Brave New World Revisited

Aldous Huxley Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Orwell's 1984 has frequently been cited as an instruction manual for the present with alarming frequency in recent times, but Huxley's Brave New World seems much closer to the mark with its totalitarian state reinforced by distraction and bullshit rather than brute force. We're living in a world where people have ceased caring about books rather than one in which they're banned, generally speaking.

Here Huxley revisits his Brave New World nearly three decades later to explain his way of thinking and take stock of whether or not he actually predicted anything, at least as of the late fifties, which he did; and were he around today I'd say he'd be ticking off even more boxes. By coincidence, I watched Jen Senko's The Brainwashing of My Dad a few nights ago, a 2015 documentary on the influence of Fox News and other right-wing media outlets which distort the truth or even flat out lie so as to encourage the sort of thinking which translates into money and power for its financial backers; and it was disconcerting to find many of the same arguments made in Brave New World Revisited which, it should be remembered, refers to a world wherein the dissemination of information occurred at a snail's pace compared to today.

Of course, Huxley - by his own admission - didn't manage to predict everything, and before any of the usual suspects feel like chiming in, I don't include his observations on population growth among his oversights. He foresaw it as a major problem, or a major contribution to the problems of life on this planet. Having expressed this view on a previous occasion, I was informed that population growth is not problem, and that the planet has sufficient resources for all of us, so the problem is in the distribution of the same; and in failing to realise this I was exactly like Hitler. I gather this assertion may or may not have derived from something suggested by Karl Marx. I have no strong opinion on Marx, but have grown sceptical of the accusation that to disagree with something he wrote is to agree with everything for which his opponents stand, particularly the ones in the uniforms who have a problem with Judaism. Whilst certain proposals as to what might be done about there being too many humans on our planet may indeed be termed fascist, the same cannot be said of the mere acknowledgement of it being a problem, or even just a potential problem. Diminishing every point with which you disagree as fascist suggests a reactionary devotion to an opposing ideology more than a nuanced understanding of the situation, whatever it may be, just as a pro-choice stance hardly renders one an advocate of eugenics.

So Huxley makes observations which some of us won't want to hear, now that we know fucking everything - not least that unlimited population growth isn't great and that some people, for whatever reason, are a bit thick - but he's essentially a humanist and this is a wonderful and methodically reasoned, if slightly depressing, argument.