Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in his astonishing 1931 novel Brave New World continues to intrigue me. Huxley’s world is one in which Western civilization has been maintained through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, where people are genetically designed to be useful to the ruling class. The Controller has a meeting with John, the Savage, in the climactic confrontation of the book. John laments that the world has paid a high price for happiness by giving up art and science. The Controller adds religion to this list and says, “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.” The Controller, in Huxley’s 1931 voice, is stating the essence of Postmodernism. Postmodernism, which emerged after 1990, is inherently suspicious of modernity and its fervent commitment to epistemology and science. Postmodernism celebrates subjectivity ­not unlike the early 19th century transcendentalists­ but without the focused metaphysical edge of eccentric believers like Emerson and Thoreau. No, Postmodernism is a post-Jean Paul Sartre movement that can no longer cozy up to any cosmology and is caught in the throes of human subjectivity. As one critic explains, “For Huxley, it is plain, there is no need to travel into the future to find the brave new world; it already exists, only too palpably, in the American Joy City, where the declaration of dependence begins and ends with the single-minded pursuit of happiness.” The Postmodern pursuit of happiness has a decidedly selfish edge and wouldn’t be recognized by the Founding Fathers. Scholar Peter Bowering concludes: In the World-State man has been enslaved by science, or as the hypnopaedic platitude puts it, “Science is everything.” But, while everything owes its origin to science, science itself has been paradoxically relegated to the limbo of the past along with culture, religion, and every other worthwhile object of human endeavor. It is ironic that science, which has given the stablest equilibrium in history, should itself be regarded as a potential menace, and that all scientific progress should have been frozen since the establishment of the World-State. And so it goes . . .

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