Brave New World

About Brave New World

Aldous Huxley published Brave New World in 1932, nine years before Orwell’s 1984. The two novels are frequently paired as dystopian warnings, but their visions are almost exactly opposite. Orwell imagines control through terror: surveillance, torture, the boot on the face. Huxley imagines control through pleasure: conditioning, drugs, manufactured satisfaction so complete that the cage becomes invisible. People in the World State are not forced into compliance. They are designed for it from before birth, and then kept happy enough that compliance never becomes a question.

The title comes from Miranda’s speech in The Tempest: “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in’t!” Miranda says this having grown up on a deserted island, seeing civilization for the first time. It is a joke, because civilization is not beautiful, but it is also sincere, because Miranda does not know that yet. John the Savage says it in the novel with exactly the same combination of irony and sincerity, which is what the novel is doing with the entire idea of utopia.

Huxley wrote the novel partly as a response to H.G. Wells’s techno-optimism, the belief that scientific progress would inevitably improve human life. Huxley was not against science; he was a scientist’s son and a science writer himself. He was against the assumption that comfort and happiness were the same thing, that a life without suffering was necessarily a life worth living. The World State is stable, efficient, and pleasant. It is also, Huxley argues, a diminishment of everything that makes human life meaningful. The Savage’s terrible end is the novel’s test of whether that argument is worth making.

Plot Summary

In the year 632 After Ford (roughly 2540 CE by our calendar), the World State operates on principles of total social stability. Humans are manufactured in Hatcheries, predestined to one of five castes, from the Alpha intellectuals to the Epsilon laborers, and conditioned in their sleep and through behavioral training to love their position, love their work, love the World State. The family does not exist. Monogamy does not exist. Religion has been replaced with the worship of Ford (Henry Ford, inventor of the assembly line). Soma, a drug with no hangover, is freely distributed. The slogan is: “Community, Identity, Stability.”

Bernard Marx, an Alpha who is physically smaller than most Alphas and consequently less confident, feels intermittently uneasy about the society he lives in. He is attracted to Lenina Crowne, a pneumatic Beta who likes him well enough but mostly regards him as another social engagement. Bernard gets permission to visit a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, one of the areas left outside the World State, and takes Lenina. The reservation is dirty, religious, aging, and full of people who suffer. Bernard and Lenina encounter John, a young man born on the reservation to Linda, a World State woman who was accidentally left behind twenty years earlier. John has grown up reading Shakespeare, the only book available to him, and has built his entire moral framework out of Shakespearean language and feeling. Linda is John’s mother; Bernard realizes that Linda is the Director of Hatcheries’ former girlfriend, and that John is his biological son.

Bernard brings John and Linda back to the World State. Linda returns to soma and dies from its continuous use within a few months. John, whom the press calls the Savage, is a celebrity. He is also increasingly horrified by the society around him: its promiscuity, its shallow pleasures, its complete absence of struggle or genuine feeling. He refuses Lenina, who genuinely wants him, in terms drawn from Shakespeare. He watches his mother die in a hospital designed for comfortable disposal of the dying. He tries to incite a crowd to throw away its soma and is arrested along with Bernard and Helmholtz Watson, a writer who has also started to find the World State insufficient.

Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World Controllers, interviews them. He explains, with considerable intelligence, why the World State chose stability over art, religion, and the forms of happiness that require suffering. Bernard is exiled to Iceland. Helmholtz asks to go somewhere difficult, like the Falkland Islands, where the climate might generate better writing. John is permitted to stay, because Mond finds him interesting. He retreats to a lighthouse outside London, whips himself, tries to live ascetically. Journalists find him. A crowd arrives. In a frenzy of mutual violence and soma-induced complicity, John whips himself and others and sleeps with Lenina. The next morning, he is found hanged from the lighthouse door.

Key Themes

The Difference Between Happiness and Meaning

This is the novel’s central argument and it is conducted seriously. Mustapha Mond is not a villain in any straightforward sense; he is intelligent, well-read, and honest about what the World State has traded away. He has read Shakespeare. He knows what has been lost. He chose stability anyway, because he believes that most people cannot handle the beauty and suffering that genuine meaning requires. John’s counter-argument, which he does not articulate well because his only philosophical vocabulary is Shakespeare and folk belief, is that a life without the possibility of suffering is also a life without the possibility of genuine love, genuine art, or genuine religion. The novel does not fully resolve this debate, which is why it has held up.

Conditioning as the Perfect Control

The World State’s genius is that it never needs to coerce. By the time citizens are adults, they want exactly what they have been designed to want. Alphas want intellectual work and their freedom. Deltas want simple repetitive labor and the security of doing it in a group. Everyone wants soma when things get difficult. There is no internal resistance to overcome because the internal life has been shaped to prevent resistance from forming. This is more disturbing than Orwell’s boot on the face, in a different way: you cannot resist what you cannot see, and you cannot see what has become your own desire.

Technology as an End in Itself

The World State worships Ford as the prophet of the assembly line, which means it worships efficiency and reproducibility as the highest values. The Bokanovsky Process that produces identical humans in batches of up to ninety-six is the assembly line applied to biology. Huxley is not making an argument against technology per se; he is making an argument against a civilization that has made technological efficiency into a moral framework. When the question “can we do this?” replaces the question “should we do this?”, you eventually arrive at a Hatchery.

Isolation and Belonging

Bernard Marx wants to feel things more deeply than the World State’s conditioning allows but cannot escape that conditioning enough to actually feel them. He is uncomfortable with shallow group belonging but not capable of genuine solitude. Helmholtz Watson is better at solitude, which is why he starts to find the World State’s frivolous writing insufficient. John the Savage has the opposite problem: he knows how to feel deeply, he has Shakespeare for the vocabulary of deep feeling, but the World State has no place for that depth and regards it as a kind of illness. All three men are exiled at the novel’s end, which is Huxley’s answer to the question of what happens to the individual in a society designed for the mass.

Art, Literature, and Why They Cannot Be Allowed

Mond explains to John and Helmholtz that great art requires unhappiness, because great art is a response to the difficulties of living. The World State has eliminated those difficulties and consequently cannot produce great art. What it produces instead is the feelies (immersive films that include physical sensation) and sentimental pop music, satisfying and empty. Helmholtz, who works as an emotional engineer writing propaganda, has already sensed that his work is hollow; he wants to write something that matters and cannot figure out what that would require. The novel is an argument that what it would require is the World State’s abolition, which is why it cannot be published there.

Meet the Characters

Bernard Marx is the novel’s protagonist by default, the person whose perspective we follow in the first half, but he is not particularly admirable. His dissatisfaction with the World State is real but mixed with resentment about his physical smallness and the social marginalization that results from it. When he becomes temporarily famous as the man who brought the Savage back, he enjoys the celebrity rather than using it. He is a character whose genuine insight is compromised by his genuine pettiness, which makes him interesting and somewhat painful to talk to. Conversations with Bernard on Novelium involve someone who sees clearly and acts badly, and who knows it.

Lenina Crowne is cheerful, well-conditioned, and quite brave by the World State’s standards: she goes to the Savage Reservation and is genuinely disturbed by what she sees there, but she processes the disturbance and moves on. She falls for John in a way that is, by World State standards, inappropriately intense, and his rejection is genuinely painful to her. She is not the villain of the novel; she is someone who has been thoroughly shaped by her world and is doing her best within it. Users can talk to Lenina on Novelium and ask her what she actually wants, which turns out to be a more complicated question than the World State’s conditioning was designed to handle.

John the Savage speaks in Shakespeare because Shakespeare is literally his only source of language for extreme emotion. When he says “O brave new world, that has such people in’t,” he means it and does not mean it at the same time, exactly as Miranda did. He has grown up outside the World State’s conditioning, which means he is capable of suffering, love, guilt, and the desire for transcendence, and he has no social context in which any of those capacities are useful. Talking to John on Novelium is an encounter with someone who arrived in the wrong world with the wrong equipment and is trying to figure out what to do.

Helmholtz Watson is everything Bernard wants to be: handsome, successful, genuinely talented, and beginning to find the World State’s demands on his talent insufficient. He writes advertising slogans with great skill and no satisfaction. He wants to write something true and cannot yet articulate what that would mean. He is the novel’s most sympathetic character, a man whose gifts are starting to outgrow his environment and who faces that fact with more grace than Bernard does. Conversations with Helmholtz on Novelium tend toward questions about creative work and what it is for.

Mustapha Mond is the most interesting character in the novel to talk to because he has read all the books that the World State prohibits and made a conscious choice. He had the option, early in his career, to continue as a physicist and was instead offered the choice between exile and becoming a World Controller. He chose control. He is honest about what that choice cost. He can argue both sides of every question the novel raises, and he chooses stability not from ignorance but from a kind of weary realism about what most people can bear. Users can talk to Mustapha Mond on Novelium and push back, and he will push back harder.

Why Talk to Characters from Brave New World?

The novel’s central debate, between the comfortable stability of the World State and the painful freedom that John represents, is never fully resolved on the page. Mond wins the argument in the room, but John’s death is the novel’s final statement. When you talk to book characters from Brave New World on Novelium, you can have the argument yourself, with Mond or with John or with Helmholtz, who is living inside the question rather than debating it abstractly.

Voice conversations also suit this novel because the World State is built on conditioning, on sounds and feelings absorbed before conscious memory. Bernard’s discomfort with the World State is partly a physical thing, a vague wrongness he cannot quite name. That kind of pre-verbal unease translates differently in voice than in text.

About the Author

Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey in 1894, into a family of formidable scientists and intellectuals: his grandfather was T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s most prominent defender; his brother Julian became a leading biologist. Aldous himself contracted a severe eye disease as a teenager that left him nearly blind for several years and prevented him from pursuing the medical career he had planned. He taught himself to read Braille and eventually recovered enough sight to read with difficulty. He wrote instead.

He published poetry, essays, and several witty novels of ideas in the 1920s before Brave New World in 1932. He moved to California in the late 1930s and spent the last decades of his life there, writing and experimenting with psychedelics as a philosophical and medical inquiry, documented in The Doors of Perception in 1954. His final novel, Island, published the year before his death, imagines a genuine utopia rather than a dystopia, a positive vision of what a society based on attention and psychological health might look like. He died on November 22, 1963, the same day as John F. Kennedy and C.S. Lewis, a coincidence that his death announcements were largely buried by. He was sixty-nine.