O Brave New World

How Aldous Huxley anticipated Governor Kathy Hochul.

Has Kathy Hochul, the Governor of New York, finally caught up with Aldous Huxley? We’ll find out very soon. A bill passed by the New York House and Senate just made it to the governor’s desk. She has ten days to sign it into law. The bill would require proceedings in state family court, child custody cases, and other domestic concerns scrap the words “mother” with the phrase “gestating parent” and “father” with “non-gestating parent.”

This little piece of linguistic insanity is a sop to the pathetic coven of woke sexual exotics who place biology high up on their list of impermissible intrusions into their narcissistic claims of unfettered autonomy. The whole machinery of reproduction, with its tiresome “binaries” and static gender roles, is something they regard with a mixture of resentment and horror.

Huxley predicted some such rebellion in his novel Brave New World. That book might be second-rate fiction—its characters wooden, its narrative overly didactic— but it has turned out to have been first-rate prognostication. Although published nearly a century ago, in 1932, it touches everywhere on twenty-first-century anxieties. Perhaps the aspect of Huxley’s dystopian—what to call it: fable? prophecy? admonition?—that is most frequently adduced is its vision of a society that has perfected what we have come to call genetic engineering.

Among other things, it is a world in which reproduction has been entirely handed over to the experts. The word “parents” no longer describes a loving moral commitment but only an attenuated biological datum. Babies are not born but designed according to exacting specifications and “decanted” at sanitary depots like The Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre with which the book opens. As with all efforts to picture future technology, Huxley’s description of the equipment and procedures employed at the hatchery seems almost charmingly antiquated, like a space ship imagined by Jules Verne.

But Huxley’s portrait of the human toll of human ingenuity is very up-to-date. Until very recently, had not—not quite, not yet—caught up with the situation he describes. We did not—not quite, not yet— inhabit a world in which “mother” and “father” were blasphemous terms from which people have been conditioned to recoil in visceral revulsion.

Are we there yet? Governor Hochul has not indicated whether she will sign this preposterous, reality-denying bill into law. Clearly, she is trying read the tea leaves and calculate the possible political costs of doing so. A spokesman said that “The Governor believes mothers are mothers and fathers are fathers, and no legislation changes that.” It is nice to see that the governor is possessed of a lively appreciation for tautology. Nevertheless, she is nervous. What if someone accuses here of being deficient in progressive woke sentiment? The aide went on—do you catch a hint of anxiety?—to note that the bill “appears to address technical legal issues related to surrogacy and parentage.” Do you suppose that is adequate cover for the rank insanity of calling mothers “gestating persons”? If a mother is a mother regardless of legislation, why not call a mother by her proper name?

To do so, the aide went on the suggest, might be to “deliberately mislead New Yorkers for political gain.” It might also be to utter the frank and unadorned truth. But George Orwell, Huxley’s great fellow-laborer in the vineyard of dystopian prognostication, well understood that if you want to construct a tyranny, language is one one of the first things you should endeavor to subvert because by subverting language you also subvert thought and the pipelines to reality that language lays down.

Stepping back, it is clear that the assault on the word “mother” and “father” are part—if perhaps a partly unconscious part—of a larger to undermine the traditional family. Tearing down that institution is high up on any Marxist’s to-do list. Old Karl declared the abolition of the family a conditio sine qua non for the establishment of his Communist paradise. His heirs have been energetic accomplices in bringing that piece of destruction to fruition. It is not, I think, fortuitous—a Marxist would say “it is no accident”—that even as Governor Hochul agonizes over the question of whether abolishing the words “mother” and “father” would be politically expedient for her staying in power, the New York City Council hosted a performance by transexuals at City Hall to celebrate “Pride Month.”

Calling the woman who gave birth to your “mother” may soon be verboten. Cheering as sexually exotic freaks prance, twerk, and gyrate at an official city government colloquy is not just OK, it is something we must celebrate. “O brave new world, that has such people in’t.”

Brave new world huxley