Brave New World Revisited

Brave New World Revisited

by Aldous Huxley
Brave New World Revisited

Brave New World Revisited

by Aldous Huxley

Paperback(REPRINT)

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Overview

"Huxley uses his erudite knowledge of human relations to compare our actual world with his prophetic fantasy of 1931. 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." — New York Times Book Review

When Aldous Huxley wrote his famous novel Brave New World, he did so with the belief that the dystopian world he created was a true possibility given the direction of the social, political and economic world order. Written more than twenty-five years later, Brave New World Revisited is a re-evaluation of his predictions based on the changes he witnessed over that time.

In this twelve-part work of nonfiction, one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy. He scrutinizes threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion, and explains why we have found it virtually impossible to avoid them. Brave New World Revisited is a trenchant plea that humankind should educate itself for freedom before it is too late. 


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060898526
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 09/05/2006
Series: P.S. Series
Edition description: REPRINT
Pages: 144
Sales rank: 101,801
Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.32(d)
Lexile: 1360L (what's this?)
Age Range: 12 - 18 Years

About the Author

About The Author
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.

Read an Excerpt

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 blessedinterval 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 comer.

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 Hider 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 fight 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-natalty--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.

Reading Group Guide

About the Book
Unlike the earlier book that inspired it, Brave New World Revisited is not a work of fiction -- although its message is, in many ways, more disturbing than the classic novel's. For while Brave New World, published in 1932, predicted a totalitarian society precipitated by various forms of mind control, these 1958 essays postdate the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and other dictators who actually manipulated whole populations in some of the ways that Huxley had predicted. "Brave New World presents a fanciful and somewhat ribald picture of a society, in which the attempt to recreate human beings in the likeness of termites has been pushed almost to the limits of the possible," Huxley writes. "That we are being propelled in the direction of Brave New World is obvious. But no less obvious is the fact that we can, if we so desire, refuse to cooperate with the blind forces that are propelling us."

Huxley is concerned primarily with the loss of human freedoms. He views overpopulation due to advances in medicine and technology as the most pressing problem, resulting in widespread misery around the globe. At the same time, modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, to a society controlled by Big Business and Big Government, which Huxley calls "over-organization." In Brave New World, Huxley "imagined" dictatorship by drugs (he invented a euphoria-inducing drug called "soma"), but his fictional depiction of chemical persuasion, he feels, has nothing on the reality of our over-medicated society. There are many other kind of mind control at work today as well -- propaganda spewed by media owned by a corporateelite, the subtle (and not so subtle) manipulation of advertising, and the possibilities of subconscious persuasion through hypnosis, subliminal projection, and hypnopaedia (teaching a person while he sleeps).

Huxley feels that we know what ought to be done to guarantee our freedoms, yet forty years after Brave New World Revisited was published, so many of the threats to individual freedom that he cites continue, and new ones have appeared. His book continues to challenge complacency and enter a plea that we educate ourselves in freedom before it is too late.

Topics for Discussion

  • Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited at the height of the Cold War. Can any of his predictions now be dismissed in light of the fall of the Soviet Union?

  • Do you think that Huxley's concerns about dictatorship by drugs has become even more possible in the age of Prozac and other psychological medications?

  • When Huxley wrote these articles, DDT still was considered a scientific advance. What other aspects of Huxley's articles now, seem dated? Which of his predictions have become even more timely?

  • Huxley writes of economic censorship, with the press controlled by the Big Business/Big Government elite. Has this censorship been diluted by the rise of the Internet? Alternatively, in what ways could the Internet pose new threats to our freedoms?

  • The birth control pill was not available when Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited. Has its dissemination helped solve any of the problems that he predicted?

  • Should legislation be enacted that curtails the rights of government, advertisers, or religious organizations to manipulate the mind of individuals?

    About the Author: Poet, playwright, novelist and short story writer, travel writer, essayist, critic, philosopher, mystic, and social prophet, Aldous Huxley was one of the most accomplished and influential English literary figures of the mid-20th century. He was born in Surrey in 1894, and his books include Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, Point Counter Point, Brave New World, and The Doors of Perception. From 1937 on, Huxley made his home in Southern California. He died in 1963. Today he is remembered as one of the great explorers of 20th century literature, a writer who continually reinvented himself as he pushed his way deeper and deeper into the mysteries of human consciousness.

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