Hell Is Here

BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED (147 pp.)--Aldous Huxley--Harper ($3).

To the Space Age, Aldous Huxley, one of its prophets, has sent a message: "Have second thoughts, will not travel."

It is barely more than a quarter of a century since Huxley had a vile vision of mankind's future, in which a scientific power elite of cads presided over a proletariat of test-tube-bred sub-morons kept happy on a tranquilizer called soma. The elite could dispose of heretics by sending them to exile in rockets. Huxley lived to see the title of his book, Brave New World, pass into common language as a wry cliche. Now he argues that his nightmare is becoming a waking reality. Looking about today, Utopiarist Huxley is appalled to find how obediently the world has grown to his fictional clippers. Why this is hell, he says with Marlowe's Mephistophilis, nor are we out of it!

With the strangled sincerity of a man who would like to tell himself "say it ain't so," Huxley says it is.

Singing Theologicals. In this verbally sparkling but essentially dismal exercise in self-vindication and world indictment, Huxley has assembled a mass of evidence to suggest that the human race is approaching his dread vision of total togetherness much more quickly than he estimated. (Huxley set the time of his soma-happy society in the 7th century A.F., or After Ford.) Institutes for Motivational Research, hidden persuaders and singing commercials make Huxley think man is being nudged closer to the dark side of the moonstruck world he once described.

His other examples range from brainwashing techniques of the Chinese Communists to the more beneficent therapies of a Californian penal system. In Brave New World Huxley had his director of Hatcheries and Conditioning use a technique called hypnopaedia, by which subjects got moral training during sleep. In 1957 the warden of the Woodland Road Camp of Tulare County, Calif, was doing just that. With pillow loudspeakers, the warden was able to reach certain delinquents in their sleep, and from a phonograph in his office counsel them to be good. The black arts of hypnosis, subliminal commercials and so on are becoming an accepted part of the machinery of civilization. To Huxley, even a hymn is a "Singing Theological."

As for the advantages of man's mastery of space, Huxley has this to say: "All our exuberant post-Sputnik talk is irrelevant and even nonsensical. So far as the masses of mankind are concerned, the coming time will not be the Space Age; it will be the Age of Over-population." In a parody of the old song, Huxley asks:

Will the space you're so rich in Light a fire in the kitchen, Or the little god of space turn the Spit, spit, spit?

Psycho Somo-Tic. Huxley is prepared to concede that 2 billion may be company on earth, but that three will be a crowd. With the air of the fourth wise man, he says that "on the first Christmas Day" there were only 250 million. It took all the time since then until the Pilgrim Fathers to double the figure. When he was writing Brave New World, in 1931, world population stood at just under 2 billion. Today, "only 27 years later, there are 2,800,000,000 of us." People keep breeding, as it were, behind Huxley's back. Clean water, penicillin, DDT are also to blame, he says. Soon there will not be enough to eat, Huxley warns, and suggests that occupancy of this planet by more than 3 billion persons is dangerous and should be unlawful.

Unfortunately, there are passages when Huxley becomes as blurred as a soma drunkard. There must be a good drug, he argues--something to make man happy and yet not bad, and he has hopes for an amino-alcohol called Deaner, which "sounds almost too good to be true" (no hangover; one just feels lovely).

Prophylactic for the East. Always a compulsive shoplifter of ideas and religious systems, Huxley wants mankind to find the ideas and beliefs most useful for a good and happy life, but forgets that men do not necessarily believe what is useful. Huxley's plan, apart from his perfect pill, seems to involve cooperative communities, birth control and freedom. Sound as some of this may be, the depraved old world is unlikely to heed. And the thought of aging (64) Aldous--an intellectual well past average breeding age--proffering a prophylactic to the teeming East is downright funny. Reactionaries will continue to listen to Singing Theologicals and hope against Stopes.

Huxley's revisitation nevertheless is a fascinating intellectual exercise for those who like to think about the shape of things that have or might come. And sometimes Huxley still sounds like the brave young worldling who wrote Crome Yellow. Most original Huxleyism is a suggested law on the lines of habeas corpus, which would be a habeas mentem for the human race. Roughly translated it would mean the right for all to say: keep your dirty hands off my mind.

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