Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and the Sage Tradition

I wrote in my last post on Crome Yellow about how Aldous Huxley´s novels were a large influence on 1920s and 30s literature. Now, however, the only one of his novels that is widely read is Brave New World (1932), a classic text of the dystopian genre which is often included in science fiction collections.

Such categorisations emphasise the forward-looking elements of the novel, and, indeed, it is set in the future – AF 632 (After Ford) to be precise, which equates to some 600 years after the novel´s publication. In several respects, however, Brave New World owes a great deal to the 19th-century sage tradition and many of the preconceptions underpinning it are rooted in sage writers such as Thomas Carlyle.

The job of the sage, of course, was to tell the future by examining the present:

The Past is a dim indubitable fact: the Future too is one, only dimmer; nay properly it is the same fact in new dress and development. For the Present holds it in both the whole Past and the whole Future;—as the Life-tree Igdrasil, wide-waving, many-toned, has its roots down deep in the Death-kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men, and with its boughs reaches always beyond the stars; and in all times and places is one and the same Life-tree!

(Past and Present, 1843, Bk. I, Ch. VI)

The dystopian novelist has a different but closely related task: to use an imagined future to pass judgement on the tendencies and mores of the present. Like the sage, the dystopian novelist devotes his intellectual energies to teasing out the links between past and future and working out the destiny of his society. A sage like Carlyle was constantly preaching disaster for his society, and this pessimism is also, by definition, characteristic of the dystopian novelist.

The first principle of the 19th-century sage stance was a sense that the world was becoming mechanised in the wake of the industrial revolution, and this posed a threat to humanity, body, mind and soul:

[L]et us observe how the mechanical genius of our time has diffused itself into quite other provinces. Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.

[…]

Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

(Signs of the Times, 1829)

The sage, then, was a specifically post-industrial figure, one who saw the effect the mechanisation and systematisation of society was having on the individual consciousness. Man was not just mechanical in the way he used his hand, that is, the repetitive physical work he undertook in an industrial workplace; he was also growing mechanical in head and in heart.

The correlative of the industrial revolution in philosophical terms was utilitarianism, which Carlyle equated with mechanical modes of thinking. The utilitarian idea of arranging society and collective human existence around the notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number was anathema to Carlyle:

Does not the whole wretchedness […] of
man’s ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in that
unspeakable Life-philosophy of his: The pretension to be what he calls
‘happy’? Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has his
head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and
divine laws ought to be ‘happy.’ His wishes, the pitifulest
whipster’s, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the pitifulest
whipster’s, are to flow on in ever-gentle current of enjoyment,
impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be
happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people
clamour, Why have we not found pleasant things?

(Past and Present, Bk. III, Ch. IV)

The concept of happiness, then, central to how we have experienced the world since the 18th century, is, for Carlyle, deeply flawed.

Sagely stances such as the above are similarly central to Brave New World. The most basic element of Huxley´s dystopia is that it is industrialised to the maximum extent. Industrialism has moved on from being an organising and productive principle to being a religion, hence the After Ford annual chronology. The inhabitants of Huxley´s World State are truly mechanical in head and in heart, as well as hand – they do not just perform mechanical work, but they literally worship mechanism. The most popular oaths in the society are Dear Ford/Our Ford, playing on ¨Dear Lord/Our Lord¨. And, equally pointedly, the iconography of the crucifixion has been replaced by the T (as in the pioneering model-T Ford): ¨All crosses had their tops cut and became T´s¨ (loc 1260).

In line with this attitude, all things are under the purview of science. Individuals are carefully constructed through genetic engineering and relentless conditioning. There is a College of Emotional Engineering and there is the administration of drugs, notably soma, to make sure everyone is in a constant state of placid contentment. As Lenina Crowne says, ¨Everybody´s happy nowadays¨ (loc 1720). The brave new world is, paradoxically, dystopic yet happy. People are happy and they have no choice but to be so.

At times, indeed, the descriptions of the happiness of some of the inhabitants is disturbingly convincing:

Hers was the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and nothingness, but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium.

loc 1653

What then, one is tempted to ask, is the problem with all this happiness? The answer given by Bernard Marx relates to the erasure of self that takes place under conditions of chemically induced happiness: ¨I´d rather be myself,¨ he sullenly announces. ¨Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly¨ (loc 1694). Everybody – almost – is happy but individuality and free will are absent, prompting Bernard to ask the question:

¨[W]hat would it be like if I could, if I were free – not enslaved by my conditioning[?]¨

loc 1717

In Bernard Marx, Huxley offers a Carlylean vision of the embattled individual, the last bastion of strength and vision, fighting against an all-encompassing system:

[H]e stood alone embattled against the order of things; elated by the intoxicating consciousness of his individual significance and importance.

loc 1816

It is the possibility for such a self-conception that is lost in the world of soma dreams. Bernard is the last fighter for individual consciousness against the somatic happiness.

In a significant passage that is internally focalised on Mustapha Mond, a high-ranking official in the World State, there is the most precise articulation on what the State works to suppress and exclude, and it is the idea that:

the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.

loc 2802

What that involves is not clear in the novel, but reading later Huxley works like the essay The Doors of Perception gives a clue to the answers he settled on: they involved mind-altering drugs. The ending Brave New World, however, makes it clear that, at this stage, Huxley does not hold out any hope for Bernard Marx and his individualistic ilk. Further, it is not certain that he finds Bernard´s position worth saving.

That is perhaps the most jarring element of Brave New World for a contemporary reader: eugenics and mind-control notwithstanding, it is not always clear that Huxley is really describing a dystopia. Sometimes, he seems to be drifting towards acquiescence in and even celebration of the coming world of drug-induced happiness and ¨achieved consummation¨. He gives space to the sagely tradition of exalting the individual, but it is not where his priorities lie. Huxley, in this novel, is not taking on the mantle of the sage. He does, however, try it on before tentatively casting it aside and hedging his bets. If Huxley saw a possible or even theoretical better world than the hyper-industrialised World State of AF 632, its lineaments or underpinning ideals are not at all clear from this disorienting novel.