Brave New World

1
Brave New World

• Caste System
• Alpha pluses at the top Epsilon minuses at the
  bottom
• Each caste is bred and conditioned to fulfill
  specific social roles
• World States motto Community, Identity,
  Stability

2

• Lower castes are really sub-human and are bred
  and conditioned to do menial labor.
• Higher castes are bred and conditioned to do the
  thinking work of Brave New World.
• All humans produced non-sexually
• Alphas and Betas are manufactured individually.
• Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are mass produced
  through a kind of cloning known as
  bokanovkification.

3

• Bread and Circuses
• All the people in Brave New World are bred and
  conditioned to be satisfied by fulfilling the the
  social roles they been bred and conditioned for.
• Also, they are bred and conditioned to be
  satisfied by the gratification of their most
  animalistic impulses.

4

• John the Savage
• Bernard Marx takes Lenina (the names are not
  accidental) on a vacation to the Savage
  Reservation in New Mexico.
• The people from Brave New World to go the Savage
  Reservation for much the same reason as people
  from contemporary America go on safari to Africa.
• Americans go to Africa to see wild animals in
  their natural habitat.

5

• People from Brave New World go to the Savage
  Reservation to see the wild humans in their
  natural habitat.
• While at the reservation, Bernard and Lenina
  discover John the Savage.
• John is the illegitimate son of the Director of
  Hatcheries and Conditioning.
• When he was young, the Director had taken a
  young woman to New Mexico, just as Bernard does.

6

• The Director, however, had abandoned the woman
  there when she became separated from him on an
  hike through the Reservation.
• Sex is just for recreation in Brave New World.
  There is no such thing as love between the sexes.
• Sexual reproduction is scandalous
• Father and Mother are dirty words.
• Bernard and Lenina bring John back to London,
  where, eventually, he has a confrontation with
  the World Controller, Mustapha Mond.

7

• Mustapha Mond vs. John the Savage.
• Mond quotes and then rejects both Newman and
  Maine de Biran.
• John argues that the humanity of those in
  Brave New World is degraded, with no possibility
  for heroism or nobility.
• Mond concedes that Brave New World has no
  heroism or nobility, but claims these are
  mediocre commodities.

8

• When John then claims that these virtues are
  necessary for genuine humanity, Mond responds
  that John is asserting his right to be unhappy.
• Is John claiming the right to be unhappy, or is
  he claiming the right to be happy in a truly
  human way, which means one must risk genuine
  unhappiness?
• Is human life in Brave New World truly human
  life, or only its imitation?

9

• Final Thoughts
• The ultimate effect of shielding men from folly
  is to fill the world with fools. Herbert
  Spencer
• Does eliminating from life all suffering and
  inconvenience, especially through biotechnology,
  run the risk of eliminating what is truly human?

10

• Medical technology offers us, in many cases, a
  devils bargain Longer life, but with reduced
  mental capacity freedom from depression,
  together with freedom from creativity or spirit
  therapies that blur the line between what we
  achieve on our own and what we achieve because of
  the levels of various chemicals in our brains.
• Francis Fukuyama, Our Post-Human Future

11

• As we proceed headlong with biotechnology,
  especially technology that treats humans and
  human life as commodities, à la Brave New World,
  e.g. cloning for bio-medical research and
  harvesting stem cells from embryos, do we run
  the risk of hearing the words novelist Tom Wolfe
  used, in irony, as the title of an essay spoken
  to us in earnest
• Sorry, but your soul just died.

12

• Homework (Treated as a Pop Quiz)
• Identify the exact source from which Aldous
  Huxley took the title for his novel Brave New
  World.
• How does the source from which Huxley took the
  novels title relate to the novels overall theme?