In Our Time - Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Episode Date: April 9, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests David Bradshaw, Daniel Pick and Michele Barrett discuss Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1932 novel, Brave New World. In Act V Scene I of Shakespeare's The Tempest, the character Miranda declares 'O wonder! How many Godly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O Brave new world! That has such people in it!'. It is perhaps the only line of Shakespeare to be made famous by someone else, for Brave New World is not associated with Prospero's Island of sprites, magic and wondrous noises, but with Aldous Huxley's dystopia of eugenics, soma and zero gravity tennis. A world, incidentally, upon which literary references to Shakespeare would be entirely lost. Brave New World is a lurid, satirical dystopia in which the hopes and fears of the 1930s are writ large and yet the book seems uncannily prescient about our own time. But why did Huxley feel the need to write it and is Brave New World really as dystopian as we are led to believe?

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In Shakespeare's played The Tempest, the character Miranda declares, when confronted by a group of young men, of whom on her isolated island she has never seen the like, oh wonder, how many godly creatures are there here, how beauteous mankind is, Oh, Brave New World that has such people in it. It's perhaps the only line of Shakespeare to be made famous by someone else. For Brave New World isn't generally associated with Prospero's island of sprites and mayhem,

magic and wondrous noises, but with Aldous Huxley's dystopia, of eugenics, soma, and zero-gravity tennis. A world, incidentally, upon which literary references to Shakespeare would be entirely lost. Brave New World is a lurid satirical prophecy in which the hopes and fears are, the 1920s and 1930s are a writ large. But why did Huxley feel the need to write this, and is Brave New World really as dystopian as real led to believe? With me to discuss Huxley's Brave New World are Daniel Pick,

Professor of History at Birkbeck University of London, Michelle Barrett, Professor of Modern Literarian Cultural Theory at Queen Mary University of London, and David Bradshaw, reader and tutor in English literature at Worcester College University of Oxford. David Bradshaw, can you introduce us to the novel's protagonist, Bernard Marx, and the life he leads in the society called the world state. Yes, the world state is planned at every level.

The population has been set at 2,000 million. There are only 10,000 surnames among the entire population. Everything's organized through biological engineering, infant conditioning, hypnopedia, podsnaps, technique, and the rest of it. So it's extremely conformist. However, there are two exceptions to this rule. There are two dissidents in the novel. One's called Helm Holtz Watson,

and he's a kind of typical alpha-plus beefcake. He's got big chest, big shoulders, but he's just become dissatisfied and in a kind of debonair way he's looking forward to exile. And the other person we come across is Bernard Marx. He's an alpha-plus, but he's also eight centimetres shorter than he should be. So he looks like a gamma. So he's got an inferiority complex and horror of horrors.

He enjoys the Lake District. He enjoys silence. He enjoys looking at stormy seas. He's a romantic. He's a malcontent. Everything about the world state, even though he works in the Psychology Bureau of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, has got to him.

And it's through him that we encounter much of the world's. state. I understand the Brave New World started life for, we're difficult to know where it's fermented

in the first place. We can go back as far as what in the life of Aldous Huxley. But let's start with it

being a satire on California. In 1918, he writes to his brother after the Americans, as it were, come to the

rescue of Europe and says that he could see no future for Europe other than relentless and increasing Americanization.

He then gets involved with a correspondence of the man called H.L. Mencken, who was a very prominent satirist in America and of American life. One of his favorite remarks about Americans was that they were homobo-bous. And

he hones his skills as a satirist through reading Mencken's writings. So I think he'd always wanted to go to America to meet Mencken. And in 1926, he goes on a world tour and lands in

San Francisco and takes the train down to Los Angeles. And with Charlie Chaplin and another friend called Robert Nichols, they go to the movie studios. And he talks about the way the director insisted that the starlet produced more pep. He wanted more pep in her performance. He reads in the newspapers of these charismatic sects where the Reverend this and the Reverend that accompanied by jazz and lots of Rasmataz

were going to have the equivalent to have the equivalent. of their community singing. And he sees on the beaches and in Hollywood Max Sennett's bathing beauties, and he then uses the phrase from T.S. Eliot's Whispers of Immortality, that these girls give promise of pneumatic bliss. And that's why Lenina Crown in the novel is such a sort of a typical Californian girl.

When she says in her desperate and desperately funny attempt to seduce the savage, hug me to you drug me honey. That honey is emphatically Californian. So we can talk about early stirrings anyway to do with America and California. And just to fill in about Aldous Huckley himself a little, he went to Eaton.

He had a terrible eye disease from the age of 16 which left him half blind, but nevertheless he went on to Oxford and got a first in English and set up as a writer almost immediately after. It's well connected. wrote novels about the society at Garsington and so on.

Daniel Pick, the opening scene in Brave New World described in very close detail the bottling plant in which human embryos are developed. What are being produced are, let's call them human beings, but they're alpha-beta, gamma-dil-telze, epsilon, five or six gradations of human beings. Can you explain the society that is being aimed for in these bottling plants?

Really, I mean, efficiency, efficiency of production, that everything will be geared towards minimizing discontent, and stability, ensuring stability, uniformity, homogeneity. And all of this is going to be produced both through the biological interference or mechanisation, but also then through social conditioning. So it's a sort of double process of ensuring that everyone fits their social role without dissent. I think the bottling plant and the beginning of the novel very much pulls together a whole set of concerns about biology and reproduction and the question of how far the state ought to interfere in natural reproduction,

what Charles Darwin had called natural selection. And I think that's a major preoccupation that runs through the novel, but in a way that pulls together a whole set of anxieties that had been there really throughout Huxley's lifetime. And of course his grandfather, Thomas Huxley, had been known as Darwin's bulldog, was Darwin's right-hand man. man in promulgating the idea of evolution.

But increasingly in the late 19th century, people came to argue that maybe the state needed to take a role in orchestrating reproduction. How influenced was Huxley by the eugenic ideas of the time? Another relative, Francis Galton, had proposed and popularized them and stood by them. And a lot of people took them very, very seriously. I mean, Galton was Darwin's cousin, and in 1883 he coined this word, eugenics to describe this sort of proposed science of racial reproduction to ensure fine offspring. Galton looked at the Victorian city and the people who were reproducing most and was horrified.

According to Darwin, they were the fittest, but this was often the underclass or people he saw as undesirable, the residuum of the city. And he comes to argue that you shouldn't just leave it to lay safe fare, but really that you needed to ensure that the right people had changed. children. And I think Huxley is caught in a way, again, in very ambivalent place about this whole theme. That on the one hand, he's also extremely concerned about overpopulation and the free for all what's happening to the world. And at the same time, there's this kind of nightmarish horror of this orchestrating of reproduction. And the way this reproduction is being organised, that you get tens and tens of thousands of gammas all exactly the same, born on the same

day, looking the same, acting the same, and being prepared to do the same things. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it links a bit with what David was saying, that on the one hand, the first kind of set of problems is European or even English, which is to do with eugenics, social Darwinism, degeneration. But I think he quite deliberately Americanises the novel, California, but also of Ford and production lines, and that's a sort of theme that runs through the novel. Ford is important to him, isn't it?

Ford, who introduced heavy industrialization of the car industry, and history is bonk and tradition doesn't matter. and Huxley sets his novel 632 years after Ford. So we're talking about a futuristic novel, but the starting point is Ford, whom he sees as this terrible man making people work, let's say, like Hans. That's right. I mean, and the Model T Ford,

that's a kind of early 20th century invention, that's cheap and aimed at the mass market, relies on the assembly line, that the work passes by each worker, so it's mechanised. The body of the worker is completely mechanised. And, of course, going back to Charles, Charlie Chaplin, that's the theme that Charlie Chaplin himself will satirize in modern times in the 30s.

And I think that whole cinematic vision of mechanization isn't in a way there. So we've got these alpha-beta-gamma delta persons thing. And then outside that, we've got the savage reservations, Michel Barrett. Bernard Marx, who David introduced us to at the beginning of the program, makes a journey to this reservation, one of these reservations. Does he see it as a better way of life inside the book? No, I don't think so. Lenina, who accompanies him, is absolutely horrified by it

because first of all they encounter a very emaciated old man and of course on the new world you get polished off when you're 60 and never deteriorate so they're upset by that and they see a breastfeeding woman and they see dead dogs and so forth and you definitely get the impression that all the worst side of this culture is being presented in the novel. And no, Bernard doesn't see it as any kind of redemptive space. It's perhaps worth having a look at the fact that what Huxley's drawing on

is an account of New Mexico from his friend, D.H. Lawrence, who lived in New Mexico in the 1920s. But Huxley, I'd have to say, is giving it a very negative spin. And so some of the things that Lawrence describes of, for example, the Taos Pueblo, come out in Brave New World with a sort of extremely negative force. Can you specify? Lawrence writes of what he says,

when you go to the Taos Pueblo, you can feel the deep, deep roots of human consciousness, and we can only be envious of that. And this gets rather parodied in Brave New World where Huxley talks about the men's deep, savage affirmation of their manhood. He's sort of satirising Lawrence on masculinity as well as Lawrence's romanticisation of what Lawrence called the Red Indian. Yeah, I think when the novel was bubbling away in Hux's head, he was going to take a far more Laurentian line that

the savage was going to be attractive and that in the same way that Lawrence pillories, the Ford infested United States in his writings, mornings of Mexico, plume serpent letters. That's how it was going to be, I think that was going to be the positive, utopian, pure, simple state in contrast to this highly mechanised world state. But I think for various reasons, he turned against Lawrence's primitivism, the more political and concerned with eugenics he became in the early 30s. I think what's really interesting about it is that the savage reservation is a different kind of dystopia. It's not that the savage reservation is set up as something that's better than the brave new world.

It's actually one that Huxley presents as a pretty grim in its own right. Daniel? One of the things that's particularly striking about the novel is the horror about promiscuity and this vision of a world in which there are no sexual morals. In fact, there's no loyalty, fidelity, all of that's been abandoned in the brave new world. And in fact, promiscuity is required. It's insisted upon. And to have a kind of dedicated relationship to monogamous

relationship. Even a four months in one case. Yeah, it's seen as a kind of pornographic scandal. And I think he has Freud in his sight there, but also other people like Havelock Ellis. And I think that's a very interesting thing. I don't be interested in what the others make of that. Yes. Well, what Huxley's done is abolished the family at one stroke simply with the bottling plant. And we're told that the idea of having a mother was an obscenity. And later on in the book, one Chapp has to actually resign because he's completely humiliated to discover that in fact he'd fathered a son by the traditional route. So he's abolished biological parenting, biological reproduction. I think it's perhaps worth pointing out that the family that he's abolished is not all families, if you like, but is a very specific one, which is the 20th century nuclear family that Huxley was actually quite critical of. And there are various other places in his writing where he gives quite a tough critique. of that form of the family. He's very dismissive of it, isn't he?

Take an inadequate male and an iniquid female and three small television addicts, put them in a four-bedroom place for 15 years and let them stew. In other words, what have we got to the end of it? He does indeed, yes. He actually says that in Ireland, his much later book, but there are some echoes of that in the way he describes a very claustrophobic type of nuclear family

in Brave New World. David Pranchaw, at the top of the top of the... of this society is one of the, I believe, ten world controllers. This one is Mustafa Mond. But he has origins, someone around the ICI factory in Billingham in the northeast of England. He did.

As 1931 unraveled, Huxley became, I believe, less inclined to satirise and more inclined to prescribe how society should be. He became an ardent advocate of planning. He went to Billingham. He saw the ICI plant,

which one would have thought might have appalled him, but in fact he was ecstatic about its clean, organized, utopian feel. And Mustafa Mon's deep, resonant voice in the novel becomes more and more dominant.

And what does that voice say? Because Huxley also makes him a rather attractive figure to Huxley, because he has a secret library in which there are books by Shakespeare. I agree with him. He's a sort of a high modernist figure. He has his secret

to supply of banned books. He's a censor. But he's also somebody who voices exactly the same ideas that Huxley writes in his non-fictional work. That is that stability is the most important thing. Without stability

there's no civilization that any form of order is better than chaos. These kinds of sentiments which the world controller impresses on Savage, who in the end his just rather sort of open mouth.

He doesn't have a, he doesn't, he hasn't given the words by Huxley to intervene and to speak against what Mustafa Mons saying. These sort of views are very much associated with Huxley's broadcasts and writings in 1931, and they are given to Mustafa Monde, who becomes a very persuasive figure. Just to point out that Samage, John Savage and Monde have an argument towards the end of the book, and as you were saying, Monde has. much more decisive lines. He's got all the aces. I just wanted to, in a way, link up perhaps the last two points

that the kind of world of New Mexico and this sort of primitive, I think it's cast as a sort of primitive world of fetishes, of totems and taboos, of violence, of a kind of primitive religion. That's satirized, but so too is the world that has lost religion in the planned, brave new world. And one of the books that's, one of the secret books is the philosopher William James is varieties of religious experience. And this is a world, on the one hand,

that's sort of disenchanted everything, that there's to be no religion and no illusion. And on the other hand, everyone's in this sort of comatose, so-called happiness, where they have to take pills to avoid feeling any distress or anxiety or discontent. I think in a way what salvages the novel in some way from just being a sort of snobbish

elitist looking down at the masses is that no position is really very comfortable. So any of the positions that get set up, whether it's to be atheist, religious, elitist, to popularise a culture. Any of these positions gets kind of, gets pulled apart. Yes, well, I was just going to come back to you, though, on whether Mustafa Monda has all the aces, because I read that conversation between Mustafa Amund and John as...

John Savage, as much more contradictory. And I think that what emerges through that whole conversation is, if you want stability you can't have art if you want stability you can't have religion if you want stability you won't have horrible diseases like syphilis and cancer and in the end there's a sort of showdown and John says I claim them all

and actually I find that quite a you know quite a moving moment in that conversation so I don't think Mustafa does win hands down Can I come back to something you said earlier David Pratchew and that's the that quotation any form of order is better than chaos I believe he said that in a BBC interview. And the book, one of the things it plays on,

one of the many things it plays on, is the tension between individual freedom and social stability. Now, can you talk to that for a few moments? Following the Wall Street crash of 1929, the ramifications, Huxley observed them for himself. He went to the Durham Co field,

he went to the industrial Midlands. He saw vast numbers of people who were unemployed. it. He then observed what he called Parliament twaddling. So he had, like many intellectuals at this time, deep contempt for parliamentary democracy, a talk shop, he called it. That's why people like Oswald Mosley prior to him becoming a fascist appealed to him. And as these, we, you know, we had a national government in 1931, we left the gold standard. It was a year of one humiliation after another. And he imagined that not only British society, but European civilization was going to the dogs. And the authoritarian tendencies that you observe in all his writings through the 20s,

where he talks about hierarchical states, Aristos ruled by the best. All this came to a head, I think, in the 30s, where in his broadcast and writings, he's advocating the state use of eugenics, the state use of hypnopedia propaganda. and I think he was prepared to countenance these things, but he was conscious that the downside was that individual liberty would probably suffer, but he thought that that was a price worth paying. When he looked back on the novel from the 1950s, in an essay he wrote called Brave New World Revisited,

I think he felt a certain embarrassment about the degree to which he'd got caught up with these more sort of fascisty ideas, and he pointed out that he wrote it just before the Third Reich came to power, and he didn't know the full horror, or felt he didn't know the full horror of what was going to unfold. And in that respect, he contrasted his own novel with George Orwell's 1984, which was written after the Second World War. Do you think, can I carry this on, Michelle Brown, that the intellectuals at the time, there's that book by John Carey, which points this out in many ways,

the intellectuals, Hux's clique anyway and perhaps was a big clique and an important clique, did find something about the rest of the population, the mass of the population, that would be better off manipulated and put in various moulds? Well, I think they did, and I think he did to a large extent. There are various places where he says quite sort of candidly in his essays and so forth that a few, maybe 100 men of genius made Western civilisation, and then there were the disciples,

and then there's the herd. So he certainly uses that sort of vocabulary. I was actually just going to push in a slightly different angle to what David said about chrome yellow, because it is very interesting that some of the very basic ideas in Brave New World, the gravied bottles and the completely divorced from love, sexual behaviour, are all there in chrome yellow. And that's very much a book that's written in response to the First World War.

came out in 1921. And in the First World War, what we have, which Huxley commented on, is a whole set of state interventions into civilian life. So there's the censorship, propaganda, the defence of the Realm Act, the Secret Service, a press bureau, which people used to call the suppress bureau and so forth. So lots of forms of increasing control of daily civilian life that were built up during the course of the First World War and not rescinded when it ended. And so, Chrome Yellow, as an immediately post-First World War book,

is drawing some of those historical themes in, which are later reprised in Brave New World. Daniel Pick, one of the fascinating things about this book is to contrast it with 1984 Orwell's book and Huxley taught Orwell at Eden for one term, taught in French as I understand it. And Orwell's book, which we needn't dwell on, but it is based on fear.

It's driven by fear. The society is driven, but it's intimidated, and the thing about Hux's book which seems rather more astute is that it's driven by pleasure if you give people enough pleasure and freedom from pain as well as active pleasure they will

give up or pass by freedom can you develop that well it just reminds me that the French writer Bart once commented on fascism that fascism doesn't just involve prohibition and fear but it involves inciting people to say yes that they have to be sort of joyously

involved to give a sort of positive identification with what's going on. And I think the novel is very prescient in looking at how this very controlled society does produce a sort of pleasure and an identification with the society, not simply through, like I think in 1984 it's much more through fear and intrusion, whereas Brave New World is a very hedonistic society in which people in a way say yes to it and the way in which that's sort of manipulated through conditioning, through propaganda

is all, I think, very much part of the novel and he's very interested. That period in which he's writing is one in which the psychology of advertising and the control of mass behaviour is really a kind of talking point. Some of the lower down the range, I can't remember, it's gamma or deltas.

We see them at the very start of the novel being trained to, they get electric shocks if they like flowers or if they want anything to do with beautiful things in a book. lovely paintings in the book, they're shocked away from it. So they do not want it. So they're conditioned to want and not want. That is the governing factor

about most of the people in Brave New World. Do you like to carry that on David Ratchew? Yes, certainly. They are being conditioned to consume there. So, as the director says, there's no money in people liking nature. What we want to do is to get out there and consume things and

build obstacle golf courses at Stoke Poges. And that involves construction and generates money for the economy. So I think this is one of the ways in which the book's very... They tried sending people out in nature and it didn't work. Well, I don't know, but certainly, you know, we keep being told that the way we're going to get out of the current recession is to consume our way out of it, to spend our way out of it. So ending is possibly better than ending for us today as well.

His idea, his attack on excessive consumption, which of course is what people, are driven to do in Brave New World, and ending is better than mending, as you've chucking stuff away, not buying things to last is better than keeping them going. That's happened very swiftly in my lifetime. I'm old and you a lot. Why did he make that? That has resonated very, very well, hasn't it, since he wrote the book, the excessive consumerism, David? Yeah, I mean, he was satirising Keynes' ideas about how to deal with the effects of the slump, which in turn also brings in the new deal in the States.

But it's, again, the idea that behind consumption is desire and you're controlling desire all the time. You limit what the gammas, the episidons, the deltas want. The alphas and the betas want different things, but wants is very much curtailed in this novel. It's to do with how you control people's sense. sense of well-being. You know, at one moment you want them giddily happy, the next minute you want them happily

working. There's no in between. There's no sort of hankering for things in this state. And you began to talk about this early on your pick. Huxley was very well aware of the nascent advertising industry, which was doing exactly what you're saying to have. It's conditioning people saying you really like to be happy. The smiling person in this ad, you need to buy a tilt.

of what's it? It's the flip side of what we were talking about earlier with production, the production line, the assembly line, is consumption and the sort of two sides and how you need to then generate demand and desire to buy all these goods that you're making, and I think the novel explores both. Can we

pick up this ambivalence, David, it is one of the central themes in the book, the nature of happiness. People in Brave New World, you could say, look, these people are genuinely happy. Even these semi-meronic epilons, they don't fear death, they are removed

from pain, they're educated when they're asleep, and so it goes in exactly where they are in society. A lot of people would say, well, that's not a bad life. Well, it's a very limited life, isn't it? It's a life that seems

horribly restricted to us. The epsilon minus semi-morons, as far as I can see, they have two jobs in the novel. One is to operate vacuum cleaners, and the others to operate lifts. And the only reason they have to play the devil's advocate. People operating vacuum cleaners and lifts nowadays

who were promised you will have no pain. You will not be in any pain whatsoever when you die. Whenever you feel like a good experience, I've got a pill that will give you a good experience, they still might say I'll have a think about this. Well, certainly I think hedonism

is extremely attractive to a lot of people because it is the opposite of the misery of life for most people. I just think that it's slightly challenged the idea of this being entirely a dystopia. Because in a way I turned it down in for a moment in a way people would say that we are

trying to make death as painless. I think feebly and inadequately and patchily and so as painless as it was as it is 600 years on in Brave New World. I think if you put everything together at the moment it's far more of a utopia than a dystopia. I think

it's misrepresented as a dystopia. Well that's interesting. We and 1984 are clearly projections of an horrific future where force and violence and torture is endemic. That's a lot of the elements of, I agree with what Michelle's being saying, but a lot of the elements of the world state are things that Huxley approved of. I want to come back to the dystopia nonetheless. I think this happiness theme, you know, partly it has a very contemporary resonance

when lots of people are talking about happiness as ought to be a guide to economic policy. But it also has a back kind of story, which is a 19th century debate about whether happiness and ought to be the be-all and end-all of whether the masses are happy. And it kind of goes back in a way to a debate that Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians have.

And John Stuart Mill, great Victorian liberal, who kind of intervenes in that debate at a certain point and says, well, the quality of the happiness does matter. It's not just the same to play. kind of tidley winks or pushpin or to be changed them. Who judges the quality of John Stuart Miller? Yeah, then it becomes a kind

of elite, potentially elite, who would impose the values. And that's what's happened for many centuries. But I think the dystopia about conditioning, there is a really bleak side to it. In fact, Rebecca West, the writer reviewing the novel, called it a

deduced abomination, this vision. And I think Pavlov, and conditioned reflexes in dogs, that was again a kind of talking point in the early 20th century that's here applied to human beings is pretty dystopian. Michelle? Well, I was just going to come in and say that, you know,

a slightly different way of thinking about it is to just say rather basically, you know, this is a work of fiction and one of the things that Huxley does a lot of the time, which causes some sort of misinterpretation is he'll create a character that's got some ideas from somewhere and

some characteristics from somewhere else and just put them on legs and start them walking. And you can't necessarily read off his own attitudes. And I think one way of thinking about this is to look at how relativist he is. And I was thinking, I was looking at the jesting pilot, which I know you've been talking about, David. And he's terribly interesting when he's come away from India. And he says, if you look at India from a European point of view, you think, oh, the spirituality is wonderful.

But when you get there, you think, oh, it needs drains and machines and the minimum wage. And so he's articulating a relativist position about. these things and I think that comes through in Brave New World. If you take something he wrote in 1931 about Fordism in a non-fiction voice he said it was the cruelest

mutilation of the human psyche with the smallest spiritual return which is you know quite an unambiguous way of looking at Fordism compared with the novel. And in chapter 11 when the savage had been shown around the world state they take

him to that small factory making lighting sets for helicopters. And you see a line of gammas and a line of deltas, and each one of them is tightening a screw or doing one thing. And it's then that the savage says, Oh, brave new world that has such people in it. And then he goes and throws up behind some bushes because he's so revolted by it.

So I agree the book is not a template, it's not a blueprint. It's got all sorts of elements. And certainly at the end of the novel, when the savage is swinging from a noose, nobody's going to say, oh, what's a jolly good idea that would be? or how marvelous. But all these elements there,

I just think that what happens as it's being written, and I think the manuscript confirms this, is that the pro-statist notions are reinforced. The savage is made rather mute. The savage reservation is made sort of smelly, unattractive, and disgusting in many ways. And I think the positive side of it is rather lost.

That's all I would. Just to clarify for a moment, the savage comes into Brave New World, it leaves the reservation, comes into Brave New World, and investigates it and challenges it, is bemused by it, and then that attacks his world. And so we have an interplay between these. A lot of other things are going on, as you proved, in this discussion so far.

You want to come in, for you? Just a tiny point. I was just wondering whether this might all change, because I gather they're going to make a new film of Brave New World, and Leonardo DiCaprio is going to be John. Sure, he's John the Savage. It's interesting

it wasn't made into a film straight away. It's one of those novels you sort of imagine was, but I think from what I read that his agent

sold the film rights to a company that would neither make the film nor release the rights to any other company so it didn't get made and much later I think there was a mini

TV series in the States. It probably didn't get made because Huxley's curse on popular culture. I think... Well, he became a Hollywood script writer, mind you. I know,

but that doesn't mean he went along with him. He just meant he went along with the money. He did have himself, he did despise popular culture, including the movies, as we know, and the book has a great deal of harsh things to say about popular culture, which he means the cinema, popular music, and particularly for some reason, group singing seems to get under his skin. He doesn't mention the Messiah, which is pretty much group singing, but anyway, group singing gets under his skin. Can we talk about Huxley's view of popular culture, why he was so animated about it? it and how it figures in the novel.

David Bruchamp. Mustafa Mond, Helmholtz, Watson, Bernard Marx, the Savage, these are all individuals, and they have an individualist ideology of different kinds, that we find out that Mustafa Mondt was almost a dissident himself, but was given a choice. Either you conform or you get sent to an island, and he conformed.

Against that kind of individuality are these mass enthusiasms, mass movements really and I think certainly the the Feeleys comes out of the talkies and Huxey sees America really as the source of such mass

cultural movements I think he's because he like a lot of intellectuals thought that mass circulation newspapers popular films made people moronic they made people open to the persuasiveness of demagogues, they made society less stable.

Yeah, I mean, I think that this idea of the crowd and the masses, the mob, was something that was being thought about in new ways, in really the 1890s, 1900s, but the idea that there was a psychology to the crowd and the masses, and I think that then gets taken up in advertising to sort of inculcate desire. But it's also something that becomes really a theme of politics of how should leaders manipulate the crowd in an age of mass democracy. And I mean, you know, key books,

there would be things like Gustav Le Bonnes, the psychology of the crowd, which was written in the 1890s, saying you have to take seriously that we now live in an age of the mass vote, and the task for elites is to manipulate and channel the desires of the populace. And also there's the idea that we live in the age of mass votes,

we have democracy, but actually if you look at it closely, the same sort of old people, the same sort of people, end up running the shoot and taking most of the rewards, democracy or not, it's a bit of a farce. There's that idea around as well. The idea is, they're coming at the idea in all sorts of different ways. I think so and I think that concern with, and horror of the crowd and the masses and mass participation comes together with another theme, which is, you know, this sort of elitist highbrow thing.

Again, there's a sort of family backstory to this that his great uncle was Matthew Arnold, who was the author of Culture and Anarchy. And this idea of a kind of culture that's going to take the high culture that will take the place of religion in binding together the nation is a kind of important theme too, I think. I think Huxi in many ways saw himself as Matthew Arnold reborn. He wanted to try and achieve that cultural authority that Arnold had had 50, 60 years before him. It's interesting to compare the unease that Bernard feels when looking down on this swarming sameness above Stoke Poges with the kind of things that Huxley writes about observing crowds from trains in his earlier writing. That unease that Daniels been talking about was very much there.

There is always a problem with somebody like Aldous Huxley who was working and writing for so many decades and was, I think, you know, does need to be said, was a very, very influential cultural figure, particularly, you know, through the 20s and 30s, very important, but was somebody who really changed his mind. I mean, you're only to think of the 1946 forward to Brave New World, where he says if I wrote it now, there'd be a sort of, you know,

a religiously satisfying option as well. It wouldn't be the book that it is. He's somebody who really did change his mind over time. And changed his personality to some extent, ending up as this sort of hallucinogenic guru on the West Coast of America. On YouTube, yes. a sort of person that when you went across in the early 20s, it might have thought, I'll satirise this lot.

Yeah, very different attitude to drugs there in his later work in the doors of perception than in this, than in Brave New World, where sort of soma is seen as simply a sort of dumbing down of the masses and keeping everyone quiet. And mescal just makes people feel sick. Why do you think that the book has, in what way do you think the book survived? And then why do you think it survived so long? Start with you, Michelle.

Well, I think one thing you could say about it is, it's been extremely fertile in terms of science fiction. So there are now, if you think about, there are many representations of, you know, the Borg, hive, or memory being extracted from one person and injected into another and all these kinds of things, I think Brave New World has been, you know, quite an inspiration in terms of science fiction.

I think also really this theme of the sort of instrumental view of nature and of human beings that is described in the knowledge, does resonate in so many powerful ways of how far to go in the orchestration, the organisation of people, of reproduction, of taste, of desire, that that's a theme he picks up. And I think really, I'll go back to the dystopian element, that as well as all the themes we've talked about, somewhere I think at the back of his mind there was H.G. Wells,

who he saw as having presented far too benign and optimistic view of the role of science in modern society, although Wells himself in the time machine had perhaps given his own dystopia. But often he saw Wells as somehow kind of simply praising science and very sort of enthusiastic upbeat story. And I think that in a way Huxley wants to turn that on its head and quite consciously has Wells in mind. There's even a character in the novel called Dr. Wells. But also like Wells, I think Huxley did flirt with the idea of world government, world government by this elite band of engineers and intellectuals. To answer your question, I think our society is because

more and more preoccupied with how we begin life and how we end life. And I think with STEM survey search cloning the ethics of what we see in a ridiculous way in Brave New World are becoming so almost that they could easily be adapted if we wished to do so, ectogenesis, Genesis and the rest of it. I think he's also a very astute and prophetic book in the way it's a very noisy place, AF632, there are helicopters everywhere, there are rockets flying in from Bombay and New York

and as our world becomes more noisy, it sort of speaks to that. We do have a tendency to cover our native land with golf courses as well, so, you know, I think this I think it's a very recognisable book, but I

think the fact that it is fissured, one doesn't quite know how to take it, and it's not just a straightforward dystopia or utopia, but it's a bit of both. That's why it survives. The problem, I think, with 1984 briefly, is it's so obvious

who the baddies are. Finally, though, I'd just like to take up one of the reasons of survival, and wonder what you think about the idea of this idea of pleasure, the giving of pleasure being something which will combat search for difficult freedoms

better than anything else. I think Huxi did understand the difference between deep happiness, which was, you know, you didn't need props for and the tendency with drugs, with films, with noise, with games, with sport, with sex, to just take your mind off things. The idea of silence, of hesitation, of doubt, of contemplation,

are things that are kind of like endangered species in the novel. And that, again, resonates very much with our culture where there is a kind of manic insistence on enjoyment, a kind of loud, you know, if you watch the television now, there's a kind of feeling that you have, of everything being very sort of high and up and manic. And I think the novel in a way questions that and just asks for people to hesitate and doubt a bit more. Yes, he's become a land of extroverts. Thank you very much, David Bradshaw, Michelle Barrett and Daniel Pick.

And next week we'll be talking about suffragism. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com. Oh.