#Ford brave new world free

Eric Blair, later known as George Orwell, was one of his students.) He had little patience for the argument that popular culture, by appealing to more people, was more “human” than the rarefied precincts of high art: “I. (And yes, Huxley attended Eton, and he taught there, too. “I find the watching of horse races or football matches less agreeable as an occupation than the acquisition and coordination of knowledge,” he wrote in 1935 by way of explanation, in a sentence that demands to be read with a posh Etonian accent, whether you have one or not. He was already aghast while he was still alive, a self-identified “highbrow” with a distaste for mass culture in all its crowd-pleasing forms. Then again, you could probably take any example from that list and fairly assume that Aldous Huxley would have been aghast even 10 years ago. “The Sopranos” was mid-run and “The Wire” was in its second season, but I don’t remember anyone making big claims yet about television as an art form, comparable in seriousness and scope to the 19th-century novel. In 2003, there was no Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter. It’s hard to guess what someone who hasn’t been around for the last decade would make of media and culture today, much less someone who has missed out on the last 50 years. The challenge the book sets us today is to prove him wrong.

“Brave New World” makes the illiberal assumption that giving people more freedom and less authority will degrade them. Human nature, in this as in other respects, is not so malleable as Huxley thought. Nor has the weakening of repression stopped us from cherishing art, science and the ideal. People still seek intimacy and even monogamy, but on a new basis sexual freedom has given our relationships more dignity, because they are based on choice and not frustrated need. Yes, we live in a time of commodified sexuality, of pornography on demand and of many kinds of vulgarity Huxley, transported to the year 2013, would smile grimly.īut “Brave New World” was wrong about the essentials. Without sublimation, there is no culture: That is the Freudian premise of “Brave New World.” If, today, Huxley’s novel often feels snobbish and reactionary, it is because we have survived the great change and found ourselves not so degraded as Huxley expected. There may not yet be a musical instrument called a “sexophone,” but the Internet has done more to make sexual images, and sex itself, available than anything Huxley imagined.įor Huxley, who was born when Queen Victoria was on the throne, sexual freedom was inevitably going to translate into emotional shallowness.

#Ford brave new world free

If you compare our generation to Huxley’s, there’s no doubt that we listen to more explicitly erotic music, wear more revealing clothing, form and break sexual attachments much more casually, and teach our children to be free from sexual shame - all things he predicted, queasily, in his novel. What has come true in “Brave New World,” to a much larger extent, is the liberation of sexuality. The more we learn about human nature, the clearer it becomes that it can’t be manipulated as straightforwardly as Huxley imagined. But the truth is that the novel’s understanding of embryology, and its crudely behavioristic ideas of conditioning, are both badly dated. When we talk about “Brave New World,” we usually have in mind the novel’s vision of a society stratified by scientific means into predestined castes - the handsome, intelligent Alphas lording it over the moronic, undersized Epsilons. All this is because, in Huxley’s meticulously imagined future, the cardinal virtue is satisfying your appetites, and the worst vice is repression. In “Brave New World,” the most obscene word, the one that has the power to make people blush and flee the room, is “mother.” The most antisocial sexual behavior is monogamy, and a man is a “perfect gentleman” if he refrains from paying too much attention to any particular one of the women he’s sleeping with. This is in keeping with the sexual topsy-turviness of Huxley’s dystopia, which turns all our taboos inside out. Pornography, however, is a term that would have no meaning in Huxley’s “World State” - or, rather, its meaning would be the reverse of the one it has now.