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On Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, recorded on stage with an audience Q&A at Manhattan’s Caveat on 4/6/19.
If we harness the power of society to employ available technologies to really focus on making people happy, what would the result be? This is Huxley’s thought experiment, drawing on the latest thinking (and a bit of sci-fi projection regarding possible future advances) in mass-production techniques (via Henry Ford, whose thought is treated as religion by the society the novel depicts), behaviorist conditioning, education (including sleep learning), embryology (he predicated cloning), eugenics, pharmacology (the drug soma, that has no negative side effects), and psychotherapy (including removal of troublesome parental relations and encouragement of childhood sex play). Some of these ideas had previously been synthesized by Bertrand Russell in The Scientific Outlook (1931, particularly chapter 15), which Huxley liberally borrows from.
So this is a test case for utilitarianism, but like all test cases for big ideas, it’s somewhat inconclusive. First, this is apparently a dystopia, but Huxley seems not so sure. While he certainly didn’t like the caste system and totalitarianism he depicts and sincerely bemoaned the loss of human autonomy (see this 1958 interview where he predicts that the brave new world is closer than ever given increasing overpopulation and bureaucratization), he also didn’t think that simply rejecting all these new technologies and insights was a feasible solution either, because the challenges we face (again, chiefly overpopulation) are real and require our ingenuity and not any kind of return to primitivism.
Second and relatedly, is the idea of making people happy using technology fundamentally faulty, or was it just not implemented in the right way here? As I argue, a utilitarianism like Bentham’s focused on pleasure instead of flourishing is impoverished. Making us “happy” isn’t just a matter of feeding our pleasure centers, much less killing off the more spiritual parts of us so that pleasure becomes our only possible requirement for happiness. (The Epicureans seemed to think that all this extra “spiritual” worrying was just pretentious anyway, that focusing on physical pleasure and freedom from worry is the only real human good.) If we accept (following Nietzsche) that human fulfillment is too complex to mass produce, does entail instead a hands-off, libertarian attitude where as a society we simply stop trying to make people happy? To me, that seems unduly pessimistic: there are plenty of things we can try to reduce the common causes of unhappiness, even if that’s not itself sufficient to guarantee universal happiness.
Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan are all here to discuss how Huxley tries to convey his ideas, what roles the various characters in the novel play, whether this is a critique of capitalism or communism (neither!), how this relates to our current social ills, and more. Featuring audience participation by Jesse, Scott, Zoe, Avi, Brenda (Dylan’s wife!), Dan (from Phi Fic!), Toby, and two guys at the end that didn’t say their names. Thanks to everyone for coming out!
If you’d like to watch this unedited, here’s the newly zoomed-in video:
Buy the edition of the book that we read
You should of course also listen to our episode on 1984, and you may enjoy this superbly presented comparison of the two (featuring “debaters” for the current relevance of each book and actors presenting key scenes live on stage). In preparation for this discussion, we all browsed in this 2008 collection edited by David Garrett Izzo: Huxley’s Brave New World: Essays
End song: “Brave New World” by Mark Lint, written prior to this show and recorded on 5/11/19. Read about it.
Image by Solomon Grundy.
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I was fortunate enough to be here, thanks for putting it together, it was a terrific experience and the venue was spot on!
I had a couple of comments about BNW that I wanted to get off my chest at the event but there was so much crowd weenie-ing going on during the Q and A that when I finally got the mic I followed my father’s advice and went for the joke.
It was great that Seth brought up Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death so quickly. Around where Seth quotes from the book, Postman goes on and says something to the effect of Huxley and not Orwell being more correct in his dystopian vision. Personally, I think it’s actually a nightmare hybrid of the two where we are addicted to the entertainment (i.e. social media, “smart” phones etc.) in the same way soma works, and that that entertainment just happens to also be an instrument of mass surveillance. Kind of horrifying, no? Some of us live in a society now where upon receiving food at a restaurant, many peoples first instinct upon appearance of said food is not to eat, it’s to take a photograph. How wildly decadent must things be if we reach for the phone and not the fork?
I believe Wes mentioned the tops of crosses being knocked off and transformed from crucifixes to T’s for Ford’s model T? I could be wrong but recall this briefly being touched on. If anyone has any thoughts on the role of Christianity in BNW that would be great. I had read this as some sort of industrial usurpation and “decapitation” of Christianities role in society. More evidence would obviously be Ford being the marker for when the calendar began. Furthermore, Mustapha Mond retains copies of the Bible and Shakespeare, its not like they are being burned ala Farenheit 451.
The target of BNW’s critique I think is the marginalising of feeling resulting from the (pop-)Enlightenment views of the superiority of the rational – homo oeconomicus. That the rational satisfaction of needs leads to this. Pursuing only the classical and excluding the romantic.
I read this book a year or so ago and here is my favorite quote from my notes:
“That is the secret to happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.” DHC
I wish I had been at this live event. What a great episode and so cool to hear other listeners as well. If I were there I would ask – what does the next 10 years hold for you all? Will there be a 20 year live show?!