Brave New World, re-Revisited

During my off-week, in between Barbarossa, I found Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Revisited. For free! So, that has entered the Lockdown List.

What we have in BNW-R is what Paul Casanova would call an Avertissement. That is: it's an argument explaining to the new generation why their school superintendents should keep buying BNW. Hence, I think, why Huxley.net are giving it away.

Huxley was winding down over the late 1950s and, in the meantime, one Eric Blair had written an interesting set of rival novels to Huxley's dystopia. I've heard Blair was even Huxley's student although, Blair was in such poor health, physical and mental, that Hux ended up outliving him.

The Great Dictators were dying off over the 1950s with the VERY notable exception of Mao; and the fascist fanclub, like Nasser and Nehru (and Khrushchev), weren't ruling in nearly the same way as their mentors had. Instead they were dialing back the stick and rationing the carrots. And yes there were carrots - if you were useful. Chernobyl does pretty well at illustrating the decent life you could have Back In The U S S R if you were Alpha and a team player. If you were a prole, well - you got lies with your prolefeed.

Huxley's book is, then, mainly a victory-lap around "Orwell". A well-deserved lap, I posit we should allow. Huxley also predicted that Communism would probably win in the next twenty years, which would come to 1977-8, when indeed it was marching across the globe.

One thing Huxley didn't predict is Brezhnev's deterioration, physical and moral, over that future decade. The Soviet form of Marxism (recently found was another FAIL with Kapital, its wrongheadedness on enclosures) ended up a Spartanism, very top-heavy. In the 1970s, the top was Brezhnev. This fossil (like US Grant) was unable to keep his Politburo from cutting corners and skimming off the top. This march-o'-progress hit its first speedbump in Iran where the local leftists couldn't stop Khomeini's ultra-reaction. As they say, weather-forecasters cannot predict a fortnight ahead; Huxley did pretty well for a score of years.

Another prediction is that populists could win against technocrats if they just entertained (most) voters. Here: Trump, Duterte, and Bolsonaro. A further one: corporations melding together, subverting democracy, and taking over the public square as oligarchy.

The one serious incoherence in this book I find was its comment on overpopulation. This middle-upper-class moral-panic was all the rage 1950s-70s. Huxley's solution amounted to "ban the Catholic Church", and "take over education". In that case Huxley is advocating for the brave new world and not against it.

BACKDATE 6/25, to when I'd finished reading this one.