Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

I really enjoyed reading this book, the style of writing is such a delight. For example when everything starts speeding up, different scenes intertwined with each other, but in a way that you can still keep up with what is happening where.

The philosophical discussion towards the end was especially interesting. I don't think that anyone could ever be happy like that (even if conditioned).

As Mark Deck (TheClick) put it so nicely: Happiness is a progress.

Happiness [isn't] achieved and everlasting. Happiness [...] requires constant investment. It's like the curve of how life is currently tilting [...], do I feel like things are going in the right direction, am I improving myself [...]? [...] when you achieve a goal you will just look towards the next goal after that. There's always a thing after, so it's more about the journey as a whole [...] rather than the specific singular achievement.

Or as Mark Manson put it:

Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is "solving." If you're avoiding your problems or feel like you don't have any problems, then you're going to make yourself miserable. [...] To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it's an activity.

The people in Brave New World don't have anything to solve, no ambitions, no passion... how could they ever be happy?

Hoo, boy, where to start. Did not think I’d be this disappointed.

I think if I’d read this 5, 10 years ago, I’d have liked it. Today, I do not.

I get why this book is a classic. It’s an idea book like a lot of old sci-fi is, and like a lot of old sci-fi, it suffers in many areas, like characterization. It hasn’t aged well in terms of race and sex.

I think what I can most get behind is what I think is Huxley’s criticism of consumption. In this world, no new activity is added unless it results in the production of something which is consumed. People discard belongings and get new ones regularly. That /has/ aged well, unfortunately.

However, his focus on sexuality and relationships in particular was odd. I wish I knew better what Huxley’s intention was here. It seems like I’m being given a choice between sexual freedom/casual sex and chastity/repression, and I’m supposed to pick chastity. Huxley’s Utopia is definitely problematic in that romantic attachment is looked down on and basically forbidden. But do I care that people have sex with who they want to have sex with? No… the scene where John calls Lenina a whore and pushes her down is very distressing. Ultimately, yes, he doesn’t want sex, so she shouldn’t push it because it’s not consensual. But if I’m supposed to side with John on this, uhh, no, I don’t want that either. Consensual casual sex (or just sex outside of marriage?? I’m not sure what John/Huxley’s standard is) does not inherently equal dehumanization of the people involved.

Is this just because it was published in 1932? Or am I supposed to be upset at John for this? I can’t tell.

One of the other points where I think I disagreed with John/Huxley was related to death. This Utopia treats death /too/ casually. People are just numbers. But what they do is keep children around death and condition children to not be scared of it. In some ways, I think that’s good. The recent book Being Mortal talks about how hard we fight death in the modern age, deny it, try to prolong life to the point that we hurt our quality of life at the end. We deny our families the ability to say goodbye or to achieve bucket list activities because we are in denial about dying in the first place. So in some sense I was like, yes, we should be more accepting of death and less terrified of being around it.

Besides that, we have the very weird racial component. John is like the “noble savage” but is actually a white man raised on the reservation. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than an actual Native American playing this role in the story. But I’m not a fan of it.

Another reviewer noted the good points Mond makes, and I kind of have to agree..

What a sad book :-(. One gets the dystopia of 1984, but the situation is not as dire, yet it's still horrible! And of course, all of chapter 17 is an attempt to bring people to Christianity, but I guess that's not the overall point of the book, although conversion does appear to be a prominent goal.
Of course, this is quite a classic of which I had heard frequently, but I had never read it. "Man believes in God only because he has been [so] conditioned." As a nonbeliever, I am in total agreement with that statement, but not the circumstance in this book.
The book was written in 1932 which was clearly before current technology and medicine and science, but the disdain of the "civilized" characters for science and the abuse of technology is painful.
It IS a good book, but the lessons are perhaps none those intended by Mr. Huxley. I'm glad I read it, but I'm also glad to be done.