Aldous Huxley's Dystopian Vision: Critiquing Utopia and Society

Aldous Huxley's Anti-Utopian Stance

Aldous Huxley's anti-utopian remarks in the late 1920s stemmed from a profound aversion to the utopian speculations he encountered by 1930. Many of these, influenced by H. G. Wells and ultimately by Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), were distinctly scientific in nature. Huxley observed that those who envisioned a utopian future ‘invoke not the god from the machine, but the machine itself. [...] Thus although in one sense Huxley’s novels and non-fiction prose prior to 1932 seemed to indicate that he would never stoop to utopian themes, in another they made Brave New World inevitable.

The Genesis of Brave New World

One of the chief reasons why Huxley wrote Brave New World was to discredit, if not discourage, the sort of utopian writing he was familiar with. The urge to write a literary satire on existing works went hand in hand with the desire to challenge, by means of correcting, less optimistic visions of his own, the picture of the future that science was enthusiastically offering. [...]

Huxley's Fascination with Eugenics

The question of ‘eugenic reform’ always held a fascination for Huxley. He explores it in Music at Night as a means of raising the critical point beyond which increases in prosperity, leisure, and education yield diminishing returns. He even speaks, with apparent tolerance, of a new caste system based on differences in native ability and of an educational process that supplies an individual with just so much instruction as his position calls for. He worries, in Proper Studies, ‘about the threat to the world’s IQ that the more rapidly reproducing inferior classes constitute.’ And when, in an essay [...], he predicts that society ‘will learn to breed babies in bottles’, or talks, albeit somewhat critically, of theatres wherein ‘egalitarians’ will enjoy talkies, tasties, smellies, and feelies, he almost seems to become Scogan.

Soma and the Quest for Individual Connection

Huxley is even more eloquent than Scogan on the possibilities of a holiday-inducing drug when he writes that: ‘If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, .. earth would become paradise’. What Scogan meant was an escape hatch, but what Huxley wants is a means of breaking down the individual’s isolation within his own ego. The difference between the two positions, however, is not so clear as to make pointing it out unnecessary. The drug called soma in Brave New World is not inherently unsatisfactory, but rather is an inadequate surrogate for something Huxley would accept in a more proper form.