Brave New World by Aldous Huxle, Essay Example

While creating his “Brave new world” Huxley was depicting a society where as a result of scientific progress humans and their desires are predetermined by pre-birth programming: humans are born into casts, while their desires are strictly controlled and those, which can not be satisfied, are eliminated before individual’s birth. As a result on the material level everyone is happy; however, this world is a world of inhuman clones, a world, where there is no such a phenomenon as a personality. People are equal, society is stable, possible strong emotions do not exist, Shakespeare is forbidden, electroshock develops hatred towards books and flowers.

As Huxley himself wrote, “Brave New World” has become a polemical response to the proposed by Wells model of the ideal “scientific” society, its tragedy and rebellion against it. The book is not against scientific progress in itself but against the affects this progress can have on human personality. In comparison with other anti-utopian works, Huxley’s novel features material well-being of the world, not false wealth, like that of Orwell in “1984”, where the mental suffering of a man is closely connected with his welfare, but indeed the absolute abundance, which ultimately leads to degradation of the individual. Human beings and their personality, identity and self awareness, are the main objects of Huxley’s analysis. “Brave New World”, more than any other work of this genre, is relevant precisely because of this focus on the human soul. In the world of assembly lines and blunt mechanical physiology, free, natural people are an exotic entertainment for the crowd of programmed human machines.

“Stability,” said the Controller, “stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.”(Huxley, chapter 3) . Hence the main goal is to regulate all forms of individual life so that thoughts, actions and feelings are identical, as any breach of identity leads to instability and threatens the whole society. All human desires are predetermined in advance: those that society can meet are met, and the unrealistic ones are removed even before the birth through the appropriate genetic modification.

One of the unshakable foundations of the dystopian “brave new world” is the complete subordination of truth to specific utilitarian needs of society. What is incompatible with common happiness must be controlled. Everyone is equal, but separated from one another by belonging to castes. Before being born, people are divided into higher and lower castes by chemical manipulation with their fetuses. Number of categories in the “Brave New World” is very large – Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and so on alphabetically till the Epsilon. It is noteworthy that unlike in “1984” where lower caste is just illiterate people, the epsilons in the “Brave New World” are specially created as mentally handicapped for dirty and routine jobs. Hence the higher castes consciously refuse any contact with the inferior ones. On the other hand, Supreme Controllers simply can not enter into the category of “happy babies”, as they understand the underlying system.

However, in their servitude the ¨happy babies¨ are as well far from being equal. If the “brave new world” can not provide everyone with equal work, the “harmony” between a man and the society is achieved through deliberate destruction of all intellectual and emotional potentials of a man which will not be needed in his activities.

Huxley speaks of the future devoid of consciousness as something taken for granted, and the society of the “Brand New World” emerged at the will of the majority. This is the most paradoxical part of the novel. There is no way out of the situation, as the society not only accepts it, but truly believes this is the only option possible, and moreover, the best option possible. “Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” – “I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.” (Huxley, chapter 6).

As a contrast to the majority, to everybody, there are some individuals who oppose general programmed happiness, like two Alpha-Pluses Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson. Through these characters the struggle of two counterforces – the one implementing the anti-utopian world and the one neglecting it is shown. “I’d rather be myself. Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly”, says Bernard Marx. (Huxley, chapter 6).

Or like the Savage, who has discovered “time, death and God”:
– We prefer to do things comfortably, – said the Controller.
– But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
– In fact,- said Mustapha Mond, – you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.
– All right then,- said the Savage defiantly, -I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.

(Huxley, chapter 17).

The Savage tries to disrupt the distribution of state drug, Soma. This rebellion can not even have an effect: to eliminate its consequences, it is enough just to disperse the drug from a helicopter again and to play an anti rebellion synthetic speech on the radio.

The desire for self-awareness and free moral choice in this “brave new world” can not become “an epidemic” – it’s only the exceptions who are able to see beyond the limits, but they are isolated from the happy people, sent to the islands, specially designed for the enlightened intellectuals, like Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson. Or, even worse, when their freedom ideas are nothing more than a mocking, they kill themselves from despair, as the Savage did. His death is welcomed by inhabitants of the “brave new world” as they are craving unusual spectacle. Thus, it is not the rulers and controllers who push him to death but the ordinary inhabitants, who are happy in this world, and, therefore, this world, once built, is condemned to stability and prosperity.

In his novel Huxley underlines the values of humanity, individuality and uniqueness of each person. Foreseeing scientific and technological progress as a way to eliminate individual differences in tastes, habits on the individual level and culture, language and traditions on national and international levels, the author warns us about our possible future, the society in which our children will grow up. Huxley once said that a utopian or anti-utopian book, as a book about the future, has value only if its predictions are likely to come true. “Brave New World” was published in 1932. Do we nowadays, more than seventy years later, with all the technologies Huxley could not even have imagined, see the tendencies described as real? As threatening? Is the society depicted not a slightly exaggerated description of ourselves today with television, facebook and multinational companies dictating us what our desires are? Seems like it, no matter how shameful it is.

Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Online edition. http://www.huxley.net/bnw/