Aldous Tells it True
Stuck in LA’s clogged freeway traffic for hours last week, I was convinced that the arteries of what Aldous Huxley once called a “super-city” cannot handle any more cars.
Or maybe the planet cannot absorb more people. This summer we’ve seen images showing thousands of desperate refugees streaming into Europe.
Being rather obsessed with Aldous Huxley, I remembered that he once wrote a magazine article making a prediction about population and the future, and I thought I had it squirreled away somewhere in my collection of Huxleyana.
After round-tripping on the clogged freeway that day, I arrived home and dug around until I came up with one of my parents’ old magazines. There it was, with its silver cover: the February 1961 special 50th-anniversary edition of True, The Man’s Magazine.
Aldous Huxley’s essay was one of 13 pieces in the issue, where he shared editorial space with the likes of John Dos Passos, Bruce Catton, Art Buchwald, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Ernest Hemingway and half a dozen other writers whose names still sound familiar those of us who came of age in the 1960s.
Huxley’s piece is called “The Shape of Things in 1986,” and it focuses on his projection of life circumstances a quarter century into the future. Of course, that would be thirty years in the past for us now, so I wanted to see how his predictions had held up over time.
The teaser over the headline of his essay posed this question:
“Will the reader of TRUE’s 50th Anniversary Issue live in a world of perpetual happiness, or one in which the dangers and tensions have grown worse. The renowned author of Brave New World predicts …”
Huxley speculated that the total population of the US would be about 250 million in 1986.
I had trouble finding information for 1986, since the census takes place every 20 years, so I jumped ahead to 2000, when the U.S. population was pegged at 281.5 million. It looks like he was not far off, considering the ten year difference.
He also speculated that Los Angeles alone would have about 20 million inhabitants. He was probably not far off there, either, if you count the many cities in LA County that comprise Greater Los Angeles.
His more futuristic take on the count of the planet at the end of the century, making it year 1999/2000, was an estimated six billion. Here we are in 2015, with an estimated count of 7.2 billion, projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050.
What this amounts to, he wrote, and I doubt anyone would argue is: “The threat posed by rampant population growth is ever increasing pressure of numbers on resources.”
Clearly.
Huxley had a few other predictions, some seemingly channeled from today’s news reports: China possessing an up-to-date armament industry, though we might state it in higher-tech terms today, including space capability.
Regarding Russia, he speculated that what was then a communist country “may well have taken its place in the community of highly developed Western nations…”
How true.
“By 1986,” he also wrote, “men will undoubtedly have landed on the moon and perhaps on Mars.”
Yes again.
He anticipated an efficient and cheap birth control pill (which came about in the mid 1960s), as well as mood changing drugs (enter Prozac in the 1980s, right on cue).
Of the nation’s ten super-cities ranging from New York to Greater Miami to LA, he wondered, “How will the traffic problems of these super-cities be handled?
That was what I wanted to know, sitting amid fumes on the 405 Freeway.
