The early 1930s were a bad time for people who loved freedom. The Communists had taken over in Russia, as had the Fascists in Italy, and the Nazis were fast gaining power in Germany. The world economy had just crashed. In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his novel of what the totalitarian future might be like.
It hasn’t held its popularity as well as Orwell’s 1984, but it may be a better prediction of the future. In Huxley’s dystopia, there are no secret police or torture chambers. The police use tranquilizers rather than lethal bullets. People are punished by reassignment rather than death or prison. It works because everyone is brainwashed from birth and controlled by drugs. Organized rebellions don’t happen. The models for 1984 were Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Brave New World is closer to modern China.
The society portrayed is stable, highly organized, and excruciatingly dull. The book suffers from the same problem. The characters are boring, with one exception. The contrasting character is John, who comes from a “savage reservation,” and he doesn’t appear until halfway through.
The reservation is inhabited almost exclusively by American Indians, though occasionally an outsider joins them. Their technology is Neolithic, and a lethal electric fence keeps them in. Why does such a place exist? Why hasn’t the BNW assimilated everyone?
Update:There’s a statement in the book that a reservation is a place which, “owing to unfavourable climatic or geological conditions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been worth the expense of civilizing.”
Huxley’s 1946 introduction acknowledges the problem and tries to explain:
In the meantime, however, it seems worth while at least to mention the most serious defect in the story, which is this. The Savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal. At the time the book was written this idea, that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true.
When the book came out, the drugs and the promiscuous sex must have offered some shock value. Today, it’s rather dull until it gets to the “Savages.”It’s hard to find the logic behind their presence, though. Is the idea that the World State put American Indians into permanent internment centers because whey weren’t good enough to participate?
Looking at Brave New World into the context of the eugenics movement clarifies the situation. Henry Ford, who is venerated like a prophet, supported the movement. In this future society, children are turned out in a factory, like cars, rather than being born naturally. The opening scene, where new employees are shown the process, is like a factory tour.
The eugenics movement was strong in America in the early twentieth century. “Improving the race” by compulsion was one of the leading progressive ideas, not a fringe movement. Many states passed laws enabling the forced sterilization of “defectives.” Not surprisingly, “defectives” were mostly poor, dark-skinned, or both. The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded routinely sterilized inmates without their consent. The Supreme Court approved.
Huxley supported this movement. In 1927, he published a piece in Vanity Fair called “A Note on Eugenics: The Battle between Inferior and Superior People for the Possession of the Earth.” It’s horrifying by modern standards, but in the twenties this was normal thinking.
He writes in this article:
It is quite possible, as Mr. J. B. S. Haldane has suggested, that biological technique will soon have advanced to such a pitch that scientists will succeed in doing what Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward, the Swan of Lichfield, tried, it is said, and failed to do: they will learn to breed babies in bottles.
Breeding babies in bottles is exactly what the BNW does. Huxley doesn’t want to wipe out the “inferior” people; rather, he considers them necessary. They’re his Deltas and Epsilons. The idea behind the reservations seems to be that some groups wouldn’t even fit in as menial servants, but would have to be segregated from civilization. They would be denied any technology that could make them dangerous.
A population of men and women descended mainly or exclusively from the successful politicians, professional men and industrialists, from the most highly gifted artists, mathematicians and men of science, from the most ravishing cabaret actresses and the most efficient female M. P.’s and lady doctors of the preceding generation would live in a state, so far as I can see, of chronic civil war.
There’s a sinister aspect to this society which Huxley hints at. People are kept youthful until about the age of 60, then they die. It’s likely the deaths are intentional, perhaps caused by a change in their drugs. People are trained not to regard death as a big deal. It certainly keeps the cost of retirement down.
Did Huxley think of his future world as a dystopia or as the best of the harsh alternatives? There’s a good case that he intended the latter but later regretted it. In the introduction he writes:
Brought up among the primitives, the Savage (in the hypothetical new version of the book) would not be transported to Utopia until he had had an opportunity of learning something at first hand about the nature of a society composed of freely cooperating individuals devoted to the pursuit of sanity.
The triumph of social engineering may have seemed inevitable to Huxley. Soul-crushing as it is, his society isn’t brutal. But just for that reason, the book delivers an important warning. The ultimate totalitarian society isn’t a boot stamping on a human face forever. It’s a human face kissing the boot because it has been trained to love it. Come to think of it, 1984 ends in the same place. A society with complete, high-tech control over people’s thoughts is the hardest of all to overthrow or escape from. (But not necessarily impossible; take a look at Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day.)
Trivia: Huxley died on November 22, 1963, the same day as President Kennedy.
Next week: If I finish it in time, I’ll talk about Ilya Somin’s Free to Move. If not, I’ll come up with something.
Another utopia in which misfits are given their own territory is the short story “Coventry” by R. A. Heinlein (1940; I seem to have lost my copy). The western US is relegated to them, and it is surrounded by an impenetrable barrier. In the rest of the world, psychiatry has replaced law, and people who are not happy with that are exiled into the reservation and left to their devices; they have divided it into three countries — one like 19th-century America, one like the USSR, and one consisting of religious fanatics. The story is gently satirical; Heinlein is having fun. He is not issuing a dreadful warning, but giving a genial picture of the way he thinks life is. A relief!
I read Coventry many years ago, in a paperback that packaged it with “If This Goes On,” which is seriously dystopian. They’re both part of Heinlein’s future history, and I think “Coventry” is supposed to show part of what happened after the Prophet’s overthrow.