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A review by oz617
Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
challenging
dark
medium-paced
0.25
A Goodreads reviewer described this as "old man yells at clouds". That pretty much sums up the experience of reading it. Huxley takes us - ostensibly as a response to Brave New World, but specifically as he tries to prove that it wasn't just a metaphor - on a tour of his political idea about individuality and collectivism. He believes that in an overpopulated world, Communism is more likely to spread because people are not able to live as individuals. This is a particular problem, in his view, in "industrially backwards" countries (he mentions Africa and Asia in broad strokes), where the people are too religious or too stupid (on account of having survived too many diseases and gone on to breed with low IQs and low quality genes) to think of birth control on their own.
If, like too many people I've seen recently, you don't think that's eugenics, you don't know what eugenics actually is.
Huxley goes on to give us some genuinely insane chapters about Nazi mind control and how the Communists can control babies while they sleep. Also he gives an overview of what drugs are on the market and how dictatorial pharmacists might control the masses with them - it's a lot. He recommends that the government ban hypnosis and subliminal messaging. In his (largely unearned) defense, it's very of its time.
Somehow this ends with urging the youth towards Syndicalism. This last chapter is the most reasonable and coherent - except that it can't be, in truth, on account of it being based on all these entirely false premises. It's all wrapped up in an anti-modernism based on the idea that 50 years ago, in Huxley's boyhood (c. 1900s), people were reasonable and democratic and it was impossible to have imagined that this society would have gone on to commit the holocaust, described as "atrocities on a scale undreamed of by the benighted Africans and Asiatics". These are the words of a man who has never read a single academic from outside his own context. The whole thing is the work of a sci-fi writer who badly needs to talk to people who are not also sci-fi writers.
Old man yelling at clouds indeed.
If, like too many people I've seen recently, you don't think that's eugenics, you don't know what eugenics actually is.
Huxley goes on to give us some genuinely insane chapters about Nazi mind control and how the Communists can control babies while they sleep. Also he gives an overview of what drugs are on the market and how dictatorial pharmacists might control the masses with them - it's a lot. He recommends that the government ban hypnosis and subliminal messaging. In his (largely unearned) defense, it's very of its time.
Somehow this ends with urging the youth towards Syndicalism. This last chapter is the most reasonable and coherent - except that it can't be, in truth, on account of it being based on all these entirely false premises. It's all wrapped up in an anti-modernism based on the idea that 50 years ago, in Huxley's boyhood (c. 1900s), people were reasonable and democratic and it was impossible to have imagined that this society would have gone on to commit the holocaust, described as "atrocities on a scale undreamed of by the benighted Africans and Asiatics". These are the words of a man who has never read a single academic from outside his own context. The whole thing is the work of a sci-fi writer who badly needs to talk to people who are not also sci-fi writers.
Old man yelling at clouds indeed.