The Promise of Progress
By Matthew J. Franck
For much of the Cold War,
George Orwell’s novel 1984 eclipsed Aldous Huxley’s
earlier work Brave New World. Orwell’s book, published in
1949, seemed to many readers the more apt dystopia for understanding the
challenge of totalitarianism, since it could be said to capture the essential
character of the regimes on the other side of the Iron Curtain. With the Cold
War now long over, and with that era’s public preoccupation with space,
military technology, and the physical sciences redirected toward the biological
and behavioral sciences and their potential to reshape human beings and
society, Huxley’s dark tale has seemed “relevant” again. This is a judgment
that would not have surprised its author. Huxley’s latest biographer, Nicholas Murray, explains that when Orwell
sent Huxley an early copy of 1984,
Huxley wrote back to say “that he had enjoyed it but believed his book [Brave New World] was better
prophecy,” with its portrait of a gentler but more effective totalitarianism
than Orwell’s “boot smashing down on the face.”
Though
Huxley clearly intended his 1932 book as a dystopia, Murray reports that the
novel was “popular with American college students in the 1950s” for its
portents of sexual liberation, and that the contemporary French novelist Michel
Houellebecq, in the words of one of his characters, treats Brave New World as “exactly the
sort of world we’re trying to create, the world we want to live in.” Murray
himself, whose strong suit is Huxley’s personal life rather than his literary
production, plays up the respects in which the novel is a “critique of modern
consumerism.” To be sure, there are the planned obsolescence of consumer goods,
the conditioned desire for empty recreations, and the replacement of God with
the shade of Henry Ford. But this is superficial. A more penetrating view was
taken by Rebecca West, who in a 1932 review of the book in the Daily Telegraph called it “the
most serious religious work written for some years,” and remarked that in one
pivotal scene Huxley had “rewritten in terms of our age the chapter called ‘The
Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers
Karamazov.” (West’s comparison was discussed at length in these pages in
Caitrin Nicol’s essay “Brave New World at 75,” Spring 2007.)
But an even
more telling comparison can be made — that Brave New World is a modern counterpart to the “city in
speech” built by Socrates and his young interlocutors in Plato’s Republic. Whether Huxley saw the
similarities himself is far from clear. In neither the “Foreword” added to the
1946 edition nor his lengthy 1958 essay Brave New World Revisited, which is published together with the
novel in some editions, does he indicate any
consciousness of a parallel. Nor do his Complete Essays (published 2000 – 2002)
shed light on this. His biographer Murray mentions no such connection in
Huxley’s mind either; nor does his earlier biographer Sybille Bedford. Yet it may not be necessary
to confirm any precise authorial intention on Huxley’s part to imitate Plato.
Whereas Huxley’s other novels are largely forgotten today by the general
public, and his later visits to the themes of Brave New World are those of a crank whose imaginative
gifts have deserted him, in writing his greatest work he seems to have been in
the grip of an idea larger than himself. Plato’s Socrates tells us in the Apology that when he “went to the poets” to “ask them thoroughly what they
meant” in their greatest poems, he found to his surprise that “almost everyone
present, so to speak, would have spoken better than the poets did about the
poetry that they themselves had made.” For as Socrates said (not without some
biting irony) in Plato’s Ion, “all the good epic poets
speak all their fine poems not from art but by being inspired and possessed,
and it is the same for the good lyric poets.” Perhaps during the mere four
months it took Huxley to write Brave
New World, he was “possessed” in this way and remained forever
unconscious of his debt to Plato.
The Structure
of Huxley’s World State
From the first paragraph of the
novel, we learn the motto of the World State of Huxley’s imagination:
“Community, Identity, Stability.” This brings to mind Socrates’ question to
Glaucon in The Republic:
“Have we any greater evil for a city than what splits it and makes it many
instead of one? Or a greater good than what binds it together and makes it
one?” Socrates and Glaucon agree that “that city [is] best governed which is
most like a single human being.” In the same vein, the individual in the World
State is “just a cell in the social body.” As for stability, described by one
of Huxley’s chief characters as “the primal and the ultimate need,” this is
something Socrates cannot guarantee regarding his city in speech: he tells his
young friends that their city is “so composed” as to be “hard to be moved,” but
that “since for everything that has come into being there is decay,” even it
will not “remain for all time.” At the end of Brave New World, we have no reason to believe that Huxley’s
World Controllers have not conquered the problem of decay. They appear to have
achieved a perfectly static perfect justice. But then, unlike the rulers in
Socrates’ city — unlike Socrates himself — they have wholly mastered a science
that is (in Socrates’ words) “sovereign of better and worse begettings.” For
the need to conquer human nature by eugenics is only the most obvious matter
where Plato and Huxley meet on common ground. (All quotations from the Republic in this essay are drawn
from Allan Bloom’s translation.)
The
necessity of eugenics is driven by another principle the two polities have in
common: “one man, one art.” Each cell in the social body has its peculiar work
to do. As Plato’s Socrates divides his city into three classes — the golden
guardians, the silver auxiliaries, and the iron or bronze farmers and artisans
— Huxley’s World State has the five classes of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and
Epsilon. Socrates recognizes that he cannot keep his classes differentiated —
hence he cannot keep the city stable — without keeping a “careful ... watch”
over the children born to the parents in each class, transferring up and down
the social scale those children who are better fitted to be reared in another
class than the one into which they were born. Ultimately, with respect to the
gold class, Socrates opts for a concerted eugenics program that involves the
destruction of marriage and the family and the concealment of every child’s
peculiar parentage, with childrearing handed over to a common nursery.
But Huxley
does Socrates one better. The World State has completely severed sexual
intercourse from procreation. No more viviparous reproduction; instead, the
Hatchery and Conditioning Centre has taken over the whole work of producing
each generation of citizens. Babies are made there on the assembly line by
strictly selected in vitro fertilization
and gestation, and their conditioning for their role in life begun even before
they are “decanted.” Special lines of “plus” and “minus” models of each class
are manufactured, from “Alpha-Plus” to “Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.” Descending
to even more particularity, they are prepared for their precise adult jobs by
doses of chemicals, exposure to heat and cold and other stimuli, and — after
decanting — by early-childhood conditioning to like or dislike objects like
books and flowers or experiences like darkness or sunshine. But will not the
State need many workers identically made to do certain low-class jobs requiring
mass manpower? That is solved in part by Bokanovsky’s Process, a method akin to in vitro cloning that can
produce as many as ninety-six copies of a single embryo.
In Plato’s
city, the sexes are generally equal in their participation in public life and
work — but not quite. As Glaucon says to Socrates, they will assign “everything
in common” to both sexes, “except that we use the females as weaker and the
males as stronger.” Soon thereafter they agree that while there is no art
“practiced by human beings in which the class of men doesn’t excel that of
women,” yet because there is “no practice relevant to the government of a city
that is peculiar to woman,” and “the natures are scattered alike among both”
sexes, the women must be educated as the men are and assigned the same duties.
Socrates blithely leads Glaucon to neglect even the possibility that there is
an art of mothering, and to agree to the joint exercise of the sexes, naked, in
their gymnastic training. Conditioning over time, they say, will accustom the
male and female guardians to this immodesty. Somehow love of the city will be
all they think of when they see what would normally be other objects of their
affection.
So also in
Huxley’s book, the sexes are in almost entire equality with one another. If
with the banishment of viviparous reproduction the word “mother” is now an
obscenity, why not? And yet, the equality is not quite complete — we never hear
of a female World Controller or other high official. But the bad joke of
Socrates’ naked unisex gymnastics is retold in Huxley’s early conditioning of
both sexes to treat intercourse as play. Children at the Conditioning Centre,
“naked in the warm June sunshine,” engage in “ordinary erotic play.” No need to
restrain the natural sexual urges and channel them for eugenic purposes, as
Socrates had to do. With reproduction cordoned off from sex — with every woman
who is not hormonally engineered to be a sterile “freemartin” always going
about equipped with her “Malthusian belt” of contraceptives, and strategically
located Abortion Centres ready in case of accident — a wholly indiscriminate
recreational sexuality can be unleashed, indeed encouraged, in both sexes.
Paramount
for maintaining the basic structure of both Huxley’s World State and Plato’s
city are their educational regimes. Socrates has his “noble lie” — a false tale
about the creation of the city and its people that, if believed to be true, would
guarantee citizens’ loyalty to the city and at the same time contentedness
about their fixed place in it — all shored up by a strict censorship of poetry
to inculcate the most politically unifying opinions. Similarly, the World State
has its regime of “hypnopædia” (sleep teaching), in which nocturnal repetitions
of moral maxims drone into the ears of the children until their conditioned
responses to virtually every social situation are automatic. Like Socrates’
citizens who are schooled that they are “brothers and born of the earth” but
fashioned by “the god” with the different metals in their natures, Huxley’s are
taught over and over that “every one belongs to every one else,” that “all men
are physico-chemically equal,” yet steadily conditioned to be unthinkingly
content with their own station in life: “I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta....
Oh no, I don’t want
to play with Delta children.”
As they grow
up, the children of the World State “learn to take dying as a matter of
course,” undergoing “death conditioning” from an early age on field trips to
the Hospital for the Dying, where men and women of sixty go to end lives that
have been productive and pleasurable to the very end — sixty apparently being
the upper limit at which all the powers of work and play can go on undimmed.
Socrates too insists that his city’s young charges must “be told things that
will make them fear death least,” so that “a decent man” will believe that for
his fallen comrade “being dead is not a terrible thing.” But Socrates’ aim is
to inculcate courage among warriors, a virtue of which there is no need in the
World State, the scene of universal peace. Where there are no enemies, there is
no need of soldiers, hence no need of physical courage in the face of violent
death. Death comes peacefully, by prearrangement at a fixed age, in the World
State. But the mystery of death is still frightening in itself, and so a kind
of moral courage is still required, in the form (as Socrates puts it) of an
“opinion produced by law through education about what — and what sort of thing
— is terrible.”
The Mastery of Eros
The ideal society needs more
than political organization and proper education toward love of the state; it
also requires that citizens’ private pleasures be rightly directed. Socrates
defines moderation as “a certain kind of order and mastery of certain kinds of
pleasures and desires.” Later in the Republic, he argues that there are three kinds of pleasures,
corresponding to “three primary classes of human beings ...: wisdom-loving,
victory-loving, gain-loving.” This describes a clear hierarchy of pleasures and
of people. In Brave New World,
this hierarchy is flattened (with the possible exception of the World
Controllers, about whom more anon). All the World State’s citizens appear to be
gain-loving, seekers of the lowest pleasures. They play Obstacle Golf (their
sports are as close as they come to being victory-loving); they go to
full-sensory movie theaters, the “feelies” (in Huxley’s day the “talkies” were
still new); they flit about in their helicopters from one empty entertainment
to another. In the case of Alphas, for whom this endless round of pleasures
might begin to pall, it is especially important that they conform to “their
duty to be infantile, even against their inclination,” that they be adults at
work and children at play. Perverse though it may be, this too is a certain
kind of mastery of desire.
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