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224 C O N C L U S I O N Brave New World Revisited—Again The public discussion and debate surrounding evolutionary psychology—and, more generally, the return of human nature—has only just begun. But wherever and whenever such discussions take place—in the mass media, in popularscience books, in the academy, at scholarly and governmental conferences— the fundamental issues addressed are strikingly similar to those that have always commanded our attention. Surely, the more things change, the more they remain the same. But the context in which these issues are addressed does change to fit the particular culture or society that is having the discussion. Ours is a world in which—and certainly the United States is a nation in which—the concerns of liberty and equality set the stage for a good deal of public discourse. In these concluding remarks, I want to venture some final opinions and raise some last questions about the impact that the return of human nature may have on twenty-first-century public discourse. I should hasten to add that the remarks that follow are extremely (perhaps wildly) speculative. Yet if there is to be wild speculation in a book, one supposes that it is best placed in the conclusion. Let me begin by addressing what may appear to be a curious lacuna in this book. Many readers will doubtless have noticed that nowhere in the preceding pages have I dropped the phrase ‘‘brave new world.’’ This was deliberate. In discussions of evolutionary psychology with colleagues and students I have found that inevitably one of my interlocutors will raise the concern that modern science and evolutionary psychology are propelling us headlong toward that dreaded ‘‘brave new world.’’ Unfortunately, I have also found that the specter of that ‘‘brave new world’’ often clouds rather than clarifies the important issues under discussion.∞ Brave New World was, of course, Aldous Huxley’s most famous work. Brave New World Revisited—Again 225 Published in 1932, the novel tells the story of a dystopian future in which humans are genetically engineered to fit within one of five rigidly defined castes, and in which order is maintained by constant social conditioning and chemical ‘‘persuasion’’ that renders the overwhelming majority of individuals quite happy and thus agreeably disposed, but completely unable to realize that they are not free. A large part of Huxley’s message was that this ‘‘brave new world’’ will be a dehumanizing place precisely because the struggle—the agon—has been eliminated from life. In Huxley’s dystopian future, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness find their perverted culmination in material consumption without purpose, freedom without responsibility, and the pursuit of mindless pleasures that involve nothing higher than that which is lowest in all of us. Huxley intended Brave New World as a prophecy and a warning. Twentysix years after that warning, he sought to clarify and intensify his message in a short series of nonfiction articles that were collected under the title Brave New World Revisited—a work that functions as something of an ‘‘apology’’ for the earlier novel.≤ Huxley begins Brave New World Revisited with the confession that he is, in 1958, even less optimistic about the prospects for humankind than he was when he wrote the novel. Although he calls for more ‘‘education for freedom,’’ he seems not altogether sanguine that such education can prove successful at this late hour. He predicts that for the foreseeable future ours will continue to be a world composed of ‘‘millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.’’≥ Today we have enough historical distance to judge the message presented in Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. In general, what strikes me about Huxley’s overall vision is its remarkable staying power. Such cannot be said of other dystopian visions that were about in the early and mid–twentieth century. Indeed, Huxley himself contrasts Brave New World with that other famous twentieth-century dystopian novel—George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour . The contrast is instructive. Orwell’s novel is usually read as a dystopia of the political ‘‘right,’’ in which totalitarian control is achieved through the terror of the police state. Huxley’s novel is usually read as a dystopia of the political ‘‘left,’’ in which another type of totalitarian control is achieved through what one might call the distractions of the pleasure state. I...

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