Brave New World Foreword PDF

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[](http://www.wealthandwant.com/auth/index.htm) [](http://www.wealthandwant.com/esse.htm) [](http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/aa_all_themes.htm) [](http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/index.htm) [](http://www.wealthandwant.com/auth/index.htm) [](http://www.wealthandwant.com/glossary.html) [](http://www.wealthandwant.com/links.htm) [](http://www.wealthandwant.com/contact.htm) +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Foreword to Brave New World, second edition \-- circa 1947\ | | Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) | | | | Here\'s my abridgement: | | | | *In the meantime, however, it seems worth while at least to mention | | the most serious defect in the story, which is this.* The Savage is | | offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life | | of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some | | respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal. \... *Today I | | feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible.* \...  *If I | | were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third | | alternative.* **Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his | | dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity** \-- a possibility | | already actualized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and | | refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the | | Reservation. ***In this community economics would be decentralist and | | Henry-Georgian***, politics Kropotkinesque cooperative. Science and | | technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been | | made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New | | World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. | | Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man\'s | | Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the | | transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of | | life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest | | Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle \-- | | the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of | | life being: \"How will this thought or action contribute to, or | | interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible | | number of other individuals, of man\'s Final End?\" | | | | \.... and here is the Foreword, in full: | | | | Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most | | undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what | | amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better | | next time. On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the | | muck is not the best way of getting clean. | | | | Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are | | the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. | | Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in relation to our bad art as | | it is in relation to our bad behaviour. The badness should be hunted | | out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore | | over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to | | patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first | | execution, to spend one\'s middle age in trying to mend the artistic | | sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was | | oneself in youth \-- all this is surely vain and futile. And that is | | why this new Brave New World is the same as the old one. Its defects | | as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I | | should have to rewrite the book \-- and in the process of rewriting, | | as an older, other person, I should probably get rid not only of some | | of the faults of the story, but also of such merits as it originally | | possessed. And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic | | remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about | | something else. | | | | *In the meantime, however, it seems worth while at least to mention | | the most serious defect in the story, which is this.* **The Savage is | | offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life | | of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some | | respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal.** At the time | | the book was written this idea, that human beings are given free will | | in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the | | other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly | | true. For the sake, however, of dramatic effect, the Savage is often | | permitted to speak more rationally than his upbringing among the | | practitioners of a religion that is half fertility cult and half | | *Penitente* ferocity would actually warrant. Even his acquaintance | | with Shakespeare would not in reality justify such utterances. And at | | the close, of course, he is made to retreat from sanity; his native | | *Penitente*-ism reasserts its authority and he ends in maniacal | | self-torture and despairing suicide. \"And so they died miserably | | ever after\" \-- much to the reassurance of the amused, Pyrrhonic | | aesthete who was the author of the fable. | | | | *Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible.* On | | the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past | | that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can | | be achieved and would like to see more of it. For having said so in | | several recent books and, above all, for having compiled an anthology | | of what the sane have said about sanity and the means whereby it can | | be achieved, I have been told by an eminent academic critic that I am | | a sad symptom of the failure of an intellectual class in time of | | crisis. The implication being, I suppose, that the professor and his | | colleagues are hilarious symptoms of success. The benefactors of | | humanity deserve due honour and commemoration. Let us build a | | Pantheon for professors. It should be located among the ruins of one | | of the gutted cities of Europe or Japan, and over the entrance to the | | ossuary I would inscribe, in letters six or seven feet high, the | | simple words: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THE WORLD\'S EDUCATORS. *SI | | MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE.* | | | | But to return to the future... **If I were now to rewrite the | | book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the | | utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the | | possibility of sanity** \-- a possibility already actualized, to some | | extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New | | World, living within the borders of the Reservation. **In this | | community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian,** | | politics Kropotkinesque cooperative. Science and technology would be | | used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as | | at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man | | were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the | | conscious and intelligent pursuit of man\'s Final End, the unitive | | knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or | | Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of | | Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle | | would be secondary to the Final End principle \-- the first question | | to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: \"How | | will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the | | achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other | | individuals, of man\'s Final End?\" | | | | Brought up among the primitives, the Savage (in this hypothetical new | | version of the book) would not be transported to Utopia until he had | | had an opportunity of learning something at first hand about the | | nature of a society composed of freely co-operating individuals | | devoted to the pursuit of sanity. Thus altered, Brave New World would | | possess artistic and (if it is permissible to use so large a word in | | connection with a work of fiction) a philosophical completeness, | | which in its present form it evidently lacks. | | | | But Brave New World is a book about the future and, whatever its | | artistic or philosophical qualities, a book about the future can | | interest us only if its prophecies look as though they might | | conceivably come true. From our present vantage point, fifteen years | | further down the inclined plane of modern history, how plausible do | | its prognostications seem? What has happened in the painful interval | | to confirm or invalidate the forecasts of 1931? | | | | One vast and obvious failure of foresight is immediately apparent. | | Brave New World contains no reference to nuclear fission. That it | | does not is actually rather odd, for the possibilities of atomic | | energy had been a popular topic of conversation for years before the | | book was written. My old friend, Robert Nichols, had even written a | | successful play about the subject, and I recall that I myself had | | casually mentioned it in a novel published in the late twenties. So | | it seems, as I say, very odd that the rockets and helicopters of the | | seventh century of Our Ford should not have been powered by | | disintegrating nuclei. The oversight may not be excusable; but at | | least it can be easily explained. The theme of Brave New World is not | | the advancement of science as such; it is the advancement of science | | as it affects human individuals. The triumphs of physics, chemistry | | and engineering are tacitly taken for granted. The only scientific | | advances to be specifically described are those involving the | | application to human beings of the results of future research in | | biology, physiology and psychology. It is only by means of the | | sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changed. | | The sciences of matter can be applied in such a way that they will | | destroy life or make the living of it impossibly complex and | | uncomfortable; but, unless used as instruments by the biologists and | | psychologists, they can do nothing to modify the natural forms and | | expressions of life itself. The release of atomic energy marks a | | great revolution in human history, but not (unless we blow ourselves | | to bits and so put an end to history) the final and most searching | | revolution. | | | | This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the | | external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings. Living as | | he did in a revolutionary period, the Marquis de Sade very naturally | | made use of this theory of revolutions in order to rationalize his | | peculiar brand of insanity. Robespierre had achieved the most | | superficial kind of revolution, the political. Going a little deeper, | | Babeuf had attempted the economic revolution. Sade regarded himself | | as the apostle of the truly revolutionary revolution, beyond mere | | politics and economics \-- the revolution in individual men, women | | and children, whose bodies were henceforward to become the common | | sexual property of all and whose minds were to be purged of all the | | natural decencies, all the laboriously acquired inhibitions of | | traditional civilization. Between sadism and the really revolutionary | | revolution there is, of course, no necessary or inevitable | | connection. Sade was a lunatic and the more or less conscious goal of | | his revolution was universal chaos and destruction. The people who | | govern the Brave New World may not be sane (in what may be called the | | absolute sense of the word); but they are not madmen, and their aim | | is not anarchy but social stability. It is in order to achieve | | stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, | | personal, really revolutionary revolution. But meanwhile we are in | | the first phase of what is perhaps the penultimate revolution. Its | | next phase may be atomic warfare, in which case we do not have to | | bother with prophecies about the future. But it is conceivable that | | we may have enough sense, if not to stop fighting altogether, at | | least to behave as rationally as did our eighteenth-century | | ancestors. The unimaginable horrors of the Thirty Years War actually | | taught men a lesson, and for more than a hundred years the | | politicians and generals of Europe consciously resisted the | | temptation to use their military resources to the limits of | | destructiveness or (in the majority of conflicts) to go on fighting | | until the enemy was totally annihilated. They were aggressors, of | | course, greedy for profit and glory; but they were also | | conservatives, determined at all costs to keep their world intact, as | | a going concern. For the last thirty years there have been no | | conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the | | right and nationalistic radicals of the left. The last conservative | | statesman was the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne; and when he wrote a | | letter to the the *Times*, suggesting that the First World War should | | be concluded with a compromise, as most of the wars of the eighteenth | | century had been, the editor of that once conservative journal | | refused to print it. The nationalistic radicals had their way, with | | the consequences that we all know \--Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, | | depression, Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of Europe and all | | but universal famine. | | | | Assuming, then, that we are capable of learning as much from | | Hiroshima as our forefathers learned from Magdeburg, we may look | | forward to a period, not indeed of peace, but of limited and only | | partially ruinous warfare. During that period it may be assumed that | | nuclear energy will be harnessed to industrial uses. The result, | | pretty obviously, will be a series of economic and social changes | | unprecedented in rapidity and completeness. All the existing patterns | | of human life will be disrupted and new patterns will have to be | | improvised to conform with the nonhuman fact of atomic power. | | Procrustes in modern dress, the nuclear scientist will prepare the | | bed on which mankind must lie; and if mankind doesn\'t fit \-- well, | | that will be just too bad for mankind. There will have to be some | | stretching and a bit of amputation \-- the same sort of stretching | | and amputations as have been going on ever since applied science | | really got into its stride, only this time they will be a good deal | | more drastic than in the past. These far from painless operations | | will be directed by highly centralized totalitarian governments. | | Inevitably so; for the immediate future is likely to resemble the | | immediate past, and in the immediate past rapid technological | | changes, taking place in a mass-producing economy and among a | | population predominantly propertyless, have always tended to produce | | economic and social confusion. To deal with confusion, power has been | | centralized and government control increased. It is probable that all | | the world\'s governments will be more or less completely totalitarian | | even before the harnessing of atomic energy; that they will be | | totalitarian during and after the harnessing seems almost certain. | | Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and | | self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism. At present | | there is no sign that such a movement will take place. | | | | There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should | | resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by | | artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not | | merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays), it is | | demonstrably inefficient and in an age of advanced technology, | | inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient | | totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive | | of political bosses and their army of managers control a population | | of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their | | servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day | | totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, news- paper editors | | and schoolteachers. But their methods are still crude and | | unscientific. The old Jesuits\' boast that, if they were given the | | schooling of the child, they could answer for the man\'s religious | | opinions, was a product of wishful thinking. And the modern pedagogue | | is probably rather less efficient at conditioning his pupils\' | | reflexes than were the reverend fathers who educated Voltaire. The | | greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing | | something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still | | greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By | | simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr. | | Churchill calls an \"iron curtain\" between the masses and such facts | | or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, | | totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more | | effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent | | denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence | | is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and the other symptoms of | | social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda | | must be made as effective as the negative. The most important | | Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored | | enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists | | will call \"the problem of happiness\" \-- in other words, the | | problem of making people love their servitude. Without economic | | security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence; | | for the sake of brevity, I assume that the all-powerful executive and | | its managers will succeed in solving the problem of permanent | | security. But security tends very quickly to be taken for granted. | | Its achievement is merely a superficial, external revolution. The | | love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a | | deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies. To bring about | | that revolution we require, among others, the following discoveries | | and inventions. | | | | All things considered it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us | | than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined. Then, I | | projected it six hundred years into the future. Today it seems quite | | possible that the horror may be upon us within a single century. That | | is, if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the | | interval. Indeed, unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied | | science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the | | means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we | | have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of | | national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the | | terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of | | civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of | | militarism); or else one supranational totalitarianism, called into | | existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological | | progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and | | developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the | | welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your | | choice. | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+