George Orwell Was Wrong

Aldous Huxley predicted the future.

When I was thirteen, I was obsessed with two books - George Orwell’s 1984 and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged - and I was as insufferable as you would expect. I had this Signet Classics edition of 1984. I considered this cover the pinnacle of “deep” art and plastered it everywhere, including on my school planner and all over my bedroom:

The strange part was that I was extremely girly and also covered my room with pink, butterflies, piles of various Taylor Swift CDs that I cried to in the middle of the night, and battered copies of the Twilight saga. Teenage girls are far more complex than society would have us believe.

I thought George Orwell saw through America’s modern cultural wasteland and predicted the certain rise of totalitarianism. Like many teenagers, I reveled in this enlightened feeling. I was lucky that my parents sent me to a tiny, nonsectarian prep school that was full of similarly artsy and academic kids, because at any other school I would have been a social outcast. I was uncool to be sure, but I had good friends and was never bullied.

Thirteen was also the year when I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I found it interesting but wasn’t especially impressed. Brave New World is a strange and prescient work, but I was too young to appreciate it at the time. Orwell’s lurid descriptions of totalitarian surveillance seemed far more compelling.

As an adult, though, it’s clear that Huxley’s vision of the future was at once far more terrifying and far more subtle than Orwell’s. As an insightful critic wrote contrasting the two works, “[w]hat Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”¹

I believe Orwell’s view of oppression remains foundational for most Western conservatives and liberals. While these groups may have different ideas about which policies constitute oppression, political discourse across the political spectrum magnifies the threat of a totalitarian state. This is why Progressives use the term “fascist” so readily, and why conservatives use “Communism” loosely. The prevailing sentiment is that an all-powerful government animated by the wrong ideas is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.

I once believed this too. Now I understand that it’s not so much totalitarian political control that threatens human liberty, but rather hubris, modern technology, and shallow materialism.

In the first few chapters of his book, Huxley describes a facility in which scientists produce and nourish embryos via artificial surrogates. The embryos are classified on a scale based on intelligence. The lower “castes” of embryos, destined for lives of menial labor, are called epsilons and are exposed to low oxygen levels to reduce their intelligence.² A director of the clinic watches as observing students shudder at the term “mother,” as mothers are effectively abolished by the use of artificial wombs. The students view sexual reproduction as dirty and uncouth, totally opposed to scientific progress. In reminding the students of how human beings were once conceived, the Director states that historically,

“the parents were the father and the mother.” The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys’ eye-avoiding silence. “Mother,” he repeated loudly rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, “These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.”³

Lest you consider Huxley’s predictions extreme, consider this⁴ recent article from the New York Times, in which a ghoulish Silicon Valley founder-slash-mother who founded a reproductive technology company opines “sex is for fun, I.V.F. is for making babies” and claims that it will one day be socially unacceptable for parents not to “screen” their children for disabilities. She was apparently inspired to start her company because her own mother was born with a genetic mutation that caused a disability, apparently not considering that the technology she promotes would have prevented her own mother from being born.

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Those who seek to genetically fine-tune children forget what children are - a gift for parents to nurture, not a commodity for parents to dispose of at will. Further, euphemistic language disguises the intended outcome of these technological pursuits, which are meant to eventually eradicate disabled individuals from the human race, as is already happening with conditions like Down Syndrome in many countries.⁵

Similar outcomes will surely follow if tests are developed to identify mental health disorders, autism, or developmental delays. Is our world really better with no such people in existence? Advocates of advanced reproductive technology would likely say yes, because a lack of disease and disability alleviates human suffering. The truth is that it is our God-given differences - which are a by-product of spontaneous fertility - from which we derive joy.

In Brave New World, The Director of the fertility lab tells his students that “in the vast majority of cases, fertility is merely a nuisance” and reminds students that most citizens are encouraged to undergo voluntary sterilization surgery for the benefit of six months’ salary.”⁶ Under this paradigm, natural fertility is a curse that introduces disorder into life and raises the possibility of inconvenient timing or imperfect children.

This mindset is now widespread. Tactics such as egg freezing and surrogacy allow women to have children far later than biological norms permit, though often at great expense. A woman’s natural biological rhythms, its limits included, are now obstacles to overcome instead of boundaries to recognize. In other words, the female body becomes the problem.

In her piece “The Great Maternal Meddling,”⁷ Emily Hancock reflects on corporate egg-freezing policies, which encourage women to suppress their fertility for as long as possible until they decide on optimal timing for pregnancy, usually well past the best time to conceive naturally. Hancock argues that “[b]y extending the reproductive years beyond what they are meant to be, we further legitimize the temporary sterilization of younger women in favor of careerism over familialism.” Like Huxley’s Director, these companies encourage young people to see biological constraints as a mere nuisance to be constrained as much as possible.

Much of the fertility industry, which promotes technologies like egg freezing, pre-implantation genetic screening, and the “disposal” of embryos, endeavors to make human reproduction as controlled as possible, and to remove the unpredictable human element in the process. But these actions are not without consequences. As Professor Michael Hanby has argued in First Things,

“[I]n seeking to become more than human, we risk becoming less than human. It is essential to modern technology, as the superhuman magnification of human power, that our power should exceed our knowledge or our wisdom. We can do things—to the world, to ourselves, and to our posterity—that we do not know how to think about and cannot ultimately control.”⁸

Hanby is correct that something about our attempts to control reproduction leach us of our humanity: more embryos are destroyed through I.V.F. annually than are terminated via abortions.⁹

Huxley saw how the human impulse to control the unpredictable would leach us of humanity. Yet, like Orwell, Huxley lacked a Christian anthropology that would have helped him understand why the world he imagined was so bleak. The reality of the soul is the inevitable truth that makes reproductive dystopia a tragedy.

Encountering Catholic sexual ethics in my twenties transformed me - and my perspective on both 1984 and Brave New World. The writings of St. Pope John Paul II in particular illuminated why Huxley’s fictional world is so unsettling, and how reproductive technology is a crucial element of that dystopia. In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, he writes:

Prenatal diagnosis, which presents no moral objections if carried out in order to identify the medical treatment which may be needed by the child in the womb, all too often becomes an opportunity for proposing and procuring an abortion. This is eugenic abortion, justified in public opinion on the basis of a mentality-mistakenly held to be consistent with the demands of "therapeutic interventions"-which accepts life only under certain conditions and rejects it when it is affected by any limitation, handicap or illness.¹⁰

This attitude, he wrote, foundational to the so-called “culture of death” that pervades our modern age, in which, as JP II describes,

The values of being are replaced by those of having. The only goal which counts is the pursuit of one's own material well-being. The so-called "quality of life" is interpreted primarily or exclusively as economic efficiency, inordinate consumerism, physical beauty and pleasure, to the neglect of the more profound dimensions-interpersonal, spiritual and religious-of existence.

In such a context suffering, an inescapable burden of human existence but also a factor of possible personal growth, is "censored", rejected as useless, indeed opposed as an evil, always and in every way to be avoided. When it cannot be avoided and the prospect of even some future well-being vanishes, then life appears to have lost all meaning and the temptation grows in man to claim the right to suppress it.¹¹

I have to admit I don’t read much Orwell or Huxley nowadays. Both have their merits, but stories of bleak dystopia hold little meaning for me. Amid the machine age, I find myself longing for simple stories that hum with life, from Anne of Green Gables to Agatha Christie to Wendell Barry. Prescient as Huxley was, I need something uplifting.

1. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985).

2. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Chapter 1.

3. Id. Chapter 2.

4. Anna Louie Sussman, “Should Human Life Be Optimized?” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/01/opinion/ivf-gene-selection-fertility.html.

5. Sarah Zhang, “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” The Atlantic (December 2020), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-last-children-of-down-syndrome/616928/.

6. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Chapter 1.

7. The Great Maternal Meddling

8. Michael Hanby, “Resist the Conception Machine,” First Things, December 1, 2024 (https://firstthings.com/resist-the-conception-machine/).

9. Id.

10. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter, Evangelium Vitae: On the Value and Inviolability of Human Life (Washington: United States Catholic Conference, 1995), para. 14.

11. Id. at 23.