How would a scientific dictator solve his problems? What would he take in order to iron out those inconvenient differences between individuals, which make the administrator’s task so difficult? How would he manipulate his subjects’ minds and bodies so as to make them love their servitude? What would he do about the embarrassing fact that the ruling oligarchy which controls the domesticated masses must itself remain undomesticated? These were some of the questions asked and, in light-hearted fictional terms, answered by Mr Huxley in Brave New World.
Today, thirty years later, we find him asking a different set of questions. What would be the character of a liberty-loving society dedicated to the proposition that its members ought to be helped, as far as possible, to actualize their desirable potentialities? On the levels of physiology and psychology, of family life and social organization, in relation to reason and the passions, to sex and spirituality, to love and death, to words and immediate experience, what, in such a society, would have to be done? «People», says one of the characters in this Utopian phantasy, «are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower, but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom. Might it not be possible, on this forbidden island, to avoid the cankers, minimise the nippings, and make the individual flowers more beautiful?»