It gives rise to only a shallow, unempathetic and intellectually uninteresting well-being. Product-range of designer-drugs to order.įor a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. Third-millennium neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a vastly richer Yet it's more akin to a hangoverless tranquilliser or an opiate - or a psychic anaesthetising SSRI like Prozac - than a truly life-transforming elixir. It's not really a utopian wonderdrug at all. In BNW, happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma.Īs perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma underwhelms. Its evocation arouses our unease and distaste. The exchange yields an insipid happiness that's unworthy of the name. Worse, it is suggested that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most hallowed shibboleths of our culture: "motherhood", "home", "family", "freedom", even "love". He taps into, and then feeds, our revulsion at Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning and eugenics. In Brave New World, Huxley contrives to exploit the anxieties of his bourgeois audience about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism. For it's all sugar-coated pseudo-realism. If you think it does, then you enjoy an enviably sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. Nor does Huxley's comparatively sympathetic account of the life of the Savage on the Reservation convey just how nasty the old regime of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. In the era of post-genomic medicine, our DNA is likely to be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long bliss, awesome peak experiences, and a spectrum of outrageously good designer-drugs. ![]() Thus BNW doesn't, and isn't intended by its author to, evoke just how wonderful our lives could be if the human genome were intelligently rewritten. In Brave New World Revisited (1958) Huxley himself describes BNW as a "nightmare". Typically, reading BNW elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation. This is because Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features calculated to alienate his audience. ![]() So how does Huxley turn a future where we're all notionally happy into the archetypal dystopia? If it's technically feasible, what's wrong with using biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether?īrave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. Yet the knee-jerk response of "It's Brave New World!" to any blueprint for chemically-driven happiness has delayed research into paradise-engineering for all sentient life. Hence to treat his masterpiece as ill-conceived futurology rather than a work of great literature might seem to miss the point. Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any regime of universal happiness.įor sure, Huxley was writing a satirical piece of fiction, not scientific prophecy. Huxley died in California on 22 November 1963.Aldous Huxley : Brave New World BRAVE NEW WORLD ?īrave New World (1932) is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever written. His beliefs found expression in both fiction ( Time Must Have a Stop,1944, and Island, 1962) and non-fiction ( The Perennial Philosophy, 1945 Grey Eminence, 1941 and the account of his first mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception, 1954). The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932, this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937). For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and an account of his experiences there can be found in Along the Road (1925). ![]() ![]() This was swiftly followed by Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) – bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early 20s, but it was his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), which established his literary reputation. Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey.
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