O Brave New World

It may have become a cliche to say this, but Brave New World really is a prescient novel. The thing that most struck me reading it for the second time was the complete absence of private life. Referring to the misfit Bernard Marx, the narrator writes of his 'mania ... for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private.' There is no sense of improving oneself, no genuine sense of the individual, no intellectual pursuits -- every body is but a replaceable cell in the greater body politic. You are socially obliged to 'have a good time', to take drugs, to engage in pornography, to attend vulgar public gatherings -- to do otherwise would be wrong and deviant. And so as Lenina tells Bernard, distressed by his unorthodox views, 'never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have to-day'. These beliefs, they are so clearly the ethic of today.

When Bernard asks Lenina, 'Don't you wish you were free?', she replies, 'I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time.' Isn't this what freedom and liberty has since been reduced to? One has the freedom to indulge, but not to offend. You are free from belief, free from the restrictions of morality, but you are not free to assert belief or to assert morality. You are free from judgement, but not free to judge (except to judge the judgemental). You have to simply go along with things. Go along with your most base instincts, go along with moral fashions, go along with 'progress', go along with what you have been told to think. The only people who are judged are those who have the tenacity to reflect and question. Nothing is more derided or, at best, ignored than the pursuit of truth and goodness.

Yet at the same time it is a society, like our own, where growing complexity has gone hand-in-hand with this decline in intelligence. Early in the novel, the Director tells some children of how

even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.

Nothing is simple in this utopia. Even life is created by the most complex inventions of science, while the simple, straightfoward mother-father family is scorned. Of course, sex therefore is entirely separated from any notion of reproduction. The idea of becoming a father -- or worse still, a mother -- is more horrid than a disease. Most women are born infertile. Children do not have parents -- everyone belongs to everyone else. Abortion is provided on demand.

The Director, again addressing the students, said

'What I'm going to tell you now ... may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.' 

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed. 

A look of astonished incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could not believe it. 

'Even adolescents,' the D.H.C. was saying, 'even adolescents like yourselves...' 

'Not possible!' 

'Barring a little surreptitious auto-erotism and homosexuality--absolutely nothing.' 

'Nothing?' 

'In most cases, till they were over twenty years old.' 

'Twenty years old?' echoed the students in a chorus of loud disbelief. 

'Twenty,' the Director repeated. 'I told you that you'd find it incredible.'

Fears about the sexualisation of children have abounded in the 20th century and into the 21st century, and they are always dismissed as hysterical. One inevitably thinks of Mary Whitehouse, who I have to admit I instinctively regard as a somewhat silly figure. But it is becoming harder and harder to dismiss her and her concerns when one sees what is taught in schools, at increasingly earlier ages, the media and entertainment which children eagerly consume, and the endless stories about poor confused children who are celebrated for their 'courage' in deciding they wish to change their sex. But Huxley did not predict the transgender phenomenon; perhaps even he would have considered this too wild a speculation.

It is a utopia in which everyone is told they are happy but there is no real joy. There is no meaning, no culture, just immediate sensual pleasures. Leisure is reduced to the worst sort of entertainment:

At twenty past nine they walked across the street to the newly opened Westminster Abbey Cabaret. It was a night almost without clouds, moonless and starry; but of this on the whole depressing fact Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware. The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness. 'CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS.' From the façade of the new Abbey the giant letters invitingly glared. 'LONDON'S FINEST SCENT AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC.'

I have a terrible feeling that I will live to see this come true. So much of the novel already has.