Thursday, 10th February

Reading Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World”; a new LifeLines series

The 1932 novel Brave New World portrays a society that has completely abolished families, totally separated sex and reproduction, and now expects and requires from its citizens the single-minded pursuit of sensual pleasure and material goods.  What messages does it have for us in 2011? 

For a long time now, writers and filmmakers have enjoyed entertaining, provoking and scaring us with frightening visions of the future.  Starting in the late Victorian era, artists like HG Wells explored themes like disease, environmental disaster, technology run amok, global nuclear war and totalitarianism.

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, with its pessimistic and terrifying description of a brutal and unyielding future tyranny, is often considered - rightly - to be one of the great works of its kind.  But sixteen years before Orwell's masterpiece, a very different, but no less frightening or profound, work of dystopian fiction was published: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Almost half a century before the first successful IVF procedure, and thirty years before the Pill enabled the “sexual revolution” of the Sixties, Huxley describes a world where the link between sex and procreation has been totally severed, where the nuclear family has been abolished, and traditional morality turned on its head, with sensual pleasure now considered the only worthwhile pursuit for individuals. 

Huxley was associated with the Bloomsbury Group, and was, it may be assumed, sympathetic to that set's radical critique of conventional sexual morality.  Yet he portrayed this world - in many ways the culmination of Bloomsbury ideas about free love and radical social change - as a grim and nightmarish place, empty of authentic human experience and emotion, hostile to individual liberty and eccentricity, and culturally barren. Intimate attachment between individuals is feared, stigmatised and avoided.

The posts in this series will begin to look at some of the key themes of this book, with particular reference to how they inform the views of pro-lifers and others concerned with the increasing instrumentalisation and cheapening of human life in the early twenty-first century.