Aldous Huxley pictured in the 1930s. 'We
failed to notice that our runaway infatuation with the sleek toys produced by
the likes of Apple and Samsung might well turn out to be as powerful a narcotic
as soma.' Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
On 22 November 1963 the
world was too preoccupied with the Kennedy assassination to pay much attention
to the passing of two writers from the other side of the Atlantic: CS
Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Fifty years on, Lewis is being honoured with a
plaque in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, to be unveiled in a ceremony on
Friday. The fanfare for Huxley has been more muted.
There are various reasons
for this: The Chronicles of
Narnia propelled their author into the Tolkien league; Shadowlands, the film
about his life starring Anthony Hopkins, moved millions; and his writings on
religious topics made him a global figure in more spiritual circles. There is a
CS Lewis Society of
California, for example; plus a CS Lewis Review and a Centre for the Study of CS
Lewis & Friends at a university in Indiana.
Huxley was a child of
England's intellectual aristocracy. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the
Victorian biologist who was the most effective evangelist for Darwin's theory of
evolution. (He was colloquially known as "Darwin's Bulldog".) His mother was Matthew Arnold's
niece. His brother, Julian and half-brother Andrew both became distinguished
biologists. In the circumstances it's not surprising that Aldous turned out to
be a writer who ranged far beyond the usual preoccupations of literary folk –
into history, philosophy, science, politics, mysticism and psychic exploration.
His biographer wrote: "He offered as his personal motto the legend hung around
the neck of a ragged scarecrow of a man in a painting
by Goya: Aรบn aprendo. I am still learning." He was, in
that sense, a modern Voltaire.
It is set in the London of
the distant future – AD 2540 – and describes a fictional society inspired by two
things: Huxley's imaginative extrapolation of scientific and social trends; and
his first visit to the US, in which he was struck by how a population could
apparently be rendered docile by advertising and retail therapy. As an
intellectual who was fascinated by science, he guessed (correctly, as it turned
out) that scientific advances would eventually give humans powers that had
hitherto been regarded as the exclusive preserve of the gods. And his encounters
with industrialists like Alfred
Mond led him to think that societies would eventually be run on lines
inspired by the managerial rationalism of mass production ("Fordism") – which is
why the year 2540 AD in the novel is "the Year of Our Ford 632".
In this world nobody falls ill, everyone has the same lifespan, there is no warfare, and institutions and marriage and sexual fidelity are dispensed with. Huxley's dystopia is a totalitarian society, ruled by a supposedly benevolent dictatorship whose subjects have been programmed to enjoy their subjugation through conditioning and the use of a narcotic drug – soma – that is less damaging and more pleasurable than any narcotic known to us. The rulers of Brave New World have solved the problem of making people love their servitude.
Which brings us back to the two Etonian bookends of our future. On the Orwellian front, we are doing rather well – as the revelations of Edward Snowden have recently underlined. We have constructed an architecture of state surveillance that would make Orwell gasp. And indeed for a long time, for those of us who worry about such things, it was the internet's capability to facilitate such comprehensive surveillance that attracted most attention.
In the process, however, we forgot about Huxley's intuition. We failed to notice that our runaway infatuation with the sleek toys produced by the likes of Apple and Samsung – allied to our apparently insatiable appetite for Facebook, Google and other companies that provide us with "free" services in exchange for the intimate details of our daily lives – might well turn out to be as powerful a narcotic as soma was for the inhabitants of Brave New World. So even as we remember CS Lewis, let us spare a thought for the writer who perceived the future in which we would come to love our digital servitude.
Guardian
