Brave New World
By Aldous Huxley
January 24, 2009
I started reading this book because Neil Postman kept mentioning it in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. He kept on comparing it to Orwell’s 1984, since both books were meant as prophetic — and grim — pictures of the future. And he kept saying that, for America, Orwell got it wrong and Huxley got it right.
And Postman’s right.
From his vantage point from 1932, Huxley imagined a world about six hundred years into the future. It’s a world where, in the name of stability, marriage, family, and even natural birth is abolished. Monogamy is laughed at. It’s a world where sex is unchecked, drugs without ill side-effects are given freely, and entertainment given the highest value in life. People are more than willing to give up their freedom and history for a life without discomfort of any kind.
That world seems much closer than 600 years away.
And Huxley paints a vivid picture of a future that seems more eerily like an exaggerated version of the present. This book helps us see more clearly the kind of culture we live in, and through Huxley, we have been warned.
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