Huxley’s vision of the future begins with a tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, in the year of stability a.f. But could it be that our insistence on seeing Huxley’s book as an exceedingly successful prophecy actually prevents us from recognizing its real insight? Is there a way for us to understand the book free of the great distorting influence of our own times? It is easy to imagine that we see the shadows of our society in Huxley’s vision of the future. We live in a time of biotechnological leaps forward that have made the term “Brave New World” almost a reflex for commentators worried we are rushing headlong toward a sterilized post-human society, engineered to joyless joy. Huxley’s most famous novel, Brave New World, was published in 1932, and the occasion of this seventy-fifth anniversary should lead us to wonder about his peculiar description of how we understand the future. For if prophecy is an expression of our contemporary fears and wishes, so too, to a very great extent, is history.” And not our notions of the future only: our notions of the past as well. “Our notions of the future have something of that significance which Freud attributes to our dreams. The future is the present projected,” said Aldous Huxley.
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