Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Blurb:

Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order—all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. 

Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as a thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites. 

Review:

Odds are that over the past ten years or so you’ve seen a Venn diagram shared somewhere on the internet, three circles at the center of which are the words “You Are Here.” In the circles are the titles of three books: George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. But is that really true? Is our current world set at the conjunction between these three classic works of speculative fiction?

Well I couldn’t really answer that confidently. I’ve read or re-read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 recently, but I realized I hadn’t actually read Brave New World since high school and had forgotten much of the substance of it. I vividly remembered the first and final chapters, but the whole of the middle was a fog. So last week I grabbed it off the shelf and cracked it open for the first time in over a decade. But before I go much further I should get the proper “review” part of this review out of the way. 

Did I like Brave New World? Kind of, I guess? It has a very unconventional story structure, closer to a “slice-of-life” type story than anything else. The protagonist of the first half of the book ends up taking a back seat to a new protagonist introduced about halfway through, and because of the nature of the world in which Huxley is writing, many of the characters have a kind of flat, uninteresting texture to them (but this is part of the point of the story, so I can’t fault it too much). In contrast to 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 it’s not a particularly exciting book, and I think has become a “classic” because of its thematic content more than anything else. So, yeah, I guess that’s as tepid a recommendation as anything else, and yet this book excited me to no end because early in the first chapter I was immediately struck by an unexpected revelation:

This book could be Aldous Huxley’s treatise against generative AI. 

I say this only half-seriously, of course. Writing from the 1930s, Huxley could never have conceived of the kind of technology we have in our midst today. In fact, in the Foreword of my version of the novel—first included in a 1940s re-release—he laments the fact that he did not predict the advent of nuclear energy. Artificial intelligence, and even computers more broadly, were definitely not on his radar. 

So what do I mean then? Why, in 2025, did I view this reading of Brave New World through the lens of generative AI? 

Well from the very first pages of the very first chapter, we’re introduced to a highly automated world. Babies are no longer born, but rather decanted from myriad test tubes on a massive, human-making assembly line. This assembly line birth-cycle serves a vital function for Huxley’s far-future world, namely in the kinds of population control it allows. Via the introduction of various chemicals (or the withholding of chemicals), the operators of this human assembly line can control every aspect of the human beings which it will birth: their height, weight, intelligence, and other factors that will contribute to their eventual place in civilized society. Alpha-plus babies come off the line like luxury automobiles, while Epsilon-minus babies are little workhorse sedans. The assembly line itself is a kind of holy object in this universe, which has long-ago raised Henry Ford to the status of god. The people of this world preach that “cleanliness is next to Fordliness,” exclaim “Ford!” in excitement and fear and wonder, and in moments of reverence make the sign of the “T” (for Ford’s famous Model-T) instead of the sign of the cross. 

But like cars out of one of Henry Ford’s factories, the mass of humans that inhabit this world are essentially clones of one another, manufactured in batches of tens of thousands at a time. We’re asked, towards the midpoint of the story, “What is an individual? We can make new ones with the greatest ease—as many as we like.” Thus one of the first protagonists we spend any real amount of time with is one who stands out from his kinspeople because, for reasons unknown, he is physically unique amongst his caste. His name is Bernard Marx. His friends and co-workers speculate that maybe his embryo got too much alcohol during his gestation on the assembly line, but the reason for his diminished stature doesn’t matter. What matters is he is different, and so he becomes an outcast. In a world of uniformity and conformity, difference, no matter how slight, stands out; and by its very nature threatens the delicate fabric of civilized society. Furthermore, every child “born” into this society—like Bernard—is subject during the first years of their life to hundreds of hours of unconscious conditioning, wormed into their minds while they sleep, to ideally prevent any deviation from socially acceptable norms and to keep them contented and happy in their predestined role amidst this society. Alphas are conditioned to desire and be happy doing complicated, intellectually rigorous jobs, while the lower castes are conditioned to love menial work and physical labor. The same character that asks, “What is an individual?” tells us that, “Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.”

But whether it’s a product of whatever error in his development made him this way, Bernard cannot help but claw against the walls of his conditioning. Early in the story he asks one of his dates, “Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” to which she replies, like a good citizen of this world, “I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

In Brave New World, uniformity is the most desired trait amongst people. No one should be elevated above any other (aside from divisions of castes, of course—but people within castes should all be the same). And so, when a person decides they might want something more out of life than that which they’ve been given, society pushes them back down. One of Bernard’s friends, a man named Helmholtz, is a writer of emotional propaganda (used to condition the world’s children); and recently he’s been experimenting with writing different sorts of propaganda, rhymes and poems that have gotten him reprimanded by his superiors. Helmholtz says, “I feel as though I were just beginning to have something to write about. As though I were beginning to be able to use that power I’ve got inside me—that extra, latent power. Something seems to be coming to me.”

Art in the society of Brave New World exists, but exists to keep the masses placated. It does not exist to say anything—“works of art [made out of] practically nothing but pure sensation” we’re told, all in the name of keeping the masses happy. Uniform, familiar, uncritical art to keep them happy. The World Controller for Western Europe tells us that:

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt.”  

But an outsider is introduced into this world, a “Savage” born in Arizona to a human mother—a woman from the Brave New World who got left behind there on a holiday gone wrong. He, John—born into a world more familiar to our own, one with art and love and God and pain and loneliness—sees the contradictions of this “civilized society”, sees what they’ve traded for this stability, “Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it… Nothing costs enough” he says. I would imagine Huxley, had he lived to see what generative AI was capable of, would say similarly: it doesn’t cost enough. 

This is the heart of the issue. Human life, our lives, is/are full of struggle, whether we like it or not. But this crucible, these little and large crucibles through which we wander every day, are what make us who we are, what make us human. We need that conflict and need that contrast. A diamond shines much brighter on a black satin background than a white one. In removing the hurdles to the creation of “art”, we’ve removed the very thing that makes art worth making: the process, the struggle, the act of creation. Solaris author Stanislaw Lem once noted that

“Where anything comes easy, nothing can be of value,” and that conflict, especially in the creation of art, is vital to conveying “the indescribable richness that can be conveyed only by real life.” (Microworlds). 

And if you’ll allow me for a moment to appeal to a theological argument for art, if—as the Christian paradigm would say—we’re made in the image of God (the Creator), our ability to create art (to create anything, really) is as much a divine imperative as anything else. Why would we hand that task off to machines? To view art manifested without a human perspective? To gaze upon a painting that says nothing? In a 1983 entry in his personal journal, famed sci-fi filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky wrote similarly: “I often wonder about how right we are when we maintain that artistic creation is a state of the soul. Why? Perhaps because man is trying to imitate the Creator.” (Time Within Time, pg. 370).

Huxley wants us to learn from Brave New World that not only is human struggle vital to the advancement of art and science, but indeed our very humanity demands the chaos of life. Uniformity and conformity may be comfortable, may be calming; but these things steal from us the very roots of our humanness. As goes the French expression, vive la différence! Machines are only capable of homogeneity. Humans, individuals with unique experiences and perspectives and thoughts and feelings, can make so much more. It may take more time. It may be harder; but it is vital that we hold on to that ability, that we hold on to the humanness of art. We must hold on to the humanness of humanness.