Episode 301: Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" Intro and Ch. 1-3

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast, Episode 301

Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World" Intro and Chapters 1-3
Date: November 4, 2025
Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks
Guest: Ella Hornstra

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Episode Overview

This lively and rigorous episode of The Literary Life Podcast opens a new series devoted to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Hosts Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks, joined by guest Ella Hornstra, set out to frame the novel historically, intellectually, and literarily. The discussion dives deep into the context of interwar optimism and anxiety, explains the nature and mechanics of satire (the form Huxley adopts), explores the novel’s key influences (from H.G. Wells and Ford to Freud), and unpacks the first three chapters with a focus on Huxley’s techniques, themes, and subversive wit. The hosts also emphasize why this book, once a dystopian satire, now feels eerily prescient, and why it's crucial for modern readers to "read irony or risk missing the point."

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Key Segments and Insights

1. Introductions and Book History (00:18 – 16:41)

• Meet the Panel:

  • Angelina jokes about “the decreasingly mysterious Mr. Banks,”
  • Introduction of guest, Ella Hornstra, a graduate and teacher with classical studies expertise at House of Humane Letters, and a prior podcast guest.
  • Ella’s recent success in academia and teaching is highlighted (02:18–03:47).

• Purpose of the Podcast:

  • Not “just another book chat” but an ongoing conversation on “the science, skill, and art” of reading literature well, rescuing story “from the ivory tower and bringing it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute.”
  • “To be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality.” — Angelina [00:18].

2. Commonplace Quotes Segment (08:11 – 11:17)

• Ella’s Quote (08:11):
  • Reads from Thomas Carlyle’s 1829 essay "Signs of the Times," presaging Brave New World:

    “Our true deity is mechanism... In a deeper than metaphorical sense. We are titans that strive by heaping mountain on mountain to conquer heaven...”

  • Connected to Huxley’s world of mechanism and lost belief in the invisible.
• Thomas’s Quotes (09:16):
  • Cites Berdyaev’s epigraph about the dangers of utopia:

    "...utopias can be realized... possibly a new age is beginning... an age in which intellectuals... will look to the means of avoiding utopias and returning to a non utopian society less perfect and more free." (09:24)

  • From Lord Byron, playfully self-pitying about exile and dissatisfaction.
• Angelina’s Quote (10:54):
  • From Dorothy Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker linking the "cardboard worlds" of advertising and hedonism—a thesis comparable to Huxley’s.

3. Panel’s Relationship to the Book (13:00–16:08)

• When did each first read Brave New World?
  • Thomas & Angelina: College era (“20 years ago!”)
  • Ella: Avoided “for fear it would not be enjoyable,” then devoured it during a visit with Angelina and Thomas, leading to this series.

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4. Who Was Aldous Huxley? Life, Context, and Influence (16:08–29:00)

• Intellectual Lineage (16:41):
  • Descended from “English intellectual royalty”—grandson of Darwin’s “Bulldog” Thomas Huxley, great-grandnephew of poet-critic Matthew Arnold.
  • Lived with tension between science and the humanities, a throughline in his work.
  • Overcame near-blindness, learned to read Braille using Chopin sheet music, developing prodigious memory ("...so intensely painful to have to read anything more than once in Braille..." – Ella, 19:59).
• Literary Career:
  • Prolific essayist, novelist, and lecturer; one of Orwell’s teachers at Eton.
• Not in the Bloomsbury Group:
  • Though close to literary circles, he was “more conservative” and notably monogamous (Ella, 25:49), which stood out among the era’s bohemians.
• World War I’s Impact (22:38):
  • Rejected from combat due to near-blindness and spent time among “the Bloomsburys, but not of them” (Angelina & Thomas, 24:11–24:36).
• Timing of Brave New World (26:12):
  • Written in mid-career (age 38), now regarded as his masterpiece.

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5. The World That Made Brave New World: Satire, Optimism, and Parody (29:00–41:36)

• “The Literary Age of Optimism” (29:00):
  • Huxley’s novel as satirical response to excessive late Victorian/Edwardian faith in “science, economics, and the possibility of a perfected world.”
  • Angelina: “The Victorians genuinely believed they were on the cusp of making heaven on earth… then it literally blew up in World War I” (31:47).
• Rise of Twentieth-Century Satire (34:33):
  • Connecting Huxley’s satire to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—both are responses to utopian optimism, revealing the need for skepticism.
  • Dystopia as consequence of failed utopia (35:03–36:49).
• Satire’s Challenges for Modern Readers:
  • Irony can be lost if readers view the “absurd world” as realistic, not exaggerated (36:49–40:12).
  • Peter Kreeft anecdote: His students “could not understand why anybody would not want to live there because it sounded great” (38:33).
• G.K. Chesterton’s Take:

  "...while the war might have destroyed the utopian mood, it only strengthened the tendency to take refuge in the technology that gave birth to the utopias in the first place." — Ella, recalling Chesterton’s 1935 essay (40:59).

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6. Influences Huxley Satirizes: Wells, Ford, Freud, and Behaviorism (41:36 – 65:55)

• Primary Models of Satire:
  • H.G. Wells:
    • Huxley set out to parody Men Like Gods—an “over-the-top utopian world” that Huxley found laughably naive (45:15).
  • Henry Ford (Industrialism & “History is Bunk!”):
    • Mass production as metaphor for engineered humanity; the “model” for dehumanized, efficient society (53:17).
    • Ford: “The past learning of mankind cannot be allowed to hinder our future learning” — Huxley makes this literal, erasing history in the World State (57:26).
  • John Watson & Pavlov (Behaviorism):
    • Conditioning humans via stimulus and response, echoing contemporary psychology (49:02).
    • Ella summarizes Watson’s ethically dubious experiments with children, “in the march of science” (50:07).
  • Sigmund Freud:
    • The “pleasure principle,” anti-family, anti-religion, immediate gratification—all core to World State philosophy.
    • Angelina: “...the family isn’t... an inhibition here. [It] will keep you from being able to achieve full sexual freedom...” (65:55).
    • “There’s no leisure from pleasure!” (67:44)
• Birth control & Eugenics:
  • Birth control closely tied to contemporary eugenics; early 20th-century dreams of "perfecting" humanity (96:24).
• Why America?
  • The “Brave New World is clearly America,” with western values and culture reshaping the globe (71:51).
  • Huxley’s prophetic “the way of America will be the way of the world”—prescient given America’s later ascendancy (72:48).

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7. Mechanics of Satire & the Dystopia (60:53 – 65:55)

• Satire as Cautionary Tale:
  • Angelina: “Satire is...closely connected to the cautionary tale. [It asks,] look at what will happen...let me blow it up...and show you where we’re going.” (60:53)
• “The World State” and Mass Consumption:
  • Religion is replaced with consumption, and “Ford and Freud” as parody gods (76:04).
  • Cross becomes the “T” for the Model T, but its vertical eradicated to signal the spiritual void (76:08–77:12).
• Light, Witty Style of the Narrative:
  • Thomas: “I did not remember it being funny... It’s actually kind of a lightly carried narrative... a witty book... a kind of light ironiness.” (61:36)
  • Ella: “This was [Huxley’s] brain break writing project... just having a little bit of fun pulling the leg of Mr. H.G. Wells” (61:58).

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8. Discussion of Chapters 1–3 (77:48 – End)

• Atmosphere of Death-in-Life:
  • Opening imagery: “All of the imagery is death. It’s all winter. It’s like stepping into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” — Ella (77:48)
• Mass Production of Humanity:
  • Assembly line humans, parodying “the Great Chain of Being” (80:02–80:22).
• Castes and Conditioned Happiness:
  • Intentionally fixed social classes—Alphas, Betas, Gammas, conditioned to love their predestined place.
• Upside-Down World, Explicitly (84:46):
  • Embryos are only happy when placed upside down; a signal to the reader that everything that follows is inverted, a warning (84:21).
• Behaviorist Conditioning:
  • Children conditioned with “Pavlovian” methods; parent, home, and family become obscenities (87:34).
• Consumer Culture Parodied:
  • “A love of nature keeps no factories busy” — Thomas (86:35), echoing modern anxieties about consumption.
• Society Without History:
  • Mustafa Mond: “History is bunk.” The erasure of all before the World State; all the “cultural specks” of antiquity whisked away (91:09).
• Superficiality and Mechanization of Desire:
  • “Pneumatic,” applied to women, highlighting the dehumanization and mechanistic view of people (98:43).
• Religious Parody & the Vertical Plane:
  • Reduction of the cross to the “T”—ending the link to transcendence.
• Irony & Tragedy:
  • Examples abound of how what was once meant as parody now reads as a description of present reality (“We have blown right past that.” — Angelina, 36:49).
• Memorable Quotes:
  • “Satire only works if the reader can recognize that the other world is absurd.” — Angelina (36:49)
  • “The normal world is supposed to be the world that the reader is bringing to it.” — Angelina (36:50)
  • “The hosts have an ever-unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world.” — (00:18)

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Angelina (about reading Brave New World as satire):
  "Satire only works if the reader can recognize that the other world is absurd." [36:49]

• Thomas (quoting Berdyaev):
  “Utopias can be realized, life marches toward them and possibly a new age is beginning — an age in which ... we look to the means of avoiding utopias and returning to a society less perfect and more free." [09:24]

• Ella (quoting Chesterton):
  “While the war might have destroyed the utopian mood, it only strengthened the tendency to take refuge in the technology that gave birth to the utopias in the first place.” [40:59]

• Mustafa Mond (as read by Thomas):
  "History is bunk... Whisk. And where was Odysseus? Where was Job? Where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk." [91:09]

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Important Timestamps

• Introduction & Panel Bios: 00:18–03:47
• Commonplace Quotes: 08:11–11:17
• First Encounters with Brave New World: 13:00–16:08
• On Huxley’s Background and Influences: 16:08–29:00
• Satire & Optimism: 29:00–41:36
• Behaviorism and Conditioning: 49:02–51:06
• Ford’s Influence & “History is Bunk”: 53:17–58:14, 91:09
• Opening Chapters Discussion: 77:48–end

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Tone and Takeaways

The tone is witty, scholarly, and convivial with a running thread of irony befitting the book under discussion. The hosts balance lightness and academic rigor, trading inside literary jokes and diving deep into intellectual history. The satirical mode of Brave New World is foregrounded—the need to read it with irony and recognize its critique, not just as a description.

Angelina’s guidance:

“Satire is much more concerned with making a point... it is very appropriate. The book is asking us to make those connections to the world.”

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For Those New to the Book

This episode provides everything a first-time (or baffled) reader needs: Why Brave New World was written, the intellectual traditions behind it, how to recognize its satirical mode, and what ideas Huxley was observing and attacking. The first three chapters are read not just for plot, but as carefully layered satire—a warning about where optimism, unchecked technology, and the cult of pleasure might lead.

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Next in the Series

In the next episode, the panel will cover chapters 4–7, delve deeper into satire and parody, discuss Alice in Wonderland connections, and explore further philosophical ideas.

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Subscribe and support the podcast for more in-depth literary explorations.

Transcript

[A]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the science, skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The literary life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford, and here with me, as always, the increasingly less mysterious, which I guess I should say, technically, the decreasingly mysterious Mr. Banks.

[B]

Decreasingly, yes.

[A]

But I like the sound of the less. The increasingly less mysterious.

[B]

Yeah, I think. I think if I had a less prosaic name, maybe then maybe that that would be an advantage. But no, I think everything about me is just more and more prosaic, I'm afraid. And maybe if I change my name to, like, Mustafa Mond, that would give me an air of mystery again.

[A]

I'm not going to call you the mysterious Mr. Mond. It's not happening.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

All right.

[B]

It's not just an idea.

[A]

Thought balloon, if you haven't figured out. We are here to start a brand new series on Aldous Huxley. There's a name for you. Aldous.

[B]

Aldous. Yeah.

[A]

I like it. I like it.

[B]

It's a smart sounding name. Smart sounding.

[A]

Aldous Banks. What do you guys say? Let's vote on this. We're here to talk about Albus Huxley's Brave New world. And we have today with us a guest for this series. Please welcome back to the podcast, Ms. Ella Hornstra. Hello, Ella, and welcome.

[C]

It's good to be back.

[A]

You guys might recognize her name. We have. I presume no one's listening to this podcast who hasn't listened to everything we've ever done, right? I'm sure that's a very, very safe assumption. See this podcast brought to you by irony, which you're going to need to be able to tell to read this book properly. But you might recognize Ella's name from her recent mini class she taught for us, the Grammar of the Natural World, which was amazing and well done and everyone is raving about it as they should. Ella is also a graduate of the House of Humane Letters and some of you may remember Ella from an episode a few years ago where we featured the literary life of Ella and her twin sister, Addison. Back then, she mentioned that she was going to be attending a small classical college, but that was not what she hoped for. And now she is on track for an advanced degree in classics at her first pick university, which happens to be one of the top, if not the classics department in the country. And Ella is also our teacher for our Latin Foundations class in the spring. So, Ella, thank you for making time out of your very, very busy schedule to talk with us about Brave New World.

[C]

No, this is going to be fun.

[A]

I think it is going to be fun. And we have a story, of course, later on for why it is that you're on this podcast. What happened, how this came about very, very naturally. I think our audience has figured out that so much of the podcast is just a conversation I have with someone, oh, this needs to be on the podcast. And then, you know, that's how it goes. So before we jump in, just a reminder that this is an ad free podcast. If you're listening on YouTube and they are sneaking in ads, that's not me. We are making no money off of that. We are not doing that to you. But instead we are member supported. And of course we always are throwing out there the other things we've got going on at the House of Humane Letters for classes where you might want to go deeper. And of course that helps to support this podcast and allow us to continue to provide this resource course for free. It means so much to me when I hear feedback from you guys where you say this podcast is like a free college class and you're learning more in the podcast than you did in college. And that means so much to me. And that is what we are trying to do. And so we always appreciate when you throw a few dollars our way in the Patreon or purchase a webinar because it does allow us to continue to do this for you guys for free. So in the spirit of that, I've got a brand new webinar coming up. So of course you should run out and buy Ella's mini class and her webinar on the grammar of the natural world, which I don't know if I should announce that you're going to see further projects from Ella on that topic. We'll just say that, we'll just tease with that. But I've got a webinar coming up which has been requested for so long and my sweet, long suffering husband has probably at least for Two years, maybe three years, been telling me to do this, and I feel finally am doing it.

[B]

I bullied you into it.

[A]

You did. I've been. You heard it here for folks you know. He bullied me into it. So here you go. Edgar Allen Poe, American defender of the medieval imagination. And here's my description. Edgar Allan Poe, while one of America's most popular authors, is also America's most deeply misunderstood author. The French have long admired Poe for his mythopoeic powers, but Americans largely think of him as the Stephen King of his day, reveling in fright, horror and nihilistic violence. Or as one critic put it, his tales are nothing more than complicated machines for saying boo. In general, American critics find little meaning beyond surface sensations in the work of Poe. But Poe, working in the tradition of the medievals through Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is interested not in the surface, but in the meaning beneath the surface of the story. He's not attempting to present reality, not even a dark reality, as some have claimed, but rather attempting to help his readers to look past surface reality and see the ideal instead. In fact, Poe thought that the function of art was to set the mind soaring upward in what he called a wild effort to reach the beauty above. In so many ways, Edgar Allan Poe is the American Samuel Taylor Coleridge, diagnosing the disease of our modernity's earthbound rationalist, materialist existence and calling us back to a medieval imagination rooted in the great chain of being and expressed through symbolic images. Join me on November 17th to find out where Northrop Fry calls Poe the greatest literary genius this side of Blake, and to learn how Poe not only defends the medieval imagination, but even anticipates the movement in the 20th century from realism to mythopoeia. And I will be talking about a bunch of Poe's work, even his non fiction. But I will try to be, you know, you know me. You know, a 90 minute webinar means probably the last five hours, but I will be focusing more particularly on the Telltale Heart, the Pit and the Pendulum, and the Fall of the house of Usher. Mr. Banks, will you be there?

[B]

Indeed I will.

[A]

You can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and register for that webinar again. It's live or later. If you can't make the live session, the video is yours to keep. You can check out Ella's classes. You can check out Mr. Banks's most recent webinar that you did in October on Oliver Cromwell. That was a big hit as well. All right. And you'll Hear more about what we've got coming up with our big Christmas sale as the series progresses. But without further ado, Ms. Hornster, would you like to go first for the commonplace quotes? Sure.

[C]

I have a quote from an essay that was written a solid century before Brave New World, and yet kind of seems to go with it. So the truth is, men have lost their belief in the invisible and believe and hope and work only in the visible. Worship, indeed, in any sense, is not recognized among us or is mechanically explained into fear of pain or hope of pleasure. Our true deity is mechanism. It has subdued external nature for us and we think it will do all other things. We are giants in physical power in a deeper than metaphorical sense. We are titans that strive by heaping mountain on mountain to conquer heaven. Also, it's from Thomas Carlyle in an essay published in 1829 called Signs of the Times.

[A]

1829, wow.

[B]

I was trying to guess who that was when you were reading it, and I. Yeah, Carlyle surprised me. That's interesting.

[A]

Yeah, me too.

[C]

Now it's an essay I really enjoy.

[A]

No, that's really good. That's really good. All right, Mr. Banks, what do you have? I mean, Mr. Mond.

[B]

So I have two commonplaces, one of which is actually the epigraph of the novel that we're about to introduce. It's from the.

[A]

Oh, yes, that was in French.

[B]

Please translate it. It's a passage in French which was actually written by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiev, who was a interesting man, Christian, anarchist, Russian emigre. He had to flee Russia following the revolution and, yeah, dedicated his life to writing and lecturing and anyhow, he writes, utopias appear more realizable than was ever believed possible before. And we find ourselves face to face with an agonizing question how to avoid their definite realization. Utopias can be realized, life marches toward them and possibly a new age is beginning. An age in which intellectuals and the educated classes will look to the means of avoiding utopias and returning to a non utopian society less perfect and more free.

[A]

That's good.

[B]

My. And I have a second one a little bit. This next one I picked because it's an odd combination of something that is funny and also self pitying. And it's from Lord Byron's letters. He's writing here while traveling in Portugal and the food and the climate are not agreeing with him. And he writes to a friend, I am like Adam, the first convict sentenced to transportation, but I have no Eve and have eaten no apple, but what was sour as a crab.

[A]

He'S so dramatic. All right, my commonplace quote. I decided to throw a curveball. No one will be surprised. You can put that on your bingo card right now. My quote is from Dorothy Sayers, the Mind of the Maker. And she said this about writing her book, Murder Misadvertised, which we did on this podcast, what, about a year ago?

[B]

I think that's right, yeah.

[A]

She says, I undertook, not very successfully, to present a contrast of two cardboard worlds, equally fictitious, the world of advertising and the world of the post war bright young people. So what she's saying is, in Murder Must Advertise, she decided to combine two things. The world of advertising and consume. Consume, consume. So that the world might go on. So that the economy, Capital E, might go on. Combined with this group of people in the wake of the World war, World War I, who were pursuing a life of decadent pleasure and pursuing that through drugs and sex and consumption. And I'm throwing that out there because I have long held a cherished little theory that Murder Must Advertise and Brave New World are the same book. And you'll be.

[B]

It's a challenge.

[A]

It is a challenge. And you'll be. You'll be hearing more of that as we go. Brave New World was published in 1932, and murder must advertise in 1933. And I am not suggesting that there's a direct influence here, but I think that they are both perceiving the same thing in the world, that this cons, this. This drive toward consumerism and this drive toward pleasure. And so she combines those things in her book in one way, and Aldous Huxley combines them in another way.

[B]

Yeah. State and corporately supplied hedonism.

[A]

There you go. All right, well, let's start off. I like to start off these kinds of series with just kind of the context of, like, where did. Where does Aldous Huxley in this book fit into your literary life? When's the first time you read it, Mr. Banks?

[B]

Like, I think probably most people. I read this in college. I. I think I read it as an assigned text, actually, and I enjoyed it, and I know I've revisited it since then, but I don't know that I've read it all the way through for. Well, college was for me 20 years ago, so. Yeah, so it's. Yeah, it's one of those books. I. I can. I could give an outline of the plot from beginning to end, but it's still. A lot of. It is kind of discovering territory for me.

[A]

Yeah, I also read it. I think I must have been about 19, maybe 20. So, yeah, college age. But unlike you, I did not read it for a class. In fact, I was talking to Ella this morning about that when we were talking about the bad ways of reading Brave New World. And I didn't know what they were because I've never been taught this book. And so I. My experience with it was totally pure. I just read it and, you know, made what I made of it. But I didn't have anybody, like, pouring bad perspectives into me. I loved it. I've always loved dystopian literature. 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World. But like a lot of people, I think I did struggle a little bit with understanding the ending back then. I hope to do a better job of that this time. But I've read it several times. I don't know how many times, maybe three times. I know I taught it before, a long time ago, and somewhere in this house is my original copy with all of its notes, but I can't find it, so I just started fresh. But it meant a lot to me. Now, Ella, you had not read this until fairly recently, about a year ago. You want to tell the story of how that came about?

[C]

No, it was. Yeah, a little bit over a year ago. It was a book I had heard of frequently, of course. I mean, as I think most people do. And I had avoided it for one reason or another. I think I had kind of formed the opinion that even if it was a book I appreciated, it would not be a book I enjoyed. But it was mentioned from a few different sources, trustworthy sources, that it is a book I should read. And so about a little over a year ago, I think I was actually, I was with you guys when I read it for the first time. You were.

[A]

You were at our house, and you looked at me and said, do you have a copy of Brave New World? And I said, indeed, I do. And I handed it to you, and then you disappeared.

[C]

Yes, I think I read it in under 48 hours, and much to my surprise, it was actually a book I enjoyed as well as appreciated, and you.

[A]

Kept coming back to me with all these insights. So I believe the context of this, and this will make sense later on, guys, I promise. But I think the context was your sister was doing her research for her Lewis Carroll.

[C]

She was.

[A]

And she was talking about Alice in Wonderland. And you guys will see that this is going to come up later. And we've discovered. We very excitedly discovered a connection between Aldous Huxley and Lewis Carroll. And that is what inspired you to pick up the book. And so you kept coming back to me with the most amazing insights in the book, and I just looked at you and said, we're doing this on the podcast. This is going on the schedule. You've got to share these insights. So here we are.

[C]

Yeah, here we are.

[A]

All right, well, let's start off with a little bit of background on Huxley and then work our way toward the book. I know Ella has been perusing. Perusing is hardly the word she's been.

[C]

It's been perusing. I have not read Perusing.

[A]

The gigantic tome that is the biography of Aldous Huxley by one of his dear friends, of course, you, Mr. Banks. I mean, Mustafa Mond. DHC, you know, but you. You seem to always know these guys. So that is not where I decided to put my research. So why don't you guys give us a little bit of context of Aldous Huxley. Tell us about Aldous Huxley.

[B]

Yeah. May I begin, Ms. Hornstra?

[C]

Please.

[B]

So Aldous Huxley, one of the first things to know about him, his last name, is English intellectual royalty. His grandfather, he's born into a family of scientists. One of his brothers, I believe, won the Nobel Prize, one of the several Nobel Prizes for the various sciences. And another brother, Julian, was a very, very famous popularizer of modern biological thought and also a famous eugenicist as well. His grandfather, Thomas Huxley, was an early advocate of Darwin's theories of natural selection and was actually known as Darwin's Bulldog because, unlike Darwin, he actually debated in public against people who were skeptical of Darwin's discoveries.

[A]

Do you think people will call me Fry's Bulldog?

[B]

I think probably, yes.

[A]

Okay. I would like that kind of nicknames.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. But so it would be. I don't know. I don't know what the. I don't know if there is an equivalent family today, but it would be like if you were David Attenborough's son or grandson or something like that. You know, I mean, the name kind of sells itself. And in fact, it's.

[A]

I don't think we have intellectual royalty families anymore. We have, you know, Instagram families, reality TV families.

[B]

That's true. Keeping up with the Huxleys.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. I would watch that.

[B]

He's famous enough. I mean, by the time, he was already famous when he wrote this novel. But if you've ever seen the movie Bringing a Baby with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant's character, the kind of fuddy, duddy scientist who meets the manic pixie Dream girl. His character's name is David Huxley. Oh, yeah.

[C]

And not just. He wasn't just a Huxley either, though. He was also an Arnold.

[B]

Also an Arnold on his mother's side. Yeah. His mother was a what? I think a niece of Matthew Arnold.

[C]

Yeah, I think he was the great grand nephew of Matthew Arnold.

[B]

I think that's right.

[A]

Oh, my goodness. That's an incredible lineage.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, it's so. Yeah. I mean, he's. He kind of summarizes. It's kind of interesting. He inherits both the scientific interest and the, you know, the interest in the liberal arts, the humanities that, you know, both sides of his family had. Had contributed to in their various ways. And the tension between. The tension between the humanities and, you know, ideologically applied science, that's kind of a tension that follows him his entire life. And this novel is kind of the distillation, I think, of a lifetime's ruminating on some of these questions.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, and also he. It's kind of an inspiring story in some ways. I mean, his life story is also a very sad one, but inspiring in that he was one of the. Had to be one of the best read public intellectuals of his time. But he was blind for much of his life or partially blind for much of his life.

[C]

Indeed. And apparently during his period of blindness, he wasted no time in teaching himself Braille, and he did so by teaching himself Chopin and I think Mozart first with braille sheet music.

[B]

Oh, my.

[C]

Then proceeded to reading as soon as possible. And apparently he says that this is the source of his prodigious memory was this period because it was so intensely painful to have to read anything more than once in braille because you read one letter at a time.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Wow, that's amazing. Yeah.

[A]

And Ella, you were telling me a story about how, despite the fact that he really couldn't see, he was known for his incredible observation skills. Yes.

[C]

Apparently a good many of his friends and acquaintances found it somewhat disconcerting that he would observe the amount that he did, even though he was functionally blind, at least for a period. And even after that had poor eyesight. And he always noticed very minute details, I think, from great effort expended.

[A]

Well, that's certainly what writers are like.

[B]

Oh, one other. So, I mean, he was a, you know, a. As I said, a public intellectual and popular novelist, also a very in demand lecturer. He wrote lots of nonfiction, you know, works on political philosophy. He wrote informal essays. He wrote literary criticism, kind of a polymath. And he also was, for a short Time a French teacher at, I believe, one of the major English public schools.

[C]

He was at Eton during the First World War.

[B]

Yeah. Where one of his pupils was a young, A young man named Eric Blair.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Who will go on to be George Orwell.

[A]

Yes. And later. I don't want to do it now, but when we get to the end of the novel, we'll look at the letter that Huxley wrote. Orwell, because Orwell, of course, sent. He writes 1984 after this, about 10 years after, and sends it to Huxley. And Huxley gets around to reading and writing it back. And it's an interesting conversation about whose vision of the future is going to actually come true. Is it Brave new world or 1984? So we'll get to that at the end. But that's, that's very interesting. Now, Ella, you. I want to go to World War I because anybody who spent any time on this podcast knows I make a huge deal about the effect of World War I on the 20th century imagination and so much of that time period's literature of the 1930s. We talked about this a lot in the Dorothy Sayers episode on Murder Must Advertise. But you have to understand that this war, what it did, what it meant, it was the culmination of all this Victorian optimism and it literally blew up. You can't really understand this time period and these works without that as the background. But he has a particularly interesting story about what he was involved with during the war. And what was he exposed to tell us a little bit about that?

[C]

Well, being blind as he was, I mean, he could see through one eye, I think, especially with a magnifying glass. He had to read with a magnifying glass for a long time. He was given a monocle later in life, but before that he wasn't even allowed glasses for some reason. He was not allowed to fight, of course, and he was not really.

[A]

They didn't want one eyed soldiers, that was. Yeah.

[C]

And he could actually. He tried to enlist like 20 times.

[A]

Oh, kept going.

[C]

He didn't. He was not a. A conscientious objector at all. And he tried to pick up various positions in the War Office and things like that. He also couldn't read well enough for that position, though. The amount of reading that it would take to read these correspondences throughout the day and so on and so forth. No one could find a job for him. So he kind of got a second place job at Eton when the staff was sent off, when the rest of them had been conscripted for One reason or another, and taught French and English for a while. But also he spent most of his holidays and a couple of years at Garsington, which was the house of Philip and Lady Otaline Morrell, about six miles outside of Oxford, which became kind of a haven for academics and conscientious objectors who kind of gave up their time to the land and to other pursuits in this massive Elizabethan manor house. And he there ran into a good many of the Bloomsbury Group and among others, became friends with T.S. eliot and Linton Strachey, all sorts of things. Very fascinating.

[A]

Yeah, that's very interesting, and we'll come back to that, because I think this is the source of a misunderstanding about Huxley. There are critics out there who will claim that Huxley was part of the Bloomsbury Group. He was not. He was literally like, you know, on the fringe of it, quarantined with.

[C]

When the. Very much the way Sybil Bedford, his friend, describes it in her biography, when the Bloomsbury's were in the house, Eldest was out of it.

[A]

Yeah, I was gonna say he. He's with them, but not with them. He's of them, but not.

[B]

You know, it kind of reminds me.

[A]

But not of the world.

[B]

It reminds me also of E.M. forster. And E.M. forster was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, but one. One of Forster's biographers caustically remarked that Forster was himself a longtime member of the Bloomsbury Group, in spite of the fact that he was kind by nature. Because basically, if you read. If you read any book about the Bloomsbury Group, it's like the constant refrain is, and then Leonard Wolf wasn't talking to Duncan Grant because someone had said something catty about.

[A]

Yeah, drama, for sure.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like a reality show.

[B]

Oh, yeah, very much so.

[A]

Right, right. So we'll get to that later when we talk about bad readings of Brave New World. But if these names are new to you, the Bloomsbury Group would be definitely the radicals of the Georgian period, very deliberately rejecting their Victorian past, particularly in the realm of sexual mores. Aldous Huxley, much more conservative. He is not part of the Bloomsbury Group. This book is not like something the Bloomsbury Group would write.

[C]

In fact, he met his future wife while staying at Garsington. She was a Belgian immigrant at the time and ended up in the same house. And the two of them were so confoundingly monogamous that they got quite made fun of.

[A]

Oh, I love it, I love it, I love it. So where in Huxley's career does this book fall like, when does he start writing?

[B]

He's written several novels by this point. Point, Counterpoint, Chrome Yellow, and a couple of the other early ones. He's got a literary reputation by now, and he is 38 when this book appears, so kind of right in the middle of his life. And it's. I don't know if it's recognized as his masterpiece right away, but posthumously, that is largely the consensus that. I mean, it's also his most representative book. If you want to know what Aldous Huxley is about, this is the place to begin.

[A]

Absolutely. Now, speaking of people who thought this book was a masterpiece, this. I've been. I've been saving this little nugget for the air. And I didn't tell you earlier, Mr. Banks, because I know that this will surprise you. So this is a little nugget that was told to me by Kelly Bond, who is a graduate of our fellowship program and a loyal listener to the podcast who has sort of become obsessed with Edith Wharton. Well, Edith Wharton, turns out, was friends with Huxley and his wife. And my brain cannot handle Age of Innocence and Brave New World existing in the same time, but they're in the.

[B]

Same universe a dozen years.

[A]

I know. Okay, so she says this book's a masterpiece, but when. So I asked Kelly Bond to find me a quote, and as she was researching the quote, she said, I found something even better than a quote from Edith Wharton saying it's a masterpiece. It turns out that Edith Wharton's novel. She wrote a satirical novel in 1927. So right before this, okay. Called Twilight Sleep. And here is. Here's the description of this novel. Get ready. Every minute of Pauline Manafort's day is planned out in advance, ensuring maximum efficiency. Never mind that some of her activities may contradict one another. What matters is she avoids discomfort, particularly the discomfort of having nothing to do. In this Jazz Age satire, Wharton pokes fun at everything from spiritual gurus to Hollywood, as Pauline's family increasingly descends into chaos, in large part due due to the order she tries to impose on her life. Twilight Sleep gets its name from a then new way of painless childbirth. Wharton's concern that modern technology inspired people to avoid any sort of pain helped inspire Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

[B]

Well, actually, another possible influence, though I. I could not confirm whether he read this novel or not, but there are enough similarities that he might well have done. Rose McCauley wrote A Kind of dystopian comedy called Whatnot, which has many of the same social features that you see in that you see in Brave New World. She wrote that about 10 years before, I think. Yeah.

[A]

And Murder Misadvertised, as I said in that series, is also a satire. So I think what we're all seeing, what I hope we're seeing, is that this is in the air at this time. A lot of people are seeing a lot of concerning things happening and they are writing satires of that. So I want to talk a little bit about a satire, because I think everybody knows this is a dystopia and we will talk a little bit about what that is, but mostly I want to talk about it being a satire. What does that mean in terms of writing it? What does that mean in terms of reading it? All of that kind of stuff? Well, let's back up, because if we're going to talk about satire, we're going to have to talk about what it is that they're satirizing. And in particular, satire works when you're in an age of extreme optimism. All right, so let's talk just really briefly, because I think when people think of, like, the 1920s America, for example, you think of the lost generation writers, you think of Ernest Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Optimism does not come to mind. Mind. And what is happening there is. That is one response to this global optimism. Satire is another response. And of course, thinking we are on the cusp of creating heaven on earth is yet another response. So let's back it up a little bit, because World War I happens as a result of. You can't even overstate this. It's going to sound like I'm exaggerating it, but the Victorians genuinely believed they were on the cusp of making heaven on earth. Ella's nodding vigorously. They really. They were drunk on it. Right. Because there's a lot of things happening. They. They have eradicated a lot of diseases because they now had a good sanitation system in London. So they're seeing improvement in. In health and in life. And diseases that used to ravish a whole town and, you know, kill thousands of people at one fell swoop, were coming under control. So we have that improvement, we have economic improvement, because the Industrial Revolution, for all the naysayers like Thomas Hardy and others saying, hey, you know, pump the brakes, don't get so excited, this isn't so great. The truth is, with the Industrial Revolution, raised the standard of living for a lot of people. So, you know, poverty seems to be going away. We have all these new sciences, quote unquote, like the science of economics. So through science of economics, we're going to no longer have poverty through this new science called political science. We are now going to have world peace. There will be no more war because we've, we've applied the scientific method to politics. We're going to redraw the map and we're going to fix mankind's long standing problem of trying to kill each other. We're going to do it through science. You've got Prince Albert's the Crystal palace, right? Showing, showcasing, literally this is the future. It's technology, it's machine, it's, it's utopia and heaven on Earth through economics and technology. And they really believed it. And then it literally blew up in World War I, like just boom, with the bombs. In, in the worst possible way that optimism explodes. And of course, so some people respond to that with this incredible, incredible despair, but not everybody did. In fact, that strain of optimism continues. So you see a big push toward eugenics mix weirdly enough, right? Or maybe not weirdly enough, apropos, because this is more of that mindset. We are going to, we're going to create this perfect, we're going to perfect mankind through these utopian schemes.

[B]

It's, it's a period in which, and not every government, not most governments really are organized along scientific principles, but almost any new form of political organization which has any chance of gaining popular support will be claiming a mantle of scientific methodology for itself.

[A]

Right?

[B]

And that's, and that's not just true of, you know, extreme forms of fascism or communism, but that's even true for like the more benign sorts of, you know, liberalism and you know, New Deal social democracy or whatever you want to call it.

[A]

I think a good example of that would be to look at the end of World War I. World War I, and look at the League of Nations, right? So this is the League of Nations, which doesn't even exist anymore. But those guys were absolutely convinced through this League of Nations, right? Through, through all of these world leaders are going to get together and you know, we're going to just talk rationally about our disagreements that we are no longer going to have war, we're going to have lasting world peace. They couldn't even last 20 years before another war broke out, right? But so in between wars you have this insane optimism and we're going to get into the specifics of that when we talk about what actually Aldous Huxley is satirizing. But the important part is to understand that satire is the correct literary response to an age of great optimism. And this is a long standing tradition. So you go Back to, like, one of the. One of the original satires, Gulliver's Travels. It's the same thing. Jonathan Swift is writing in a time of just incomprehensible optimism. People genuinely believe that mankind is perfectable. Through science, through education, we can make a perfect human being. We can. We can have, you know, heaven on earth. And so Jonathan Swift's response to that is to make fun of that and to say, you're wrong. You know, I'm going to poke at this optimism bubble you're in, I would say.

[B]

Would you say that satire also can only really thrive in societies that have attained a certain degree of material prosperity and wealth?

[A]

Well, so that certainly feeds into the optimism. Yeah, it's hard to be optimistic when your people are starving to death.

[B]

Yeah. So I was thinking, yes, Swift and. Swift and Huxley have that. I mean, I think. Not Huxley. Swift's influence. I would dare say that it is in Huxley. I think it's even more obvious in Orwell. Go back to him.

[A]

Absolutely. So Gulliver's Travels was George Orwell's favorite book, and he read it every year. And in my early modern lit class where we teach Gulliver's Travels. And actually, if you buy the Gulliver's Travels webinar I did, you'll see it there as well. But you can see the stuff in Gulliver's Travels that ends up in 1984. The Thought Police is in there, right. What's the treason decree? Because we all know treason starts in the heart. Even though you haven't committed treason, you did in your heart. And therefore we're going to go ahead and put you to death. So, you know, thought crime shows up there. A whole. A whole bunch of 1984 shows up there. Really. Book three of Gulliver's Travels is a dystopia. It's a. It's a. It's a city run by literal. Literal technology. Right. They have that pulley system and magnets, and it makes the city float above, and then the city, it comes down, it smashes anybody who tries to rebel against them. So it is. It is a. One of the first dystopian satires. But so satire as a genre, as a form of literature, is going to have some things peculiar to it that are going to be a little bit different from some of the other things. So one of the ways that satire works, and you're going to see that this is what Dorothy Sayers ends up doing in Murder Mis Advertised, is it gives you two Worlds, a normal world, an absurd world. But satire only works if the reader can recognize that the other world is absurd. So what in Murder must advertise, there's the real world contrasted by two absurd worlds, the world of advertising and the world of pleasure. Aldous Huxley is doing the same thing, but he combines the consumerist world and the pleasure world into one world. So that is the absurd world and the normal world is our world.

[C]

Right, except that it's not anymore. So.

[A]

Well, yes, and I was just going to say that. But the, the normal world is supposed to be the world that the reader is bringing to it. Right. So one of the real challenges of Brave New World that I am learning, because I never would have imagined this, but listening to the feedback of our Patreon, I realized that a lot of people read a of lot Brave New World a long time ago and did not realize it was a satire. And I think it is because the, the he is giving satire works by like drawing out these extremes that are obviously absurd. So we can all laugh. Haha, that's so stupid. But also kind of frightening. Like, oh my goodness, maybe this is on the trajectory that we're going and everyone can see, right? It's self evidently obvious no one would want to go to that place. So we need to, you know, pop this optimism bubble, come to our senses and, and stop the track we're going to. The problem is that the insane world that Aldous Huxley imagined, we have blown right past that. We're right past that. So we live in that absurd world. And so now that's causing a whole bunch of confusion for us when we read it. Because I think what's happening is our, our people are reading Brave New World and thinking they don't see the satire, right? They don't see the irony. They really, they think, oh, he's describing the world as it is. And he thinks it's good because in satire the author hides his own view, right? It's disguised in there. The reader's supposed to pick up on it with the, with the heavy irony. But we'll talk about that later when we get more into the book. But that's part of the confusion, I think. Well, it may be the biggest challenge for somebody to read this book is to, you have to understand it's a satire. And about also a lot of jumps.

[B]

In perspective as well, which is totally loved.

[A]

We'll look at that. But just one more thing about this. So about 10 years ago, maybe eight years ago, I was in the audience when Peter KREEFT was giving a talk. Peter Kreeft, the author and public intellectual. And he said this, and it stopped me in my tracks. I could not believe this was true. But of course it has. It's so much worse now. And I get it. But he said he could no longer teach Brave New World to his college students because they didn't see it as a bad world. They couldn't understand why anybody would not want to live there because it sounded great.

[B]

Oh, no, I believe that. I entirely believe that.

[A]

So I'm gonna work under maybe. Maybe.

[B]

That's probably before Tick tock.

[A]

No, it is. It is. With social media, it's way worse. In fact, we'll talk about some of the. Some of the behavior models that Huxley is satirizing and how actually it's the. It's literally he is satirizing the literal science that is used by computer programmers and app companies to get you addicted to your phone. So, like, that's why we're so. But that's why we've blown right past this. We didn't. We don't have to be engineered in a lab. We're doing it to ourselves through our phones. But we'll get to that. But I'm gonna presume that our audience is the kind of audience that even if you think we live in an absurd world, you don't think we should be living in this absurd world. So I think you will be able to see that this is satire and that satire works by taking the things that Aldous Huxley sees, the troubling thing he sees in the world, and he exaggerates them to make a point. So, you know, one other thing.

[C]

G.K. chesterton wrote an article in 1935, so a few years. A couple years after Brave New World was published, where he kind of paints this same outline, saying there's. There was an international idealism that collapsed during the war and then a compromise where it kind of rose up again, and then what he called the Great Slump. But he makes the point of saying that while the war.

[A]

What's the name of that essay?

[C]

It's called the Reign of George V. A summing up. I think it's in the Illustrated London News. It should be free online. I think I found it online. But he. He says that while the war might have destroyed the utopian mood, it only strengthened the tendency to take refuge in the. In technology that gave birth to the utopias in the first place.

[A]

Yes, yes.

[C]

So after the war, it only got worse. And it was that rising of the technological utopia that Aldous is satirizing, and.

[A]

That'S only gotten worse. We believe in our bones that the solution to tech problems is tech solutions. Like, if you're addicted to your phone, get an app to help you not be addicted to your phone. That's not going to fix it.

[B]

It's also really the first. Well. Well, not the first period, but a major period in which, I mean, cities are being rebuilt to accommodate new technologies. Because the 1920s, 1930s, this is, you know, the first time when an ordinary family can own a Model T. And with all these new Model Ts on the road, you have to, you know, expand the roadways. You have to design cities around roads rather than roads around cities. So, yeah, I mean, the. The very. The very way in which cities are engineered and planned is being changed to accommodate all of this, you know, progressive, mechanistic growth.

[A]

Yeah. And so you also. The 1920s is one of my favorite time periods to study because it is. It is the birth of where we find ourselves now. And it happened very, very fast, and it was extremely disorienting. And that was why we. For the first time, we have a generation gap between parents and children, which has only gotten worse with the rise of technology. And it was the car culture, it was the telephone, and it was the teen culture. So consumers are deliberately. Consumers, advertisers. It's also the birth of modern advertising. So advertisers are for the first time targeting teenagers as a special separate group from their parents to buy things, and they sell it to them by, of course, you know, teen culture. So this is the first time that teens are dressing different from their parents, listening to different music, reading different books.

[B]

The microphone. The microphone or the car.

[A]

The different.

[B]

The symbolic, you know, device of the age. But, yeah, either could be, I suppose.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Actually, Adolf Hitler a decade later said that without the invention of the microphone, he and Mussolini probably would never have been able to seize power in the way that they did.

[A]

That's true. I mean, as silly as it sounds to us, people at the time were really concerned about the radio, that it was destroying our attention span. It was pervasive. It was everywhere. You couldn't escape it. People are listening to records on instead of playing music for themselves.

[C]

But it was this period that made such a big difference between the type of war that took place in World War I and the type of war that took place in World War II.

[A]

Exactly. Because the rise of technology. So let's talk about the things that Aldous Huxley was seeing with those great powers of observation that he had and noticing and satirizing. I've got a list here and I'll just kind of go through some of the things that I've noticed he's satirizing. And then you guys jump in with your other things. So the first One is that H.G. wells in 1923 comes out with a book called Men Like Gods. And it was a utopian novel. Extremely optimistic, because H.G. wells is a true believer. And we talked about this before in our series on C.S. lewis's out of the Silent Planet, because it's a very similar thing. Same time period. Lewis is responding to H.G. wells's view of science and technology and utopia. But this is a very over the top book that we are going to be able to truly make heaven on Earth. We are on the cusp of it. And Aldous Huxley said when he started reading it, he didn't even finish the book before he knew he was going to write a parody of the book. That this book needed to be satirized, that H.G. wells was completely wrong, that we are not on our way through technology to heaven on Earth, we are on our way to hell. And he's like, I've got to write a response to this. And he said as he started writing it, though, he quickly realized that the imaginative capabilities of writing a negative utopia, which is what a dystopia is, it excited him so much that he kind of expanded. And so wasn't just writing a response to H.G. wells, but was writing response to, like everything he saw. But that book ends up being a big influence and we'll talk about that as we go, because there's a lot of one to one parallels between that book and this book.

[B]

I myself, if I could interject, I really enjoy H.G. wells as a creative writer, but he was exactly the sort of person who, if he were living in our day and age, would almost be eager for death so that his consciousness could be uploaded to the cloud or something like that.

[A]

The first guy. Yeah, yeah. There was a doctrine at that time called Wellesley in progress. So from his name, and this is the doctrine that man can live by technology alone. And a hundred years later, the tech giants still believe this. The rest of us are like, no, our technology might actually be killing us. You know, people like Cal Newport, the Georgetown professor, his entire career is about how this technology is killing us. It's making us dumber, it's making us less human. But, you know, we have not yet gotten over our optimism that tech is going to create Heaven on earth. And every new tech advance is going to make our lives better somehow.

[B]

And all of this, I mean, we've already indicated how this technological growth is. You can't discuss it without discussing also these things, this parallel growth of the new dictatorships, whether in Russia or Italy or Germany. And often the, you know, the. The tech geniuses are the guys who are most supportive of the new illiberal forms of, you know, state organization. So Marconi, for instance, the great inventor of the radio, was a committed fascist, amongst other things. And, yeah, you could. You could point to other examples like that as well.

[C]

Men Like Gods also, as a novel, it's kind of. It operates on the idea that the great flaw in humanity is this inherent combativeness. Every man wants to fight with every other man, and that at some point, humanity cracks the code and replaces that combativeness with what he called creative service, so that they were always only improving each other and themselves, and then they could live happily ever after. And the whole thing is kind of like. Yeah, well, I guess like a computer code of sorts.

[A]

Yeah, that's the. That's the great collectivist dream, right? Like behind all of the communist regimes is the idea that we are learning how to live as brothers. You know, it's. It's. So we serve one another, but it just never, ever works like that. But that all comes through this. Everyone belongs to everyone else.

[C]

And I think. I think in Men Like Gods also, they. The way that they deal with living together without a hierarchy is that they each take turns. And the example is that one man might be playing music and engaging in the arts, and the other might be out working in the field. But then, like, every half day, they'll switch so that they can both do it. And Aldous, satirization of that is just to have people bred into the hierarchy already because.

[A]

But we did see that wonderful scene of two guys just getting along so well about sharing a girl. I mean, what could go wrong there? Just. It was so good. All right, Another. Another big influence and big thing he's. He's pushing against is we are starting to see the rise of behaviorism. So in particular, we've got the experiments by the great Russian behaviorist Pavlog, from which we get Pavlov's dog. So the idea that we can, through instinct and impulse, we can change behavior, right? So his famous experiments of you feed the dog and ring a bell, right? And so if you keep doing that, eventually you can ring the bell and not feed the dog, and the dog will salivate because you have trained him to associate the bell with this impulse, with what's getting fed. But he had an American disciple named John Watson.

[C]

Not to be confused with the sidekick of Sherlock Holmes.

[A]

No, right, right, right. One's good and one's bad, but he's the American disciple, and he sort of takes Pavlov's ideas and run with it. And he. He says you can apply what Pavlov does to humans, because how's this for a terrifying quote? Man is a human machine. Man is a human machine. We think this now, don't we? We think. We think people are computers. We are. Gosh, listen to any podcast episode we've done where we've talked about education, and we definitely think that. Input in, input out, output out. Right. So man is a human machine. And the experiments in chapter two of Brave New World are almost identical to John Watson's.

[C]

Reading about Watson's experiments was honestly horrifying.

[A]

Oh, tell us about that. He had.

[C]

He ran a series of experiments with young children, seeing how quickly they could respond to loud noises, because that seemed to be the stimulus that upset them the most quickly. So he would.

[A]

Well, that's in the book. That's in Japan.

[C]

Some favorite toy of theirs around them and over time would train them to expect that every time they would touch it, there would be some kind of horrendously loud noise. I think he said he had an empty steel pipe and a metal hammer and would hold it behind their head and bang it the minute that they would touch this. This object of theirs. And it's so funny, he has this note at the end of one of his experiments where he's like. Due to the child being too upset, we had to take a break for a week so that he could regulate before we tried again.

[B]

I sometimes wonder, like, how does someone like that acquire these children? Like, their parents were somehow convinced that, you know, this is a good of science. This is part of the march of science.

[A]

Exactly, exactly. There's actually gonna. I forgot to say this earlier, but the character Dr. Wells, that is H.G. wells. And it's a little bit of an inside joke because H.G. wells famously does not have a PhD and had a. Like a bit of an inferior.

[B]

No, you're right.

[A]

Yeah. And H.G. wells hated brave New World, by the way, and said that Aldous Huxley was a treason to science, a traitor to science. And I have a quote later on when we get to the end from about what HD well said about that. But they were lifelong friends. But, you know, on the other side of this. Yeah, it's interesting too because that is a, that is the same attack that was on CS Lewis was out of the silent planet, people saying he was anti science and he's like, I'm not anti science.

[C]

So, you know, I, I actually also have a couple of quotes from his 30 year anniversary interview on Brave New World also where he makes that clear in H.T.

[B]

Wells.

[A]

Come back to that. Yeah.

[B]

W. Somerset Maugham, in a Reminisce, a volume of his reminiscences. He, he knew H.G. wells, you know, as part of the London literary scene. And he observed of him that people who disagreed with him, he classified either as stupid or as perversely obstructionist. Because my theories of how society ought to be reorganized are manifestly true. And anyone who would disagree with or criticize them must be either an idiot or, you know, some kind of somehow corrupt.

[A]

All right, so two more big, big influences that I've kind of been building up because we're going to see that Huxley is actually going to combine all of these things. And the other, of course the next one is, is Henry Ford and in particular Henry Ford's autobiography. And Huxley, like a lot of people, was initially very impressed with Henry Ford because how can you not be right? He's a self made man, he's. Mr. I went out there and I did it and I had an idea and you know, I made it. You know, Henry Ford is almost inseparable from what it is to be an American. Right. Nobody gave me anything and I went out there and I did it and I'm innovative and I in charge and I'm, I made my own business. But very quickly Aldous Huxley started to see there's a lot of problems here. So let's talk, because I've got a bunch of quotes here. But first let's just talk about like Mr. Makes. Why don't you tell us about the, the thing about Henry Ford is not just that he invented a car, it's that he invented a process. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

So how to maximize industrial output. Henry Ford is one of the, one of the great, both theorizers and practitioners there. So conveyor belt processes, almost, almost every major modern industry, I dare say, owes something to him. His influence is not just on the automotive industry, but many others as well.

[A]

Right. And the idea is how can we as quickly and cheaply mass produce things?

[B]

Actually, I mean even this is a really grim example, but even the, the German death camps during the Holocaust were deliberately organized on 40 in Principles of so and so many bodies brought in on so and so many trains per hour, you know, and gassed and then, you know, incinerated. And that was. It was. It was a 40 in process. Conveyor belt methods of genocide.

[A]

And Huxley in Brave New World rightly perceives that you can apply this to human beings. And so we see human beings being mass produced in this book. So mass production, but mass production in particular for maximum economic output, which is very, very different from a single craftsman making something from beginning to ending. Right? Very different. And of course there's a lot of interesting, you know, current thought on that we need to move away from the mass production model. There's interesting articles and books about like what does it do to a worker who only ever just tightens a bolt on the assembly line versus somebody who can see things from beginning to ending. I remember reading this Might even been like in the Wall Street Journal. This was a while back. But it was about the psychological and I would even say spiritual effect it has on a person if they can never see the finished product of what they're working on. Right. You're just a cog in a machine. You're not, you know, you're not crafting something and that. I mean, this goes way, way back. This goes back to like Thomas Hardy. This goes back to like the Luddites being upset about the spinning Ginny. Right. Rather than spinning by hand because they saw that human beings were going to lose something essential if they give it, if they. If they outsource what they do to machines. And it's so hard to talk about this stuff. I mean, I almost just want to cry because I'm like, oh, we're so much worse than that. Everything they feared has come true and.

[C]

More and afford actually actually made ended up using kind of the cheapness of their vehicles because of mass production to their advantage in advertising. There's actually, I think in the song in chapter three when he says Flor Ford is in his fliver in the. In the quote. So fliver was the derogatory term for a bottle tea. It was. It meant simply a failure, like a flubber, a mistake. And they called them that because they were so cheaply made that they would, well, fall apart. And there was a. It actually started because there was a famously a truck carrying nitroglycerin and a Model T crashed into it and the nitroglycerin was fine, but the Model T fell apart and they used it for advertising and said, well, thank goodness it was a fliver. And it. That kind of, like, started the campaign, but the name stuck.

[A]

So that is amazing. And you know that.

[B]

Famously. Sorry, go ahead.

[A]

Well, I was going to say, it makes me think of how right now the things that are manufactured have a planned obsolescence. You know, everyone complains about how your 1970s refrigerator will never die, but the one you bought last year will last seven months and it'll go kaput. Because that's a dis. That's a feature now, because they want you to constantly be buying something new, right?

[B]

And Ford's. I mean, famously. Probably a lot of people will know this already, but for a long time, the Model T was only available in the color black. That's right, because it's more efficient if you don't have to, you know, manufacture so and so many in different colors. And it was. I think they even made a campaign ad out of that. You can have any color Ford you want as long as it's black.

[A]

All right. So connected to that, of course, is Ford's view of the past. And this is also a big part of Brave New World. So in a 1916 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Henry Ford famously said, history is bunk. Elsewhere, he says, history is tradition. We don't want tradition. We live in the present. Right? It's like, oh, I want to punch him in the face. In his autobiography, we wrote, and it often happens that a man can think better if he is not hampered by the knowledge of the past. The past learning of mankind cannot be allowed to hinder our future learning. So, in other words, Henry Ford is a big proponent of the idea that the past is an obstacle to progress.

[C]

Not the parent of the present at all.

[A]

Not at all.

[C]

Because we don't need parents, do we?

[A]

Well, yeah, that'll be the next influence we come to. But this is part of the reason that you're going to see that the society presented in Brave New World is in a permanent present state. Right? They have no past. There's no. I mean, there's nothing to connect them to a past. And they don't have any future either. They just live in this present, which, oh, my gosh, is so much like we are now.

[B]

Not too many, but one feature that both Orwell's and Huxley's dystopias have in common is a complete absence of any knowledge about real history. It's been. You know, people have been successfully brainwashed or conditioned just to have no interest in that. And even if they did, no means of obtaining that information.

[A]

Right.

[C]

I mean, rewriting history is the first step to Control of the world.

[A]

That's right. And of course, you know, we're living with that now. We live in an incredibly historically ignorant age, and it's part of what makes people feel so disconnected. But they don't see any value. Why would I learn about a bunch of dead guys? What does that tell me about now? It's not entertaining. It doesn't help me. They don't see any value in it. But I should stop and say this just in case somebody's been listening to this podcast a long time and saying, man, Angelina is doing a lot of connecting the stuff in this book to this, to life now. And isn't that the opposite of how she says we should read? So let me go ahead and address that. Satire is trying to work differently than other types of literature. Satire has the intention of poking at things that the author sees in the world and deliberately has the intention of trying to get the reader to see the world they live in right now with new eyes. The satire is very, very closely connected to the cautionary tale. Right. This is. This is why they typically have kind of depressing endings. And people say, oh, I don't like those dystopian novels. They're so depressing. And I think.

[C]

But you.

[A]

But you want the. You want the utopian scheme to work. You want the author to show that it doesn't work, because it'd be far more depressing if the utopian scheme worked. So it is connected to the cautionary tale. Look. Look at what will happen. It's like a big thought experiment. Let's take these things that I see in the culture right now that are very troubling, and let me blow it up real big for you and show you where we're going. And hopefully you're going to see it's a nightmare world, and you're going to not want to go there. So that doesn't mean that satire does not have a transcendent realm. It does. It has a connection to that. But satire is much more concerned with making a point.

[C]

It doesn't exist in a vacuum, but only in reference to the thing it's satirizing.

[A]

Exactly. Exactly. So for this kind of book, it is very appropriate. The book is. Is asking us to make those connections to the world also one.

[B]

And obviously, we haven't even gotten into the story itself. But something I really admire about this book, in a second read. I did not remember it being funny, honestly.

[A]

Me too.

[B]

I did not. It's been so long. I did not remember it being funny. But it's Actually kind of a lightly carried narrative. And it's a witty book. It almost has this kind of. I mean, it's not a Jane Austen esque book, but it almost has that kind of depth, that kind of lightness.

[A]

That kind of light ironiness.

[B]

Because like, one problem I have with a lot of dystopian writing, from Orwell to Margaret Atwood, even writers who are smart people, is there's a kind of heaviness about it. Like this kind of, please take me seriously, I have an urgent message here kind of quality. I think that's a temptation of dystopian writers. I think Huxley mostly avoids it.

[C]

Well, actually, interestingly, this book was his brain break writing project. He had something do, he had to write something. It was about time for him to write another full length novel he just done. He just released a lot of poetry in a series of essays. And in his own words, he was just having a little bit of fun pulling the leg of Mr. H.G. wells and then he got too caught up in it.

[A]

That's fantastic. You know what? I was much more impressed on this read with the writing. The chapter three is brilliant with the three alternating scenes. Brilliant.

[B]

Yeah. Like that almost kind of telegraphic style there.

[A]

Yes. It allows the narrator to not have to be heavy handed. It was the juxtaposition of the conversations which creates the feeling of horror and, and, And.

[C]

Yeah, but also that you were being inoculated with the ideas.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

You almost feel like at a point, like you're on a merry go round, which is surrounded with strobe lights or something like that.

[A]

So, like it was hypnotized me. Yeah.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Like the writing, which of course is what the whole Brave New World does. And we're not going to talk about the title today, but it's coming. It's. Oh, Ella's face. It's coming. It's coming. We have to wait a little bit further to understand why it's called Brave New World, but we'll get there.

[B]

You mentioned the quality of the writing. And a contemporary of Huxley's whose opinion counts, W. Somerset Maugham, said that he thought Huxley was the greatest English essayist since William Hazlett. He didn't care as much for his novels, but he thought he was one of the great prose stylists of the time and a master essayist. And I think that's. I think that's certainly true. His essays, whether he's writing, he wrote about nonsense poetry and water music and travels in the Far east and like just all sorts of, you know, not closely related to each other's subjects. And he always did so with a kind of deft touch that's also authoritative and you feel that he knows his subject. So I really recommend Huxley the, the Essayist as well as Huxley the Novelist.

[A]

I have never read that. You've been reading it though, Ellie. You've been reading his essays.

[B]

Yeah, on the margin, Music at Night and several volumes of essays. I know.

[A]

All right, so obviously Henry Ford is mentioned all in the book, right? But the other big name that is mentioned because R. Ford, who obviously has become the God of this, this, this, this utopia, is interchangeably known as our Freud. So for some undiscernable reason, undiscernible reason, our Freud. All right, so Sigmund Freud, another huge name from the 1920s. Huxley read him and was never, never enamored with him. Good boy, Aldous. So Freud, in a nutshell, if we can put him on the therapist couch, looks at the Victorians and says their problem is they're so repressed. This is because we have these desires and we're repressing them. That is causing our neuroses. And so we need to overcome that. So there's gonna be a number of key Freudian principles that Huxley is again exaggerating for satirical effect. One, let's talk about the fact that. All right, let's talk about Freud's book, the Pleasure Principle. This is, this is a big, you know, a big angry fist at the Victorians who are, you know, very sexually conservative. The Pleasure Principle is in a whole book about how human beings need to be able to pursue sexual pleasure and sexual freedom. And all of the things that stand in the way of that are bad because if we repress our urges, that is going to turn into neuroses, what we would now call mental illness, but what he called neuroses, a number of those neuroses. The names of them will be important once we get further into the book.

[B]

So I'll save it for that one side note there. In fairness to Freudi, he wasn't like, just so we're not being misleading, he wasn't a modern day progressive and he didn't think that all forms of sexual liberation were necessarily healthy. In fact, some he would have defined as diseases or neurosis themselves. But, but, you know, continue with that thought.

[A]

No, no, you're right, you're right. So he's a big proponent of immediate gratification. And we can see the way that Huxley combines that with the consumer age Right. The consumer impulse. We need to buy everything. And when Mustafa Mound has that question with that boy in chapter three, you know, have you ever had to wait for something? Yes, yes. One time I had to wait four weeks for a girl I wanted. And he said, how did you feel? Is it horrible? It's like. Exactly. You know, we never want to have to feel the pain of delayed gratification. So immediate gratification. Obviously, as the chapter three points out, Freud perceived Christianity as something that is standing in the way of us being able to achieve the pleasure principle. Right. Christianity wants us to repress ourselves and suppress ourselves, and that's bad. So that stands in the way of full sexual freedom. And the other big thing that he thought stood in the way was the family. Of course, we see in Brave New World this. They have gotten rid of the family. So the family isn't. Is an inhibition here. It's something that's going to keep you from being able to, you know, I won't even use a euphemism, just achieve full sexual freedom. And so this entire society is based on the pleasure principle. That line in chapter three where he says, there's no leisure from pleasure. Oh, that is so good. It's just they are pursuing pleasure all the time. All the time, all the time. Of course, you know, that also, that's also our society. And we actually find it exhausting and we find it more and more difficult to find pleasure because we are in pleasure overload. Right. It's all feasting. It's no fasting. It's all Easter Sunday, but it's no Good Friday.

[C]

We.

[A]

We're just not made for that way. Another thing is that Freud blamed everything, all the neuroses on childhood trauma. So that's why there's all that stuff in Brave New World about. Well, we all. Can you imagine a mother doting over its baby? How horrible. And they're like.

[C]

But ironically, not only are they trying to avoid the neuroses by avoiding the family, they're also using the neuroses to their advantage by training everyone from, you know, before birth to be right.

[A]

Yeah, they're giving them a. They give them their own version of childhood trauma. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. We're going to avoid the. The traumatic conditioning that comes from living.

[C]

In a home and traumatizing us all. Yes.

[B]

Sexualize these children from a very, very young age.

[A]

So that's an also Freudian thing. Again, you know, we can. And again, I don't think, as you said, to be fair to Freud, I don't think Freud would have nodded along with all the ways that that has been interpreted now. But you can see where it has led. Right. It's not uncommon for kindergartners to be given what they call sex education, but with. Not too long ago, would have been called criminal acts on children, and you would have, you know, been arrested, which.

[C]

I think this is one area where Huxley is often accused of reacting against Victorian moral slaves.

[A]

All right, yeah, let's bring that up. So Freud actually thought children should be encouraged in erotic play. And so Freud puts that into Brave New World. There are critics out there who. And this. I just found this out. And Margaret Atwood, you brought her up. Shame on you, Margaret Atwood. You should know better than this. But she wrote an essay in which she said the most absurd things, and she claimed that Brave New World. Well, first of all, she claimed Aldous Huxley was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. And I'd like to think we, we, we, we.

[C]

She also kind of gave the impression that this was like one of his first works. And he was quite young when he wrote it.

[A]

Yeah, she said he was young. And he's part of the Bloomsbury Group, meaning he's a sexual libertine. Right. And he's a revolution. He's a young revolutionary. That's how. Not an old married man, monogamous and conservative. But that. So she claimed. She claimed that what Huxley is satirizing is the Victorian. That. That he thinks the Victorians are too repressed. And he's satirizing that. But the reality is he's satirizing the man who made the claim that the Victorians are repressed. And that's the problem with everybody.

[B]

As for his politics, and his politics are hard.

[A]

No, no, I don't mean conservative politics. I mean monogamy is sexually conservative versus what the Bloomsbury Group was into. I don't.

[B]

But, no, he wasn't like a Tory cartoon.

[A]

Thank you for clarifying that. When I said conservative, I meant dystopian. Novels by nature are conservative. They, they. They reject a sort of progressive optimism and think that there's more value in tradition and the past. Okay, Ella, go ahead.

[C]

This is from that same article on the summing up of the reign of George V. And he says, after the age of utopias, meaning the widespread idealism, came what we may call the American age. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to. To many to have solved the social riddle and made capitalism the common good. But it was not native to us. It went with a buoyant, not to Say blatant optimism, which is not our negligent or negative optimism, much more than Victorian righteousness or even Victorian self righteousness. That optimism has driven people into pessimism. Brave New World is much more a revolt against utopia than against Victoria.

[A]

Here, here, Chesterton. All right, let's follow up this thought about America.

[C]

Yeah, I think he was. By saying this was not our optimism, he was saying this was not British optimism, this was American optimism.

[A]

Absolutely. So Huxley is British, but he's. The book is clearly America. The Brave New World is clearly America. And one of the things that he was extremely foresighted on was seeing that the way of America was going to be the way of the world. Whichever direction America went, the world was going to go. And for him to see that in the 1920s is extremely remarkable because in World War I, no country even wanted America to join. The France didn't want him to join and would only. They only let him come to France if they would be soldiers under a British command. Like, that's how much international disrespect there was to America. We were not a world power. Nobody thought America is the way things are going to go now. World War II changed that. And of course America ends up becoming a world power because of our technology. So this is another way that Huxley sees the seeds of things and he's like, keep your eye on America.

[C]

That's so much of what happening. What happens in Brave New World is so American that it flopped in the US after it was published.

[B]

Should we mention the fact that he's lived here for much of his. Later, he died in Los Angeles, California in 1963. Yeah, he. He lived for a short time in Taos, New Mexico, and then moved to California, where In the late 50s he was a visiting lecturer at UCSB, where of which our own Dr. Phillips is a graduate, so a University of California at Santa Barbara. He was their first visiting lecturer in literature there. And yeah, he made a home for himself here. He's one the.

[A]

Of.

[B]

Of one of not very many great British authors who is very comfortable in this country. And. Yeah, and he, in an odd way, his life here kind of is a, kind of, is a pre. A preview of some of the kind of hippie drug culture in the 1960s and 70s. And he also.

[A]

Well, he must have thought it's all coming true kind of.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it's. He also was interested in Orientalism in a kind of esoteric way. And he wrote a good deal about Hindu philosophy. So like a lot of the intellectual and cultural fads of the 60s and 70s, he either foresaw or participated in.

[C]

I think he even wrote the introduction and maybe edited a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is a sizeable Czech section from the Indian Mahabharata.

[A]

Yeah. Before we go on though, Mr. Banks, you must tell the story of Huxley's connection to your family.

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Let me plume myself here. Yeah, I wish I could say we were close friends.

[A]

He's the godparent of our books.

[B]

Yeah. So my grandfather met him once. A friend of my grandfather's.

[A]

Your grandparents lived in Santa Barbara?

[B]

Yeah, they were in Santa Barbara, my grandparents. My grandfather was a businessman there and he was a member of the country club. And one the of. Of his fellow club members once brought this kind of eccentric Englishman who wore sunglasses indoors all the time to, you know, hang out there. And my. So yeah, my grandfather met him. I can't say that he knew him well or anything like that. But yeah, he met Aldous Huxley.

[A]

That's amazing. And Aldous Huxley also has a Hollywood connection. But we're going to wait on that until we get Ellis excited. We're going to wait on that until we get a little further into the book when some things come up and we'll, we'll point that out. So the whole, as I said, the whole society is based on the pleasure principle of Freud. And this is one of the things that puts Brave New World in contrast to other dystopias like 1984, because he does not use fear. The society here does not use fear or power or threats to control or to prevent opposition. They use pleasure to control. So that'll be something interesting for us to keep an eye on. So lastly, what he gives to us really is a consumer based society with no higher meaning. You notice there's no spiritual anything. In fact, there's a parody of spirit.

[C]

Which I think is maybe one of the reasons they cut the top off of all the crosses.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Only have the horizontal.

[A]

Exactly. No, exactly right.

[B]

That's a wonderfully deployed symbol.

[A]

Yeah, well, we'll actually is. Honestly, we'll take a look at that because I know Ellis got some good thoughts. Thoughts too, about, about what's going on with the cross of the T over the, of the belly. But, but yes, that's a parody of religion. So I, I love that he made the connection between the T for the model T4. But. But. Because immediately I thought, okay, this is a cross. And then later he explicitly says they cut all the tops of the crosses. So what Ella's getting at is the cross is that picture of the vertical and the horizontal. Right. So you've got the up and down, and then you got a cross, which, you know, we talk about a lot. Northrop Fry shows us that that's how stories work. You've got the horizontal plane and the vertical plane. And we're always looking for that vertical, that spiritual, that transcendent, to kind of break through into that horizontal plane. So if they cut off the top, they have cut off the vertical. They have deliberately. And of course, they said they. It was very deliberate. They deliberately rejected Christianity. They would deliberately reject any kind of transcendent or spirit. And they're only interested in the horizontal. The.

[C]

The.

[A]

The tea, which is so good. So what you see then is a society built around mass consumption and numbing superficial amusements, which are the twin gods of Ford and Freud. All right, I think that that's enough background for us to be able to jump into these first three chapters. There's so much more to come. We will explain much more about satire and parody a little bit later. We got to meet some other characters for. But let's jump in to chapter one, because. So interesting to me that it starts off with a description of birth, but all of the imagery is death.

[C]

It's all winter. It's kind of like stepping into the lion, the witch and the wardrobe.

[A]

Yes. But everything. The light is frozen. It's dead. It's Gru. It's a ghost. Like all the language here. It's white, it's marble, like you're in a tomb. It's death.

[B]

It's a very eerie universe because it's clean, but also sterile.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

The entire world feels like a laboratory, kind of.

[C]

Yeah. I think he says wintriness responds to wintriness.

[B]

And all the people, I mean, all the young men and women are amorous without seeming virile or no romance.

[A]

Right. Yes. Yeah. Without seeing. Fertile. Exactly. Well, they're not. Right. So we see. Right. On the second page, right. They track the years Anno Ford, 632. So in the year of our Ford. And I love how he played on Ford and Lord. So instead of in the year of our Lord, it's the year of our forward. And later he says, your fordship instead of your Lordship. Like, that's so clever. Very, very clever. But they call it in this, the year of our stability. And that. That's a big thing, right, Is they keep saying in these chapters, stability equals happiness. And for them, stability means no Discomfort, Nothing to upset you. You don't think about anything that creates instability.

[C]

You have no break between desire and gratification.

[A]

Right, right. And then we have. Right there on the third page, the DHC says he doesn't know where to begin. So he says, well, if I don't know where to begin, I shall begin at the beginning. And they all write, begin at the beginning. Now, two different things about that one. It's a parody of Genesis, obviously, right in the beginning, but it's also. Oh, Ella wants to say it. Go for it. Go for it. Well, it's also.

[C]

The last scene. One of the last scenes in Alice in Wonderland, the trial of the. The king, when Alice asks, where should I begin? And he says, begin at the beginning.

[A]

Yes, it is a very clear Alice in Wonderland reference. And we will be talking more about Alice in Wonderland and what that has to do with this book later. Because we have to. We can't say everything. The first episode. You guys will be here for 10 hours. All right, so what else? Okay, so we've got human beings being made on an assembly line. Mass production applied to humans.

[C]

They've gone down underground to the assembly line. It all takes place underground because it's in the basement. But the time period, I think. How many days did he say it was like that they were under there? Let me see. I made a note of this. Oh, yeah. 270. 76 days is roughly nine months. So they've just created an artificial pregnancy.

[A]

A parody.

[C]

And it is also just artificial creation, though. Man is still coming up out of the Earth. They're just coming up out of the assembly line in the basement.

[A]

Yes. Yes. Oh, that's so good, Ella. That's so good.

[B]

You also have a very sharply defined caste system. I mean, not just different social classes, but you are assigned to this particular order of. And then conditioned Gammas or Deltas or Alphas. Yeah.

[A]

Conditioned to love your place in the world, which is a parody of the Great Chain of Being.

[C]

It is.

[B]

Oh, yes. Everything has its place, but it's an artificially imposed place.

[A]

Yeah. Just like their artificial Brotherhood. So there's a lot of parodies. Parodies of brotherhood. Parodies of the Great Chain of Being. The right Chain of Being is the medieval. Well, the ancient and then medieval concept that everything has a place in the universe and it's divinely appointed and you should be content with your place. And that sounds misleading. It makes. It makes. It makes it sound like, you know, if you're the low man on the totem pole, you should be Happy about it. That's not exactly what it was was. It's more like, well, rise to your. Well, as Alexander Pope says, like it's. It's like figuring out who you are, what your gifts are, what your callings are.

[C]

And you were completely fulfilled if you were wholly where you were meant to be. So there wouldn't be.

[A]

Right, Right. So what they're doing in the caste system is a parody of that because they're predetermining who the little man on the totem pole is in a lot of ways.

[C]

They've also tried to create a world where men without chests is possible because no one needs a will.

[A]

Yes, right, right. They're all bellies, thus the. The T over the belly. But we'll talk about that more later. So they say that not only have they. Well, it's not just that they've replaced nature because now they can artificially create light. But they say we have improved on it.

[B]

We've streamlined it.

[A]

Yeah, well, he says we've improved on it and how. And the boy says, I don't understand. Why is this better? And he's like, because we can make more.

[C]

So from the stilted world of nature to the world of human invention.

[A]

Exactly. So more, more. Ghost, Ghost, ghosts. We quickly find out this is global, so this is how the whole world is, not just how this country is. More talk about improving on nature. Now, when he gives the example of the horse to explain how they're conditioning, I thought that's got to be a hard times reference.

[B]

Oh, like the gram Niverous quadruped.

[A]

Yeah, because the guy says consider the horse. They considered it mature at six. The elephant. Anyway, I just thought that was probably a hard time reference because pretty sure interesting. No, but when grad Grind says the thing to Cissy Jessup about, you know, what is a horse, that is in the context of that book of the industrial revolution is destroying education. And it's just you no longer understand the natural meaning of something.

[B]

One actually another common feature. Both books begin with a lecture in a classroom of sorts.

[A]

Oh, yes, yes.

[C]

Isn't pod snap. They talk about pod snaps technique. Isn't he a Dickens character too?

[B]

Yes, yes, he is. It's a great name.

[A]

All right. Right at the end of this chapter, I got very excited and we're just going to introduce this idea now, but we're going to explain it more later, okay? Because we got to get a little more of the story under our belts to be able to see what it is that I'm talking about. With some of these things. But a big part of what's going on in satire and parody is the idea that you're put in an upside down world. So I was thinking to myself, okay, where's going to be the upside down language? And of course, the fact that machines are producing human life is pretty upside down. But I thought, let me wait for it. I bet he's going to say it explicitly. And then he did. So we get to the end of that chapter and we find out that the embryos are placed upside down. We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down. They learn to associate Topsy Turvy Tum with well being. In fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing on their heads.

[B]

No, it's, it's seriously, it's seriously a world, you know, arranged and ordered by Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

[A]

No, exactly right. So he's saying, guys, this is how, you know, this is a satire, the narrative. The character's saying, everybody in this world is only happy when they're upside down. They are upside down. We, the reader are supposed to be right side up enough to recognize that's what's going on. This is an upside down world.

[C]

They're also trying to do away with the period of childhood entirely. Find the happy medium between 6 year old adults and 20 year old adults.

[A]

Which weirdly, the Victorian period was an age that was expanding childhood. Right. So it's doing the opposite of that. All right, in chapter two, we start to see the Pavlovians conditioning that we talked about. In particular the Watson experiments. But again, look how the room is described. Pale as death. Pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble. That's. That's a tomb. That's a mausoleum. He's so good. So, yeah, we see the Pavlov experiments applied to children. More upside down language. What man has joined nature is powerless to put asunder.

[B]

And it's, it's not like even intentional blasphemy or anything like that, because as we learn, nobody really remembers what religion is. And they like and they say at one point, and there was this thing called God at one point that people believed in while they were alcoholics. But it's not even like, it's not even as if revealed religion is hated the way it might be in a totalitarian state. It's just, just. It's completely irrelevant and ishielated.

[C]

Well, I think they took Marx's idea of religion as the opiate of the people. And he literally made it an opiate in the form of soma.

[A]

Yes, yes.

[C]

They don't need religion because now they have Soma.

[A]

Exactly. That's exactly right. And we'll talk more about Soma because it's only suggested at the end of chapter three. And we'll see. There'll be a lot more discussion in this book about Soma. So we see that part of what they're conditioned to be, in addition to being happy where they are in the cast, is to be consumers. They're conditioned to be consumers to love nature, but to hate flowers. Right.

[C]

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

[A]

What a lie.

[B]

I put that in my commonplace book.

[A]

Such a good line. You can come place this whole book. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. Honestly, you could see somebody saying, roses.

[B]

And landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect. They are gratuitous. Actually, George Orwell once wrote an essay about growing roses during. During wartime, and he got an angry letter to the editor. It was. It was for some Marxist magazine that he was writing, but one of his readers thought that that was an irrational and a wasteful and a bourgeois hobby, gardening. Like, why would you.

[A]

He should be out there fighting the magic.

[B]

You know, it's. It's a nod to the private life. And that's what we want to abort or.

[C]

Well, of all people, did his duty in the war. I think about shot in the neck for it.

[A]

Indeed. So we also see the idea that parent is a bad word, mother is a bad word. Family, home. These are all things that make these boys blush. And they're blushing literally in front of two children engaging in sex play. And they don't blush over.

[C]

They're blushing because of the word viviparous, which just means capable of giving birth.

[A]

Yes. Right again. We should be thinking, this is upside down. They're upset about the wrong things.

[B]

Yeah. And normal relations to them, whether it's of, you know, lovers or parents and children or whatever, they kind of gross them out and make them feel uncomfortable.

[C]

They were incapable of drawing the line between smut and pure science.

[B]

Yeah. Yes, exactly. So.

[A]

Oh, no. That was so good. That was so good. I'm trying to decide if we have time to talk about the cross of the T on the stomach or if we should wait till next time. What do you think? Because there's a lot that we're going to talk about. The tripartite soul. We're going to have to.

[B]

We can put it off till.

[A]

Let's just. Okay, we're going to come back.

[C]

Bring Freud up again anyway.

[A]

Yes, Freud's going to come back. Up, up. And we'll, we'll talk about why they're making the sign of the cross of the T over their bellies and what's going on with that. All right, Chapter three. Consume. Consume. Consume, Consume. Man, they won't even let you have any simple games. It has to be the most complicated game that's super expensive. Just makes me think of all the, should I say it, the video games where you can buy add on packs.

[C]

And equipment is the name of the game.

[A]

That's right. You. There has to be a way. Apps within app purchases. Right? There has to be a way to keep monetizing.

[C]

Also, they're not, when they're playing Bumble Puppy or whatever it is, they're not playing with each other either. They're just playing with the machine because the ball is just being spit out of the. The machine towards them and they catch it and throw it back.

[A]

And in this scene when the director is, is talking to them about the past, he's. He's also dissing the past. I realize this sounds incredible. The past is incredible.

[B]

There was once a time when women gave birth to live children.

[A]

Okay, but, but the essence here, boy, did Huxley's got his finger on something that very came true is that we see ourselves as the most evolved, the most progressed, and everything behind us is less evolved. Which is such a dangerous position to take because you have to realize that people 100 years from now are going to be thinking that about you, that you're not evolved.

[C]

And it's kind of disconcerting that he's created this garden scene where there's this sunlight and bees and flowers and then it's little children that are rolling around playing these erotic games.

[A]

Right, right, right. And then we get the quote from Ford. History is bunk. Actually read this paragraph. This was so good. So start here and go there.

[B]

All right, so this is Mustafa Mond speaking here. And Mustafa Mond, by the way, the name among the great dictators of the 20th century, one that probably most Western people have forgotten, is Mustafa Kemalp, who was the ruler of Turkey and also as importantly, the modernizer. He attempted to recreate Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire as a secular state and introduced the Latin Alphabet and insisted that the Quran, when it was studied in public school, should be studied in Turkish rather than Arabic. So he affected one of the most a ruthless and also very efficient revolution. And Brought his country into the 20th century. And he was, he was effective enough that he was actually admired by people you might expect, like Adolf Hitler, but also Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. They all saw him as one of the great statesmen of the time. Anyway, so that's where the name comes from.

[A]

And we should probably also say the other names too. Trotsky, Marx, Lenin.

[B]

Oh, yeah, those obviously. So, yeah, there's nods to the Russian Revolution as well.

[C]

Monde, though, also is just the French word for world.

[B]

World. Yep. So you all remember, said the controller in his strong, deep voice. You all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of our fords. History is bunk. History, he repeated slowly, is bunk. He waved his hand and it was as though with an invisible feather whisk. He had brushed away a little dust. And the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees, some spider webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Knossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk. And where was Odysseus? Where was Job? Where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk. And those specks of antique dirt called Athens, Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom all were gone. Whisk. The place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk. The cathedrals. Whisk. Whisk. King Lear and the thoughts of Pascal. Whisk. Passion. Whisk. Requiem. Whisk. Symphony. Whisk. Dot, dot, dot.

[A]

So good, so good. And he. So we got a little Shakespeare reference here. And he actually ments in Shakespeare again in this chapter as something they got rid of. We'll come back to that later in the book about why that's important, but he's laying the groundwork there and then in the alternating scenes. This is just so good, right? He, he, he's dissing the family in the home, immediately switched to. What they live in now is same sex dormitories. And.

[C]

And weirdly, everyone shares last names because they only have so many last names, but no one is related.

[B]

Yes, it reminded me a little bit of, you know, the year 1968, which was, you know, a very, very much a transformative year in our own national culture and politics. And, you know, we had student demonstrations and all that. Also a great year with many of the same things in France. The student riots in France in 1968. One of the main causes was the demonstration of male students at universities demanding admittance to female dormitories. Which seems like the most French thing to write paper, but. Yeah, but they got it, you know, all right.

[A]

We actually covered a Lot of chapter three already in our earlier discussion, but I'll point out a few things. You got to pay attention to the details. So when Lenina gets out of the bath and she's about to spray the talcum powder on herself, she puts the nozzle to her breast as though she meant to commit suicide. Okay? Boom, boom. All the death imagery here. This is not life in this culture. This is death. And then we get an Alice in Wonderland reference. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole. Okay, we'll come back to why that's there. Just note it for now, as I tell my students, just notice it. We have to wait and see what the author is going to do.

[C]

Also, this is like a small note, but Lenina, she sprays herself with perfume. But it's not a specific perfume, it's just a family of scents that exists out there. So like there's no individuality, it's just like.

[A]

Yes, yes, there is. No, it's a yes, exactly. Yeah.

[B]

Which is sandalwood, I believe.

[C]

Yeah, well, I. I thought it was just a citrus base.

[B]

Maybe you're right. I seem to remember sandalwood, but maybe I'm wrong.

[A]

Lots of conversation about how repression is dangerous. That's what, that's what he's talking about when he says, think of a water under pressure in a pipe. Okay, so the idea that if you. If you build up all this repression, it's just going to burst out in this horrible way. So this is, this is all Freud. The machine turns on. Turns on. Must keep turning. Yeah. Okay, so Freud and Ford all over the place. We talked about that already. The no degrade gratification. But we start to see that Bernard is a little bit different. And he's getting upset, and he's getting upset with how they just repeat as true things they have been programmed to say. And he should know because he's one of the programmers.

[B]

And the. The mode of education here, or indoctrination or whatever you want to call it, is mostly done in people's sleep. Yes, it's what a form of hypnotherapy, basically that, you know, slogans and proverbs and things like that are. Are dinned into the heads of sleeping children.

[A]

Such a thing at that time, so.

[B]

That they subliminally accept them.

[A]

Get by records to teach you French and you're supposed to learn it in your sleep.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

You also find out though that they don't actually know anything from this. They can only learn morals because if asked a question based on this training, they can't answer only works for moral education.

[A]

Right, Right. No, that's exactly right. And then we actually get in between these four different conversations going on. It's so good. We find out that they tried and that Christianity resisted. People resisted. They wanted culture. And what happened was a war and economic collapse. That's what happened. And he even says, you know, yes, we. We went and gassed to death the people in the museum. But that didn't work.

[B]

The simple lifers. Yes.

[A]

So that didn't work. It worked better to just condition them with pleasure. Then, of course, we see Big Pharma indicted here. The discoveries of Fitzner. Yeah, that's. This sounds like Pfizer to me.

[B]

You know, that's what I thought of too.

[A]

Yeah, I know.

[C]

Pfizer was founded in New York in 1849, so I think it was.

[A]

You think it is?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Because, I mean, it's clearly talking about birth control.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Those are the companies that put out propaganda against viperous reproduction.

[B]

The birth control device is called a Malthus Belt. And so Thomas Malthus was sort of the father of modern day population studies and was. He was one of those very smart men who was wrong about everything and he believed that the world would be massively overpopulated by the early 1800s. And.

[A]

Yeah, anyway, so should we say that the birth control movement has always been associated with eugenics in its early days? We don't think about the birth of it.

[B]

No, that's true.

[A]

True. It's all part of that. It was all part of the idea.

[B]

That Three Stopes and Margaret Sanger.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

What they wanted was to control the birth of quote, unquote undesirables. So it was all part of utopia.

[B]

Which usually meant members of certain races.

[A]

Yes, exactly. I was trying to be mystic rather than just straight up racist, but yes, yes, the movement in the early 20th century for birth control was. Was always tied with eugenics and having a master race. And again, utopian schemes. And one of the cool things about the next few pages. And again, now it's not even going scene by scene, it's going sentence by sentence through these scenes. It's so good. But he's literally showing us what they've been traded, what they've traded. Right. They're talking about, I'm going to go to the Feelies and then it goes to him saying, we got rid of Shakespeare and there's back Parliament and Parliament and like, this is what you get in exchange. And we are supposed to be able to see. That's a nightmare. That's not an okay, trade. And the fact that people read it now are like, yeah, who cares about Shakespeare? I want to go to the feelies. Just shows that we are in an upside down world. This is a mess.

[C]

It only remained to conquer old age. Old men used to retire to religion and thinking.

[A]

Yes. And then we get the line, no leisure from pleasure. And then the very end of that chapter, the DHC tells the little boy and little girl, go away, go away. He's, he's a busy guy. Don't, don't, don't mess around. His Ford ship. And he says, suffer little children. So that's, you know, Christ imagery right there. He's. He's the Christ person. And that takes us to the end of chapter three. Man, we have gone a long time. But I think that this will give everybody a pretty solid foundation for, for, for if we get in the next few chapters. So anybody have anything else they want to say before we wrap it up about this?

[B]

A question. I don't know if I'll regret this or not, but when they describe a particularly attractive or desirable girl, they call her pneumatic. But pneumatic means puffed up or windy.

[A]

Yeah, I don't know what that means.

[C]

I think it's actually a term for a machine.

[B]

Huh.

[A]

That's what I think, too.

[C]

It's a type of machine. I think it's a way that a machine moves that's very. It's almost like it's moving on air.

[B]

It's a dehumanizing.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Yeah. Even though it's being used as a compliment.

[A]

And she's clearly being used. Oh, yeah.

[B]

I mean, she is. Yeah. And we see that people still have, like, lingering instincts about, you know, being attracted to a particular person. Not just everyone in the room. But at the same time, the society and the sexual mores it imposes try to get people to multiply their partners, as we would say today.

[A]

Right, right. All right, so join us next time. We're going to do chapters four through seven. We'll get deeper into this stuff. We're going to explain more about satire and parody and how they work.

[C]

Work.

[A]

We'll talk about Alice in Wonderland. We'll talk about the tripartite soul, all kinds of things. So join us next time. And remember, this is a fully member supported podcast. So take a look at Our [e-mail] Literary Life & See if you'd like to support it. You can see our webinars and my class, Mr. Banks's class, Ella's [e-mail] and don't forget about our publishing house, Cassiodorus Press. Go check out Dr. Baxter's new book, why Literature Still Matters. We're gonna have some new titles coming out in the press, so stay tuned for that. And until next time, guys, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save not just the brave new world, but the world. Thank you for listening to the Literature Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out if how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[B]

Books and Thoughts by Aldous Huxley Old ghosts that death forgot to ferry across the leafy of the years these are my friends and at their tears I weep, and with their mirth am merry on a high tower Whose battlements give me all heaven At a glance I lie Long summer nights in trance, Drowsed by the murmurs and the scents that rise from earth, While the sky above me merges its peace with my soul's peace. Deep meeting deep, no stir can move me Naught break the quiet of my release in vain the windy sunlight raves at the hush and gloom of polar caves.