Word: huxleyism
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Reading the Advocate Anthology is like re-reading your freshman Gen Ed papers three years later; it simply embarrasses you. The best work is outrageously derivative; you suffer for Thomas Huxley or H.L. Mencken or Henry Miller or whoever was being imitated. The worst causes real anguish; only Harvard undergraduates could write so much oddly-arranged verse with obscure Latin titles or such dogged, tedious, unknowingly funny short stories...
...wonders if TIME is trying to prove Aldous Huxley right when he said, "In a few years, no doubt, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, good for a period of twelve months, with no law against changing dogs or keeping more than one animal at a time...
There are some who gloomily expect a society run by a small elected elite, presiding over a mindless multitude kept happy by drugs and circuses, much as in Huxley's Brave New World. But most futurists believe that work will still be the only way to gain responsibility and power...
While the play has flickers of wit and moments of poignance, it is less a drama than an exercise in computer programming. Albee has fed into it only such data as will produce the answer that this is the worst of all possible worlds. And just as Aldous Huxley spoke of "murderee" types, Malcolm is a corruptee-he invites corruption. He is dumb, passive and available, and he lacks all strength of purity. The healthy organism rejects disease; the pure spirit resists evil. As for the spectacle of the supine young Adonis having his flesh and heart beaked...
...from a basically land-oriented state of mind, which he can persuasively argue was vestigial feudalism, to a totally disoriented materialism. He celebrates "age segregation," the war and post-war generations' cult of self which, even if it sounds a trifle too much like the emancipation proclamations of Aldous Huxley et al. some 40 years ago is still a real and well observed phenomenon...