So we don’t miss the point, all the novel’s characters are named after a deliberately wide ideological range of modernizing figures, from Lenin to Mussolini, from Malthus to Ataturk, and the prophet of its utopia is Henry Ford. This synthesis suggests that modernity in all its varieties, whether left or right, is moving toward a single end: the abolition of the soul. He bases his imagined future on a conflation of laissez-faire capitalism’s rationalized inequality and socialism’s subsumption of the individual in the state. Huxley shows culture reduced to base sensationalism, religion banished, the family obsolesced in favor of non-reproductive sexual pleasures beginning in early childhood, and even science itself firmly kept at the level of technical application lest it induce metaphysical speculation. Their entire lives are chemically and technologically regulated to prevent their developing inner lives capable of subverting this utopia of universal satisfaction. Humans are grown in laboratories and conditioned in childhood for specific life roles, from the knowledge-worker Alphas to the proletarian Epsilons.

Since you read this 1932 novel when you were in high school, gentle reader, you don’t need me to tell you the conceit and the plot, but just in case: it is the 26th century and humanity, under the rational and utilitarian governance of a world state, has achieved happiness. I should have read it when I was in high school, because then it probably would have seemed profound but now I confess I find it a superficial and confused fiction. Don’t ask me why I didn’t read Brave New World when I was in high school the way everybody else did-the powers-that-be never assigned it to me in school, and I’m only now catching up to it on my own.

Brave new world book setting