Second and relatedly, is the idea of making people happy using technology fundamentally faulty, or was it just not implemented in the right way here? As I argue, a utilitarianism like Bentham's focused on pleasure instead of flourishing is impoverished. While he certainly didn't like the caste system and totalitarianism he depicts and sincerely bemoaned the loss of human autonomy (see this 1958 interview where he predicts that the brave new world is closer than ever given increasing overpopulation and bureaucratization), he also didn't think that simply rejecting all these new technologies and insights was a feasible solution either, because the challenges we face (again, chiefly overpopulation) are real and require our ingenuity and not any kind of return to primitivism. First, this is apparently a dystopia, but Huxley seems not so sure. ![]() So this is a test case for utilitarianism, but like all test cases for big ideas, it's somewhat inconclusive. Some of these ideas had previously been synthesized by Bertrand Russell in The Scientific Outlook (1931, particularly chapter 15), which Huxley liberally borrows from. ![]() If we harness the power of society to employ available technologies to really focus on making people happy, what would the result be? This is Huxley's thought experiment, drawing on the latest thinking (and a bit of sci-fi projection regarding possible future advances) in mass-production techniques (via Henry Ford, whose thought is treated as religion by the society the novel depicts), behaviorist conditioning, education (including sleep learning), embryology (he predicated cloning), eugenics, pharmacology (the drug soma, that has no negative side effects), and psychotherapy (including removal of troublesome parental relations and encouragement of childhood sex play). On Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel, recorded on stage with an audience Q&A at Manhattan's Caveat on 4/6/19. ![]() Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:38:40 - 90.4MB)
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