Despite its firm dystopian (or at least anti-utopian) credentials, there is at times a detectable ambivalence in Brave New World as if, just occasionally, the author is beguiled by the world he has created. And indeed this may be closer to the truth than the author would later have liked to admit.
Despite his dislike for Wells, the Huxley of the 1920s and '30s had a certain amount in common with the man. Like many 'visionaries' of the time, they both shared a suspicion of parliamentary democracy, and felt that society would be in a better state if tightly organised into a hierarchy of mental ability, and controlled by an intellectual élite. This sort of thinking often went hand in hand with the Eugenics movement which found much popularity across the political spectrum in the first half of the Twentieth Century, before Hitler's Germany exposed the stark reality of the biological manipulation of a population. Wells is often accused of being a proponent of the movement, although he actually wrote against its practises, preferring instead social reforms. However, Brave New World's World State has no need for social reforms, because it is a biologically perfect society. Here, as with many of his views, he was not always consistent throughout his life, delivering the memorable quote: 'these black and brown and dirty-white and yellow people who do not come into the needs of the new efficiency, they will have to go". Although it engineers its population primarily through post-fertilisation biological and social conditioning, it is clear that the Alphas, Betas and so on are pre-selected on a genetic level. As the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning says to a student: "Hasn't it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?" And Bokanovsky's process of 'budding' multiple individual from a single embryo is essentially a process of human cloning. Clearly the shadow of Eugenics (and more) haunts Brave New World, and it touched Huxley's own views. Though he may have been embarrassed to mention it in the 1946 forword to the novel, in the early 1930s Huxley was on record as, if not a supporter of Eugenics, then at least someone who was interested in the results it might be able to achieve. In a talk broadcast in January 1932 on BBC Radio he discussed the possible use of Eugenics as an instrument of social control, and saw it as a solution to the "rapid deterioration of the whole West European Stock". "It may be," he said, "that circumstances will compel the humanist to resort to scientific propaganda, just as they may compel the liberal to resort to dictatorship. Any form of order is better than chaos." The message is one of necessary evil, and Brave New World poses the question: when does a necessary evil undermine the intended good?
It was the question of stability that interested Huxley, just as it interests the World State: "'Stability,' said the Controller, 'stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability... Stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability.'" Back in the real world, the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had sent the world spiralling into economic collapse and, by 1931, Britain appeared to be on the brink of chaos. After visiting areas of mass-unemployment, and witnessing the run on sterling, the abandonment of the gold standard, and the increasingly ineffectual posture and dither of Parliament, Huxley concluded that it was time to abandon democracy and submit to rule "by men who will compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands". He advocated widespread propaganda (what is this, if not a form of conditioning?) and the implementation of a national plan of the kind that had been used in the Soviet Union. In 1928, when the first Five Year Plan commenced in Russia, Huxley had written 'To the Bolshevist idealist, Utopia is indistinguishable from a Ford factory.' There, it seems, was a seed for Brave New World.
Indeed, inspiration for the novel came from sources other than communism. World Controller Mustapha Mond is named after Sir Alfred Mond, Chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. Huxley visited one of Sir Alfred's factories just before he began writing Brave New World and was much impressed by the 'ordered universe... in the midst of the larger world of planless incoherence.' And Mustapha Mond, a controlling, censoring totalitarian, is given a largely sympathetic rendering in his encounter with Bernard, Helmholtz and John, as he explains, with "good-humoured intelligence" that all the evils of the World State are for the greater good.
Indeed, the idea of continual happiness in a world where all problems can be solved with a pill, where no-one gets old, where death is not seen as a tragedy, where you can have sex whenever and with whoever you please, can seem at times beguiling. Even after all the pain that the civilised world puts John through, he still treasures the memories of the stories Linda told him of "that beautiful, beautiful Other Place... a paradise of goodness and loveliness." It is, of course, meant to seem at least slightly attractive, or else there would be no point in satirising it or drawing attention to the things that would be lost if it were the case.
But the world in which Huxley lived, as well as rife with problems, was ripe for satire. Like most visions of the future, Brave New World gets its cue from events in the present, and the novel is much more an assault on the early 1930s than it is an expression of sympathy for proposed solutions. Indeed, once Huxley the satirist gets going, the idea of Brave New World as any sort of blueprint fades distinctly into the background.
After the First World War, Huxley had predicted the 'inevitable acceleration of American world domination' and when he visited the country in 1926 he found it every bit as enthrallingly terrible as he had expected. The 'Feelies' are clear descendants of the 'Talkies' (movies with speech, the first of which, The Jazz Singer, was only released in 1927); and Brave New World's sex-hormone chewing gum, ever-present zippers (according to Huxley, America's national "crest"), caterwauling sexophones, and 'pneumatic' promiscuity owe as much to America in the 1920s as they do to the World State in AF 632. Indeed, Huxley had discovered Henry Ford's My Life and Work in the ship's library during his voyage to the United States, and he found a country that seemed to fit in perfectly with the car manufacturer's vision.
America was not the only country up for satirising. A central tenet of the World State philosophy is that "ending is better than mending": it is each citizen's duty to consume as much as possible to keep the wheels of industry and society turning. Says the Director: "Strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated existing games." Here Huxley is taking a shot at the view espoused by the likes of economist John Maynard Keynes that Britain's problems were caused by under-consumption. Keynes saw unemployment being reduced and the economy revived through a systematic programme of public works, and sure enough the World State is plastered with acres of Reimann-surface Tennis and Elevator Fives courts that are in continual use. [Georg Riemann was a German mathematician, who worked out new system of geometry that aided the development of modern theoretical tennis. We can only assume that the sport is fiendishly complex.] This sort of 'ten men to dig a hole, so that ten more can stand in it, before another ten fill it in again' approach to employment was certainly to work for Hitler a few years later. And like the German economy prior to and during World War Two, Huxley's World State is propped up by what is essentially a slave population, who in this case really are biologically inferior to those who they produce for - an untermenchen of the State's creation. These Bokanovsky Groups of Epsilons are "the foundations on which everything else is built. They're the gyroscope that stabilizes the rocket plane of state in its unswerving course." The difference is that they have been conditioned to love their place in society. As the Director says, "That is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny." As the hypnopaedia for Betas says: "Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and the Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilon children are still worse..." And so it goes on. It is here that Huxley's vision differs substantially from the dystopia of Wells. The upper and lower strata of The Time Machine's future were divided wholly into discontented labour underground and happy wastrels on the surface. Huxley's society is all the more enticing and terrifying because very few within it think to argue against it.
Thus whilst the inhabitants of the World State are taught to consume, they are also conditioned to have a totally non-aspirational attitude lest they should threaten the hallowed stability. Brave New World manages to simultaneously satirise the communistic outlook that the collective body is the important factor, and the capitalistic one that individual consumption is a social imperative. The names of the characters, both major and secondary, emphasise this: Marx, Engels, Lenina; but also Rothschild (the name of an international banking family) and Mond (the industrialist).
There are also echoes of the original Utopia. As Hythloday reports in Thomas More's book, work and leisure time are controlled: "Because they live in full view of all, they are bound to be either working at their usual trades or enjoying their leisure in a respectable way." In the World State, 'usual trades' are set at birth, and respectable leisure means endless rounds of Obstacle Golf.
Clearly there is a tension between the problems facing Huxley's world in 1932, and the solution to these problems implemented in AF 632. However, we should not expect our authors to have totally consistent opinions, any more than we expect ourselves to have them. Nor should the judgement of a work be unduly affected by information not in the text itself. Whatever Huxley happened to be feeling in 1932 as the world seemed destined for chaos, Brave New World remains a future that, whilst a dream for the inhabitants that don't know any better, is a nightmare for others. Certainly, had Huxley the misfortune to find himself decanted into AF 632, he would have found himself almost as disturbed as the Savage, John. Indeed, it is John's conditioning-free eyes through which this Brave New World is most clearly and horrifyingly seen. Like More's Hythloday, it is John who is the voyager to the new Utopia. However, unlike the fictional renaissance explorer, John finds himself trapped in a world where nothing is how it should be, where everything goes against the urges that John identifies as natural.