A Book Written in the Past about the Future

               The closing years of the twentieth century, leading on to the millennium one, threatened us with absurd annihilation wrought by a computer click — the Y2K. These were anxious years. They were also the years of my youth and maturing. I lapped up books like Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World, Utopia, Eyeless in Gaza, and also read with interest and horror, Plato’s bland suggestions, made centuries back in his Republic to create perfect people through selection and eugenics. Nineteen eighty-four came and went…. Years passed… I partied on New Year’s Eve in 1999 — the Millennium was reached without any more fireworks than those I saw go off on Goa’s beaches where we ushered it in. But the anxiety remained — not overtly — but lurking… a shadow at the corner of my mind… this anxiety about where we were heading.

               I first read Brave New World thirty years back — I was in college then, and full of the optimism of youth. I am still optimistic… about the future of humanity. I read the book again recently. At my first reading, I remember, I had been more absorbed with the fate of the individual characters, Lenina, Bernard, Helmholtz … and yes, the Savage — John (although most of them, other than John, had been programmed to be a little less than human, their humanness invariably shone through their conditioned actions and reflexes). But through yesterday’s reading — although I was not completely indifferent to individual destinies — I pondered more on our future, not just of human beings, but of the whole planet. Would we survive, and sanely? And I was troubled in my search for a definition of sanity.

               I have with me, a copy of the book, for which Aldous Huxley had written a new ‘Foreword’ in 1946. He has stated that he had not included in it events like a nuclear bomb explosion, which are quite probable events in AF 632 (After Ford, as the events are dated in the book) or even before, because he was concerned not with the science per se that made these occurrences possible, but with the effect they had on human living. And that was what primarily appealed to me. A description of the setting in which the events occur is given, the necessary scientific jargon and explanations are included, but they are only enough — just enough to create the necessary backdrop for the events, and are not the in-your-face Space Age pseudo-scientific drivel that could bring down the book’s quality to supermen comic book levels.        

               The conditioned inhabitants of the World State are human and recognizable enough, to make us give a second thought to the social fashions that affect the world today — fashions considered ‘civilized’. Some of them like hedonistic lifestyles, over-pre-occupation with good looks and sexual performance, condoning sexual promiscuity — “everyone belongs to everyone else”, considering emotional long term attachments and the family as unfashionable (a crime, in 632 AF in the book), and seeing learning and introspection and the desire for space as dangerous, are satirised. While it may provide humour (grim), it made me stop and think about where we are heading, collectively as a race, and as individuals. Let’s not forget that all this was written more than seventy-five years back; it is still relevant today, as a book of the future. And in some of the instances mentioned, the future is already upon us. (Cloning, the genome theory, instant communication through the internet are all developments that happened years after the book was written.)  

               The other delightful aspect of the book (for me) are the references to Shakespeare, and Shakespearean quotes by the Savage, taken out from a decadent past to describe the present events of the era after Ford. (Shakespeare has a line or two about every conceivable thought and emotion…). These lines from Shakespeare intersect, and weave through the latter half of the story in an interesting pattern from future to past, past to future. And while doing so, they give us two different perspectives, the perspective of a poet — that of human emotion, and the other of a ‘scientific’ dedication to the continuity of the human race in the most ‘rational’ manner.

                And while weaving his story, without his having explicitly stated it, Huxley makes me ponder on what makes us humans, human. And I realise that it is the desire, the need to strive for something; it is a certain incompleteness in us that makes us human. When they have everything, like the inhabitants of the World State do, they lose their humanness. But neither do they attain Godhead. They remain suspended in absurd limbo. Like children without parents. Which they, in fact, are. The book makes us think… But again, only if we wish to...

               Because we may prefer not to ‘think’, and may want to read it just as a good work of fiction. And we can do that too. If it is an entertaining story we are looking for, without other trappings, it is possible to read the book in that fashion. Just as I had read it thirty years back — a gripping story, totally fiction, with sufficient grounding in present reality to hold my interest.

               So whichever way we wish to see the book — as something that nudges us to ponder deeply on the future of mankind, or as a good story that keeps us entertained on a monsoony afternoon, while we sip our tea and chomp on hot pakoras — that’s entirely up to us. This is a book for all age groups, and for all kinds of minds.