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A review by notwellread
Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
4.0
When Brave New World was first published in 1932, it provided a glimpse into a possible, but rather remote future. By the time Brave New World Revisited was published 26 years later, enough progress had taken place towards the direction of Huxley’s prophecies that he could already demonstrate how real-world examples had corroborated his original thesis, and show that the predicted changes were happening much faster than he had originally thought.
Overpopulation
Instead of the Nine Years’ War of Brave New World, Huxley first cites overpopulation as a purported cause of social overhaul, arguing that “[d]eath control is achieved very easily, birth control is achieved with great difficulty.” This includes some uncomfortable discussions of ‘dysgenics’, based on the view that less intelligent people are likely to have more children, like in the film Idiocracy. He argues that the chaos which will rise in the wake of overpopulation will lead to demands for greater government control, and ultimately tyranny. We may find some small comfort in the fact that, according to the World Bank, the rate of population growth is decelerating, but nevertheless it is still growing (i.e. more people are being born than are dying), and the pending crisis Huxley identifies of a strain on natural resources and agricultural output is still apparent. He also links it to centralisation of government power, which I think (from my own observation) is most likely to become true if the threat of mass migration leads to calls for stronger, more powerful central governments with the hardest possible border controls in order to control access to essential resources.
Propaganda and ‘the Art of Selling’
Clearly both the Second World War and the rise of communist dictatorships and the Cold War made Huxley think totalitarianism was far closer than previously suspected, and so authoritarian ideologies play a major role here. A society with that level of centralised economic control allows for bigger businesses and mass production, often of unnecessary extra goods, which Huxley had already witnessed happening in the post-War west, especially in the US. Huxley was especially unnerved by commercial jingles (which he terms ‘singing commercials’), with their uncanny ability to take over the subject’s mind involuntarily — who among us has not struggled to get an annoying song out of our heads? There were also scandals at the time around subliminal messaging in American films; whether you think this is still a factor today (for instance, in overwhelmingly positive portrayals of the military and police, or in consistently positive portrayals of certain groups and figures and negative views of others) is a matter of opinion. This was not a theme in Huxley’s ‘fable’, but something Huxley had since observed and wished he had included for its congruence with its vision.
Drugs
By the 1950s, the use of tranquillisers like Valium had already become commonplace, in lieu of disrupting conformity and stability by making reasonable changes to social and cultural problems. The parallels with soma, the fictional drug in Brave New World, are apparent, and are still relevant in the overmedicalised world today — again, this is a problem primarily associated with American culture, where medicalising unruly or non-conforming children is particularly common, but historically was an extremely pervasive method of sedating ‘troublesome’ women as well, an attitude that was still prevalent in the 1950s and arguably still at place in medicalising women’s responses to trauma today. This is my interjection, though: Huxley doesn’t delve into this angle of who is medicalised and why, and soma was used pretty universally, but the manifestation of his predictions in real life added an additional nuance due to cultural context.
Since Brave New World Revisited was published, certainly many of Huxley’s examples have been further exemplified in obvious ways. Furthermore, it seems Huxley’s observations in the US formed a large part of what made him fear for the future of Europe, writing in [b:Jesting Pilate|698868|Jesting Pilate|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266620093l/698868._SY75_.jpg|3239895] in 1926 that America was undergoing “a revaluation of values”, “a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards”. This may have provided the inspiration to write Brave New World in the first place, and no European with a modicum of historical knowledge could deny the pervasiveness of ‘Americanisation’ that has since taken place. He did not predict the intersection of politics and entertainment, epitomised in American politics but evident elsewhere, but this seems to me to be part of the same trends he observes.
Huxley shows that we have found it virtually impossible to avoid these threats, and explains why that is. He warns his readers of being lured in to a world they would consciously choose to reject, and of being distracted by everyday consumerism and instant gratification. However, the humour and surprising ambivalence with which he approached the society of Brave New World suggests that he did not want his readers to lose hope entirely: hope remains in the active, thinking mind of the individual. If the most sinister consequence is the cementing of the aforementioned methods of social control, the only mitigating factor can be our own vigilance.
Overpopulation
Instead of the Nine Years’ War of Brave New World, Huxley first cites overpopulation as a purported cause of social overhaul, arguing that “[d]eath control is achieved very easily, birth control is achieved with great difficulty.” This includes some uncomfortable discussions of ‘dysgenics’, based on the view that less intelligent people are likely to have more children, like in the film Idiocracy. He argues that the chaos which will rise in the wake of overpopulation will lead to demands for greater government control, and ultimately tyranny. We may find some small comfort in the fact that, according to the World Bank, the rate of population growth is decelerating, but nevertheless it is still growing (i.e. more people are being born than are dying), and the pending crisis Huxley identifies of a strain on natural resources and agricultural output is still apparent. He also links it to centralisation of government power, which I think (from my own observation) is most likely to become true if the threat of mass migration leads to calls for stronger, more powerful central governments with the hardest possible border controls in order to control access to essential resources.
Propaganda and ‘the Art of Selling’
Clearly both the Second World War and the rise of communist dictatorships and the Cold War made Huxley think totalitarianism was far closer than previously suspected, and so authoritarian ideologies play a major role here. A society with that level of centralised economic control allows for bigger businesses and mass production, often of unnecessary extra goods, which Huxley had already witnessed happening in the post-War west, especially in the US. Huxley was especially unnerved by commercial jingles (which he terms ‘singing commercials’), with their uncanny ability to take over the subject’s mind involuntarily — who among us has not struggled to get an annoying song out of our heads? There were also scandals at the time around subliminal messaging in American films; whether you think this is still a factor today (for instance, in overwhelmingly positive portrayals of the military and police, or in consistently positive portrayals of certain groups and figures and negative views of others) is a matter of opinion. This was not a theme in Huxley’s ‘fable’, but something Huxley had since observed and wished he had included for its congruence with its vision.
Drugs
By the 1950s, the use of tranquillisers like Valium had already become commonplace, in lieu of disrupting conformity and stability by making reasonable changes to social and cultural problems. The parallels with soma, the fictional drug in Brave New World, are apparent, and are still relevant in the overmedicalised world today — again, this is a problem primarily associated with American culture, where medicalising unruly or non-conforming children is particularly common, but historically was an extremely pervasive method of sedating ‘troublesome’ women as well, an attitude that was still prevalent in the 1950s and arguably still at place in medicalising women’s responses to trauma today. This is my interjection, though: Huxley doesn’t delve into this angle of who is medicalised and why, and soma was used pretty universally, but the manifestation of his predictions in real life added an additional nuance due to cultural context.
Since Brave New World Revisited was published, certainly many of Huxley’s examples have been further exemplified in obvious ways. Furthermore, it seems Huxley’s observations in the US formed a large part of what made him fear for the future of Europe, writing in [b:Jesting Pilate|698868|Jesting Pilate|Aldous Huxley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1266620093l/698868._SY75_.jpg|3239895] in 1926 that America was undergoing “a revaluation of values”, “a radical alteration (for the worse) of established standards”. This may have provided the inspiration to write Brave New World in the first place, and no European with a modicum of historical knowledge could deny the pervasiveness of ‘Americanisation’ that has since taken place. He did not predict the intersection of politics and entertainment, epitomised in American politics but evident elsewhere, but this seems to me to be part of the same trends he observes.
Huxley shows that we have found it virtually impossible to avoid these threats, and explains why that is. He warns his readers of being lured in to a world they would consciously choose to reject, and of being distracted by everyday consumerism and instant gratification. However, the humour and surprising ambivalence with which he approached the society of Brave New World suggests that he did not want his readers to lose hope entirely: hope remains in the active, thinking mind of the individual. If the most sinister consequence is the cementing of the aforementioned methods of social control, the only mitigating factor can be our own vigilance.