerism, the discussion of the latest material product available; which is ultimately devoid of meaning and no form of communication at all. The drug soma provides any required escapism. The society of BNW is one where “everyone belongs to everyone” sexually, promiscuity is used to subdue the sexual impulse and to harness it to the social cause. Huxley’s use of language, using the word “pneumatic” to describe Lenina’s sexuality, shows the reduction of the individual’s physical impulses to terms of industrial economics.

While the individualistic ideology of freedom that John proposes as having more intrinsic worth than the conditioned happiness of the state initially appeals to the modern reader as the more worthy cause, Huxley does not moralise so simplistically. Although John’s individualistic ideology may sound more genuine, it is ultimately flawed. The freedom to seek happiness and be hurt in the process incorporates its own defeat; to be hurt is not happiness, but it is freedom. Happiness is then sought but unachieved; freedom is an unhappy state of being. In contrast, while demeaning to John’s idea of the individual the citizens of culture of BNW know happiness by their own definition. That it is a limited form of happiness does not matter because through conditioning they are made unaware of any other possible way of seeing the world. Those that do somehow slip through the system are still part of it, they may be unhappy with the social system, but they are bound to it. Ultimately those opposed to the system are still incorporated into it by being shipped off to islands where they will not trouble the social whole.

Huxley contrasts this two systems of thought but does not place one as morally superior to the other. To be free or to be a happy drone. Each can only be judged on its own merits. To each their own seems better. You cannot judge both ideologies by both different standards simultaneously.

It in this ambiguity that Huxley fails to forecast social demise.

John’s individualistic society of the past can be equated to our own. The society of BNW can be seen to represent the future, but likewise incorporates parodied but recognisable elements of modern society. Huxley’s novel is totalitarian in that there is no alternative offered between the two. Neither is better than the other as the individualistic society has/will evolve into the mass culture of BNW. Both systems are totalitarian in that they offer no alternative to themselves. The BNW is self perpetuating, there is no inherent demise in its system. The ’savage’ society seeks individual happiness but does not find it, this search will however lead it to become the BNW society, offering each individual happiness at the cost of their freedom, unaware of the trade off taking place. There is no social demise, the individualistic system is self perpetuating in that it has already evolved into the BNW; all that remains is a historical preservation of the past to contrast to the novel’s present.
Both society’s are degenerate in one form or another, but neither is in demise. They may mock modern society with their parodies of current social conditions, but neither offers an alternative to it.

Huxley’s depiction of a dystopian future fails to forecast a social demise but instead parodies and mocks aspects of modern society; it may be satirical but it is far from prophetic.