I Hate Aldous Huxley-Part 2

Let me count the ways I loathe Aldous Huxley…it’s not quite poetry or Shakespeare, but it will do. I figured that since I’m on a roll with hating Aldous Huxley and I haven’t finished Brave New World yet, that I should keep on hating Aldous Huxley. I know this month is supposed to be all about being thankful and I’m pretty much going in the opposite direction, oh well.

I did read up a bit on Aldous Huxley when I wrote my first post about why I hated him. I found out he had been a professor at one point. I found out that he moved to the United States. I found out he experimented with LSD and all manner of illegal substances. I actually found out that his last request, ever, was for LSD. His wife, second, third, or fourth I don’t remember, obliged. I don’t hate Aldous for his drug use or his strange leanings towards cults. As far as I am concerned, a person can do both of those things if they desire. You want to be in a cult…. no, the Mormon church is not a cult, go ahead. You want to put LSD into your body? It’s your choice, even if it is illegal. I’m not going to force you to choose what substances you put into your body.

None of these things are what bugs me about Aldous. Remember I mentioned intentions. I still don’t know his intentions and I may never know his intentions. With research, I may find that he leaned one way or the other, but I will never know his true intentions. Aldous isn’t alive anymore, he has left us with only his words. It’s amazing how your words live on after your death.

Brave New World is Aldous’ most famous novel. It’s what people remember him for. I don’t know if I have explained this before, but dystopian novels come in one of two flavors, generally, but you don’t know what flavor your novel is without knowing the author’s intentions. Those flavors are warnings and explorations or instructions manuals and hopeful wishing. Some authors write a dystopian novel to explore the idea of a broken society stemming from societal misdeeds they have observed. Some authors write a dystopian novel because they had this terrible awful idea and want to write a book about it. Maybe nobody is looking for world domination, but the hint of world domination is there.

Really, these intentions do not matter to the reader, unless you’re like me and object to authors purely on their moral grounds. Notice I never say a book by these hated authors is terribly written, I just say I don’t like the book and/or I don’t like the author. The work can speak for itself to an extent. What a book becomes is what you make of it. It’s what your neighbor makes of it. It’s what a bully of a child makes of it during high school literature class. Thus, a book written as a warning could just as easily become a blueprint for world domination. Words take on the life you give them as the consumer, even if the original speaker or writer of those words meant no such thing.

With all of this said, what’s so bad about Aldous Huxley? The truth of the matter is that I find some of the things he mentions deplorable. There are lots of deplorable things and ideas in dystopian novels. I don’t like the idea of everyone being the same, but I also don’t like the idea of people being forced into groups without a chance to be different. There are two things in chapters two and three of Brave New World that really bug me.

In chapter two, children are fed constant BS about how other children wearing certain colors are better than they are or are lesser than they are. In chapter three, children and adults, are taught that families are some kind of vile practice. Everybody belongs to everyone else.

Let’s discuss chapter two first. Treating someone differently because of how they look, or because of their genetic makeup, or because of something they believe in, is called discrimination. I tried to play Devil’s advocate with this and think of a situation in which discrimination against people is a good thing. You know what…I couldn’t think of one situation in which I would benefit from discriminating against other people. There is really no point. You can be discriminating when it comes to your food, or where you live, or what clothes you wear, but you can’t do that with living, breathing human beings. It’s wrong.

Saying to a child, “Oh, don’t play with Billy, his mom isn’t as smart as we are,” or, “Don’t play with Susie her father is Puertorican,” is stupid, also wrong. It’s vile that Aldous pictures this world in which children are subjected to this consciously and unconsciously. What children become when they are adults can be largely determined by how they were raised. Even if one of these children grows up and sees the light, they’re never going to fully get rid of that prejudice that someone else put into their head. I think it’s terrible to put some poor kid on an uneven moral playground before they can even make decisions on their own.

Now, onto to chapter three, chapter three bugs me because the idea of families is seen as cave-mannish, morally bankrupt, and perverted in ways. Children are raised by the state, that’s a scary thought. We like families. A family doesn’t necessarily mean a mom, a dad, and 2.5 children. These days a family can be all manner of combinations, a mom and a dad, just a mom, just a dad, two moms, two dads, a mom and a grandmother, ten kids, two kids, a couple and their three dogs, fourteen kids, adopted kids, a bunch of cats and an old woman, several generations of a family living in one house and so on. Family is not a word that requires certain people or certain numbers of people, family is a state, more or less. People who care for each other in a somewhat small unit are considered family.

Is it possible for children raised in a group-home-ish environment to become family with their caregivers and fellow group-home children? I suppose in the right emotional environment, it could happen, but the right emotional environment in these types of situations is rare. In one of these chapters, the group looks on eighty children sleeping in one room. Eighty. Do you even have eighty people in your family? Some of us do, if we count all of our cousins, and maybe all of their first cousins. We only see eighty people in our family when it comes time for family reunions, then all the weird relatives come out of the woodwork. It’s hard to be family with eighty people.

So these kids have no idea what family is. They have no idea what siblings are. They have no idea what parents are. The word parent is a dirty word to these children. Granted, the word “parent” can be a dirty word to people today, all of us were not raised in the best home environment. The idea Aldous writes in this book is not simply indifference to the institution of family, but a vehement protest against the idea of family. That’s extreme and so odd. I don’t always get along with my family, but the idea that someone would abolish the very idea of my family is scary.

Here’s another weird implication of Aldous’ no-family-world, so Aldous paints birth as this large scientific experiment. They can cause one egg to split up to ninety-six times resulting in ninety-six identical twins, but also, they use one ovum to produce thousands upon thousands of people. So what? So, you have thousands upon thousands of brothers and sisters. Everyone belongs to everyone else, right? You can have sex with anybody you want, right? Well, considering you have thousands upon thousands of brothers and sisters, sterile they may be according to chapter one, you’ve probably had sex with one of your siblings. In Aldous’ no-family-world, the idea of incest doesn’t mean anything. If you don’t have a family, you can’t commit incest. How strange is that?

Aldous not only takes the benefits of family away from his fictional world, he also takes away the detriments of family away from his fictional worlds. Would you trade the good times you had with your family just to get rid of all the bad times? It’s a personal decision, of course, but it’s a choice you cannot make. Aldous took it away from you, if you lived in his world, that is.

I could go on, and on, but I won’t. I think you get my point. I hate Aldous Huxley, like I hate Jack London. Neither are terrible writers, but their ideas rub me the wrong way. Their morality or lack thereof, rubs me the wrong way.



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