huxley

Essay on Huxley’s Brave New World
by Charles Glenn

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley offers a frightening glimpse into a possible future in which humanity has finally overcome its own nature. The author brilliantly details what such a world might look like to individuals living within it as well as how it might appear to those outside it. The title is taken from Shakespeare and is indicative to the irony of the plot, which is essentially a criticism of the human pursuit of happiness at any cost.

The question that Huxley poses to the reader is "which would you prefer?" Is it preferable to live within a savage world while maintaining your personal freedom, or to live in a utopia that requires your abject and total submission? Utopia seems to be what mankind is collectively pursuing, but to what end? What sacrifices must be made for its achievement?

The real question is not this, however. It is rather, "how do you define happiness?" In a strictly materialistic sense, happiness could be found in the Brave New World, but it means that the extremes of the human emotional experience must be eliminated. The proverbial baby goes out with the bath water.

Extremes such as romantic love are as undesirable to the "World Controllers" as hate-crimes. While its inhabitants live out their lives productively, they are denied the opportunity to rise above their genetically programmed station in life. Citizens of the Brave New World never feel sorrow, but they never feel joy, either. Free will is programmed out of existence and suppressed whenever it is reborn. Genetic engineering and Pavlovian conditioning combined with an opiate such as "soma," allows the government to maintain control over the people.

Huxley manages to capture the horrific nature of such a society, and through the eyes and mouth of "the Savage," he allows the reader to express his outrage. Outrage is the appropriate response, in my opinion.

Unfortunately, the Savage is not very well equipped to survive in the Brave New World while simultaneously maintaining his integrity. His instincts are correct – faith in a living God is certainly the best defense, in my opinion. His substitution for this is inadequate and reveals Huxley’s simplistic understanding of religion in general and Christianity in particular. I would have written a much different ending.