"One Cubic Centimetre Cures Ten Gloomy Sentiments"

When I first read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, I had recently read 1984 and I was curious about the drastic differences between Huxley's and Orwell's visions of the future. 1984 focuses on the soul-crushing dangers of totalitarian government. Brave New World takes the future in a different direction, instead focusing on the dangers of science and consumerism. At the heart of this futuristic society is a drug called soma. It is "euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant." In essence, it is the perfect, side effect free drug.

Huxley published Brave New World in 1932. Twenty-two years later, in 1954, he published The Doors of Perception, a work describing his experience with the drug mescaline. I had always wondered what inspired the drastically different approaches to the future taken by Huxley and Orwell. I knew that 1984 was inspired by the political climate in which Orwell lived, but reading The Doors of Perception finally gave me some insight into the creation of Huxley's future. In his tradition of borrowing his titles from other works (Brave New World took its title from Shakespeare's The Tempest), this work's title (which inspired a certain 1960's band) came from a poem by William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

But the book is more than a celebration of drug use. It explores many issues, including mental illness and religion, among other things. And when I read it, aspects of Brave New World made so much more sense. People who are familiar with Brave New World might recall the community sings. These sessions were designed to reinforce class solidarity through the use of soma and orgies. In The Doors of Perception, Huxley discusses the role of peyote (which is essentially mescaline) in Native American religious rituals. His belief was that one of the reasons religion seemed to be falling by the wayside was that most people could not achieve truly transcendental religious experiences. This is partially because modern religion frowns upon the use of intoxicating substances (with the exception of a tolerance of alcohol). As not everyone can realize religious transcendence through ritual, he believed that the creation and use of an intoxicating substance with no ill after affects would bring religion into the present and bring people back to religion.

Now, he wrote this belief after Brave New World. One is led to believe in that book that the boundless use of soma is one of the evils of that future. And yet, years later, Huxley advocated almost exactly the same thing in The Doors of Perception. So, had the actual use of drugs changed his mind, or was the point of the earlier book that the use of soma had gone to far, to the point of swallowing up a healthy life? I would like to believe it was the later, moderation in all things. Yet I cannot help but find it interesting that underneath the hellish reality of his dystopian future, just barely beneath the surface, lies a future he might actually have wished for. Which I suppose underlines the truth: our idealistic views of what life could be tend to be corrupted in the making, unless we are very careful.