My Heaven could be Your Hell

kw: utopias, dystopias

I happened to read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, because my son had to read it to prepare for Junior English. Allow me to grump a bit, that this book really ought to be rated PG-21. I don't think it is suitable input to the formative teenage years, and not just for its sexual content. That is such a blatant caricature of the "free love" advocated by some 1920s Suffagettes, most teens can see through it. But some can't, and they'll be influenced; positive influence being unlikely.

I think I might be getting mature, as I approach 60, so I could tell that everything is a caricature. Huxley was presenting an admittedly false dichotomy (as his 1946 foreword notes) between the statist control and libertarianism. His "Savage" concludes in despair and suicide, a conclusion foregone in the existentialist tenor of the times, and explored further by Camus. Huxley did not succumb to the despair of existentialism, but surmounted it in a quest for spirituality and transcendence in his later writing.

As great writing does, this book can help us learn ourselves better. It also reveals the writer, as he uses the writing to work through difficult aspects of his own relationship with the world and where it might be going.

It is largely due to writers such as Huxley, Camus, Orwell, and other trend-extrapolators that society is able to avoid following risky trends to their logical extreme. Even more, looking back over history, every trend has buried within it a counter-trend; things tend to gravitate back to a middle-of-the-road situation over time.

Whatever the mighty of the world may want for us, most of us just want to be left alone.