Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on Brave New World, Fordism, and Huxley’s Ambivalent Dystopia

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is read as modern literature’s other great dystopia, the soft twin to Orwell’s 1984 — a world governed not by terror but by pleasure, where nobody bans books because nobody wants to read them. Sandbrook and Syrett argue that this reputation rests on a misreading: the novel is far less a warning than it looks, because Huxley’s own sympathies lie at least as much with the world controller who defends the system as with the savage who denounces it. They also make the historical case that the book is less prophecy than period piece — a 1920s intellectual’s satire of Henry Ford, H.G. Wells, and Los Angeles, mistaken by later readers for a vision of the twenty-first century.

Key ideas

1. The dystopia is administered through pleasure, not fear. Where Orwell’s state rules by terror — the boot, the rats, the secret police — Huxley’s rules by conditioning, promiscuity and soma, a drug conferring bliss with no side effects. Syrett’s formulation is that the world state ‘dominates every aspect of life, but it is not domineering’: it starts at birth, guides every step, and never punishes, because it has removed the impulse to rebel rather than the ability. Dissidents are not shot but posted to the Falkland Islands or Samoa to live among other dissidents.

2. Huxley cannot decide whether he disapproves. The hosts take this as the novel’s central defect and its most interesting feature. The confrontation between John the Savage and the world controller Mustapha Mond is the book’s climax, and Mond gets the better lines — his answer to John’s demand for freedom is a list of what freedom actually entitles you to, from syphilis and cancer to ‘the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind’. Sandbrook notes that Mond is the one character in the book you would want a drink with, and that Huxley, an enthusiast for state planning who admired ICI’s Billingham plant as ‘an ordered universe in the midst of the larger world of planless incoherence’, was temperamentally closer to Mond than to John. Following the critic David Bradshaw, they conclude the ambiguity is Huxley’s, not the reader’s.

3. The book is a satire of 1920s America, not a prophecy of the 2020s. Huxley’s first visit to America in 1926 supplied the germ: he wrote that what was happening there was ‘a reevaluation of values, a radical alteration for the worse of established standards’, and asked what the world would look like if it all turned into America. The London of the novel is essentially 1926 California — dollars, skyscrapers, zippers (Huxley called the zipper America’s national crest), jazz, an obsession with staying young. The ‘feelies’ extend the arrival of the talkies, and the film John and Lenina watch parodies the Rudolph Valentino sheik pictures. Read this way, much of the celebrated critique of consumer culture is standard Bloomsbury-adjacent sneering at mass entertainment.

4. Fordism is the organising conceit, and it was a live idea when Huxley wrote. Ford is the deity — dates run from A.F. (After Ford), the cross has had its top bar cut off to make a T, and ‘Our Ford’ is conflated with ‘Our Freud’ whenever psychological matters arise. Huxley read Ford’s autobiography My Life and Work on the ship to America; in the novel it functions as scripture. Ford had just built his Dagenham plant east of London, with housing, schools and leisure facilities attached, which contemporaries called Fordopolis and hailed as the town of the future. Huxley’s nightmare is that world as the whole world: assembly-line people making assembly-line things, history stopped.

5. The hosts split on which dystopia describes the present, and both rank the novel low. Syrett takes Huxley’s side — smartphones, endless scroll, a life so easy that curiosity is not encouraged, and books competing with everything else — while Sandbrook thinks that reading is too bleak about human nature and too snobbish about how people choose to spend their leisure. Both then rank the book poorly as a novel: five out of ten from Sandbrook and six from Syrett, on the shared ground that its characters are thin, its story has no tension, and a novel of ideas would generally be better off written as an essay.

Content

Two dystopias, and why the softer one is harder to resist

The episode is organised throughout as a comparison with 1984, which the show covered earlier. Margaret Atwood’s preface to the Vintage Classics edition supplies the frame: two visionary books cast their shadows over the second half of the twentieth century, Orwell’s offering a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state, Huxley’s a different and softer totalitarianism of conformity, bottle-grown babies, hypnotic persuasion, boundless consumption, enforced promiscuity, and soma.

The hosts trace the contrast down to texture. 1984 opens physically and viscerally — Victory Mansions, boiled cabbage, a broken lift, Winston’s varicose ulcer — and puts the reader inside a named consciousness from the first page. Brave New World opens with a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre in which no character worth caring about appears for chapters. Sandbrook reads this as diagnostic rather than incidental: Huxley is more interested in the world than in the story, and the book confirms it. Syrett adds the consequence for the reader — everyone encountered early is jolly and at ease with their world, so nothing invites the reader to question it either. ‘It’s a flat terrain. There are no bumps, hillocks, and there’s nothing three-dimensional.’

The mechanism of control follows from that flatness. Embryos are cloned in thousands by the Bokanovsky process and sorted before birth into castes from Alpha Plus down to Epsilon Minus semi-morons; oxygen is given or withheld according to how clever a given baby is meant to be. Post-natal conditioning teaches infants to hate books and flowers — books so they will not question, flowers because a love of nature keeps no factories busy and generates no consumption. Sleep-teaching (hypnopaedia) finishes the work. The decisive refinement, as Sandbrook puts it, is that the conditioning makes you love your station: you will not resent being unintelligent, because you will have been made to prefer it and to look down on those who are not.

Huxley, and the family that produced him

Sandbrook’s summary of Huxley is that he is what you would get by putting Virginia Woolf, P.G. Wodehouse and George Harrison in a blender — the bohemian intellectual, the writer of country-house comedy, and the devotee of Eastern mysticism. He is a product of the late-Victorian intellectual elite: grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, who toured the country debating evolution as popular entertainment; son of Leonard Huxley, who married a granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Tom Brown’s School Days.

Three traumas shape him. His mother died of cancer when he was fourteen; his brother Trevenen, to whom he was close, killed himself; and an eye infection at Eton left him effectively blind for two years and, on the hosts’ reading of the evidence, blind in one eye for life. The blindness closed medicine to him and kept him out of the First World War. He took a first in English at Balliol, wrote prolifically across genres, worked as a farm labourer and for House & Garden and Vogue, and spent a year teaching French at Eton — where one of his pupils was a teenager named Eric Blair, later George Orwell, and where Steven Runciman remembered him as a useless teacher who could see nothing and had no authority.

He moved to America in 1937, which the hosts find strikingly incongruous for a man who had made his name diagnosing American civilisation as a threat to Europe, and settled eventually in Los Angeles, writing scripts (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, an unused Alice in Wonderland for Disney) and keeping company with Chaplin and Garbo. His late enthusiasms — philosophical pacifism, the Bhagavad Gita, mescaline and then LSD, the latter producing The Doors of Perception in 1954 — were unorthodox for the period and forward-looking. He lost the power of speech to cancer and died on 22 November 1963, six hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and on the same day as C.S. Lewis, both literary deaths entirely eclipsed.

The title, Shakespeare, and John the Savage

The title comes from Miranda in Act 5 of The Tempest — ‘O brave new world, that has such people in it’ — where it is already ironic, since the goodly creatures she admires are the men who betrayed and exiled her father, and Prospero answers drily, ”Tis new to thee.’ Shakespeare runs through the novel as the banned literature that finds its way back in.

It arrives through John, born on the Savage Reservation in New Mexico to Linda, a Beta Minus from the Fertilizing Room who was stranded there years earlier while pregnant by the Director. John has learned the world from a single volume of Shakespeare, so his morality and cultural reference points are those of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century Englishman, and he is repelled by everything he finds in London — Lenina’s sensuality above all. The hosts stress that Huxley does not present the reservation as an alternative utopia: it is dirty and flea-ridden, full of ritual flagellation, alcoholism, sexual jealousy and violence. Placing it in New Mexico is another private joke, since Huxley’s friend D.H. Lawrence — the prophet of free love and primal energy — had moved to Taos, and John, living where Lawrence lived, turns out to be puritanical and buttoned-up, Lawrence’s exact inverse.

Both hosts find John unlikeable. Syrett expected a hero and got a prig; Sandbrook reads him as a walking warning against self-righteousness, a zealotry that consumes the character by the end, when he flagellates and starves himself and attacks Lenina because he is attracted to her. The result is that neither reader knows whose side to take — which the hosts attribute to Huxley not knowing either.

The targets: Wells, eugenics, and the anxieties of 1931

Huxley told a friend the book was a novel about the future ‘on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and the revolt against it’. The specific target was H.G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923), in which a man from Sydenham is transported three thousand years forward, finds a world without religion or politics where everyone is free, honest and happy, and returns determined to bring it about. Huxley set out to spoof it, then, in his own words, ‘got caught up in the excitement of my own ideas’. Sandbrook, having found a copy, reports the Wells novel is forgotten for good reason.

The other targets are of their moment. Bertrand Russell, whose writing influenced the book heavily and who had helped found the progressive Beacon Hill school, is glanced at in the children’s ‘erotic play’. The 1920s backlash against intoxication and the American prohibition make free state-issued soma a joke against the taboos of Huxley’s own time. And the names are in-jokes: Mustapha Mond fuses Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the great secularising moderniser, with Sir Alfred Mond, first chairman of ICI, whose Billingham plant Huxley had visited and admired.

The eugenics material is the most uncomfortable, and the hosts do not soften it. The novel is now widely read as a warning against engineering human beings, but Huxley was himself interested in eugenics: before publication he told a BBC radio audience that ‘we might need to use eugenics to stop the rapid deterioration of the whole Western European stock’. He turned against it later; in the 1920s and 1930s the position was unremarkable among intellectuals, and the Nazi application that made it unspeakable had not yet happened. The background condition is the collapse of 1931 — the Great Depression, the fall of the Labour government, mass unemployment — which put stability and control, the novel’s two organising words, at the centre of intellectual life.

Orwell, Huxley, and the letter

Orwell certainly read Brave New World; his own deeper debt was to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, which he suspected Huxley had also taken from, though Huxley denied ever reading it. When 1984 appeared, Huxley wrote Orwell a letter the hosts describe as condescending — congratulating him and then explaining why his own book was better. Its argument is that within a generation rulers would find infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis more efficient instruments of government than clubs and prisons, and that ‘the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience’.

Syrett thinks the letter poor behaviour and the argument partly right: a regime held as taut as Orwell’s must eventually snap, whereas one governed by happiness has a fluidity that could continue indefinitely, unquestioned. The line of criticism running through Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) makes the same case — Orwell feared books would be banned, Huxley feared nobody would want to read one.

Asked which vision describes the present, Syrett chooses Huxley, setting aside the eugenics and the science: phones, social media, cookies and endless scroll produce a thoughtless state easily slipped into, and the effort of reading competes badly against everything easier. Sandbrook resists, on two grounds — that it is too bleak about human nature, and that the critique is snobbish. He returns to it in the ranking: the novel appeals to people who dislike the modern world, mass culture and technology, and he agrees with none of that. Syrett’s own concession is the sharper one: you should not look down on a comfortable, well-nourished society.

Related

• Dominic Sandbrook — co-host
• Tabitha Syrett — co-host
• Brave New World — the book under discussion
• Totalitarianism — the wiki’s account of the coercive model; this episode supplies the contrasting mode of control by pleasure
• Aldous Huxley — the author