Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) offers a projection of what life on earth might become in another 500 years if technology plays an increasingly dominant role and if government control of all aspects of human activity becomes absolute. Skyscrapers will become taller, factories will become more efficient, travel will be mainly by air, diseases will be virtually eliminated, and universal happiness will be provided through elaborate sports and entertainment programs and through a happiness pill called soma.
The new plan of society does not conform to many of the familiar features of classical utopias. Money is used in much the way it was used in the 20th century—for wages, for the purchase of goods and property, and for amusements and travel. Most radical of the anti-utopian features is the denial of equality. Mankind is classified in a caste system that is achieved through controlled genetics and that insures the society a supply of dull-witted, underdeveloped individuals to perform the less agreeable jobs and those demanding lesser skills.
The application of scientific methods begins in the “Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.” There humans are bred in test tubes, transferred as they grow to larger jars, and nourished under controlled conditions until they reach the stage for hatching or “decanting.” Even in the test tube stage they are marked for treatment that will produce the type of human desired. The types are labeled alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon, with certain plus or minus grades within each type. In infancy the individuals are scientifically “conditioned” to cultivate certain desires, to abhor certain things, to believe certain truisms, according to the kind of service for which they are designated. The conditioning takes the form of nutritional treatment, electric shock, screeching sirens, or hypnopaedia—that is, sleep-teaching.
Every individual is employed according to his classification—in an office, a factory, a hatchery, on a farm, or flying a helicopter taxi. A great variety of entertainment is provided for after-working hours—sports like electromagnetic golf, Riemann-surface tennis, and centrifugal bumble-puppy. There are lively nightclubs and “feelies,” movies that provide accompanying scents and that also stimulate appropriate tactile sensations. Every evening seems to end with going to bed with someone of the opposite sex. Sexual relations are completely promiscuous. “Everyone belongs to everyone” is one of the clichés drummed into the consciousness through conditioning. There is no such thing as a marriage. Contraceptives are provided by the government to make sure that people will not interfere with the test tube method of producing children. Sex is purely for sport.
The planning of their extensive program of amusements has two main purposes. First, it is intended to stimulate the economy. The games and feelies all require expensive equipment; that means more factories and also more opportunities for people to distribute their pay checks. Second, the government is concerned to keep everybody busy during waking hours to leave them no odd moments for thinking.
This so-called Brave New World, based primarily on advanced technology combined with regimented control, as Huxley presents it, is a horror because it means death to individuality, to liberty, to art and literature—to the spirit of man. The book is one of the most virulent of the anti-utopias.
In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), the society of the year 1984 which Orwell projects for us is based on the assumption that a “limited” nuclear war of the 1950s had left civilization severely crippled and that government controls were seized by well-organized opportunists employing the familiar methods of a police state to maintain power. London, the scene of the novel’s action, is the capital of Oceania, one of three superpowers. The other superpowers are called Eastasia and Eurasia. The city of London contains a few enormous government buildings and a small number of fine apartment buildings, but the vast majority of the buildings are eighteenth- or nineteenth-century houses in dilapidated condition which provide shelter for the common people. There are also a good many neglected bombed-out areas. Certainly this is not a picture of somebody’s dream city.
Oceania is completely dominated by the members of “the Party,” a handpicked group of loyal supporters of the government. The mass of the population, the proletariat or “proles,” are purposely kept poor and ignorant and are without any voice in public affairs. Actually, the real power is held by the “Inner Party,” the elite of the Party membership.
The methods employed by the Party to maintain control and to manipulate the population are copied directly from the records of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Any opposition to the system in deed, word or thought is summarily stamped out. Naturally freedom of speech and of the press are suppressed. Spies are everywhere. There are hundreds of posters throughout the city showing the enormous head of a man with steely eyes and heavy black mustache. The caption of the posters reads: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. Monitoring screens for official spying are in public places, in hallways, and even in apartments. One’s every action or word may be under surveillance. It represents something of a refinement over wiretapping. People live in constant fear of being detected in some fault or of being suspected of some fault, and there is always present the dread of a banging on the door in the middle of the night. Confessions are wrested even from innocent persons by refined methods of torture.
A new form of language called “newspeak” is being developed to facilitate the process of thought control, and there is a movement called “doublethink” whereby the most absurd ambiguities are propounded in all seriousness. The mottoes of the Party are: “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” The Ministry of Truth deals mainly with propaganda, the Ministry of Peace manages military operations, the Ministry of Love is concerned with matters of law and order, and the Ministry of Plenty regulates the economy.
There is, of course, nothing new in all of this program, nothing fantastic such as Huxley’s “Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.” The reader, while he cringes at the horror, keeps repeating to himself, “It can’t happen here.” Nevertheless, Orwell compels us to recognize not only Nazi devices but also certain telltale symptoms in our own social and political practices that cannot help but undermine our complacency.
1984 is brutally anti-utopian in every detail, the complete antithesis of the meliorative societies conceived by More and Bacon, by Bellamy and William Morris.
The reports of the above books must not be regarded as reviews of them as literary works. They are all cast in novel form with a plot line and cast of characters. Our study is concerned only with those aspects that throw light on the concepts of society reshaped. In each case it is fair to say that the author has concentrated more attention on the “brave new world” concept than on the accompanying romantic fiction.
