Aldous Huxley's Brave New World appeared in 1932.  Everyone at that time was dazzled by the technocratic skills of the Ford Motor Company, able to turn out identical cars by the millions on highly efficient assembly lines.  In Huxley's novel, the calendar counts years A.F. – After Ford – and God's new name is Ford. The zeitgeist was obsessed with control.  Ideologues liked the possibility of more precise social engineering.  Communists in particular were focused on planned societies and central economies, with super-smart experts sitting around a table and deciding what every citizen could do and could not do.  Psychiatrists like Ivan Pavlov wanted to show how drastically you could manipulate cognition and personality. Aldous Huxley devised a single beautiful image for capturing all of these hopes and fears: a hi-tech assembly line where infants were manufactured to specification.  In particular, oxygen...(Read Full Article)