Brave New World Revisited

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A passage in Crome Yellow contains a brief pre-figuring of Brave New World, showing that Huxley had such a future in mind already in 1921. Mr. Scogan, one of the earlier book's characters, describes an "impersonal generation" of the future that will "take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world." Popé, a native of Malpais. Although he reinforces the behaviour that causes hatred for Linda in Malpais by sleeping with her and bringing her mescal, he still holds the traditional beliefs of his tribe. In his early years John attempted to kill him, but Popé brushed off his attempt and sent him fleeing. He gave Linda a copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare. (Historically, Popé or Po'pay was a Tewa religious leader who led the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 against Spanish colonial rule.) Russell, Robert (1999). Zamiatin's We. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. p.13. ISBN 978-1-85399-393-0. Banned Books". Classiclit.about.com. 2 November 2009. Archived from the original on 2 October 2010 . Retrieved 1 June 2010. Soma doesn't merely stupefy. At face value, the happiness it offers is amoral; it's "hedonistic" in the baser sense. Soma-fuelled highs aren't a function of the well-being of others. A synthetic high doesn't force you to be happy for a reason: unlike people, a good drug will never let you down. True, soma-consumption doesn't actively promote anti-social behaviour. Yet the drug is all about instant personal gratification.

Huxley implies that by abolishing nastiness and mental pain, the brave new worlders have got rid of the most profound and sublime experiences that life can offer as well. Most notably, brave new worlders have sacrificed a mysterious deeper happiness which is implied, but not stated, to be pharmacologically inaccessible to the utopians. The metaphysical basis of this presumption is obscure. Huxley, Aldous (1932). Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers. p.252. ISBN 978-0-06-085052-4.

A n t h r o p o c e n t r i c

According to American Library Association, Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged in the United States due to insensitivity, offensive language, nudity, racism, conflict with a religious viewpoint, and being sexually explicit. [45] It landed on the list of the top ten most challenged books in 2010 (3) and 2011 (7). [45] The book also secured a spot on the association's list of the top one hundred challenged books for 1990-1999 (54), [6] 2000-2009 (36), [7] and 2010-2019 (26). [8] Lawrence biographer Frances Wilson writes that "the entire novel is saturated in Lawrence" and cites "Lawrence's New Mexico" in particular. Wilson, Frances (2021). Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 404-405. John Henry Newman, 19th century Catholic theologian and educator, believed university education the critical element in advancing post-industrial Western civilization. Mustapha Mond and The Savage discuss a passage from one of Newman's books. Forgotten Actors: Charlotte Lawrence". Forgottenactors.blogspot.ca. 4 December 2012 . Retrieved 11 August 2016. Bernard Marx, a sleep-learning specialist at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. Although Bernard is an Alpha-Plus (the upper class of the society), he is a misfit. He is unusually short for an Alpha; an alleged accident with alcohol in Bernard's blood-surrogate before his decanting has left him slightly stunted. Unlike his fellow utopians, Bernard is often angry, resentful, and jealous. At times, he is also cowardly and hypocritical. His conditioning is clearly incomplete. He does not enjoy communal sports, solidarity services, or promiscuous sex. He does not particularly enjoy soma. Bernard is in love with Lenina and does not like her sleeping with other men, even though "everyone belongs to everyone else". Bernard's triumphant return to utopian civilisation with John the Savage from the Reservation precipitates the downfall of the Director, who had been planning to exile him. Bernard's triumph is short-lived; he is ultimately banished to an island for his non-conformist behaviour.

We Don’t Want to be Happy”, in: The New Leader (11 March 1932), reprinted in: Donald Watt, Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage (1975), pp. 210–13. Thus BNW doesn't, and isn't intended by its author to, evoke just how wonderful our lives could be if the human genome were intelligently rewritten. In the era of post-genomic medicine, our DNA is likely to be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long bliss, awesome peak experiences, and a spectrum of outrageously good designer-drugs. Nor does Huxley's comparatively sympathetic account of the life of the Savage on the Reservation convey just how nasty the old regime of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. If you think it does, then you enjoy an enviably sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. For it's all sugar-coated pseudo-realism.Perhaps the Controllers fear historical awareness would stir dissatisfaction with the "utopian" present. Yet this is itself revealing. For Brave New World is not an exciting place to live in. It is a sterile, productivist utopia geared to the consumption of mass-produced goods: "Ending is better than mending". Society is shaped by a single all-embracing political ideology. The motto of the world state is "Community, Identity, Stability." Livni, Ephrat (19 December 2018). "A woman first wrote the prescient ideas Huxley and Orwell made famous". Quartz . Retrieved 28 October 2020. The novel opens in the World State city of London in AF (After Ford) 632 (AD 2540 in the Gregorian calendar), where citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programmes into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labour. Lenina Crowne, a hatchery worker, is popular and sexually desirable, but Bernard Marx, a psychologist, is not. He is shorter in stature than the average member of his high caste, which gives him an inferiority complex. His work with sleep-learning allows him to understand, and disapprove of, his society's methods of keeping its citizens peaceful, which includes their constant consumption of a soothing, happiness-producing drug called "soma". Courting disaster, Bernard is vocal and arrogant about his criticisms, and his boss contemplates exiling him to Iceland because of his nonconformity. His only friend is Helmholtz Watson, a gifted writer who finds it difficult to use his talents creatively in their pain-free society. Huxley, however, has an altogether different agenda in mind. He is seeking to warn us against scientific utopianism. He succeeds all too well. Although we tend to see other people, not least the notional brave new worlders, as the hapless victims of propaganda and disinformation, we may find it is we ourselves who have been the manipulated dupes. Not really; or only on the most malaise-sodden conception of what it means to be human. Media stereotypes of today's crude psychopharmacy are not a reliable guide to the next few million years. It is sometimes supposed that all psychoactive drug-taking must inherently be egotistical. This egotism is exemplified in the contemporary world by the effects of power-drugs such as cocaine and the amphetamines, or by the warm cocoon of emotional self-sufficiency acutely afforded by opium and its more potent analogues and derivatives. Yet drugs - not least the empathogens such as Ecstasy - and genetic engineering can in principle be customised to let us be nicer; to reinforce our idealised codes of conduct. The complex pro-social role of oxytocin, the “trust hormone”, the "civilising neurotransmitter" serotonin and its multiple receptor sub-types, is hugely instructive - if still poorly understood. If we genetically re-regulate their function, we can make ourselves kinder as well as happier.