Brave New World Revisited

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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. Similarly, in 1944 economist Ludwig von Mises described Brave New World as a satire of utopian predictions of socialism: "Aldous Huxley was even courageous enough to make socialism's dreamed paradise the target of his sardonic irony." [39] Fordism and society [ edit ] Translations of the title often allude to similar expressions used in domestic works of literature: the French edition of the work is entitled Le Meilleur des mondes ( The Best of All Worlds), an allusion to an expression used by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz [12] and satirised in Candide, Ou l'Optimisme by Voltaire (1759). The first Standard Chinese translation, done by novelist Lily Hsueh and Aaron Jen-wang Hsueh in 1974, is entitled "美麗新世界" ( Pinyin: Měilì Xīn Shìjiè, literally " Beautiful New World"). Sharma, Partap (1975). Razdan, C. K. (ed.). Bare breasts and Bare Bottoms: Anatomy of Film Censorship in India. Bombay: Jaico Publishing House. pp.21–22. BNW is a benevolent dictatorship - or at least a benevolent oligarchy, for at its pinnacle there are ten world-controllers. We get to meet its spokesman, the donnish Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western Europe. Mond governs a society where all aspects of an individual's life, from conception and conveyor-belt reproduction onwards, are determined by the state. The individuality of BNW's two billion hatchlings is systematically stifled. A government bureau, the Predestinators, decides a prospective citizen's role in the hierarchy. Children are raised and conditioned by the state bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families. There are only ten thousand surnames. Value has been stripped away from the person as an individual human being; respect belongs only to society as a whole. Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids. This would seduce their allegiance away from the community as a whole by providing a rival focus of affection. The individual's loyalty is owed to the state alone. By getting rid of potential sources of tension and anxiety - and dispelling residual discontents with soma - the World State controls its populace no less than Big Brother.

No, surely not. Underground chemists and pharmaceutical companies alike are likely to synthesise all sorts of "soma" in future. Licitly or otherwise, we're going to explore what it's like; and we'll like it a lot. But to suppose that the happiness of our transhuman descendants will thereby be "false" or shallow is naïve. Post-humans are not going to get drunk and stoned. Their well-being will infuse ideas, modes of introspection, varieties of selfhood, structures of mentalese, and whole new sense modalities that haven't even been dreamt of today. Ira Grushow (October 1962). "Brave New World and The Tempest". College English. 24 (1): 42–45. doi: 10.2307/373846. JSTOR 373846. In later life, Huxley himself modified his antipathy to drug-assisted paradise. Island (1962), Huxley's conception of a real utopia, was modelled on his experiences of mescaline and LSD. But until we get the biological underpinnings of our emotional well-being securely encoded genetically, then psychedelia is mostly off-limits for the purposes of paradise-engineering. Certainly, its intellectual significance cannot be exaggerated; but unfortunately, neither can its ineffable weirdness and the unpredictability of its agents. Thus drugs such as mescaline, and certainly LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of nightmarish bad trips and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA. Uncontrolled eruptions within the psyche must be replaced by the precision-engineering of emotional tone, if nothing else. If rational design is good enough for inorganic robots, then it's good enough for us. Henry Ford, who has become a messianic figure to the World State. "Our Ford" is used in place of "Our Lord", as a credit to popularising the use of the assembly line. Of course, it's easy today to write mood-congruent tomes on how everything could go wrong. This review essay is an exploration of what it might be like if they go right. So it's worth contrasting the attributes of Brave New World with the sorts of biological paradise that may be enjoyed by our ecstatic descendants.Even then, none of the utopians of any caste come across as very happy. This seems all too credible: more-or-less chronic happiness sounds so uninteresting that it's easy to believe it must feel uninteresting too. For sure, the utopians are mostly docile and contented. Yet their emotions have been deliberately blunted and repressed. Life is nice - but somehow a bit flat. In the words of the Resident Controller of Western Europe: "No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy - to preserve you, as far as that is possible, from having emotions at all." 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] 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." Alfred Mond, British industrialist, financier and politician. He is the namesake of Mustapha Mond. [32] Fanny Crowne, Lenina Crowne's friend (they have the same last name because only ten thousand last names are in use in a World State comprising two billion people). Fanny voices the conventional values of her caste and society, particularly the importance of promiscuity: she advises Lenina that she should have more than one man in her life because it is unseemly to concentrate on just one. Fanny then warns Lenina away from a new lover whom she considers undeserving, yet she is ultimately supportive of the young woman's attraction to the savage John.

Typically, we are indignant when we see the callous way in which John the Savage is treated, or when we witness the revulsion provoked in the Director by the sight of John's ageing mother - the companion whom he had long ago abandoned for dead after an ill-fated trip to the Reservation. Above and beyond such nasty incidents, all sorts of sour undercurrents are endemic to the society as a whole. Bernard is chronically discontented, even "melancholy". The Alpha misfits in Iceland are condemned to a bleak exile. Feely-author Helmholtz Watson is frustrated by a sense that he is capable of greater things than authoring repetitive propaganda. The Director of Hatcheries is humiliated by the understandably aggrieved Bernard. Boastful Bernard is himself reduced to tears of despair when the Savage refuses to be paraded in front of assorted dignitaries and the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury. Lesser problems and unpleasantnesses are commonplace. And appallingly, the utopians come to gawp at John in his hermit's exile and watch his suffering for fun. Huxley deftly coaxes us into siding with John the Savage as he defends the right to suffer illness, pain, and fear against the arguments of the indulgent Controller. The Savage claims the right to be unhappy. We sympathise. Intuitively but obscurely, he shouldn't have to suffer enforced bliss. We may claim, like the Savage, "the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind". Yet the argument against chemical enslavement cuts both ways. The point today - and at any other time, surely - is that we should have the right not to be unhappy. And above all, when suffering becomes truly optional, we shouldn't force our toxic legacy wetware on others. Even though we find the nature of BNW-issue "soma" as elusive as its Vedic ancestor, we think we can imagine, more-or-less, what taking "soma" might be like; and judge accordingly. Within limits, plain "uppers" and "downers" are intelligible to us in their effects, though even here our semantic competence is debatable - right now, it's hard to imagine what terms like "torture" and "ecstasy" really denote. When talking about drugs with (in one sense) more far-reaching effects, however, it's easy to lapse into gibbering nonsense. If one has never taken a particular drug, then one's conception of its distinctive nature derives from analogy with familiar agents, or from its behavioural effects on other people, not on the particular effects its use typically exerts on the texture of consciousness. One may be confident that other people are using the term in the same way only in virtue of their physiological similarity to oneself, not through any set of operationally defined criteria. Thus until one has tried a drug, it's hard to understand what one is praising or condemning.

If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle—the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?" [43] First UK edition