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By Today there are strong debates and questions about the extraordinary breakthroughs in science such as cloning, in communications through the Internet with its never ending pool of knowledge and the never ending movement to censor it, and the increasing level of immersion in entertainment. People facing the 21st century are trying to determine whether these new realities of life will enhance it and bring life as they know it to a great unprecedented level, or if these new products will contribute and perhaps even cause the destruction of society and life. To many cloning, censoring, and total immersion entertainment are new, but to those who have read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the topics are reminiscent of the horror that is found in Huxley's fictional utopian world where the dehumanizing of man is achieved in the interests of "Community, Identity, Stability," the world state's motto. The novel Brave New World shows that in order for a utopian society to achieve a state of stability, a loss of individuality, and the undoing of Mother Nature must occur. Successfully engineering these conditions produces a world where people are finally living "happily ever after," but at a great cost. The time of Brave New World is in the future on the planet earth and it is, "a pessimistic accounting of the shape a scientifically planned community would take, of its sterility and human emptiness," (Nicholls 300). Ten controllers of the world states determine all aspects of society. Children are born in state hatcheries where according to what social class they will be, they are given or denied certain elements that are critical to proper development. The citizens are happy and content with their simple lives as it is shown in the novel when a character states, "We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability," (Huxley 153). Therein lies the problem. The key ingredient to stability that the novel implies is that individuality must be absent. The government in Brave New World understands that fact and in the worlds of one of the ten controllers of the world states, "[there is] no civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability" (Huxley 28). The need for stability creates a government which, "believes that stability can be achieved if people think and look the same," (Fan 1). Stability, in effect, demands robots, not people. The main element of what makes a person human and unique are the emotions that inhabit their minds, which they can control to some degree. Watts echoes this as he defines man in his biography, Aldous Huxley, "[as] a creature marked by confusion, fear, and deathlessly individual awareness" (79). Emotions are the fuel that drives man to act on a belief or a dream, to become a better person, to grow and learn and to love. Emotions are such a personal, intimate feeling of such overwhelming individual influence it is to no amazement that the government in Brave New World discourages these intense human characteristics. Emotions are thus controlled in Brave New World. Control and stability can best be achieved when everyone is happy. The government does its best to eliminate any painful emotion, which means every deep feeling, every passion, is gone. Huxley shows that the government recognizes the dangers of negative emotions when the controller states, "Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery" (150). Once individuality and emotions have been eliminated in Brave New World, the chain of dehumanization next enters into the field of art and personal expression. Since no one in Brave New World can create or express emotions, individual expression is retarded. The lack of a cultural environment adds to the artistic wasteland and as Watts states "…tragedy does not arise form man's situation; it once arose from the instability of a particular situation-one that in the new society [Brave New World] has been erased" (80). Fan bemoans this loss noting, "Without literature, people will never think and learn…of course they will live in a stable society where nothing will ever change, but people pay the price of creativity and the ability to think" (2). The leaders in Brave New World suggest that "you've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art" (150). The citizens of Brave New World see the purpose of life as just maintenance of well being, not as "some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge" (119) as Huxley writes. Religion, a product of an individual's thinking of creation, is gone. "People," Birnbaum states, "are never taught religion, and are conditioned so they'll never be alone and think about the possibility of God…" (3). The creation of a religion is almost akin to an act of artistic expression, as it requires an enormous amount of emotion and individual belief. With an idea of a higher being and consequently an idea of a more important aspect of life than just remaining stable would be detrimental to the utopian world. Instead of pondering an afterlife, the citizens remain true to their society which is shown when a character states, "Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead," (49). The importance of the individual is zero. Thody states that the people of Brave New World "…are refused any opportunity to plan their own property, change their role, rank or employment in society. Or even live permanently with another person of their choice" (49). In the end, the society has erased the individual and at the same time ceased human growth, even while they themselves think they are expanding humanity. This display of warped perspective is illustrated best by Jerome Meckier in his novel Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure when he writes, "If they cannot insert a square peg into a round hole, it will redefine roundness until a perfect fit results," (182). With all of the controlling of the citizens in Brave New World, a wide variety of means are implemented to control individuality and emotion and to ensure stability. Loss of identity is in large part the result of genetic engineering. Tampering with Mother Nature and the miracle of life ensures that early off in life there are few, if any emotional ties. The people of Brave New World are not born to a mother or father. Instead a single fertilized egg is cloned repeatedly until ninety-six separate embryos are present. From the cloning process the identical embryos are put in tubes and then grow until they are ready to be born. The implications of this engineering are tremendous. Everyone in the Brave New World is essentially parentless and as Thody states, "…the words 'mother' and 'father' have become the ultimate in unmentionable obscenity" (49), as though those words were a link to the past in which society is very different from its current form. With the destruction of the family, the government has single handedly prevented the largest source of human emotion: family love. There are no mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, or grandparents. Everyone seemingly melts into a giant generic mass, all in the name of stability and progress. To further stabilize the society, "sexual freedom is legalized…" (Huxley 33). Free sexual relations are encouraged for all, especially for the young, to discourage any sense of love. With sexual relations starting so early, the citizens can never fully appreciate the act of love and the feelings that go with it. Neil Postman says in his essay Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, "Although everyone can have sexual relationships with just about everyone else, no emotional feelings can be involved" (3). This emotional engineering shows the clever ways in which the reigning government body can sugar coat a loss of basic human feelings. In this Utopia, what would be considered true love for one person in today's world would lead to neurotic passions and the establishment of family life, both of which would interfere with the community and stability. Fan states that, "In Brave New World people embrace their oppression willingly…" (1). This is due to the teaching of the young. Controlling birth and numbing emotion while experimenting with sex at young ages, the new "person" is educated. The teaching the inhabitants of Brave New World receive is more of a method of programming than a process of learning, thinking and discovery. This in turn produces a society that, "adore[s] the technologies that undo their capacities to think," (Postman 1). Every human being in Brave New World is conditioned to fit society's needs, to like the work he will have to do. The government uses hypnopaedia, or sleep teaching, and also shock therapy as the main means of education for they see that, "…the vulnerability of the human mind can be put to some practical purpose," (Thody 50). Huxley shows an example early in Brave New World of the method of education as a Director of a Hatchery explains to a group of students: Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks-already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly liked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissoluble. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder (14). Huxley then reiterates the power of this technique in his essay Brave New World Revisited in which he states, "Children, as might be expected are highly susceptible to propaganda" (67). The government takes advantage of the innocence of children and uses it to further fuel their carefully tweaked machine that they call society. Entertainment in the society is no more than blinds created by the government to hide the cultural and emotional emptiness. Huxley explains this phenomenon in Brave New World Revisited: Non-stop distraction of the most fascinating nature… are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation (45). In addition to the entertainment created by the government, there is a powerful drug called soma. Soma use is encouraged by the government to be consumed by the citizens. The main reason for this is that soma puts the person into a deep numbness, void of all feeling. In the novel, a character that is feeling too emotional takes a dose of soma to rid herself of those odd sensations. Huxley shows that when the citizens were either alone or had a moment of free time, creative forces tended to creep out. This is when it was most opportune to take soma tablets, when the individual is conscience of being an individual. For a book that was published way back in 1932, Brave New World has remarkable meaning in today's world. The sudden appearance of viable ways to clone humans has astonished and frightened millions of people. Is this the beginning of mass production of identical drone humans, even if just for the role of medical use? One can already see the loss of the individual. The incredible wealth of knowledge available on the Internet is astounding. But for all of the valuable information there is an equal amount of disturbing smut or other questionable items. Should one censor this information or allow sex to imbed itself into the young and desensitizes their developing feelings? Already one sees the crumbling of the individual. As entertainment becomes more and more extreme and cutting edge, one wonders if virtual reality will take the audience on a soma-like trip into its deep unconscious? Can a new medium with even more bells and whistles than television waste even more of an individual's time? One can already see the wasting of the individual. The society in Brave New World does have a good side: there is no war or suffering, little disease or social conflict. But for those few highlights, the society pays a very high price. There is no love, family, science, art, religion, and history. Nicolas Berdiaeff best states the final thought on the utopia: Utopias appear to be much easier to realize than one formerly believed. We currently face a question that would otherwise fill us with anguish: How to avoid their becoming definitively real (inside cover Brave New World)? Works Cited (these were available on the author's website) Aldous Huxley links (these were available on the author's website) somaweb home |