TagAldous Huxley
In Memoriam: Two Prophets and a President Died This Day
The prophetic artists of the past still speak
Revisiting Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
How can we read and remember the past with the influx of digital noise and distraction?Which one was right, Brave New World or 1984? Are we living in a hedonistic mirage or a totalitarian face-stamping global regime? The conversation over prophetic twentieth-century texts often homes in on these two admirable books, but another classic dystopian novel pokes its head from behind the curtain, asking to be regarded: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It’s the riotous, mega-talented sci-fi writer’s most famous work (though I’d argue not quite his best) and follows the life of a fireman, Guy Montag, whose main job is not to squelch housefires but to burn books, and the houses that hold them. This fireman is a member of a brigade tasked with the destruction of literature. With the destruction of meaning. In the Read More ›
Escape from Spiderhead and the Question of Love
Is love more than a chemical reaction and are humans more than machines made of meat?Brave New World, a speculative work by British writer Aldous Huxley, explores a society where people are conditioned via drugs and genetic engineering to live stable, highly pleasurable, but totally meaningless lives. One pop of a pill, and negative feelings like sadness, anger, or envy vanish. In the brave new world, “everyone belongs to everyone else,” and pleasure supplants purpose. A Story for Our Age That book was written in 1932. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and another fictional work, albeit shorter, goes arguably even deeper than Huxley’s magnum opus. The short story Escape from Spiderhead by George Saunders is about a group of inmates being tested by mood-altering drugs in a facility nicknamed “Spiderhead” for its nebulous layout. Read More ›
Huxley’s Brave New World and the Hard Work of Sadness
A society centered on pleasure has no place for mourning, and so has no room for loveNinety years ago, Aldous Huxley published his prophetic and incisive Brave New World (1932), a dystopian novel that imagines a society of people intoxicated and controlled, not by state power, but by pleasure. Whereas George Orwell predicted an inevitable totalitarian world government in his novel 1984 (penned in 1949), Huxley proposed that human beings wouldn’t need to be coerced into submission but could be coaxed by the allure of pain-erasing drugs. Both nightmarish visions of the future have already somewhat played out today in American society. The government set up the Disinformation Governance Board in April of 2022, which sounds eerily like the “Ministry of Truth” in Orwell’s 1984. (The board has since disbanded.) Tech companies can track us more Read More ›
Can LSD Help Us Understand the Mind–Brain Relationship?
Is the mind generated by the brain or does the brain merely focus the mind on the current scene? An experiment sheds some lightIn a fascinating article inThe Guardian titled “Acid test: scientists show how LSD opens doors of perception,” science editor Ian Sample discusses recent research on the mechanism by which LSD alters the brain and the mind. He begins by quoting Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) who noted that LSD “lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing the mind on the problems of life.” Remarkably, recent work in neuroscience supports Huxley’s view. The research, conducted at Cornell University, confirms what has been called the Rebus model of psychedelics. Rebus is a rough acronym for “relaxed beliefs under psychedelics”; the model proposes that the brain is essentially a prediction engine for daily life. In this model, the brain processes information Read More ›
1984 is 70 years old yet still feels current
Did Orwell prove a better techno-prophet than Huxley did in Brave New World?In 1949, Huxley thought he was closer to the mark than his former student Orwell was. Later generations have tussled over the question, with revealing results.
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