Brave New Worlds

During the decades after World War II, two powerfully disturbing novels captured the imagination of those of us who were apprehensive about the human future: George Orwell's ''Nineteen Eighty-four'' and Aldous Huxley's ''Brave New World.'' The former, generalizing from Soviet despotism, depicted human life flattened under the boot of a worldwide tyranny rendered invincible by means of the insights of mass psychology and consummate techniques of surveillance and intimidation. The latter, generalizing from the modern scientific project, depicted human life degraded under the gentle hand of a compassionate humanitarianism that was rendered competent by genetic manipulation, psychopharmacology, hypnopaedia and high-tech amusements. Now that both 1984 and the Soviet Union have come and gone, everyone can see that Huxley's dystopian utopia was always the more profound. It goes with, rather than against, the human grain -- indeed, is animated by modernity's most humane and progressive aspirations. And Huxley knew that it is generally harder to recognize and combat those evils that are inextricably linked to successful attainment of partial goods. The much-pursued elimination of disease, a