Books: New World Reconsidered

Fifteen years ago Novelist Aldous Huxley regaled British and American wits with a prophetic novel entitled Brave New World. In this caustic, chilly fantasy of a world-to-come (A.D. 2,500), babies were born in class-distinctive bottles, travel was in state-controlled helicopters, scientific absolutism was the universal rule. People swallowed a tabloid of happiness when they felt blue, worshiped a mechanistic god named “Our Ford,” and believed that sexual fidelity was obscene. Faced with the alternatives of being Utopian or regressing into a squalid primitivism, the unhappy hero of Brave New World chose to hang himself.

This week, in an introduction to a new edition of Brave New World (Harper, $2.50; 311 pp.), Novelist Huxley casts a cold eye over his fantasy, firmly classes it among “the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth.” It is now too late, says Author Huxley, to try and “patch up” Brave New World; all that can be done is to investigate its conclusions. Some fresh findings:

“Fifteen years ago … I projected [my Utopia] 600 years into the future. Today it seems quite probable that the horror may be upon us within a single century.

“One vast and obvious failure of foresight is [that] Brave New World contains no reference to nuclear fission. . . . The next phase may be atomic warfare . . . but it is conceivable that we have enough sense [to confine ourselves] to a period, not indeed of peace, but of . . . only partially ruinous warfare. . . . During that period the nuclear scientist will prepare the bed on which mankind must lie.

“The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call ‘the problem of happiness’—in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude.

“The equivalents of soma and hypnopaedia [the happy-making drugs in Brave New World] and [a] scientific caste system are probably not more than three or four generations away. Nor does the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant. In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months. . . . Dictator[s] will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile [people] to the servitude which is their fate.

“The [hero of Brave New World”] is offered . . . life in Utopia, or the [abnormal] life of a primitive .. . insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other. . . . If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer a third alternative . . . the possibility of sanity . . . in a community of exiles and refugees.*… Economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and cooperative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man. . . . Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man’s Final End . . . the transcendent Godhead.”

*Author Huxley, an expatriate, now lives in California.