Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Or, Should I wirehead my cat?
We start at the beginning, with babies growing in bottles to a civilization evolved past the need for families. This is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the seminal work of the utopian genre. Here, the motto of the World State is “Community, Identity, Stability”. Huxley paints a bleak picture of technologically enabled hedonistic excess. Unfortunately for possibly all of humanity, Brave New World is much more popular than it’s utopian counterpart Island, written thirty years later. The attention grabbing portrayal of a society that values happiness to the exclusion of culture, freedom and even love has tainted the idea of paradise-engineering in the public eye for decades. Taking into account the immense amount of human and animal suffering in the world, stymying research into abolishing suffering is a moral catastrophe, one Huxley contributed to.
Brave new world conflates paradise engineering (using technology to fulfill hedonistic imperatives, ie make everyone happy all the time) with wireheading. Wireheading is changing your reward architecture to be happy all the time. The term refers to experiments where wires were used to electrically stimulate regions of a rat’s brain, short circuiting the brain’s reward mechanisms. This is endless reward, without the tolerance or satiation of sex or drugs. Rats will push a lever that provides inter-cranial stimulation until they die of dehydration. Humans find wireheading repugnant, at odds with their most sacred values. In Brave New World, humanity has wireheaded not a rat but all of humanity. With children freed from the tyranny of families, hypnotic conditioning to accept your place in society, and endless soma, the hangover free high, “everybody’s happy nowadays”. (BNW 96)
Brave New World functions as a piece of propaganda, warning us against the dangers of scientific utopianism. To this end, Huxley endows this society with features calculated to alienate his audience. He names the price of universal happiness as the destruction of our values, motherhood, home, freedom, love. To be fair, Huxley had me at his descriptions of the endless, socially mandated noise, designed to keep you from any sort of introspection. Likewise, Huxley ties biotechnology to fears of racism and eugenics. Using genetic engineering to make everyone healthy and well-adjusted is not the same as manufacturing a rigid hierarchy of genetically-preordained castes. In reality, there is no fundamental connection between soulless hedonistic existence and a scientifically engineered paradise. The lingering question of Huxley’s legacy is if we could have the best of both worlds, freedom, culture, family and love as well as the removal of all suffering.
We have learned to rationalize mental pain as good for us, developing character or increasing empathy. This is to remain sane in a world where there is no way to avoid it. This does not mean that mental pain could not be engineered away, or that it is morally wrong to do so. There’s no causative link between Brave New World and the low social standing and funding of paradise engineering research. Huxley’s views are more likely a symptom of wider societal disapproval than the cause. Still, "It's Brave New World” has become the thought-terminating cliché for arguments to improve society with anything from genetic engineering to designer drugs.
Is Huxley a fear mongering puritan denying us our lotus thrones, or a visionary saving us from a lever pressing hell? The answer, like most things, depends on your perspective. Someone struggling to get by on minimum wage, stuck in a house with abusive parents, or chronically lonely would jump at Huxley’s Brave New World, where the drugs are free and the orgies continuous. Here even work is light and stress-free, calibrated to free you from the tedium of too much leisure. But Huxley was rich, well-educated, and a successful writer. His self insert, Helmholtz Watson, a handsome and gifted writer, is an “Alpha'' genetically engineered to lead society. He is haunted by the feeling that society which has eradicated suffering has stifled his potential as a writer. He is foiled by Bernard, another “Alpha'' whose short, low class stature leaves him a poor fit for the role society has assigned him. On Mavlov’s hierarchy of needs, Huxley is striving for self-actualization while the poor are fighting for their physical needs.
Unfortunately, Huxley was right about a lot of things. Despite declaring “science is everything”, science is kept “chained and muzzled” by high-ranking politicians, to serve their own agenda. But lying, self-serving politicians are low-hanging fruit. Huxley describes how an equitable society made only of high-caste leaders dissolved, “all the people detailed for a spell of low grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were”. (BNW 248) Now elite overproduction is fueling the rise of credentialism, where people burn years of their lives in universities, to scheme and backbite for tenure. Huxley envisions a future where “mother” is a bad word, and liberals are pushing to de-emphasize the family for “extended clan-networks”. His ideas on genetic engineering and prolific drug use must be considered within the context of other, correct, predictions.
The logical extreme of paradise-engineering is not only eradicating people’s suffering, but that of animals. Even the suffering of wild animals is not pre-ordained. Factory farming is a huge animal welfare issue, but interventions focus on reducing the need for meat via recruiting for vegetarianism, or improving physical conditions. There is next to no research on eliminating the pain and distress of domestic animals at the source, through wireheading or psychoactive pharmaceuticals. The sheer magnitude of human and animal suffering means any delay in a reduction of that suffering is a huge moral burden. To the extent to which Brave New World contributed to that delay, we must leave the suffering at Huxley’s feet.
Enter Piper, the eponymous cat. He is orange, anxious and oblivious to the fact that his ass hangs out from beneath the kitchen chair. It’s his favorite hiding place, ever since he was a kitten I could hold in the palm of my hand. Nowadays it takes both hands, but he still spends a lot of time there, wedging himself in whenever the neighbors stomp past the front door. Piper used to be a stray, and he’s scared of nearly everything, including strangers, loud noises and new things. On the streets, it’s a survival instinct. In my apartment, his fear vestigial, the appendix of the brain. Knowing that he’ll never need it, should I drug him to remove his anxiety? Piper doesn’t have a job, family responsibilities, or any moral duty to the society that made him. If it’s moral to drug his anxiety away, isn’t is also moral to give him heroin? If you love your cat, or your dog, shouldn’t your goal be to drug them into eternal bliss? Would such an existence be worth living? What self actualization can a cat achieve?
The question is, with current technology, a moot point. Gabapentin, the anti-anxiety drug of choice for cats, is cleared through the kidneys, already the point of failure for a desert adapted animal. Yet when I consider it, more impactful than any list of side effects is the nauseated repulsion that comes from the image of Linda, pressured to drug herself to death on soma for the convenience of the society around her. As they justify to themselves, “every hour on soma is like a thousand years”. (BNW 133)
As society moves towards total automation, more and more people are left without work, but also without self-actualization. Eventually, the drive to work and neurotic perfectionism of a model doctor or engineer become just as vestigial as darting beneath a chair at loud noises. This inspires the niggling suspicion humanity is in a race between automation and modifying ourselves to live in a completely automated society. The future teeters between engineering ourselves to be able to be content in paradise and societal collapse back to the hunter-gathers we’re genetically primed to be. If we fall, I’m going to blame Huxley on the way down.
Huxley’s work reflects the fears of the society he was steeped in. Brave New World centers drug use, female promiscuity, the war on religion and the destruction of the nuclear family. These fears have gone out of style, enough to make the modern, more politically correct reader uncomfortable. Still, the people who lambast Huxley as a eugenicist stopped reading when the Delta (low-caste) workers were described as “small, dark and hideous”, (BNW 55) if they made it past the part where 70% of women were sterilized at birth. Certainly at twenty-five instead of fifteen I would have put down a book that declared “everybody (women) belongs to everybody else (men)”. (BNW 46)
Brave New World’s society is racist, or more appropriately, classist. But the characters shaped by this society are a stunning rebuke of the idea of genetic predestination. The low-caste workers were stunted with alcohol as embryos and conditioned since birth to accept society’s place for them, but still have to be drugged into complacency with consumerism, entertainment and soma. Bernard, ordained to be an alpha, is an outcast due to his short stature and slim build. Even Helmholtz, the ostentatiously perfect alpha, is discontented.
Reading Brave New World as an adult, it’s harder to defend. The plot meanders, the proposed society is unsettling and hits a little too close to home. Still, this was the cornerstone of the entire utopian genre, tangling with the idea of whether suffering eradicated through the perfection of society, and whether it should be. It is not good, but seminal. Seminal as the embryonic tissue of a genre, male centric and vaguely repulsive. Personally, as a teen Brave New World was the first book to change the way I thought. It helped me formulate questions I didn’t know how to ask. The question at the core of Huxley’s book is simple. Is the purpose of life to be happy? I still haven’t figured that one out, but at least my cat can self-actualize.