Brave New World: Truth, Happiness, and Personal Responsibility

Introduction: A Prescient Dystopia

Aldous Huxley is often cited as an architect of a society eerily prescient of our own future. "In a number of specifics Huxley's prophecies are tellingly accurate," writes literary critic Kirkpatrick Sale, such as "the ubiquity of sports, television in hotel and hospital rooms, a general ignorance of history," and "psychology and chemistry as important change agents," as opposed to religion (Sale, 2000, p. 3). This future world is frequently depicted as a world of falsehood, in contrast to the truth embodied by the Savage John. However, perhaps Huxley's dystopia is not so much a society where truth and happiness are incommensurate, but rather a place where personal choice and freedom are impossible to experience alongside perfect happiness. To take responsibility for one's present actions and one's failures in the past often means experiencing pain — and thus, everything must be decided for the citizens of Brave New World.

Shakespeare, Truth, and the Limits of Memory

The title of the novel comes from a quotation in Shakespeare's The Tempest. The Savage John quotes the phrase "O brave new world! O wonder!" upon meeting individuals from civilization, expressing his personal sense of wonder at encountering an entirely new land. John, however, does not truly know the "truth" of either the present or the past. He has been educated in a romantic and fictional version of history through his mother's memories and books. In contrast, the individuals of the future have come from a world with no sense of a past — where history and truth have been eliminated from the collective consciousness for the sake of societal happiness and agreement. But neither the Savage John nor the scientist Bernard Marx possesses a complete picture of truth. Rather, both hold only subjective ideas of what the world should be like: one shaped by a false vision of history, the other by a romantic vision of tomorrow.

Why the Past Must Be Eliminated

To truly seek an unromantic past implies reconstructing something in its factual reality, rather than merely reading Shakespeare. Remembering also implies looking back — perhaps with regret at a lost opportunity, or perhaps with joy. Either way, it implies a sense of loss, since even a joyful past moment cannot be recaptured. Thus, memory is always a source of learning but also of pain and potential disagreement among those who remember history differently. All such pain, reflective or otherwise, has been eliminated by a society built on soma and commercialization.

The fact that the past is so subjective — that it cannot be standardized because everyone remembers it differently — means that remembering the past can cause conflicts, which stifle happiness. This is another reason for the total elimination of a sense of history. To seek truth, especially the truth of the past, implies choosing one version of events over another, and any choice creates a sense of loss and, therefore, harmony-destroying unhappiness. Preferring chocolate over vanilla creates conflict; it is far simpler to make everyone want the same thing, engineering happiness rather than tolerating potential disorder and disagreement.

Thus, even if the reader views John's commitment to old ideals — such as marriage, fidelity, and the subjugation of female desire — as a kind of falsehood, John's flawed but unique sense of truth also demonstrates that seeking intellectual autonomy from the collective "enjoyment of the moment" implies a dangerous and individualistic commitment contrary to the dictated, agreed-upon values of society. Even a false but personally held sense of truth creates a spirit of questioning that sows doubt in the social order. A disagreement about something as trivial as the present moment undermines harmony; to question the past would be to question the entire project of the new world.

Conclusion: Huxley's Warning for the Present

Technical fixes, yes — and perhaps even more damagingly, a lack of a sense of responsibility for the bad consequences of our actions. The parallel between soma and modern pharmaceutical culture, or between the Controllers' engineered consent and today's consumer society, is difficult to dismiss. At least, however, the novel exists — a product of the past — to remind us that our current state of affairs did not spontaneously generate, like a clone from a laboratory, but has been percolating in our culture for a very long time.

Annotated Works Cited

Gray, John. "Back to the Future: Aldous Huxley Was Very Much a Product of His Time; Racist, Snobbish and Superior. But He Was Also a Visionary, a Chronicler of Our Disturbed Modernity: Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual." New Statesman. April 8, 2002.

Critical book review of Huxley's novel and of a recent biography. Provides an overview of contemporary and modern critical reception to the novel.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1931.

The primary source text. A searchable online version of the complete novel allows readers to locate specific references — for instance, all mentions of Shakespeare's The Tempest — with ease.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. "The Future Brought to Book." The Ecologist. 2000.

Scholarly article analyzing how relevant Brave New World remains to the contemporary mentality, treating soma as a kind of Prozac and examining issues of personal responsibility in modern society.