This society has no knowledge of its past and hence, one is meant to assume, no aspirations for any kind of future growth. History, and indeed all old things, are forbidden. Traditional religion has been abolished and replaced by "Community Sings". Sexual jealousy is kept to a minimum through strong community norms of promiscuity and discouragement of monogamy ("everyone belongs to everyone else"). Diseases are largely a thing of the past, and people maintain a youthful appearance and vitality until they expire in "Galloping Senility Wards". The underlying judgment here seems to be that nearly everyone, given the opportunity, will take bread and circuses and like it. Strong passions and solitude are discouraged, while harmless distractions like elaborate sports, "the feelies" (described as basically classy pornography with added tactile stimulation), or casual sex keep people too busy to think. Differences in social standing are hard-wired from ( in vitro) conception to (heavily medicated) death, with ample conditioning in between to make everyone content with their lot. The overarching principle behind the book's changes to human society are all done in the name of stability and tranquility. Judgments About Human Nature and Social Organization Given that Brave New World is more of a fable than hard sci-fi, a creditable job of extrapolation overall. In a foreword found in some editions published after WWII, Huxley castigates himself for not anticipating nuclear fission and its consequences, and I'm content to accept his mea culpa. His failure to anticipate genetic engineering beyond selective breeding and embryo manipulation is forgivable, given that in 1932 it wasn't yet nailed down that DNA is the medium of heredity. His description of using fetal alcohol exposure to deliberately create cognitive limitations is crude but not implausible. He was in the vanguard of Western interest in hallucinogens. Huxley was bullish on mind-control techniques like hypnopaedia and operant conditioning to make and keep people docile. Hence, we have a futuristic society (with literal flying cars and rocket planes) that still uses human elevator operators. Certainly, they wouldn't have appeared to Aldous Huxley, a man educated in the humanities, likely to be of importance. For example, lots of progress had recently been made in automation of the big-machines-in-factories type (hence all the references to Henry Ford), but computers, to the extent they existed at all, were big, clunky, and not at all in the public consciousness. We couldn't have much of a plot without some sort of conflict now, could we? Predictions About Technologyīrave New World was published in 1932, and we need to take that into account when reading it in 2021. Everyone is tremendously happy with the situation, because they've been conditioned to be so. Further control is achieved through endless repetitions of mantras during sleep, as well as copious, promiscuous (heterosexual) sex and liberal doses of soma, a sort of combined antidepressant/hallucinogen/tranquilizer. Higher-caste individuals ("Alphas" and "Betas") are one-of-a-kind, but members of society's lower orders ("Gammas", "Deltas", and "Epsilon semi-morons") are created as masses of clones and shaped with growth hormones and poisons to have just the right size, temperament, and intellectual ability for their lives of drudgery.
Families are no more embryos are incubated in vitro, decanted en masse, and conditioned chemically and psychologically to fill just the niche they were created to occupy.
The world is under a unified government that prioritizes stability and tranquility. The story takes place in the Year of Our Ford 632 (which by my calculations should correspond to 2495 CE) in London and surroundings, with a brief sojourn to New Mexico.
This isn't a formal book review, and I won't deliberately spoil the plot, but I will be discussing the implicit predictions and judgments about human nature, society, and technology, and I'll need to talk about the world-building to do that properly. Like any worthwhile piece in this genre, some predictions seem prescient (increase in sexual freedom and unproductive distractions), while others seem off the mark, even considering publication date (no significant automation of routine tasks). I recently re-read Aldous Huxley's masterpiece of dystopian fiction Brave New World for the first time in at least a decade.
0 kommentar(er)
