Community, Identity, Stability

I've just finished reading Brave New World - and I'm struck by how complex a piece of science fiction it is. Usually touted as 'Dystopian Fiction', it somehow evades such a simple reading. Although many aspects of Huxley's imagined future world - the eugenics, mindlessness, infant conditioning - are typical components of visions of a nightmare future, the whole is much more morally ambiguous.

Totally misleading, but very amusing, cover from one of the early printings

Brave New World is often held up as the antithesis to Orwell's 1984, since Orwell imagines a future dominated by Spartan state control whilst Huxley imagines a future dominated by pleasure. This isn't entirely accurate. The characters in Brave New World live absolutely according to their whims; disappointment, social rejection and lacking are unknown. But those very whims are pre-conditioned into them as young children - so that people become the agents of their own control. What's complex, is that this leads to a future of total happiness and stability for everyone. How can we feel that people are oppressed by being forced to be happy?

Isn't there something in living dangerously?"
"There's a great deal in it," the Controller replied. "Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time."
"What?" questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
"It's one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we've made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory."
"V.P.S.?"
"Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenalin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences."
"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

Historical sources indicate that Huxley was very aware of his own ambivalence towards the Brave New World he had imagined. Before World War II, he had written publicly in favour of eugenics as a solution to class wars, economic collapse and the 'deterioration' of the human spirit. Funnily, he was much more troubled by his first visit to America where he first witnessed the pleasure-driven, consumer lifestyle of the US 1920s. This strange combination between an idea he was repulsed by and an idea he thought could be the saviour of humanity seems to be the reason for the novel's shifting moral ambiguity.

The Savage, raised in a reserve outside of this new society, seeing through the readers' eyes, is horrified by the infantilism, godlessness and hypersexuality of this world. But at the same time, the reader can't help but be aware of the fact that the Savage's community is shown as barbaric, frightful and equally morally corrupt (with a religious self-righteousness only too familiar). The situation becomes impossible for the Savage - unable to reconcile his desires and his guilt - he ends his life.

It's an unsettling novel with no clear conclusion (unless, perhaps, Huxley's final utopian work, Island, is seen as the resolution to Brave New World's problems). It remains as challenging and relevant in 2011 as it was in 1932.

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