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 Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is not really as brave and as good as it sounds – it’s a horrific world filled with brainwashing, loss of individualism, sexual promiscuity, the absence of the family unit, adversity, and of God! Reading through the book not only appalled me, but made me all the more appreciate the kind of world I am currently living in, imperfections and all.
The book is set in London at a very distant future. Science and Technology has changed the very lives of people, and everything is perfect! Society is ‘stable’ and peaceful, and people are generally ‘happy’ – they know no sadness or suffering. However, this happiness appears to me to be very artificial, and seems to be very dependent on soma, a hallucinogenic drug everyone is often encouraged to drink to bring them into that state of elation, patience, calmness, and virtuousness. It has been described by one of the characters there as “Christianity without tears.” And some kind of Christianity it is, when they don’t even know Christ, and better yet believe there is a God! To them, God is ‘old’ and therefore irrelevant because “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.” And since they have youth and prosperity all their lives, they deem it reasonable to be “independent of God,” since, there’s nothing more they could possibly need from Him.
 Huxley may have written this as a satire about the future and “the advancement of science as it affects human individuals,”¹ and yet I cannot help but feel such great dislike for it. It has portrayed Science as a great evil masked in such perfect splendor, that it has dissolved the very essence of morality and theology. It is so perverse! As early as childhood, people in Brave New World are taught sexual promiscuity because “Every one belongs to every one else.” No one is allowed to love one thing too much, hence the abolition of family, monogamy, parenthood, romance and eventually, individualism and even solitude! It seems like a pessimistic view of the future, where everything is abhorrent behind a beautifully deceitful façade, and people are easily assuaged and conditioned to believe some and disbelieve all others, instead of viewing the future in the same hopeful tone that we, at present, strive for to achieve. Huxley calls this futuristic world, “an insane life in Utopia” but apparently, it is no Utopia at all when it is as insane as the one he has written – it is Dystopia!
I can only conclude this reaction to Huxley’s Brave New world in one word --- it is ‘pneumatic’ -- and I mean ‘gaseous’ enough like malodorous flatus you would certainly not wish to be inhaling within the vicinity of!
1Huxley, Aldous. Foreword. Brave New World, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1946, p. ix.
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