RECENTLY I have come across several references to Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (BNW), and I realised, that though I had read the other dystopian novel often mentioned in the same breath, Nineteen Eighty-Four, as a teenager (in the 1960s) I had never read BNW, an omission I have recently corrected. I wondered how the world created in the book compared with our own, or that which might be fashioned in the next few years, now that a new government (and a party much led by pressure groups) is in place.
It would be wrong to see BNW (or Orwell’s novel) as a prediction of the future (most attempts to imagine ‘the shape of things to come’ fail ludicrously), and it is clear that Huxley was (as we should expect) reacting to events and circumstances in his world. The book was published in 1932; pre-Nazi novels often have an easy-going attitude to such things as race and eugenics, and this one is no exception, and of course, there is no wokery: inferior kinds of people, and references to negroes, occur readily in BNW.
Huxley’s book depicts a future society in which people are created artificially, in a vast laboratory, and conditioned to accept and relish the caste in which they are created and its concomitant duties. Intelligent people are at the top, morons required for labour at the bottom. The conditioning comes in the form of ‘hypnopaedia’: ideas – slogans – fed into the infants’ brains while they are sleeping. Above all, procreation by biological parents and existence of the family are strongly despised. In our world only a small fraction of people are created in vitro, but the family – as readers of TCW will know – has been roundly under attack by governments and pressure groups for some time. At least the rulership of Huxley’s society seem to realise the need to perpetuate the species by the making of new people; our leaders seem more than happy with the ‘demographic winter’. In our world, there is not exactly conditioning and hypnopaedia as we see them in BNW, but many claims are made these days regarding brainwashing at school and university towards blind acceptance of critical race theory, cultural Marxism, catastrophic environmentalism and gender fluidity.
From the start, inhabitants of Huxley’s world are conditioned towards the normality of casual sex, and lots of it. Sexualising children from birth is far from absent in our world, as seen in the ever-reducing age considered appropriate for sex ‘education’ at school, and TV dramas presenting characters readily having recreational sex in between solving crimes, rooting out spies or whatever. The manufactured foetuses in BNW are quickly put into the hands of low-caste people who have the job of rearing them, and I immediately thought of the rush in our society to place young children into ever-more supported (by all parties) child-‘care’ facilities, as chillingly portrayed recently on this site by Laura Perrins.