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Interesting article in last month's Commentary, "How Highbrows Killed Culture":

In 1931, as Huxley was composing Brave New World, he wrote newspaper articles arguing that “we must abandon democracy and allow ourselves to be ruled dictatorially by men who will compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands.” It was Huxley’s view that “dictatorship and scientific propaganda may provide the only means of saving humanity from the misery of anarchy.” Many of the elements in the “brave new world” that contemporary readers find jarring actually appealed to Huxley. The sorting of individuals by type, eugenic breeding, and hierarchic leadership were policies for which he had proselytized. The problem with the world he created is the lack of spiritual insight, spiritual greatness, on the part of its leader.

Most of our teachers probably took Huxley as a good democrat concerned about elitism and the evil effects of technology, but according to this, Huxley was an elitist and an enthusiast for reproductive technology who only wanted the guardians and new technologies to reflect older spiritual values.

I guess you could find a similar ambivalence in Orwell, who was enthusiastic for the "classless society" he saw in wartime Barcelona but repelled by Stalinist dictatorship. Huxley, though, was apparently a far more conflicted character than Orwell. Maybe his book was a success and has lasted because it wasn't simply a tract attacking modernity, but reflected a deep ambivalence about what was going on and what he expected from the future.