It’s been a long time since I read BNW but I think you’ve got it.
Huxley was definitely more anti-capitalist than genuinely socialist in a Marxist sense, although I wouldn’t put it past him to be some sort of DemSoc or a fabianist or a utopianist.
I think that a more apt way of putting it would be to say that Huxley was, at least in BNW, anti-industrialisation more than anything in particular.
(Spoiler warnings ahead for a book that’s a century old, I guess?)
With regards to birth, people became divorced from the natural process of gestation and various chemical additives were applied to the fetus, along with scientific-style conditioning, to create the necessary “grades” of humans to meet the needs of society, much like how produce is grown under different conditions for different purposes and graded according to different categories.
Even the dominant society’s experience of nature and leisure is a sort of walled-garden that is simulacrum rather than “authentic” wilderness, whatever that is exactly.
The lowest class being subjected to conditioning so they abhored nature is a good example of how Huxley perceived industrial society to go so far as to “pervert” nature and natural inclinations to the point of them being in total opposition to human nature.
The application of orgies and drugs is all very much a scientific endeavour to maintain stability and (re)direct natural urges in people.
Obviously there’s the sort of Walden-esque or anprim urge within BNW about the savage reservation and Huxley’s concern that, ultimately, humans would create a society so synthetic and curated that it would be downright intolerable - both for a “natural” human to exist within and for the manufactured man with their relationship to their natural instincts or whatever.
(Of course I’m talking in broad brushstrokes and I’m pretty skeptical about claims of authenticity and what is “natural” and all of that stuff.)
Obviously there’s the characters names - Bernard Marx and Lenina etc. - and these are (hamfisted) references that I think are more than pastiche but that they are Huxley warning about what he thought about the modernist projects of Marx and Lenin by “artificially” crafting a society to “produce” man according to scientific ideals with the application of scientific methods and research.
Of course, there’s Fordism which is pretty obvious in what it represents too. (I guess “Taylorism” was already taken and even that must have seemed too hamfisted for even Huxley lol.)
I feel like Huxley was pretty close to the mark with a corporatist, gentle style of fascism that we could expect to see within the secure borders of a soon-to-be nation.
I think it’s a decent story and it has a much better message than Orwell’s. Huxley’s letter to Orwell congratulating him on plagiarisingcompleting 1984 while basically softly gloating that he was right and Orwell was wrong is worth a read. Although I think Huxley was both right and wrong - his is the better take but there’s absolutely no reason why both predictions couldn’t coexist in an alternating way or a contemporaneous way (e.g. a boot stamping on a human face in the internal colonies or the dispossessed groups while the privileged get their Soma etc. or where you get your Soma and consumerism but the moment you step out of line you get the boot stamping your face).
But underneath BNW is this idealistic notion of when humans were in their “right” place that I think is pretty naive, much like chuds who glamorise the 1950s or the Roman Empire or whatever - there’s this ahistorical, nostalgia-clouded view of when things were great and that gets coupled with a whole lot of underlying essentialist assumptions. I personally do not buy it. I think that Huxley is a good example of how a lack of genuinely materialist analysis often lead people to really bizarre anprim and similar sorts of conclusions, although that’s not to say that he didn’t have a vulgar sort of materialist approach to how he understood the direction that society was heading in.
I can’t really remember the role of new consumer goods in relation to how they soaked up work-hours, I just remember them as fashion trends that need to be adhered to in order to be a “functioning” and accepted member of society.
It’s been a long time since I read BNW but I think you’ve got it.
Huxley was definitely more anti-capitalist than genuinely socialist in a Marxist sense, although I wouldn’t put it past him to be some sort of DemSoc or a fabianist or a utopianist.
I think that a more apt way of putting it would be to say that Huxley was, at least in BNW, anti-industrialisation more than anything in particular.
(Spoiler warnings ahead for a book that’s a century old, I guess?)
With regards to birth, people became divorced from the natural process of gestation and various chemical additives were applied to the fetus, along with scientific-style conditioning, to create the necessary “grades” of humans to meet the needs of society, much like how produce is grown under different conditions for different purposes and graded according to different categories.
Even the dominant society’s experience of nature and leisure is a sort of walled-garden that is simulacrum rather than “authentic” wilderness, whatever that is exactly.
The lowest class being subjected to conditioning so they abhored nature is a good example of how Huxley perceived industrial society to go so far as to “pervert” nature and natural inclinations to the point of them being in total opposition to human nature.
The application of orgies and drugs is all very much a scientific endeavour to maintain stability and (re)direct natural urges in people.
Obviously there’s the sort of Walden-esque or anprim urge within BNW about the savage reservation and Huxley’s concern that, ultimately, humans would create a society so synthetic and curated that it would be downright intolerable - both for a “natural” human to exist within and for the manufactured man with their relationship to their natural instincts or whatever.
(Of course I’m talking in broad brushstrokes and I’m pretty skeptical about claims of authenticity and what is “natural” and all of that stuff.)
Obviously there’s the characters names - Bernard Marx and Lenina etc. - and these are (hamfisted) references that I think are more than pastiche but that they are Huxley warning about what he thought about the modernist projects of Marx and Lenin by “artificially” crafting a society to “produce” man according to scientific ideals with the application of scientific methods and research.
Of course, there’s Fordism which is pretty obvious in what it represents too. (I guess “Taylorism” was already taken and even that must have seemed too hamfisted for even Huxley lol.)
I feel like Huxley was pretty close to the mark with a corporatist, gentle style of fascism that we could expect to see within the secure borders of a soon-to-be nation.
I think it’s a decent story and it has a much better message than Orwell’s. Huxley’s letter to Orwell congratulating him on
plagiarisingcompleting 1984 while basically softly gloating that he was right and Orwell was wrong is worth a read. Although I think Huxley was both right and wrong - his is the better take but there’s absolutely no reason why both predictions couldn’t coexist in an alternating way or a contemporaneous way (e.g. a boot stamping on a human face in the internal colonies or the dispossessed groups while the privileged get their Soma etc. or where you get your Soma and consumerism but the moment you step out of line you get the boot stamping your face).But underneath BNW is this idealistic notion of when humans were in their “right” place that I think is pretty naive, much like chuds who glamorise the 1950s or the Roman Empire or whatever - there’s this ahistorical, nostalgia-clouded view of when things were great and that gets coupled with a whole lot of underlying essentialist assumptions. I personally do not buy it. I think that Huxley is a good example of how a lack of genuinely materialist analysis often lead people to really bizarre anprim and similar sorts of conclusions, although that’s not to say that he didn’t have a vulgar sort of materialist approach to how he understood the direction that society was heading in.
I can’t really remember the role of new consumer goods in relation to how they soaked up work-hours, I just remember them as fashion trends that need to be adhered to in order to be a “functioning” and accepted member of society.