The other time I read this, I think I borrowed it from the school library. I didn’t understand all of it or what inspired it. I knew a bit about Henry Ford, assembly lines and “history is bunk”, but I had no sense that his factory system was seen as so great a rupture. Mass production and assembly lines were the norm as far as I was concerned; I could even see myself as a product of the mass social assembly line of the post-war welfare state – NHS, health visitors, free school milk, child-centred education, libraries, leisure centres, an industrial policy that provided jobs for our bread-winner fathers, etc etc.

Coincidentally, a couple of days ago I came across this in Grand Hotel Abyss, which illuminates where Huxley seems to be coming from:

Fordism’s new industrial revolution changed production, consumption, culture and thereby what it was to be human. At the level of production, by training his workers to specialise in one of the eighty-four discrete steps necessary in the car production, and by deploying motion-study expert Frederick Taylor to make those jobs even more efficient, Ford raised output, enabling him to cut the prices of the finished cars and, crucially, change the relationship between workers and the product of their labour. For philosophers as far back as Spinoza and, in particular, for Karl Marx, humans were productive beings, who were only alive to the extent that they grasped the world outside themselves in the act of expressing their own specific powers. Mass production, through division of labour, increasingly thwarted the possibility of such fulfilment . . .

Assembly lines sped up the production processes but diminished workers: they increasingly became cogs in a machine, or, worse, rendered obsolete by machines. For example, Henry Ford’s car factories included machines that could stamp out parts automatically far faster than mere humans. Humans were becoming unfit for productive purpose, a fact that, for Marxists who deemed humans to be essentially productive beings, might have seemed existentially tragic were such terms part of their theoretical vocabulary. . . . Humans weren’t just becoming machines or being replaced by them, but were becoming desiring machines – their identities defined through their more or less passive consumption of mass-produced goods.

The above encapsulates some elements of the novel: efficiency, intense specialisation (of human types as well as labour), humans “unfit” for reproductive purposes, mass production of embryos by the “Bokanovsky process”, passive consumers (the horror of enjoying anything without purchasing something!) plus a constant state of happiness and absence of negative feelings engineered by early sleep-learning and soma, polyamory, solitude as a social defect . . . the perfect society. In contrast there is the “Savage Reservation” of unengineered humans or far-flung outposts like Iceland where dissidents are sent.

It was interesting to revisit Brave New World – mostly for what it implies about the Zeitgeist of the early part of the twentieth century: fears of totalitarianism, wiping out the creative, messy human spirit, the rise of consumerism, morality, perhaps an upper-class distaste for the democratisation of leisure and pleasure. As for predicting the future: well, looking around after I’d finished the novel, I distinctly felt that we are a long way from the hygienic, homogeneous control of Huxley’s World State. Human messiness looks set to stay.