Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, written in 1931, presents a future in which everyone (well, almost everyone) is happy. Five hundred plus years from now earth is ruled by ten World Controllers, the executives of the World State. Stability has been achieved via control of reproduction, psychological conditioning, and careful management of information. Members of each of the five castes are trained and indoctrinated from before birth to engage in only those activities appropriate to their caste. Science has been whittled down to technology, and the arts have been replaced with propaganda disguised as entertainment. Actions that threaten the stability of the existing order result in warnings, and, absent improvement, in exile.
To make certain that happiness reigns, every imaginable problem has been eliminated or controlled. Unpleasant relationships with one’s parents can’t occur if there are no parents; reproduction takes place in the laboratory, gestation occurs in a bottle, and children are raised in conditioning centers. Marital problems can’t occur since there is no marriage; everyone is promiscuous, and attachment to a member of the opposite sex is frowned on as antisocial. The twin plagues of decrepitude and death have been tamed, the first by eliminating all physiological signs of age so that even sexagenarians about to die “had the appearance of childish girls,” the second by training:
“Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course.” (p. 110)
All of this social engineering is in the service of happiness, which in turn is in the service of stability. The aim is to make everyone prefer those things that contribute to the established order. As the Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center puts it, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” (p. 10)
So, if what people want is happiness, wouldn’t this be a perfect society? To Huxley, the happiness comes at too great a cost. That cost is evident in a conversation between Mustapha Mond and the Savage, who, having grown up on a reservation in New Mexico, is an outsider critical of the current order. The Savage asks, why is Shakespeare outlawed? He’s so much better than the feelys. Mond argues, “You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the art.” (p. 150) The same goes for science: “Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.” (p. 153) And then there is religion: “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.” (p. 159) Besides, who needs the consolations that God provides if there is lifelong youth and prosperity?
The type of happiness achieved by the World State is obviously shallow, consisting entirely of enjoyable moods and frequent pleasures. For Huxley, not only is this happiness not worth the loss of art, science, and religion, it also isn’t worth the loss of freedom. At one point, the Savage interrupts distribution of soma to a group of Deltas (the next-to-lowest caste), trying to convince them to stop drugging themselves and become free instead. They stare at him dumbly, then charge him when he has the audacity to throw boxes of soma out the window.
Though among Americans freedom may surpass happiness as a cultural icon, plenty of us, like the Deltas, enslave ourselves to whatever we think will make us happy. I found the Delta’s lack of maturity more troubling. Exasperated by their resistance, the Savage asks, “Do you like being babies?” And it’s not just the Deltas but everyone who is a baby. Free of commitments, failures, or concern over mortality, the new worlders seek only childish pleasure. The Savage encounters immaturity even in a ward for the dying:
“Faces still fresh and unwithered (for senility galloped so hard that it had no time to age the cheeks—only the heart and brain) turned as they passed. Their progress was followed by the blank incurious eyes of second infancy. The Savage shuddered as he looked.” (p. 135)
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child,” wrote the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians. “When I became an adult, I put away childish things.” There seems little to recommend a happiness that never achieves adulthood.
August 27, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Except happiness. I mean, I agree with you but this is sort of a James T. Kirk definition of adulthood. Remember how in the original Star Trek the Enterprise would occasionally happen upon an idyllically happy society, everyone peaceful and productive, only to decide that they weren’t living right and charge in to destroy their culture to set them free? And Kirk would deliver a puritanical homily about salvation through suffering, as if misery was self-evidently the path to human fulfillment.
I don’t think the challenge of the brave new world is this easy to dismiss. Huxley built his monster too well.
August 27, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Huxley’s Brave New World is an anti-utopia. But it is not nearly as bad as Orwell’s 1984. At least people are controlled thru happiness, not propaganda, spies and torture. How many people would be willing to give up freedom for happiness?
If we are free but unhappy, what good does it do us?
Certainly the sources of happiness discussed in Brave New World seem pretty shallow–drugs, sex, things people are conditioned to enjoy. How do we attain happiness in our own world? TV commercials tell us what we should buy or do to become happy. Yet doing things for others may make us happier than acting just for ourselves.
How important is happiness? If different people find happiness in different ways, is one source of happiness superior to another?
Is it better to be superficially happy without self-awareness (as with most characters in Brave New World) or self-aware but unhappy (like the Savage)?
Some interesting issues!
August 28, 2008 at 1:28 am
Carl–I’m with Kirk! Let’s punish everyone who has the audacity to be happy in ways we don’t approve of! Let’s take away their soma!
Happiness does certainly have much to recommend it, even the form of happiness that consists only of pleasure. I don’t see happiness as the highest value, though, and, even if I did, I think I would prefer forms of happiness that seem to be associated with other valuable outcomes. I do see maturity as good in its own right, though I wasn’t making that case, only expresing my dislike for a society that makes maturity impossible.
John–it’s good to have you join the discussion. As you imply, many of the ways we seek happiness find their parallels in “Brave New World;” Huxley was of course providing commentary on 20th century English society rather than creating a fictional world out of the whole cloth. I like your question about whether one form of happiness is superior to another. My thinking about happiness seems to be taking me in that direction, though I’m still awfully fuzzy on what makes some types of happiness better than others.
August 28, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Back to the issue of freedom vs. happiness and the question of whether it is better to be free or happy. I just watched The Mystery of Happiness documentary with my ENG 101 students and was struck anew by the fact that control seems to be critical to happiness. As you might remember from when we watched that movie in our school meeting, babies are happy when they can control the appearance and disappearance of visual stimuli, and they get unhappy when they can’t. Apparently also, people in totalitarian countries report lower levels of happiness, presumably because they have too little control over their lives. If it is true that control is key to happiness, then the freedom vs. happiness conundrum isn’t one at all: one can’t be happy if one isn’t free. Just a thought–and by the way: Hi John!
August 28, 2008 at 5:41 pm
What Huxley envisions is a world in which people are controlled in a way that makes them desire to do what the authorities want. If you always choose what you would be forced to do if you didn’t choose it, do you even know you’re not free? Not knowing, couldn’t you be happy even though you don’t have freedom?
August 29, 2008 at 1:12 pm
A tangential word on genre: a literary dystopia, like a literary utopia, is usually not so much about itself as about the society around it. Generally, we are expected to read the text and then change our society to avoid the dystopia or achieve the utopia (or some elements of it: Charlotte Perkins Gilman didn’t think _Herland_ would create a women-only society, but she would seem to have hoped that it would open people’s eyes to the potential women have for contributing to public life).
Given this, we might ask, to what degree are we prone to the temptations Huxley worries about? (If we aren’t, then the book is somewhat moot). How do these temptations shape public policy? How do we change the world so that Huxley’s society doesn’t develop?
August 29, 2008 at 3:13 pm
KCWC–Good point about the genre. Brave New World was certainly about the society of its day, and also has been prescient about how society has changed since then. I haven’t read Brave New World Revisited, Huxley’s follow up collection of essays published in 1958, but I understand that he discussed societal changes such as evolving propaganda techniques, evocative advertising images, Communist totalitarianism and Western consumerism in light of the unfree but happy world he described in Brave New World. Regarding your first question, Huxley seems to have been convinced that we are highly prone to the temptations he described, and it’s hard to argue otherwise on that point.
September 5, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Thanks to you
September 24, 2008 at 8:40 pm
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