Like so many, I reread Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World after seeing the streamed serial episodes produced this year. The series is not the book. I am fine with that if only because the book is less than great, so any deviation from the book is a promise of doing something, hopefully and possibly, more than what was given in the book. The 2020 series delivers on that hope. Now, again, the series is not the book. I hate how the credits read, ‘based upon the book’, when better to say, ‘inspired by…’. 

     To that end, the series under the guise of offering literature instead peddles soft porn to the lazy adolescent who did not read the novel. The series producers took a single aspect of the novel and ran away with it to the extreme. Be forewarned, every episode contains a minimum of two or three sex scenes and every other episode features an orgy. As much I did not like the orgy scenes, the borrowed music for one made that the best choreographed orgy. The music is a simple haunting chord joined in with minor accompaniment syncs so well with the thrusting wave of the orgastic motion. A must see. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nTeE3WfO84

     In a later episode, the haunting theme returns as the only revelation of an offscreen fated action bestowed upon a character.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

     Given recent unrest in Portland, the right-on-cue Black Lives Matter protests, and the growing political, cultural, and social divide such as talked about back in 2017 (https://nypost.com/2017/08/16/a-warning-from-george-orwell-on-the-monument-wars and https://www.yourconroenews.com/neighborhood/moco/opinion/article/Orwell-s-powerful-warning-in-1984-a-reality-in-12177984.php) that may reach a climax in this year’s presidential election, many are rereading those early works that speak on such political apotheosis, George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

     Orwell’s 1984 is a carefully crafted creation that explains the mechanism of authoritarian control and how such comes about versus Huxley’s Brave New World is, at best, a hyperbolic forecasting sketch from a pastiche of borrowed notions in the milieu of his intellectual upbringing.

     Huxley is given too much credit for the ideas and predictions made in his BNW. Only a few and not all what is forecast need come to past to cement impressions that the source as a prophet. BNW is the beneficiary of accidental propheticism. Let us examine three prime predictions found in BNW: Soma, sexual orgies, and genetic engineering.

     In the early days when science-fiction emerged as something more distinct than mere speculative fiction, a forgotten trope of future science tech was the ‘food pill’, the idea that a whole meal can be consumed in a single or a handful of pills. Obesity, bad dietary habits, even food addiction, would be a thing of the past. All the nutritional needs would be contained in a single or a cocktail of pills. Soma is an extension of this idea.

     Both the country (UK) and the men who fought in the Great War (World War I) suffered from shell-shock, today what is called PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). Along with the emotional and mental anguish was, of course, the physical pain. Popular analgesics included morphine, opium, and cocaine. Whether ingested, imbibed, or introduced intravenously, the intent is easing the body from something unpleasant. Imagine, if you will, the same means employed at addressing unpleasant emotions or memories. In some respects, cocaine and opium accomplished in doing so all too well. When extrapolating such analgesic practice, which is not difficult to do, coupled with the Food Pill science-fiction trope there derives the very idea of Soma, a pill form analgesic that tackles even emotional and mental pain. A device that alleviates all pain and leaves one with a pleasant feeling.

     Speaking of pleasant feelings, hedonistic pleasure is the pinnacle of pleasant feelings. What is to be made of the sexual libertine escapades of the Alphas and Betas? Are there similarities between the Huxley’s predicted heighten hedonistic exercises and our contemporary ability at quenching our wanton exuberance represented through our dating apps e.g. Tinder, Grindr, and online dating sites Adam4Adam (and the defunct personals section of Craigslist)? To be sure, there might exist parallels with our expanded tolerance toward varying sexual proclivities and Huxley’s future depiction of fornication. What, however, given to us in BNW is the notion that sexual promiscuity is orchestrated and promoted.

     There is neither a pragmatic, utilitarian, nor political advantageous either to promote, to support, or to sustain sexual promiscuity. On the contrary, there are a host of reasons why societies have evolved varying mores which all condemn promiscuity in favor of monogamy, the least of which is treatable hemophiliac. So where did this idea that libidinous exercise will become the norm as opposed being rebuked as is today? Let me suggest two possible seeds as source that have taken root in Huxley’s mind.

     One is Marx. Leaving aside his ignoring centuries of societal evolution that lead to institutional support of monogamy, a mainstay of Marx is his atheism. The often cited quote of Marx, “religion is the opium of the masses [people in some translations]” reflects his antagonism toward religion and the institution. The hallmark of his Socialist utopia is the elimination — the non-existence if you will, of religion and all that falls under its purview including marriage, which in our modern practice is about sanctifying monogamous unions. (I am ignoring the business contractual origins of marriage because Marx and Huxley do so.) Within the binary framework, the direct opposite of monogamy is promiscuity. Contrary to the idea that sexual union is to one person and one person only, sex is not a union between two but a shared enterprise almost to the degree that everyone (Alphas and Betas only) are obliged to engaged in sexual intercourse at anyone’s wanton will.

     The second seed I venture is from Bertrand Russell. Yes, that same famous logician and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is impossible that Aldous Huxley was unacquainted with Bertrand Russell. Thus exposed to Russell himself, no doubt his many ideas including Free Love. Russell, his adulterous practices notwithstanding, did not single-handedly spur on what has come to be known as the Sexual Revolution, predicted by Wilhelm Reich decades prior, but Russell’s Free Love ideology exemplifies the libertine latitude that (socialist) utopians imagine the future or utopia being. 

     Not does Free Love stand in anathema to the restrictions imposed by most religious dogma, such sexual fluidity goes against what BNW represents most, structure and predictability. Huxley’s BNW is an incoherent mess. Contradictory themes and ideas are presented without meaningful coherence in what BNW suppose to support, rebuke, or prophesize. There is no religious, as we readers may recognize, but there are regular attended gatherings where people fondly, almost in a Quakerish way, praise Ford, as in Henry Ford, and they verbally genuflect signum crucis themselves with the letter ’T’  (in honor of Ford’s Model T car) instead of the cross ✟. London AF in BNW is a utopia that thrives on a sustain class system without any social mobility, neither up nor down that prides itself on the perfect efficiency of the Fordian — the assembly line production process. Even Ayn Rand, or in particular John Galt, could not imagine a better capitalist utopia than World State city London. If BNW is suppose to be satire, then Huxley failed both to demonstrate how London 2034 is necessarily bad and to offer an alternative that is necessarily good or better. The old world had greed, conspicuous consumption, envy, and all the evils of the old capitalist world done away with versus in this new World [Order] State where everyone is in their place by design and with well-defined purpose for their existence which is what the Communist oligarchy strive to maintain, Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen*. Even as a rebuke of Communism, BNW still fails becasue what the reader is to perceive as horrible must be juxtaposed to the ‘savage’ remients of the old world, represented by John.

     In reading BNW, one gets the impression that Huxley, in writing included a variety of ideas about aspects of possible future without regards either of consistency or of cohesiveness of such a possible future world [Order]. By contrast, in irony of doublespeak, 1984 is consistent from cover to cover throughout the book. There is a plot and theme that runs throughout all of 1984 that is lacking in BNW. Huxley’s book is missing a plot that can be said to be the spine of the novel, instead BNW is composed of episodic scenes revolving around few characters, including one who for a time drops out of the book altogether and later returns without explanation to serve as a convenient plot device for emphasis on emotive power of Shakespearean prose. Huxley tossed in a bunch of ideas hoping something will stick to the proverbial wall. And one of those ideas did stick.

     Again, a fortune teller need only be right part of the time to be respected as the great forecaster they pretend to be. Huxley’s original, but not far reaching even in his Depression era day, is genetic engineering. For my purposes, I need not dwell on this ‘prediction’ save to call attention, once again, the inconsistency in BNW. With genetic engineering, why need (Behaviourism) conditioning? Why even need Soma? Rather like using multiple tools to accomplish the same job.

     One can forgive Huxley’s failure at predicting the contraceptive pill, which was instrumental in spurring on the Sexual Revolution, what cannot be forgiven is Huxley’s inconsistency in free fornication. How can Alphas and Betas have so much sexual congress without reproductive consequences? (The one plot in the whole book.) Why did he not think of a pill that regulates sexual impulses just as they managed to regulate envy and greed? If they have the tech to engineer a class of people that can be content in their role as servants, why not do likewise for reducing sexual impulses or reproductive outcomes from wanton coital contact? And Huxley totally missed ‘smart pills’. Such an obvious thing really.

     Even before seeing the 2020 BNW series, YouTube inlcluded the video Brave New World vs Nineteen Eighty-Four featuring Adam Gopnik and Will Self among recommended videos watch list.

     For my part, I am interested only in cited what is wrong with BNW and not concerned with defending 1984. Clear enough, thus, I am prefer Orwell’s novel over Huxley. Yet, BNW is what made, I think bigger impact on me as a person. For the longest time, I had thought myself as a closted Communist all throughout high school and well into university even while I was a stalwart Regeanite, William F Buckley Conservative. Why? The utopia described in BNW matched my own sentiments on how the world should be: perfectly structured and organized: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. Never uncertain in what one’s life role or function is; they were born for a specific tasks and abilities and that is how things should be. No one attempting to reach above their station in life, pursuing goals that they can never achieve e.g. becoming a world class Classical pianist or a star Baseball pitcher. I adored and welcomed the idea of a well-order soiciety, the micromanaging other people's lives, because they do not know what is fit for themselves. The current pandemic with which we are living through today has reminded me, people are the root cause of many problems in the world. If everyone had done what they should have done, then the pandemic would be cleared and ended by now.

 * “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Critique of the Gotha Program 1875, Karl Marx