If utopia is a perfect place or at least the best possible social arrangement, it must be a very dull place where any change is a change for worse and not for better, where nothing can be new and good at the same time. There can be no conflict in utopia, no challenge, no thrill, no victory, no heroes. It is a place where status quo is a permanent state of affairs. Any experimentation looks suspicious because it endangers the status quo.
This is why plays written by Shakespeare are forbidden in the World State described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. They could disrupt the process of conditioning by disturbing people’s minds and awakening in their hearts a longing for something different, dreams about reality which is a little more interesting and solid that the reality they live in. Just as it happened with John the Savage, who, inspired by Shakespeare confessed: “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
He was claiming, as Mustapha put it, “the right to be unhappy.” But this was no option in the World State. To stabilize the system, the controllers promised people: not tears, no sorrow, no pain, no struggle, no conflict, no challenge, no dilemma. Only by eliminating all these things could they keep the status quo. But by doing this, they turned people into living zombies, they deprived them of any dream that could make life worth living for.
What looks like a first crack in the system is Bernard’s dissatisfaction with the perfect world and his desire to experience something that would give him an extra shot of adrenaline. First, he enjoys his helicopter flight over a stormy ocean; then he visits a savage reservation. He does this because the experiences give him a feeling of being himself and not just “a part of something else, not just a cell in a social body.” But most in the society are very well pleased to be cells in a social body, even if it means to be less individual, less human. They accept the official ways of dealing with dullness of a perfect society: orgies and soma, a hallucinogenic drug which gives people “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” The drug, soma, is an opiate for the masses, like all the rituals, which resemble religious rituals but are secularized.
Both of them, plus computer games and recreational sex, provide a sense of shallow happiness, or a feeling of well-being and security, and they serve to stabilize the system, to infantilize the masses and so to make them subdued to the system, to the collective or, actually, to the elite represented by Mustapha Mond. The masses are reduced to work force, consumers, and entertainment recipients. In Kierkegaardian terms, we could say that the masses live at the aesthetic stage, which is characterized among others by immersion in sensuous experience and flight from boredom.
And, we have to admit, that the elite is very successful in keeping the masses under control. Apart from Barnard Marx and John the Savage there are no people who would in any way question or challenge the system. Barnard’s conditioning is blamed for his behavior, and John is deviant because of his upbringing in the savage reservation.
John the Savage might not be right in everything he said, yet he sensed the problem with the World State well: It arose from social monism à la Emile Durkheim, according to which the coercive power of the conscience collective is necessary to hold together any society as functioning entity (see Scott Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science). However, coercion does not have to be physical, but as well may be based on social engineering combined with silly TV shows which aim to convince people that promiscuity is the true form of liberty. Dumbness is the main tool of control in the hands of the elite.
In his introduction to Huxley’s Ends and Means, Howard Schneiderman noticed that Huxley was well acquainted with the writing of Durkheim for whom such an “unattached individual” like John the Savage presented a real danger for any society. Schneiderman claims that Huxley wrote Brave New World (first published in 1932) in defense of such “non-attached men,” and gave a full treatment of the topic in Ends and Means (first published in 1937). Schneiderman may be right about Huxley’s defense of “non-attached man” against Durkheim, however John the Savage does not seem to be such a man.
According to C. J. Ryan, who called Ends and Means “a brilliant presentation of the true remedy of our ills,” the idea on “non-attachment” is connected with sriving for impersonality. Ryan explains that impersonality “is the only practical method of breaking down the obscuring veils between man and his inner Divinity. Impersonal love, forgetfulness of the selfish demands of the lower personality, are the ways to save humanity from sinking into an abyss from which it could only escape after passing through untold suffering.” The way to salvation leads through detachment from “desires of the lower side” and “strictest self-discipline.” In such a concept of salvation there is “no room for a personal, anthropomorphic God.”
John the Savage is not such a man. He is not the positive hero of the novel. He is neither another Winston from 1984 nor Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451. Huxley presents him as a masochist who needs to suffer in order to feel alive. He is not a non-attached man. He is controlled by desires and lacks self-discipline. He wants God.
If John is not the hero of the novel, then who is? In her essay, “Designing a Brave New World,” Joanne Woiak attempts to interpret the novel in the light of other Huxley’s writings from that period. She comes to a conclusion an apocalyptic vision of the world gone mad is not the worst case scenario, but rather “a viable alternative to mass destruction in a future world war,” as Bertrand Russel put it. Mustapha Mond convincingly defends such an arrangement against the claims of John the Savage. He is the one “who is granted the most compelling viewpoint in the novel.” He is the voice of reason.
Woiak adds, that Huxley not only believed that a vast majority of people are morons but at the time when he wrote Brave New World he also was a very militant supporter of so called Reformed Eugenics. Once he said, that “about 99.5% of the entire population of the planet are as stupid and philistine… as the great masses of the English. The important thing, it seems to me, is not to attack the 99.5%… but to try to see that the 0.5% survives, keeps its quality up to the highest possible level, and, if possible, dominates the rest. The imbecility of the 99.5% is appalling – but after all, what else can you expect.” And on this ground “he defended eugenic policies of encouraging higher birthrates among the ‘intellectual classes’ and sterilizing the lower-class ‘unfit,’ which he believed would improve the inherited mental abilities of future generations and lead to responsible citizenship.”
Later Aldous Huxley became a spiritualist influenced by eastern religions, and that shift can already be seen in Ends and Means. At the time when he wrote Brave New World, however, he was “an elitist technocrat and eugenist.” So, according to Woiak, “in the broadest terms, Brave New World is about the relationship between science and society. Huxley was asking: how can scientific knowledge and technologies be used to improve human life, and in particular to create well-ordered states out of the social and economic chaos of postwar Europe?”
Huxley later admitted that “he favored neither the conditioned stability of the novel’s World State nor the outsider John the Savage’s desire for ‘freedom to be unhappy.’ Instead there had to be a workable compromise between the two extremes, and until that was found ‘our efforts might have to be limited to the training of an intellectual aristocracy’” (cited in Woiak). Huxley distanced himself not only from John, but also from Mustapha. But that appears to come from his shift to eastern mysticism which happened in the late 1930s.
It seems that Huxley’s worldview at the time when he wrote Brave New World was the following: the intellectual elite or aristocracy has to organize the imbecilic masses and satisfy their needs in order to stabilize the society and prevent a worse scenario which would lead to a world-wide catastrophe. Dystopia happens when the intellectual elites are unable or unwilling to reduce the percentage of imbeciles in the society and to satisfy masses’ desire for security and entertainment that leads to dystopia. Brave New World is not dystopia but utopia which might not be a perfect state of affairs but the best possible one, where morons are neutralized, masses are bemused, and few are in power in the name of peace and security.
It would take another essay to sketch an alternative to the World State but any such a sketch should be based on a Trinitarian perception of reality. And it is pretty obvious that Huxley did not think in Trinitarian categories, which is why his vision of utopia is both dull and oppressive and his concept of non-attachment leads to depersonalization of human beings.
The Trinitarian God is God who delights in making new things, in improving them, in modifying what is good into what is very good, in leading people to maturity, in transforming His creation from glory to glory. This of course reflects the inner life of the Trinity, where we can find excitement, action, and vivid relationships. There is mutual submission and individual freedom. In God, there is life, and not flight from clutches of social entropy or desires of human heart.
Bogumil Jarmulak is pastor of Evangelical Reformed Church (CREC) in Poznan, Poland. His PhD is from Christian Theological Academy in Warsaw, Poland.