Word: huxleyism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Brave New World Revisited, by Aldous Huxley. One of the 20th century's brightest gloomologers decides that fact has already caught up with his 1932 horror fiction, what with subliminal commercials, wholesale tranquilization, and the threat of much too well-bred man crowding himself off his own planet...
Psycho Somo-Tic. Huxley is prepared to concede that 2 billion may be company on earth, but that three will be a crowd. With the air of the fourth wise man, he says that "on the first Christmas Day" there were only 250 million. It took all the time since then until the Pilgrim Fathers to double the figure. When he was writing Brave New World, in 1931, world population stood at just under 2 billion. Today, "only 27 years later, there are 2,800,000,000 of us." People keep breeding, as it were, behind Huxley's back...
Unfortunately, there are passages when Huxley becomes as blurred as a soma drunkard. There must be a good drug, he argues-something to make man happy and yet not bad, and he has hopes for an amino-alcohol called Deaner, which "sounds almost too good to be true" (no hangover; one just feels lovely...
Prophylactic for the East. Always a compulsive shoplifter of ideas and religious systems, Huxley wants mankind to find the ideas and beliefs most useful for a good and happy life, but forgets that men do not necessarily believe what is useful. Huxley's plan, apart from his perfect pill, seems to involve cooperative communities, birth control and freedom. Sound as some of this may be, the depraved old world is unlikely to heed. And the thought of aging (64) Aldous-an intellectual well past average breeding age-proffering a prophylactic to the teeming East is downright funny. Reactionaries will...
...Huxley's revisitation nevertheless is a fascinating intellectual exercise for those who like to think about the shape of things that have or might come. And sometimes Huxley still sounds like the brave young worldling who wrote Crome Yellow. Most original Huxleyism is a suggested law on the lines of habeas corpus, which would be a habeas mentem for the human race. Roughly translated it would mean the right for all to say: keep your dirty hands off my mind...