Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited

Huxley’s classic depicts a biological future of mass-produced infants, moral brainwashing, and a social culture of unrestrained hedonism. The work touches on the value of life, autonomy, and meaning, and the themes are explored through the characters of Bernard and John, who don’t quite fit into the world order. The book is enough a classic that I don’t need to say much more, and it’s made salient a lot of the thoughts and ideas I had about biotechnology and neuroscience. Later in his life, during the 1950s, Huxley made his ideas more explicit through a philosophical reflection on Brave New World entitled Brave New World Revisited. I loved Revisited perhaps even more than BNW, and a big reason was that I often disagreed with Huxley (he was too committed on individualism and the value of freedom) but his points were salient that I found myself reflecting and rebutting constantly .

Although the fictional world is sold as a dystopia, its obedient residents probably had happier and more comfortable lives than most people in our real world. What’s interesting is when freedom and comfort become decoupled. Everyone is given a plentiful share of corporeal joy, aided by a miracle-drug called soma (effectively alcohol minus the negative effects); with such comfort, the people lose their will to protest since their life is too good. For the masses, who would prefer comfort over sublime and lofty notions of freedom, the world of BNW isn’t so bad; people would enjoy an animalic, dumb kind of happiness but their biology doesn’t discriminate between the dopamine that got released from reading a good book versus the one released from drugs or sex, it just cares whether the dopamine is present and how much there is. Around the same time I’m reading BNW, I read Dostoevsky’s short parable on the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov which also explores the clash between comfort and freedom, and it was just as provocative as BNW and BNW Revisited.