The author revisits the concepts in his 1931 novel Brave New World, re-assessing his fanciful predictions by the fearful light of the Cold War.

"Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government," Huxley writes early on in this book. In places, Brave New World Revisited is frighteningly prophetic. In other places, however, it's also amusingly off-target.

Where Huxley really had his sights set on the future was in the area of how governments relate to their citizens. Many methods of propaganda and downright brainwashing are discussed, some of them a bit more far-out than others, but the quieter, more insidious stuff - where he draws parallels between the sociological studies of Madison Avenue and the Nazi war machine - is where Huxley scores head-on. And ultimately, I think that's the stuff we'll wind up guarding against. If we're not already.

Huxley calls attention to overpopulation as the greatest problem facing the world, but he downplays his novel's prediction that the populace at large would be drugged into submission. While I'm not paranoid enough to think that the U.S. government is holding the reins of illegal drug use, the general populace - or at least a significant portion of it - does seem to be trying to dose itself into a euphoric state of not caring about the real problems they face in the world, either with chemicals or meaningless entertainment. Huxley includes marijuana in a category of "harmless" drugs that - from his vantage point in 1958 - won't catch on enough to be a societal issue. This may, in fact, be Brave New World Revisited's biggest misfire.

Huxley also spends a fair amount of time extolling the virtues of raising the next generation to be more willful individuals. He doesn't provide clear-cut answers on that front, and in a way I'm glad he doesn't, as his contention that the majority of each successive generation breeds fewer worthy intellectuals than the one before reeks a bit of social elitism - a discriminatory way of looking at things that you'd think the author of Brave New World would rail against. Alpha Plus indeed, Aldous.

Finally, perhaps the most interesting element of the book is a continual look back at the original novel through the eyes of today. In some places, Huxley's novel feels more prescient than his post-mortem analysis. I thoroughly enjoy his comparisons of Brave New World and Orwell's 1984; Huxley admires 1984, but correctly illuminates each book as a product of its times: Brave New World was clearly a product of the era in which jingoism was the only answer anyone had to a worldwide depression, when Hitler and his contemporaries were just starting to carve out their unfortunate niche in the respective nations' collective psyche. 1984, penned in 1948, was a reflection of early Cold War mindsets: an ongoing war with an ever-changing cast of political characters, an all-seeing government monitoring its citizens' every move, and torture as a means of persuasion deemed acceptable by the state.

In any event, Brave New World Revisited is a rare and unique glimpse into the author's thoughts before and after writing his novel. Huxley's real-life research that led to his unsettling speculations was impeccable, and while his afterthoughts on the same subjects are sometimes slightly less accurate, they still make fascinating reading.

Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster

• Year: 1958
• Author: Aldous Huxley
• Genre: non-fiction

• Length: 147 pages
• Publisher: Harper & Row