Brave New World (1932) Is One Of The Most Insidious Works Of Literature Ever Written.

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Brave New World (1932) is one of the most insidious works of literature ever written.

An exaggeration?

Tragically, no. Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any regime of universal happiness.

So how does Huxley turn a future where we're all notionally happy into the archetypal dystopia? If it's technically feasible, what's wrong with using biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether?

Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. This is because Huxley deliberately endows his "ideal" society with features likely to alienate his audience. Typically, reading BNW elicits disturbing feelings which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation.

Thus BNW doesn't, and isn't intended by its author to, evoke just how wonderful our lives could be if the human genome were rewritten. Let's say our DNA will be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long bliss, awesome peak experiences, and a spectrum of outrageously good designer-drugs. Nor does Huxley's comparatively sympathetic account of the life of the Savage on the Reservation convey just how nasty the old regime of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. If you think it does, then you enjoy an enviably sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. For it's all sugar-coated pseudo-realism.

In BNW, Huxley contrives to exploit the anxieties of his bourgeois audience about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism. He taps into, and then feeds, our revulsion at Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning and eugenics. Worse, it is suggested that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most hallowed shibboleths of our culture: "motherhood", "home", "family", "freedom", even "love". The exchange yields an insipid happiness that's unworthy of the name. Its evocation arouses our unease and distaste.

In Brave New World, happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sport, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma.

As perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma underwhelms. It's not really a utopian wonderdrug at all. It does makes you high. Yet it's more akin to a hangoverless tranquilliser or an opiate - or a psychic anaesthetising SSRI like Prozac - than a truly life-transforming elixir. Third-millennium neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a vastly richer pro

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