∎ Read Free Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited Aldous Huxley Christopher Hitchens 9780060776091 Books

Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited Aldous Huxley Christopher Hitchens 9780060776091 Books

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Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited Aldous Huxley Christopher Hitchens 9780060776091 Books

I know I had to read this in high school, but I could not remember one bit of it when I recently decided to revisit it. Maybe that goes to show how unconscious the programming was for me back then, or conversely how well I resisted it. But from this perspective in my mid-life and 80 (!) years after it's writing, this seems an amazingly subversive book, quick and easy to read, but thought provoking and disturbing in it's implications.

Of the two great dystopic novels/visions of the past century, it seems that the 20th Century saw the rise and fall of the authoritarian approach of 1984, with the rise and fall of communism, while the soothing ("kinder, gentler") vision of Brave New World (BNW) appears more prescient for the 21st Century. It is actually horrifying how much the modern world has come to reflect Huxley's vision - driven by desires for safety, comfort and conformity rather than liberty, truth and freedom - a world where personal happiness and youthfulness has become the overwhelming goal, to the exclusion of any sense of history or humility of our place in the larger scheme of things.

I will not spoil the story for you if you are like me, too foggy of the details from an old reading, or if you are as yet new to this world. But I will say, it is a classic that is best read with eyes open (not dulled by it being an assignment), and is more complex than it appears. Huxley, while not a great writer, wrote an amazingly perceptive book here. But what may be confusing (and I'm sure the basis of many an assignment paper) is how he appears to be playing both sides of the game, as in critic/cynic and in programmer/designer of the BNW (which is now more openly being called the New World Order). In other words, it appears he had a love/hate relationship with his vision, with a desire to simultaneously indulge in, and escape from it.

The inclusion of his 1958 essay "BNW Revisited" is a nice plus, but really not essential in it's details, beside giving more insight into Huxley's background and point of view. What is does show however is that Huxley is part of the very camp (of social planners and do-gooders) he is warning us about in BNW. And that as much as he is writing satire he is also trying to find a way to solve what he sees as the problems of the world - overpopulation/random breeding, overly organized/rigid traditions and taboos, wide-spread propaganda/brainwashing, chemical and technologic dependence and obsessive consumerism - through the very means of communo-fascist control he so vividly envisions. This is thus a fascinating aspect of the novel for me, and one that makes it all the more relevant and powerful today. The road to serfdom (thank you FA Hayek), which is literally what the NWO supposedly will be, is the one which central planners make, whether they be benevolent or malevolent.

Perhaps more than ever this book is a timely reminder of what we have to lose and look forward to if we choose the easy way out.


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Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited Aldous Huxley Christopher Hitchens 9780060776091 Books Reviews

Do NOT bother with the version. Specifically the one with the picture of the eggs and blood. There IS a kindle version that is the correct text (with the title in red banner) listed for $10+. But the eggs and blood version is completely different, simplified, dumbed down version of the physical book. The paperback format as pictured on the product page is what I have for my physical copy and they are vastly different. I read the kindle version while at work on my computer during slow periods and then came home and attempted to read the book version where I left off, only to find that chapters didn't line up, there were entire pages of conversation missing towards the end of the book between Mustapha Mond and John, the Savage. ENTIRE. PAGES. Very upsetting to learn this. It shouldn't be on the same product page listed as a kindle version. It's a completely different version.

DO NOT PURCHASE THE KINDLE VERSION.
Before there was ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Bladerunner’, before there was even ‘1984’, there was 'Brave New World'. It is astonishing that Aldous Huxley wrote this tale of technological dystopia in 1932. The social elements from the story are similar to those in Orwell and Kafka and others, namely a society of obedient sheep run by the state and benevolent dictators through brainwashing and groupthink. But what’s striking about the novel is how it so astutely anticipates a society taken over by benevolent technocrats rather than politicians, a scenario that appears increasingly likely in the age of AI and genetic engineering. Huxley came from an illustrious scientific family with social connections. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s close friend, publicist and “bulldog”, whose famous smackdown of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce has been relished by rationalists fighting against religious faith ever since. His brother was Julian Huxley, a famous biologist who among other accomplishments wrote a marvelous tome on everything that was then known about biology with H. G. Wells. Steeped in scientific as well as social discourse, possessing a deep knowledge of medical and other scientific research, Aldous was in an ideal position to write a far-reaching novel.

This he duly did. The basic premise of the novel sounds eerily prescient. Sometime in the near future, society has been regimented into a caste system where people are genetically engineered by the state in large state-run reproductive farms. Anticipating ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, only a select few women and men are capable of providing fertile eggs and sperm for this careful social engineering. The higher castes are strong, intelligent and charismatic. The lower castes are turgid, obedient and physically weak. They don’t begrudge those from the upper castes because their genetic engineering has largely removed their propensity toward jealousy and violence. Most notably, because reproduction is now the responsibility of the state, there is no longer a concept of a family, of a father or mother. There is knowledge of these concepts, but it’s regarded as archaic history from a past era and is met with revulsion.

How is this population kept under control? Not shockingly at all, through sex, drugs and rock and roll. Promiscuity is encouraged from childhood onwards and is simply a way of life, and everyone sleeps with everyone else, again without feeling jealousy or resentment (it was this depiction of promiscuity that led the book to be banned in India in the 60s). They flood their bodies with a drug called soma whenever they feel any kind of negative emotion welling up inside and party like there’s no end. They are brainwashed into believing the virtues of these and other interventions by the state through subliminal messages played when they are sleeping; such unconscious brainwashing goes all the way back to their birth. People do die, but out of sight, and when they are still looking young and attractive. Death is little more than a nuisance, a slight distraction from youth, beauty and fun.

Like Neo from ‘The Matrix’, one particular citizen of this society named Bernard Marx starts feeling that there is more to the world than would be apparent from this state of induced bliss. On a tryst with a particularly attractive member of his caste in an Indian reservation in New Mexico, he comes across a man referred to as the savage. The savage is the product of an illegitimate encounter (back when there were parents) between a member of a lower caste and the Director of Hatcheries who oversees all the controlled reproduction. He has grown up without any of the enlightened instruments of the New World, but his mother has kept a copy of Shakespeare with her so he knows all of Shakespeare by heart and frequently quotes it. Marx brings the savage back to his society. The rest of the book describes the savage’s reaction to this supposed utopia and its ultimately tragic consequences. Ultimately he concludes that it’s better to have free will and feel occasionally unhappy, resentful and angry than live in a society where free will is squelched and the population is kept bathed in an induced state of artificial happiness.

The vision of technological control in the novel is sweeping and frighteningly prescient. There is the brainwashing and complacent submission to the status quo that everyone undergoes which is similar to the messages provided in modern times by TV, social media and the 24-hour news cycle. There are the chemical and genetic interventions made by the state right in the embryonic stage to make sure that the embryos grow up with desired physical or mental advantages or deficiencies. These kinds of interventions are the exact kind feared by those wary of CRISPR and other genetic editing technologies. Finally, keeping the population preoccupied, entertained and away from critical thinking through sex and promiscuity is a particularly potent form of societal control that has been appreciated well by Victoria’s Secret, and that will not end with developments in virtual reality.

In some sense, Huxley completely anticipates the social problems engendered by the technological takeover of human jobs by robots and AI. Once human beings are left with nothing to do, how does the state ensure that they are prevented from becoming bored and restless and causing all kinds of trouble? In his book “Homo Deus”, Yuval Harari asks the same questions and concludes that a technocratic society will come up with distractions like virtual reality video games, new psychoactive drugs and novel forms of sexual entertainment that will keep the vast majority of unemployed from becoming bored and potentially hostile. I do not know whether Harari read Huxley, but I do feel more frightened by Huxley than by Harari. One reason I feel more frightened is because of what he leaves out; the book was published in 1932, so it omits any discussion of nuclear weapons which were invented ten years later. The combination of nuclear weapons with limitless societal control through technology makes for a particularly combustible mix.

The biggest prediction of Huxley’s dystopia, and one distinctly different from that made by Orwell or Kafka, is that instead of a socialist state, people’s minds are much more likely to be controlled in the near future by the leaders of technology companies like Google and Facebook who have formed an unholy nexus with the government. With their social media alerts and Fitbits and maps, the tech companies are increasingly telling us how to live our lives and distracting us from free thinking. Instead of communist regimes like the Soviet Union forcibly trampling on individual choice and liberty, we are already gently but willingly ceding our choices, privacy and liberties to machines and algorithms developed by these companies. And just like the state in Huxley and Orwell’s works, the leaders of these corporations will tell us why it’s in our best interests to let technology control our lives and freedom, when all the while it would really be in their best interests to tell us this. Our capitulation to their inventions will look helpful and voluntary and will feel pleasurable and even noble, but it will be no less complete than the capitulation of every individual in “Brave New World” or “1984”. The only question is, will there be any savages left among us to tell us how foolishly we are behaving?
I know I had to read this in high school, but I could not remember one bit of it when I recently decided to revisit it. Maybe that goes to show how unconscious the programming was for me back then, or conversely how well I resisted it. But from this perspective in my mid-life and 80 (!) years after it's writing, this seems an amazingly subversive book, quick and easy to read, but thought provoking and disturbing in it's implications.

Of the two great dystopic novels/visions of the past century, it seems that the 20th Century saw the rise and fall of the authoritarian approach of 1984, with the rise and fall of communism, while the soothing ("kinder, gentler") vision of Brave New World (BNW) appears more prescient for the 21st Century. It is actually horrifying how much the modern world has come to reflect Huxley's vision - driven by desires for safety, comfort and conformity rather than liberty, truth and freedom - a world where personal happiness and youthfulness has become the overwhelming goal, to the exclusion of any sense of history or humility of our place in the larger scheme of things.

I will not spoil the story for you if you are like me, too foggy of the details from an old reading, or if you are as yet new to this world. But I will say, it is a classic that is best read with eyes open (not dulled by it being an assignment), and is more complex than it appears. Huxley, while not a great writer, wrote an amazingly perceptive book here. But what may be confusing (and I'm sure the basis of many an assignment paper) is how he appears to be playing both sides of the game, as in critic/cynic and in programmer/designer of the BNW (which is now more openly being called the New World Order). In other words, it appears he had a love/hate relationship with his vision, with a desire to simultaneously indulge in, and escape from it.

The inclusion of his 1958 essay "BNW Revisited" is a nice plus, but really not essential in it's details, beside giving more insight into Huxley's background and point of view. What is does show however is that Huxley is part of the very camp (of social planners and do-gooders) he is warning us about in BNW. And that as much as he is writing satire he is also trying to find a way to solve what he sees as the problems of the world - overpopulation/random breeding, overly organized/rigid traditions and taboos, wide-spread propaganda/brainwashing, chemical and technologic dependence and obsessive consumerism - through the very means of communo-fascist control he so vividly envisions. This is thus a fascinating aspect of the novel for me, and one that makes it all the more relevant and powerful today. The road to serfdom (thank you FA Hayek), which is literally what the NWO supposedly will be, is the one which central planners make, whether they be benevolent or malevolent.

Perhaps more than ever this book is a timely reminder of what we have to lose and look forward to if we choose the easy way out.