Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Aldous Huxley Revisited

 In 1932, Aldous Huxley published his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Initially criticized, the book has gained great popularity over time and, today, can be found on many lists of the most important books of the 20th Century.

Brave New World is set in the United Kingdom during the year 2540. A new world order has come into being following civil wars between competing political ideologies. The winning faction, World State, has implemented a totalitarian society administered by elites. The population is controlled by genetic engineering so humans are conditioned, from birth, to occupy a pre-determined role in society. Those roles are designated by five castes (alpha to epsilon), and one’s caste determines career choice, social position, and behavior. Socially, members of each caste mix only with members of their own caste. All life’s pleasures are available in this world, including travel, food, and sex. Depression and sadness do not exist because the population is provided with euphoria producing drugs whenever needed. For enjoyment, people attend feelies, movies that give the viewer a multi-sensory experience.

Brave New World explores individuality, freedom, and the problems of a mass-production society. It’s a world without sickness, suffering, sorrow, and pain, but it’s also one devoid of freedom, faith, love, and pride. People have been programmed to live like robots and are satisfied with their way of life. Blatantly obvious to the reader, however, is the extinction of their humanity.

In 1937, Huxley, his wife, son, and friend, the historian Gerald Heard, moved to the United States, and settled in Southern California. Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa, which emphasizes respect for all living things and the rejection of violence. In 1938, Huxley befriended Jiddu Krishnamurti, a well-known Eastern philosopher, whose teachings he greatly admired. Huxley and Krishnamurti enjoyed debating about life, with Krishnamurti taking the role of idealist and Huxley, the pragmatist.

Huxley developed an interest in mind altering drugs and began experimenting with Mescaline and LSD in the early 1950s. An aspiring mystic for most of his life, he wanted to explore hallucinogenic drugs to see if they could provide him with a mind-expanding experience. Huxley wrote about his mescaline experience in the autobiographical The Doors of Perception, published in 1954.

In 1958, twenty-six years after Brave New World was published, Huxley updated his ideas with the non-fiction work, Brave New World Revisited. It served as a platform to express his thoughts about the destiny of Western society and the likelihood of a dystopian future. Huxley devoted each chapter to a single factor in modern society that threatened human survival. His list included overpopulation, over-organization, and brainwashing.

Huxley believed over-population posed the greatest threat because the human population was growing so rapidly the planet will eventually run out of resources. Only population control could prevent this impending calamity. Over-organization was also seen as a significant problem. The world has become too complex, particularly in large metropolitan areas where the population density requires enormous bureaucracies. Human organizations must be divided into smaller units in order to be effective.

Huxley stepped through the human control weapons used in Brave New World, including brainwashing, chemical persuasion, subconscious persuasion, and hypnopedia (learning while asleep). He discussed each with respect to their current status and how they might be used in the future. In each case, he saw an opportunity for great good or great harm.

Nearing the end of his life, Huxley detected the growing spirit of a new generation in the United States, and it helped revive his utopian ideas. His novel, Island, published in 1962, was an anti-Brave New World tale about a utopian civilization.

The story centers around Will Farnaby, a lackey for oil baron Joseph Aldehyde, who sinks his boat near the south sea island of Pala. He hopes to come ashore to negotiate a business deal with island’s queen to buy the island’s oil assets. The people of the island are non-violent, practice Buddhism, and use psychedelic drugs for mind expansion. The island was under the threat of invasion, but its people were not willing to save themselves if it meant abandoning pacifism. After experiencing the wonders of life on the island, and aware the invasion is imminent, Will realizes he was wrong to think the island should be exploited. The book’s themes and ideas include overpopulation, ecology, pacifism, democracy, mysticism, and mind-altering drugs, but their application is reversed from Brave New World. For example, drugs are used for social bonding and not control, trance states for learning rather than indoctrination.

Aldous Huxley was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1963. On his deathbed, he asked his wife to inject him with LSD to ease his transition into the afterlife. He died the same day President Kennedy was assassinated.

Huxley was a hero to the counterculture movement of the 50s and 60s because they were attracted to his advice on how to stop civilization's march to the apocalypse described in Brave New World. Specifically, he told them “Do anything not to consume and go back to nature."

Brave New World uses the conflict between consumerism and freedom to stimulate a debate about culture. The tangible prospect of a technology-driven, inhuman future can only be stopped by a retreat to the utopia offered by nature. That retreat can only be achieved by not consuming. To the counter culture movement, Huxley’s pronouncement was not a demand, and the rejection of consumer culture did not necessarily require a return to nature.

Technology came from culture, not nature, and, because of its investment in popular music, the counterculture movement had to reconcile technology’s role in their belief system. Rejecting materialism and participation in the values of the mass society did not did not necessarily include a rejection of consumer capitalism. The focus on nature obscured the counter culture’s reliance on technology and other capitalist structures of mainstream 1960s and permitted an engagement with them.

In his 1969 book, The Making of a Counterculture, Theodore Roszak (1933-1977) asserted that the movement had two separate components: protesting the Vietnam War, racial injustice, and hard-core poverty were attacked from within the culture while their interest in the psychology of alienation, oriental mysticism, psychedelic drugs, and communitarian experiments placed them outside the culture.[1]

Huxley’s writings about taking hallucinogenic drugs and his focus on Eastern religions influenced many in the counterculture movement, and the Doors of Perception became a “how to” manual for taking Mescaline.

The Beatles admired Huxley and placed his image on the cover of their “Sgt. Pepper” album. The rock group, The Doors, took their name from the book’s title.

Sixty years after his death, what would Huxley have to say about the world today?

Undoubtedly, his greatest fear would be the breath of postmodern communication systems and the use of propaganda to control the public. He might even agree this problem is approaching the level described in Brave New World. Today’s media is saturated with propaganda, representing competing ideologies and driving a political wedge between the people of America. In Brave New World, there was only one voice, because the battle of ideologies had already been won. The winner of today’s propaganda war is unknown.



[1] Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture. Faber & Faber, London, 1970.