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John: Brave New World
Huxley showed his true disposition byhis friendship with DHL(when the Bloomsbury set had rejected him).DHL was interested in artists'colonies andwas himself in search of new worlds andthe mechanization of America and cars he loathed. Huxley also wrote his owngreat search into spirituality in 1946The Perenial Philosophy,which was aboutbelief,prayer,spirituality and the search for the Godhead.In BNW you havethe industralization of reproductionand the planned State where pleasuretakes the place of coercion and the figure of John the savage is a hybridof himself and DHL-and he hangs himself!QED.
Brave New World
On the modern relevance of BNW, Neil Postman's 'Amusing ourselves to death' is well worth investigating. In the preface he sums up his argument by stating that Orwell got the future wrong, Huxley got it right.
Nick Inman Brave New World
I'm surprised no one on the programme mentioned Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death which argues that Huxley (in Brave New World) was right about the future –which is now our present – and Orwell (1984) wrong. You don't need a totalitarian police state to control people's thoughts; you just need to keep them amused and infantilised with the banalities of television and, by extension, the internet.
Richard Strauss, Brave New World
I was interested to hear that Brave New World is as much a Utopia as it is a Dystopia.Rereading More's Utopia it occurred to me that, at least according to a modern understanding More's work, More's Utopia isn't a place where many would like to live; I doubt it was a place More would have liked to live, either. There is a lot that is satirical, and indeed quite nasty in Utopia.Did More really mean Utopia to be a model state? I think that for More it may have been an ideal place in the platonic sense, but it was never intended to be an ‘idyll’.‘Utopia’, then is as much a dystopia as it is a utopia. The opposition of ‘dystopia’ to ‘utopia’ might be based on a 19th century misreading of utopia as a ‘perfect place’ and not ‘no place’ as More’s rather playful Greek would have it. If that is the case, it is a misreading that is still current.Perhaps I’m just a pedant. Still, I would enjoy hearing More’s Utopia discussed on In Our Time.
Luke Chandler
BNW is most definitely Dystopian not Utopian as the guests put forward. As to really enjoy life and know its worth we must go struggle was what Huxley was saying. A world of instant gratification and consumerism without want and longing, yet stable interspersed with chemical hoildays is hell, and that is how many people live today and do not know they are even alive and will not until it is to late. Go to your town centre and look around you, many gammas and epsilons consuming rubbish and watching moronic feelies. The brave new world is here. Yet I like to think there is a Delta out there whilst on a break from their hoovering is reading the complete works of Shakespeare and is totally engrossed in it, untouched by Hypnopaedia, intellectual freedom intact and truly alive!
Violet-Huxley-Brave New World
The background to why Huxley formulated the structure of the novel was explained quite well.e.g.industrialization, time and motion and the Ford ideology,the advancement of science etc.Visionary perhaps, but the book was written in 1931, many aspects can be projected forward. It was to be noted that Huxley taught Orwell for aleast a term.The title is of course ironic.
SUSAN GREENWOOD - BRAVE NEW WORLD
An interesting discussion, prompting a re-read. I have always thought of Huxley's 'novels' as essays - especially this one which seems to me to about the very thorny subject of the role of suffering in human life. Huxley's exposition is brilliantly open ended and still thought provoking.
michele roohani brave new world
i have to re-read BNW after this programme; i read it thirty years ago and it seems it's more relevant now than ever...i particularly liked david bradshaw's analysis.
Colin Lester, Brave New World
Re. Huxley's relationship with DH Lawrence, there's an interesting item from (if I remember aright from 45 years ago) the Memorial Volume edited by Julian Huxley (pub. Chatto & Windus 1965) where Martha Huxley, typing the mss. of Lady Chatterley, is said to have been asked by DHL not to use 'those 4-letter words' in Huxley's presence 'because it would shock him': an interesting view of a man who reportedly shocked some friends by talking loudly in a restaurant about the sex life of octopuses. There's also an interesting contribution from Pound who, when asked by Huxley about the value of his poetry, was 'able to advise him to confine himself to essays, of which he made himself the master' (I paraphrase throughout this note). It's in many ways a volume fascinatingly insightful (of contributors as well as Huxley & others), not least for being produced because Huxley's death was deemed to have been overlooked as it occurred on the same day as JFK's assasssination.
Helen Willis- Buddhism and Brave New World
It's been over 40 years since I read "Brave New World." It was an important book for me as a teen and lead to me reading much more stuff by Huxley as I aged. I think I thought as a teen that the things that Marx and the women saw at the savage village that upset the girl were copied after the things Gautama saw that made him search after spiritual truth. Weren't Buddha's disease, age, death, and an ascetic? I thought that Marx's shielded life was being paralleled with Prince Gautama, but then Marx doesn't find enlightenment at the end of his quest, just exile.
Brave New World
The question isn’t only if the world is brave, but also if it is new. What about Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of ‘Eternal return’, and some systems of thought such as Buddhism,which are attributed, wrongly, to belong exclusively to eastern philosophical and religious tradition? It seams that believe that it isn’t new, works as a driving force of that story.The story itself is title oriented. It is constructed around the title, so any speculations about possible literary influences, though not entirely unjustified, are of lesser importance for understanding its origins. And a battery supplies the power to any device, the title is a “driving” or inspirational force but also partly disconnected from the meaning of the story. The quotation from Shakespeare sounds as the greatest curse ever spoken. But who can be angry with fellow human beans permanently? They are selling old stories as new onesand have tendency of forgetting their meaning but, they also don’t always know what they are doing. In order to show that there have been people prior me to with similar views I have call upon Nietzsche and others, but it wouldn’t be right to play that game strictly. The case isn’t that the world’s story is repeated in its totality but only the best parts.
Dennis Chang -- IOT
All good -- just back from two weeks away, and it's been great to catch up with the last couple of programs. (Though I thought Baconian Science a bit more interesting than Huxley: perhaps a case for not having an entire program on a single novel?) Still, I've gotta take issue with Melvyn and with Will below: Rhodri Lewis wasn't being a pedant when he insisted that Bacon didn't say knowledge is power, for the excellent reason that Bacon never did get around to saying anything of the sort. It'd be boring to go into this now, but here's a link to a useful further discussion:https://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7115Bacon thought that certain kinds of knowledge did confer power on their possessors, but the phrase as it's attributed to him is a simple error. He was talking about the relative merits of *God's* knowledge and power, not ours, much less about any equivalency between knowledge and *political* power. This ain't rocket science and I really don't know what Melvyn and Will find so hard to swallow. (For the record, and despite Will's suggestion below, the actual Latin of the Meditationes sacrae reads, in a parenthesis on divine foreknowledge, "quam et ipsa scientia potestas est", the vagaries of which I'll leave to those of you who've studied Latin.) Otherwise, keep up the good work, Cheers, Dennis
Marjory Brave New World
I enjoyed the discussion. Like many, I read BNW in my late teens and really enjoyed it. Re-reading a few years ago, I was quite disappointed. It has some interesting ideas in it, but is full of long turgid descriptions about what life is like. It fails to work as a *novel*.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
I was surprised that at least some of the experts thought that Huxley was broadly sympathetic to the regime portrayed in BNW. In his preface to Brave New World Revisited he says that although he had set BMW in the 26th century, he now tought that "the horror may be upon us in a single century" The abiding impression I took from the novel, which I read years ago admittedly, was of a world spiritually and morally dead, with the population dehumanised and rigidly controlled. I find it hard to believe that Huxley with his great interest in the spiritual, which manifested itself more openly in his later work would have welcomed the world he describes. Was his novel not a warning of what would happen if the trends he identified went unchecked?And does he not adopt the same technique as Orwell in 1984 in using the future as a backdrop to highlight his concerns about the present, except that BNW is more satirical? A point not fully developed in the programme was prominence given to Freud. It is not entirely clear whether the year in which the novel is set, AF 632 is the year 632 of Our Freud or of Our Ford, and indeed by AF632 the names seem almost have merged into one. Stephen Gore
Brave New World
The forerunner of both Brave New World and 1984 is Zamyatin’s We. Zamyatin himself had lived and worked in England and derived his inspiration from HG Wells’s novels of dystopian social fantasy, a form he used to reveal the defects of the existing social structure and not to construct some paradise of the future. Writing in 1930, Huxley undoubtedly owed to Zamyatin the basic concept of a critique of the future based on an extrapolation of certain present trends. Huxley also shared Zamyatin’sconcern about man’s enslavement to the demands of a society whose rationale isthat of technology-in Zamyatin’s case his future world is an almost successful attempt to subordinate man to the laws of mathematics and engineering, while Huxley sees the chief danger to humanity in a surrender to the logic of thebiological and genetic sciences. What is absent in Huxley, however, is a sense of the power of ideology: BNW is apolitical, whereas for Zamyatin writing in Petrograd,ideology+terror was the main threat; he predicted Stalinism. Orwell shared this revulsion from the tyranny of ideology, saw Stalinism realized before his eyes and,projecting it slightly forward in time, predicted its evolution in terms that made itappallingly clear to even the insular and politically complacent British. Both BNW and We deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalized,mechanised, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about 600 years hence. Happiness and freedom , love and sex are all incompatible. Ties like motherhood, fatherhood and the family have been abolished. Stability is the chiefgoal. The problem of ‘human nature’ is solved by prenatal treatment, drugs andhypnotic suggestion and society is highly stratified. Huxley in BNW shows proto-fascist tendencies:high culture for the few, elitist rule, a denigration of mass communication(press, cinema, democracy) and mass happiness is inferior. Orwelltook his inspiration from We more than BNW because the latter shows a life that is stratified for no reason,there is no economic aim nor power hunger nor strong motive for those at the top, and life has become pointless and would not endure. As Zamyatin shows in We, imagination is the disease in a totalitarian state. There is aneed for human sacrifice and the worship of a leader with divine-like attributes. All you get in BNW are electric shocks, pneumatic bliss and pleasure, ho hum. People aresocially controlled by being brain-washed into well-being, having their wants curtailed. Our present awareness of the twin threats to civilized humanity-science and ideology as ends in themselves- has been aroused more by the power of Huxley andOrwell than the work of politicians. It was Zamyatin that grasped the potential in the literary technique(Dystopian tradition) of an English writer of one generation, gave it a new dimension and handed it on to two masters of the next generation.
Michael Moore, Brave New World
I first read Brave New World many years ago. I agree with the view that it is an odd novel, I always put this down to Huxley's almost vicious insight and his pessimistic expression of the nightmare society that he could see as a potential and partly realised result of the modern industrial age. It has remained a 'relevant' novel in that it speaks to the underlying anxiety created by the thought of spiritual values and aspirations denied, thwarted and suppressed by a totalitarian state. The obsessive secularism we experience in our society today is enough to ensure the survival of this work as a satirical polemic against state control. Thank you for - as always - a very enjoyable program.
jane Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Mmm...a visionary with no answers but plenty of directed talent. The intimations of truth are etched deeply in the chaotic miasma we wade through generation after generation but paradoxically, in such a context, evoke endless distortions of themselves. The 'phoenix from the ashes' will always be central to our story....and one day, we humans will perhaps understand, scientifically...or not, the real nature and function of life and especially of love. It's staring us in the face but we've developed collective cataracts. The head cannot be severed from the heart....we're all struggling with this paradigm whether we're consciously aware of it or not. Interesting if distressing programme - thanks enormously. (sorry, just couldn't bite my tongue on this one!) Best wishes to all.
LDW - Brave New World
Generally, I'm a big fan of IOT. But today's discussion struck me as below par. There was too much synopsis: if we've read it we KNOW what the story is and don't need reminding. There was a lot of very shallow talk about 'dystopia' - a word which appears in the description of the programme.To me, BNW is NOT dystopian. As was finally conceded in the last two minutes, it is simultaneously utopian and dystopian: the whole merit of the book is that Huxley does not make value judgments (at least overtly) about which aspects of his possible future are beneficial to man.The people ARE happy, sickness HAS been eliminated, children do NOT have birth trauma or parental neglect. These things are things we would all wish for. The question Huxley poses is, 'what is the price of this perfect world, and is it worth paying?'I heard the sound of some academics who were just a bit too pleased to be on the radio. Or was I just in a bad mood?
Shujaat Hussain Islamabad Pakistan
Hi, Thanks for such great program on BNW and Aldous Huxley!!
paul kelly "Brave new world"
you say that "Brave new world" is the only Shakespeare words to be made famous by someone else.what about "ill met by moonlight" by W.Stanley Moss?
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