Brave New World Revisited

By Aldous Huxley

In this “brilliantly written” book, the author of Brave New World reflects on his dystopian classic—and its echoes in the real world decades later (Kirkus Reviews).
 
Written almost thirty years after the publication of Aldous Huxley’s groundbreaking dystopian novel, Brave New World Revisited compares the “future” of 1958 with his vision of it from the early 1930s. Touching on subjects as diverse as world population, drugs, subliminal suggestion, and totalitarianism, these timeless essays provide a fascinating look at ideas of early science fiction in the context of the real world.
 
“It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time. . . . fascinating.” —The New York Times Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780795311697

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a prominent and successful English writer. Throughout his career he wrote over fifty books, and was nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Huxley wrote his first book, Crome Yellow, when he was seventeen years old, which was described by critics as a complex social satire. Huxley was both an avid humanist and pacifist and many of these ideals are reflected in his writing. Often controversial, Huxley’s views were most evident in the best-selling dystopian novel, Brave New World. The publication of Brave New Worldin 1931 rattled many who read it. However, the novel inspired many writers, Kurt Vonnegut in particular, to describe the book’s characters as foundational to the genre of science fiction. With much of his work attempting to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western beliefs, Aldous Huxley has been hailed as a writer ahead of his time.

Book preview

I

Over-Population

In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching—these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren. I forget the exact date of the events recorded in Brave New World; but it was somewhere in the sixth or seventh century A.F. (After Ford). We who were living in the second quarter of the twentieth century A.D. were the inhabitants, admittedly, of a gruesome kind of universe; but the nightmare of those depression years was radically different from the nightmare of the future, described in Brave New World. Ours was a nightmare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. In the passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds—the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative.

Twenty-seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much has not begun and shows no sign of beginning. In the West, it is true, individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those countries that have a tradition of democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane. In the rest of the world freedom for individuals has already gone, or is manifestly about to go. The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.

George Orwell’s 1984 was a magnified projection into the future of a present that had contained Stalinism and an immediate past that had witnessed the flowering of Nazism. Brave New World was written before the rise of Hitler to supreme power in Germany and when the Russian tyrant had not yet got into his stride. In 1931 systematic terrorism was not the obsessive contemporary fact which it had become in 1948, and the future dictatorship of my imaginary world was a good deal less brutal than the future dictatorship so brilliantly portrayed by Orwell. In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia and recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell’s book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody’s predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984.

In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behavior in general, and human behavior in particular, it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effective, in the long run, than control through the reinforcement of desirable behavior by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children. Punishment temporarily puts a stop to undesirable behavior, but does not permanently reduce the victim’s tendency to indulge in it. Moreover, the psychophysical by-products of punishment may be just as undesirable as the behavior for which an individual has been punished. Psychotherapy is largely concerned with the debilitating or anti-social consequences of past punishments.

The society described in 1984 is a society controlled almost exclusively by punishment and the fear of punishment. In the imaginary world of my own fable punishment is infrequent and generally mild. The nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable behavior, by many kinds of nearly non-violent manipulation, both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardization. Babies in bottles and the centralized control of reproduction are not perhaps impossible; but it is quite clear that for a long time to come we shall remain a viviparous species breeding at random. For practical purposes genetic standardization may be ruled out. Societies will continue to be controlled post-natally—by punishment, as in the past, and to an ever increasing extent by the more effective methods of reward and scientific manipulation.

In Russia the old-fashioned, 1984-style dictatorship of Stalin has begun to give way to a more up-to-date form of tyranny. In the upper levels of the Soviets’ hierarchical society the reinforcement of desirable behavior has begun to replace the older methods of control through the punishment of undesirable behavior. Engineers and scientists, teachers and administrators, are handsomely paid for good work and so moderately taxed that they are under a constant incentive to do better and so be more highly rewarded. In certain areas they are at liberty to think and do more or less what they like. Punishment awaits them only when they stray beyond their prescribed limits into the realms of ideology and politics. It is because they have been granted a measure of professional freedom that Russian teachers, scientists and technicians have achieved such remarkable successes. Those who live near the base of the Soviet pyramid enjoy none of the privileges accorded to the lucky or specially gifted minority. Their wages are meager and they pay, in the form of high prices, a disproportionately large share of the taxes. The area in which they can do as they please is extremely restricted, and their rulers control them more by punishment and the threat of punishment than through non-violent manipulation or the reinforcement of desirable behavior by reward. The Soviet system combines elements of 1984 with elements that are prophetic of what went on among higher castes in Brave New World.

Meanwhile impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses. The techniques of manipulation will be discussed in later chapters. For the moment let us confine our attention to those impersonal forces which are now making the world so extremely unsafe for democracy, so very inhospitable to individual freedom. What are these forces? And why has the nightmare, which I had projected into the seventh century A.F., made so swift an advance in our direction? The answer to these questions must begin where the life of even the most highly civilized society has its beginnings—on the level of biology.

On the first Christmas Day the population of our planet was about two hundred and fifty millions—less than half the population of modern China. Sixteen centuries later, when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, human numbers had climbed to a little more than five hundred millions. By the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, world population had passed the seven hundred million mark. In 1931, when I was writing Brave New World, it stood at just under two billions. Today, only twenty-seven years later, there are two billion eight hundred million of us. And tomorrow—what? Penicillin, DDT and clean water are cheap commodities, whose effects on public health are out of all proportion to their cost. Even the poorest government is rich enough to provide its subjects with a substantial measure of death control. Birth control is a very different matter. Death control is something which can be provided for a whole people by a few technicians working in the pay of a benevolent government. Birth control depends on the co-operation of an entire people. It must be practiced by countless individuals, from whom it demands more intelligence and will power than most of the world’s teeming illiterates possess, and (where chemical or mechanical methods of contraception are used) an expenditure of more money than most of these millions can now afford. Moreover, there are nowhere any religious traditions in favor of unrestricted death, whereas religious and social traditions in favor of unrestricted reproduction are widespread. For all these reasons, death control is achieved very easily, birth control is achieved with great difficulty. Death rates have therefore fallen in recent years with startling suddenness. But birth rates have either remained at their old high level or, if they have fallen, have fallen very little and at a very slow rate. In consequence, human numbers are now increasing more rapidly than at any time in the history of the species.

Moreover, the yearly increases are themselves increasing. They increase regularly, according to the rules of compound interest; and they also increase irregularly with every application, by a technologically backward society of the principles of Public Health. At the present time the annual increase in world population runs to about forty-three millions. This means that every four years mankind adds to its numbers the equivalent of the present population of India. At the rate of increase prevailing between the birth of Christ and the death of Queen Elizabeth I, it took sixteen centuries for the population of the earth to double. At the present rate it will double in

Reviews for Brave New World Revisited

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am not impressed by the book, but as the author's intent was a revision of an earlier triumph, I'm not surprised. Some of the criticism leveled at Huxley's first pass at prediction were legitimate, but only in hindsight. the book is primarily valuable as point from which to compare the extent to which the critics' strictures were borne out by further experience. it is readable, but unlikely to be read nowadays by anyone uninterested in the original novel as an artifact.

[markkeeffe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I didn't enjoy this much but I suppose I wasn't meant to. I assume it was Aldous Huxley's attempt to warn us about the consequences of using technology to hide from the truth about what we are and our nature.

[madepercy-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Huxley writes about the world in 1957, 25 years after his most famous novel, Brave New World. This is more or less an academic work where Huxley considers numerous scholars of the period (in particular, psychologists and behaviourists) and comments on propaganda, marketing, social engineering of the day (noting John Dewey and B.F. Skinner a few times). I took the time to write down all the names and works that appear in the book, as much of Huxley's commentary is lost to earlier memories. Nevertheless, his companion book to his major work of fiction is no less prophetic. I couldn't help but wonder first, how Brave New World could have such predictive power in 1932, and then, that he could do the same again in 1957. I suppose this particular work is somewhat lost because it is not a work of fiction. But it has opened my eyes to how the issues of the present are rooted in the past.

[nick1967-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I know some people don't care for this book much, but for me I just loved it to death. I will admit while reading this book I found it to be creepy and at times frightening. I will admit for the story that was written the book seems too short. I sort of wished it would have went on a little more and we could have explored more about the society created by this author. I also loved how some of the ideas of the "future" were more likely than others. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone.

[karenrinn · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Huxley's addition to Brave New World is a diatribe on overpopulation and states the solution is selective breeding and aborting based on genetic materials. Surprising since this was written 15 years or so after WWII and Hitler's great experiment. Huxley attempted to support his argument by stating this is the only way to save the planet. Unfortunately, his rhetoric could only be seen as positive by those who are naive and uneducated, the very people he suggested should not be alive.

[birdbrian-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Last review of the year!I admit I expected this to be fiction... a story picking up where Brave New World left off. Shows you how much I know. Actually, this is a series of essays, in which Huxley explains why he wrote some of the things he wrote in BNW. In that sense, the book reads like an interview on one of those shows like Charlie Rose or Inside the Actor's Studio. It's a little bit self-indulgent on Huxley's part, but it's also captivating. This new volume was written in 1958 - twenty-seven years after Brave New World was penned, and Huxley makes some interesting comments on ways that the world has grown to look more like the world of the OneState.Naturally, Hitler and Stalin are mentioned; both dictators employed propaganda techniques described in BNW. Those comparisons were more or less expected. What I found much more absorbing was Huxley's detailed catalogue of all the new pharmaceuticals developed between 1932 and 1958, which in various ways suggest an effort (conscious or not) on the part of pharmaceutical companies to come up with a drug exactly like "Soma". The most interesting part of this book, in fact, is Huxley's refining of how he thinks a dictatorship would medicate its population. It's a little more sophisticated than what he described in Brave New World. Essentially, Huxley makes a case for tranquilizing (or hallucinogenizing) the population during peace, and amphetiminizing it during war.From the standpoint of 1958, it looked like Huxley's prophecy had been fulfilled... a proliferation of prescription tranquilizers was on the market (as the Rolling Stones sang in 1965: "Mother's Little Helper"), and the country was in a decades-long Cold War, but no hot war. From the standpoint of 2012, things are a little muddier. The number of psychotropic meds available is stunning, and many have a tranquilizing effect, but many of the SSRI meds have a simultaneously uplifting effect. Incidentally, it's also difficult to know whether most citizens would say we're in a state of war or not, given George Bush's advice to go shopping and forget about our foreign military adventures. The world has become very complex.No matter; this book is not really about Huxley saying "Aha! Prophecy fulfilled!" or not. It's about why he wrote what he wrote, and pretty much why he still in 1958 contends he would have written the same thing. This gets to answering questions I posed in my own review of Brave New World, namely: Did Huxley pen BNW to warn the population of creeping totalitarianism, or to rub our noses in it? With this second book, the answer is straightforwardly clear: to warn us. For as much as our society's creep towards the Brave New World is engineered (by people he calls the "Power Elite"), Huxley very articulately denounces it. However he also attributes the march to tyrrany partly to unengineered circumstances, such as the world's increasing population, the scarcity of various strategic resources, the advance of technology, the advent of social sciences, and the unintended consequences of a free market economy. I won't say I agree with every last point, but getting inside of his head for a few hours made for good reading, and further enhanced my appreciation for Brave New World.Most depressing of all, Huxley identifies in our own society a love for gullability and suggestability, which are so easily seized on by those who would control us. Too often, we prize group cohesion over truth; easily-told lies over difficult-to-explain truths, if the latter seem to promote some good; and unthinking slogans which rouse the spirit -so long as the cause is worthy. To illustrate his point, he tells the sad story of the Institute for Propaganga Analysis (IPA). The institute was founded in 1937 in New England, by philanthropist Edward Filene (of "Filene's" department store fame), who was rightly distressed at seeing how effectively Hitler's propaganda was swaying opinions in Europe. The intention of the IPA was to strip the fallacies from Hitler's message, and expose his manipulative trickeries for what they were. At first, the Institute was lauded and supported, but soon the State Department realized they wanted to rouse Americans to war with many of the same techniques. Moreover, certain members of organized religion felt the work of the IAP undermined the spirit and teachings of their various churches. Educators started to voice concern that propaganda analysis would make students too cynical and unruly. Military leaders feared too much critical thinking would make troops unleadable. In short- too many elements within our own "free society" identify with the impulse to control through manipulation- and more importantly, are willing to sacrifice nuanced, critical thinking in exchange for managability of the public to their causes. The IPA was closed six years after it was founded, and its true history is one of the most troublesome anecdotes I've ever heard from a functioning democracy. At the end of this book, the editors saw fit to include a letter written by Aldous Huxley to George Orwell in 1949, after Huxley first read 1984. In my mind, at least, this is a great moment in literary history: a personal communication between the authors of the two great dystopian novels of the twentieth century. Huxley applauds 1984 for its literary merits, and agrees the mechanisms of oppression described therein certainly exist. Huxley sees 1984-style tyrrany as a possiblility, but disagrees with Orwell that it would be a static endpoint in history.He argues that in 1984, political stability is achieved at too high a price (e.g. maintaining a large secret police apparatus to oversee the entire population) which would not be sustainable long-term. The Brave New World is a much more efficient tyrrany; by training a public to love their subservience, the oligarchs of the OneState did not require nearly as large a police force. Where 1984 may be a necessary intermediate for would-be oligarchs, Huxley believes Brave New World better approximates the Power Elite's ultimate model society.Amazing.I'll leave you with a nice passage from page 120:That so many of the well fed young television-watchers in the world's most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. "Free as a bird", we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Dated -- obviously--, boring and written in an uninteresting way.

[katharinedb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

another book on the evils of the future- was pretty good and if you consider he wrote it in 1933 it is excellent . would recomend it to those interested in this genre and would like to read his other works.

[radaghast_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent companion to Brave New World. Written in 1958, it has just the right about of distance from the original work, yet close enough for Huxley to basically be the same person as when he wrote the original. There is so much to talk about in this short book I'm not sure where to begin. Brave New World Revisited is Huxley's post-WWII take on his book, first published in 1932. What is amazing and almost eerie is how much of what Huxley writes about we are seeing today. The concept of "Endless War," the growing dependence on medication to improve mood and productivity, the increase in surveillance, the power of modern propaganda, mass media, etc. Huxley takes themes from 1984 and Brave New World and extrapolates on what things will look like in the next millennium. Our millennium. What's amazing is how nearly all of this book is still relevant today. Shockingly relevant. It seems we are just now reaching a point where the world Huxley and to a lesser extent Orwell envisioned is a realistic threat.Of course, there are some things that are silly by today's standards. Huxley's theories on subliminal messaging and sleep teaching have never come to fruition. Also, even where he recognizes the danger of drugs emerging during his time, he writes a glowing review of LSD, the drug that dominated his final years. How a brilliant man like Huxley could fail to realize he was prey to his own soma is perplexing. Lastly, Huxley's words on overpopulation are much more relevant now than during his own time, but still have not reached the level of danger he predicted.There are a few moments of annoyance, where Huxley takes small shots at religion, without ever addressing the issue or justifying his assumptions. But these are very minor. Overall, if you recognize Brave New World as a piece of great literature, or you wish to learn about the origin of many of our modern problems, read this book. I did not do it due justice, trust me.

[takeitorleaveit_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

my favorite book of all time. including, Heaven and Hell BNWR tells it EXACTLY how it is.