‘Words Without Reason’: State Power and the Moral Life in Brave New World

Abstract

The two meanings of the word ‘utopia’ are so well known that they hardly require much commentary. But it is worth bearing in mind that because these meanings are intertwined the concept of utopia is always, in all its iterations, an unstable one. For on the one hand it denotes an ideal, a belief in perfectibility and thus a drive towards its realization, while on the other hand it secretes within itself a recognition that it posits an unattainable state: the optimistic hope for a flawless world is inseparable from the sharp sense that this is at best a problematic counterfactual and at worst a stark impossibility, a ‘nowhere’ that can exist solely in the minds of visionaries and fantasists. That inveterate theorizer H.G. Wells, whose Men Like Gods (1923) Huxley’s Brave New World set out to parody, touched on this tension between the plausible and the unattainable in his earlier A Modern Utopia (1905): ‘Our deliberate intention is to be not, indeed, impossible, but most distinctly impracticable, by every scale that reaches only between to-day and to-morrow’ (MU 11–12). Utopian speculations are entangled with potentially dystopian consequences. The dream of an irreproachable life all too often is overtaken by the dread reality of an accursed existence. ‘The mind is its own place’, Milton warns us, ‘and in itself | Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’¹