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Aldous HuxleyBrave New World Revisited
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1932A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 11-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Education for Freedom”
To counteract the increasing collectivism and propaganda in modern life, Huxley calls upon us to “educate ourselves and our children for freedom and self-government” (109). This education must focus on true facts and values, including:
- individual freedom, based on the fact of human diversity and genetic uniqueness
- charity and compassion, based on the human need for love
- intelligence, which makes the other values possible
Heredity and the function of genetics is just as important as culture, so we must affirm the importance of individual human beings, not merely their social environment. We must resist the modern tendency to iron out the diversity of human life in favor of uniformity. Education for freedom must be built on a proper understanding of language and its correct use, so that concepts are clearly understood and irrational propaganda rejected.
Chapter 12 Summary: “What Can Be Done?”
In the concluding chapter, Huxley restates the threat to freedom, then makes prescriptions to combat the threat and reform society.
Huxley recalls the importance that individual freedom has always had in our legal system. Yet freedom from physical constraint is not the only kind of freedom. Freedom of the mind is also important, and this is being threatened today. Mental slavery is particularly insidious because its victims have become desensitized and are unaware of their state. In the future, leaders will continue to use the language of liberty and rights, and the old democratic institutions will continue to exist; but the core meaning of these things will have disappeared, to be replaced by a “non-violent totalitarianism” (115).
Since freedom is being attacked from many directions, it will be necessary to defend it on many fronts—demographic, social, political, psychological. In particular, we will need to be alert to the new and unaccustomed forms that totalitarianism will take, such as mind manipulation. Huxley advocates for the following processes: birth control, the conservation of natural resources, the improvement of farming methods to produce more food, the distribution of property to as many people as possible, and the reviving of small communities to encourage more meaningful social interactions.
Reform will be a challenge, since many young people seem indifferent to freedom and appear too accepting of the idea of government control. Everyone who believes that freedom is necessary for human flourishing must fight for it.
Chapters 11-12 Analysis
Having delineated the problems society faces, Huxley in the two concluding chapters presents a call to social action. His call centers on self-education and a renewal of traditions that support individual freedom and self-government. Huxley sees these actions as the only way to combat the collectivism and mind-control that are growing more and more prevalent in the modern world. While asserting this observation, Huxley makes a defense of the worth and dignity of the individual. Modern thought, since Herbert Spencer and other Victorian thinkers, reduces man to his environment. In an extreme form of this opinion, one might say that great actions are not performed by individual human beings but by society. Huxley wishes to reaffirm the importance of individuals and of their actions. Huxley points out that individual human beings affect history, not culture, social environment or “behavior” in the abstract sense.
Similar to George Orwell, a key element in Huxley’s program is education in the proper use of language. Although language has made progress and civilization possible, language is now being used to obscure the truth, as seen in various forms of propaganda. The adherence to proper definitions and usages of words, as well as understanding the difference between abstractions and realities, will allow us to maintain intellectual honesty and to prevent us from being deceived by propaganda.
In the final chapter, Huxley makes specific prescriptions for social reform. He advocates creating new “small country communities” (118) that will foster healthy and authentically human living; alternatively, Huxley suggests humanizing the city by creating the equivalent of small communities within it. Such communities will allow people to meet and cooperate as individuals instead of being subsumed into an anonymous mass where they are defined only by their function. Huxley also advocates decentralizing economic power and distributing property widely, so that individuals will have a sense of autonomy and personal initiative (119). All these measures will rescue society from the “spiritual impoverishment” which now threatens it.
Huxley faults members of the younger generation for apathy and indifference to freedom, an apathy born partly of the affluent postwar economy which has allowed more leisure and entertainment. He insists that vigilance will be necessary to maintain personal liberty in the face of the mechanization and over-organization of modern life. Thus, the final two chapters of Brave New World Revisited offer practical solutions to the problems discussed throughout the rest of the book.
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By Aldous Huxley
