Huxley vindicated

Nicholas von Hoffman

Helmholtz rose from his pneumatic chair. "I should like a thoroughly bad climate," he answered. "I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example ..."

'The controller nodded his approbation. "I like your spirit, Mr Watson ... what about the Falkland Islands?" ' Thus, in Brave New World, Mr Helmholtz Watson is banished from England by the controller for the socially destabilizing act of writing poetry reflecting the emotions of a distracted heart. Nineteen-eighty-two marks the 50th an- niversary of the publication of Aldous Hux- ley's anti-utopian novel, his prophetic dream of our western democracies. In the interim it has been somewhat blotted out by 1984, George Orwell's anti-utopian novel about the future of Marxist despotism. Big Brother entered our language in a way no phrase from Brave New World has, yet in America at least, the present much more closely resembles what Huxley warned us against than what Orwell did. On these shores, at least, Big Brother, while frighten- ingly powerful, is generally regarded as in- ept, stupid and ineffective. If he is feared, he is also ridiculed and, by whatever measure he is judged, he has not attained the unitary omnipotence of the Orwellian nightmare.

Huxley's vision of an uncoerced but com- pletely manipulated and controlled society seems much closer. Like Orwell, Huxley foresaw the centralised State in which all decision-making would be done by a small group of hierarchs: the evolution of a na- tion like the United States into a somewhat

chaotic oligarchy of corporate structures, who are unable to plan and manipulate society because they cannot agree with each other, was not anticipated by this writer who did, nevertheless, see our future with greater precision a half a century ago than most present-day Americans see it.

In Brave New World when you are blue or angry or bored, you take a pinch of a drug called soma. Huxley would later write of his own book that 'the systematic drugg- ing of individuals for the benefit of the state (and incidentally, of course, for their own delight), was a main plank in the policy of the World's Controllers. The daily soma ra tion was an insurance against personal maladjustment, social unrest, and the spread of subversive ideas. Religion, Karl Marx declared, is the opium of the people. In the Brave New World this situation is reversed. Opium, or rather soma, was the people's religion.'

Opium, or some other mind-altering drug, is bidding fair to become the opiate of the people in the United States. Literally billions of tranquilisers and other mood altering drugs are prescribed every year. In addition there is the illegal drug traffic, the suppression of which, if you step back and look at society with a bit of perspective, seems to have less to do with what is good for people than with power and profit. The government is of a mind to make the dispensing of drugs a licensed monopoly whereby only certain companies and in- dividuals may licitly play the drug trade. No serious effort is undertaken to get people off drugs, only to get them off drugs sold them by freelance entrepreneurs. Narcotics, like violence, are to be a monopoly of the State.

In Brave New World it was the conscious policy of the ruling group to foster the tak- ing of soma: in America the veneration of doctors and medical science, such as it is, amounts to a policy of promoting drugs, but not by people who knowingly wish to control and manipulate behaviour with them. One exception to that may be in con- nection with lower class blacks: not that anyone exactly and overtly wants to keep them drugged, but the keener students of the ghetto have long said that there is less violence when there are more drugs, if you don't count alcohol as a drug. Nevertheless, regardless of motive, tens of millions of us, black and white, poor and not so poor, spend our days under the influence of drugs designed to change our mood and control our behaviour. It is useless to speculate how or if public life would be different if the drugged 20 per cent of our population were straight, but it is plausible that we are already a different society because of the chemicals so many of us are addicted to.

In Brave New World control was also achieved by making people isolated integers with essentially a single homogenous per- sonality. In BNW the individual has no family since his life begins as an egg fertilis- ed on a petrie dish which is then transferred into a bottle where he remains until he is ripe for 'decanting'. An outrageous conceit

50 years ago, but only a matter of time in 1982.

After decanting, people have the correct norms and values incorporated into them by `Hypnopaedics', having recorded slogans whispered in their ears all night every night of childhood while they sleep in their dorms. The American child and the American adult, both, get their messages, called 'impressions' by the advertising in- dustry, through television, a machine that Huxley anticipates.

In Huxley's futuristic society one of the ways that individualism and the dangerous virtues (courage, love of truth, etc.) it brings in its train are smothered is by frown- ing on anything that smacks of solitude, of being alone, of encouraging thought. In BNW as opposed to 1984 these goals are achieved by benign means, not through police or the threat of imprisonment or tor- ture. The citizens in BNW are happy, so that there is a hopelessness about their case that is not present in the humourless 1984.

BNW is a tasteless world where people wear colourful polyester double knits and don't have to be treated by the State as Potential insurrectionists. Their tummies are full and their minds are empty because even when they are alone, they aren't alone. They are constantly being entertained and diverted by games, shows and happy drivel. Writing about his novel in the mid-1960's Huxley spoke of 'the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant ... A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fancy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would mani- pulate and control it.'

Even the inhabitants of BNW might cringe at what is shot into the heads of Americans day and night. With the advent of the communications satellite and cable television, the circus never stops.

The messages that are fired into our brain cells by the consortium of corporations who decide their content reinforce our commit- ment to their freedom of enterprise, but much of the message is neither true nor false, but unreal and hopelessly tangential to what ought to be our concerns.

Huxley was not a supine determinist, a the sara sara type. He believed that people have free will and that their free will can be applied to the making and the remaking of society. Nevertheless, it may be that at some point in the building of the Brave New World it will be impossible to turn back because there are too few people who want to. pop half a gram of soma and forget it. There are days on this side of the Atlantic when it seems we're that gone, but we aren't. There is an underground of people who will not turn on their television, and who, when no one is looking, flush their daily soma ration down the lavatory.