Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) is a book that you probably had to read in high school, when you were too young to appreciate it. The society crafted by technocrats in this novel is in fact what too many high school students (especially boys) would find the perfect world: Sex is abundant, guilt-free, and offered with no strings attached. Work is easy, pleasant, and brief. All anxieties and unhappiness are dulled immediately with a quick dose of happy pills. The price of these happy times is that the state suppresses religion and bans great works of literature, such as the Shakespeare plays that high school students would rather not have to read anyway. What’s not to like?
Of course, as the book makes clear, the down side of organizing society around the greatest number of pleasant moments for the greatest number of people is that no one becomes an adult. No one makes any meaningful sacrifice for any cause at all, much less for another person. So there is no real love, either — not even parental love, since all reproduction is done in labs and children are raised by government experts to be cheerful and well adjusted. Sound familiar? Because Huxley was a masterful literary artist, his depiction of this dystopia is rich and three-dimensional; he doesn’t stint when he shows the painful price of embracing tradition and religion as alternatives to post-modern sub humanism. The outcome is a novel that helps us to understand exactly why so many of our contemporaries are willing to trade their human dignity for a promise of greater contentment, and the book helps grant us the imaginative sympathy required if we hope to guide souls to the straighter, narrower path.