Brave New World Revisited

This group of chapters serves as the foundation of the entire book and introduces its main themes. Huxley begins the book by addressing the issue of overpopulation because he sees overpopulation as the root problem of modern times, one that has ramifications in many different areas of life. Huxley details the statistics on the world population, which has been steadily rising over the centuries, to prove his point. 250 million people existed in the world around the time of Christ, and the number has burgeoned to two billion eight hundred million people in 1957.

While death rates have fallen, birth rates continue to climb, and Huxley advocates contraceptives as a form of birth control to solve this problem; he does acknowledge religious and social objections to birth control. To Huxley, overpopulation illustrates the irony of modern scientific progress; while improving the lives of countless people in the form of penicillin and other medicines, such progress comes at a price, namely, too many people for the planet to sustain. This crisis will hit underdeveloped countries especially hard because their political systems are unstable, and births in these countries tend to be numerous; the crisis will eventually hit developed countries like the United States too. Huxley calls overpopulation “the shortest and broadest road to the nightmare of Brave New World” (17).

Huxley’s concern about overpopulation feeds into another one of his major preoccupations in the book, the rise of totalitarian government and the loss of personal freedom. The social unrest that could result from overpopulation might provide a pretext for political tyranny; in Huxley’s words, “[u]nrest and insecurity lead to more control by central governments and an increase of their power” (11). Huxley predicts that this tyranny will take the form of communism as it exists in the Soviet Union. Totalitarian control could lead to the practice of state-sponsored eugenics, a technique that involves the manipulating the human gene pool to create “superior” human beings.

Along with overpopulation, over-organization is another problem that Huxley sees as central (see Themes). Over-organization is inherent in urban life, where industrialization has reduced human beings to job functions; thanks to industry norms, humans are cut off from normal ways of behaving and relating to one another.

In this section, Huxley frequently compares Brave New World with George Orwell’s 1984, another famous dystopian novel, written 18 years after Huxley’s. Huxley argues that his novel reflects subsequent political developments more accurately than Orwell’s and, thus, is more prescient. With its emphasis on violence and repression, 1984 reflects the experiences of World War II and its immediate aftermath. By contrast, Huxley’s book presents a world of “soft tyranny” more in tune with the Cold War. While the tyrants of 1984 maintain power by inflicting pain and punishment and sustaining an atmosphere of “constant war,” the leaders of Brave New World control their people through the means of enforced pleasure, with the aim of keeping people docile and indifferent to their fate.

While stating his personal views, Huxley acknowledges alternate viewpoints and stresses the importance of individual freedom and responsibility. For example, he acknowledges the possible social or moral objections to birth control, and he makes a highly-developed argument for the superiority of Brave New World over 1984. His careful attention to dissenting views reflects Huxley’s respect for a diversity of opinion and his opposition to state-enforced actions aimed at imposing uniformity on human life and thought.