Huxley’s vision was articulated in Brave New World (1932) and a short later essay called Brave New World Revisited (1958). In Huxley’s world, science and technology are put to good use to maximize pleasure, minimize the time one spends alone, and provide for a 24/7 cycle of consumption (one of the regime’s slogans is “ending is better than mending!”). Not surprisingly, the citizens lose any ability to think critically and become complacent with whatever is imposed on them from above. Sexual promiscuity is encouraged from early childhood, even though sex is considered a social activity rather than the act of reproduction. The idea of a family is considered “pornographic,” while social relations are organized around the maxim “everyone belongs to everyone else.”
The two men knew each other and corresponded. Orwell, the younger of the two, even briefly studied French under Huxley’s tutelage at Oxford. In 1940 Orwell wrote a provocative review of Huxley’s book, and Huxley revisited both his own work and 1984 in his Brave New World Revisited. Orwell thought that while Huxley provided “a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia,” he misunderstood the nature of power in a modern totalitarian state. “[Brave New World was] ... the kind of thing that seemed possible and even imminent before Hitler appeared, but it had no relation to the actual future. What we are moving towards at this moment is something more like the Spanish Inquisition, and probably far worse, thanks to the radio and the secret police,” wrote Orwell in a 1940 essay.
Huxley, however, wasn’t convinced. In a 1949 letter to Orwell, he expressed his doubts about the social controls described in 1984: “The philosophy of the ruling minority in 1984 is sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful.” He continued: “My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.”
Unlike Orwell, Huxley wasn’t convinced that men were rational creatures who were always acting in their best interest. As he put it in Brave New World Revisited, what was often missing from the social analysis of Orwell and other civil libertarians was any awareness of “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” Huxley was being unfair to Orwell, however. Orwell did not entirely discount the power of distraction: The Proles, the lowest class in 1984’s three-class social hierarchy, are kept at bay with the help of cheap beer, pornography, and even a national lottery. Still, it was readers’ fear of the omnipotent and all-seeing figure of Big Brother that helped to make Orwell’s arguments famous.
Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been something of a cliché to claim that Orwell failed to anticipate the rise of the consumer society and how closely technology would come to fulfill its desires. Huxley, too, was chided for underestimating the power of human agency to create spaces of dissent even within consumerist and hedonistic lifestyles, but it is widely assumed that he was the most prescient of the two (particularly on the subject of genetics). “Brave New World is a far shrewder guess at the likely shape of a future tyranny than Orwell’s vision of Stalinist terror in Nineteen Eighty-Four. ... Nineteen Eighty-Four has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere,” wrote the British dystopian novelist J. G. Ballard in reviewing a Huxley biography for the Guardian in 2002. “Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right,” is how Neil Postman chose to describe the theme of his best-selling Amusing Ourselves to Death. “[In contrast to Brave New World], the political predictions of ... 1984 were entirely wrong,” writes Francis Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future. Maybe, but what many critics often fail to grasp is that both texts were written as sharp social critiques of contemporary problems rather than prophecies of the future.
Orwell’s work was an attack on Stalinism and the stifling practices of the British censors, while Huxley’s was an attack on the then-popular philosophy of utilitarianism. In other words, those books probably tell us more about the intellectual debates that were prevalent in Britain at the time than