Brave New World

Brave New World
A debate always raged between my former roommate Josh and I. He would ask me why I didn’t read Brave New World, given that I liked 1984 so much. And I would counter to him: “How can you not have read 1984 if you like Brave New World?” We were in a Mexican standoff for years, but now I can finally claim the upper hand. A few months ago, I read Brave New World and am therefore the winner of the Josh/Sofie books about failed utopias battle.

First off, I kept thinking about how odd the whole book was. Even odder when you consider that it was published in 1932 and Huxley had no idea of the totalitarianism and insanity that was yet to come. I think there are also a lot of parallels and topics addressed in the book that mirror existence in today’s world or the possibilities that could exist in the world of the future.

A few points:

1. Man’s ability to control science and human life renders the idea of a God unnecessary.
2. There is a parallel between the mindless entertainment generated in the technological age and the drug “soma,” which people take to remove themselves from the world.
3. Social conditioning teaches people how to interact with others. They identify and organize themselves into hierarchies based on the social level they were bred into. Isn’t that also similar to class differences?
4. Not only does genetic engineering in Huxley’s dystopia determine social level, but it even determines the jobs that people do throughout their lives. These jobs and classes never change. Isn’t this relevant to today’s seeming lack of social mobility?
5. People are produced in factories, which was one of the most distressing concepts in the book for me. Being “decanted” out of a jar makes family life obsolete and anything referring to it profane. In this world, there is no loyalty or ties to anyone. Not to families, and not to other people. People become products produced in factories; they are created just like the consumer goods that the state wants them to buy.
6. Babies are trained and socially conditioned from a very early age using hypnopedia, or sleep-learning. The learning gives them all the instructions they will ever need in life, and instills passivity and an aversion to learning on one’s own.
7. The emphasis on collective life makes solitude impossible. Those individuals wishing to be on their own are regarded with contempt, because individualistic behavior is strange, even suspect.
8. The situation that created the Brave New World (BNW) sprung from previous wars. The wars were so bad that people were willing to give up anything: tradition, culture, knowledge, love, family for a peaceful existence.
9. In BNW, permanent happiness is the ultimate goal. Happiness is more important to the citizens of BNW than even ideals like truth and beauty. The reason is that truth and beauty are painful.
10. Everything that is old is useless. BNW is a world without the Bible and a world without Shakespeare. These items eventually surface in a powerful man’s library as reminders of what the world used to be like. Contrary to the lack of intellectualism in BNW, these old books have a character that the new and shallow discourse of the BNW doesn’t have.
11. The eternal question of comparison. What is happiness if you have never known sadness? What is hate if you’ve never known love? These dualities mean that understanding one term is impossible without understanding the other. You always need something to compare something else with. Towards the end of the book, John the Savage laments that nothing costs enough in BNW. For example, to have ideas like truth and beauty, you have to be willing to pay for them with an eventual feeling of pain they might cause. Because these two ideals are averted, it renders happiness meaningless.
12. Youth and old age / live and death. BNW is fixated on superficiality and appearances. For this reason, all people are youthful in appearance until sixty, when they die. When Linda comes to BNW, people are appalled at her signs of age. In reality, I’ve always consider signs of aging to signify that you have lived. Whether one’s life has been full of hardships or success, or love and hate, wrinkles and scars are signs that you’ve survived. This idea would never occur to someone in BNW, because aging is profane even if it’s a part of normal human life. Because family and other relations are non-existent, no one mourns and death is seen as something unimportant.

So as the next decade of the 21st century begins, are we any closer to Huxley’s vision of a Brave New World?

We don’t have the feelies or scent organs, but we have television and internet. In BNW, the feelies are movies that you can feel and scent organs are machines that spew scents. They are both forms of mindless entertainment and distractions, largely meant to keep people from thinking and to keep them together in a large group. Now think about things like Twitter and the idiocy of 140 character Tweets or the entire gestalt of Facebook. Is there a connection there? If that weren’t enough, popular television continues to become more and more infantile. Shows about bad children and their nannies; swapping wives or people living on an island. In my opinion, reality television has been the largest step backwards on the public discourse level I’ve seen in my short life (aside from Sarah Palin’s FaceBook page). Why are people watching “reality” on television when reality is right there in their homes? Why spend so much time watching others’ lives when we all have our own? Because it’s meant as a distraction and not meant to provoke thought. It is the most passive of passive experiences and the general public eats it right up. Besides, television has always been less about content and more about selling consumption. In BNW, consumption is embedded in citizens by the state with clever slogans in their sleep training. To that end, what can we say of our own “conditioning”?

We don’t have soma, but we have over-medicated Americans and their doctors that believe the answer to every problem is solved by a pill.

And books? The statistics, and the internet is loaded with them, speak for themselves. A recent article in the German science magazine GEO speculates the end of the book, at least in the format we know it (more on that later). In BNW, books are old and are banned for that reason. Only technical books about the BNW are available, there is nothing that is aged. Literature is a product of the environment where it was generated, and as such, it is timeless. BNW, through its lack of written history, its populace’s willing ignorance, and its subversion of the most basic of human natures (curiosity), is a cultureless world. Given that there are so many similarities between BNW and our current way of life, I tend to be a bit pessimistic and think that in some ways we are headed in the same direction. Will there be a time when we find ourselves in the same line of thinking as the World Controller when he says, “what is aged is no longer relevant, we have these things now.”?