Brave New World - a Defence of Paradise-Engineering

BRAVE NEW WORLD ?

A Defence Of Paradise-Engineering

Brave New World (1932) is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever written.

An exaggeration?

Tragically, no. Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any regime of universal happiness.

For sure, Huxley was writing a satirical piece of fiction, not scientific prophecy. Hence to treat his masterpiece as ill-conceived futurology rather than a work of great literature might seem to miss the point. Yet the knee-jerk response of "It's Brave New World!" to any blueprint for chemically-driven happiness has delayed research into paradise-engineering for all sentient life.

So how does Huxley turn a future where we're all notionally happy into the archetypal dystopia? If it's technically feasible, what's wrong with using biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether?

Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. This is because Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features calculated to alienate his audience. Typically, reading BNW elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation.

Thus BNW doesn't, and isn't intended by its author to, evoke just how wonderful our lives could be if the human genome were intelligently rewritten. In the era of post-genomic medicine, our DNA is likely to be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long bliss, awesome peak experiences, and a spectrum of outrageously good designer-drugs. Nor does Huxley's comparatively sympathetic account of the life of the Savage on the Reservation convey just how nasty the old regime of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. If you think it does, then you enjoy an enviably sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. For it's all sugar-coated pseudo-realism.

In Brave New World, Huxley contrives to exploit the anxieties of his bourgeois audience about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism. He taps into, and then feeds, our revulsion at Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning and eugenics. Worse, it is suggested that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most hallowed shibboleths of our culture: "motherhood", "home", "family", "freedom", even "love". The exchange yields an insipid happiness that's unworthy of the name. Its evocation arouses our unease and distaste.

In BNW, happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma.

As perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma underwhelms. It's not really a utopian wonderdrug at all. It does make you high. Yet it's more akin to a hangoverless tranquilliser or an opiate - or a psychic anaesthetising SSRI like Prozac - than a truly life-transforming elixir. Third-millennium neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a vastly richer product-range of designer-drugs to order.

For a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It gives rise to only a shallow, unempathetic and intellectually uninteresting well-being. Apparently, taking soma doesn't give Bernard Marx, the disaffected sleep-learning specialist, more than a cheap thrill. Nor does it make him happy with his station in life. John the Savage commits suicide soon after taking soma [guilt and despair born of serotonin depletion!?]. The drug is said to be better than (promiscuous) sex - the only sex brave new worlders practise. But a regimen of soma doesn't deliver anything sublime or life-enriching. It doesn't catalyse any mystical epiphanies, intellectual breakthroughs or life-defining insights. It doesn't in any way promote personal growth. Instead, it provides a mindless, inauthentic "imbecile happiness" - a vacuous escapism which makes people comfortable with their lack of freedom. Soma is a narcotic that raises "a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds."

If Huxley had wished to tantalise, rather than repel, emotional primitives like us with the biological nirvana soon in prospect, then he could have envisaged utopian wonderdrugs which reinforced or enriched our most cherished ideals. In our imaginations, perhaps we might have been allowed - via chemically-enriched brave new worlders - to turn ourselves into idealised versions of the sort of people we'd most like to be. In