Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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Brave New Worldby Aldous Huxley

• A satirical piece of fiction, not scientific
  prophecy

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Satire

• A piece of literature designed to ridicule the
  subject of the work.
• While satire can be funny, its aim is not to
  amuse, but to arouse contempt.
• Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and several other
  techniques are almost always present.

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• Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and
  even sinister place

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What does this mean?

• Reading Brave New World elicits the same
  disturbing feelings in the reader which the
  society it depicts has vanquished.

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• Huxley exploits anxieties about Soviet Communism
  and American capitalism.
• The price of universal happiness will be the
  sacrifice of honored shibboleths of our culture
  motherhood, home, family, freedom, even
  love.

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• Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western
  Europe, governs a society where all aspects of an
  individual's life are determined by the state,
  beginning with conception and conveyor-belt
  reproduction.
• A government bureau, the Predestinators, decides
  all roles in the hierarchy.
• Children are raised and conditioned by the state
  bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families.

• There are only 10,000 surnames.
• Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have
  their own kids.

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• Brave New World, then, is centered around control
  and manipulation

• He instills the fear that a future world state
  may rob us of the right to be unhappy.

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• time and place written 1931, England
• date of first publication 1932
• settings (place) England, Savage Reservation in
  New Mexico

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• settings (time) 2540 AD referred to in the
  novel as 632 years AF (After Ford), meaning 632
  years after the production of the first Model T
  car
• narrator Third-person omniscient
• point of view Narrated in the third person from
  the point of view of Bernard or John, but also
  from the point of view of Lenina, Helmholtz
  Watson, and Mustapha Mond

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• Happiness derives from consuming mass-produced
  goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and
  Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex, the
  feelies, and most famously of all, a supposedly
  perfect pleasure-drug, soma.

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Soma

• People resort to soma when they feel depressed,
  angry or have negative thoughts.
• They take it because their lives, like society
  itself, are empty of spirituality or higher
  meaning.
• Soma keeps the population comfortable with their
  lot.

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• Soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It
  gives rise to only a shallow and intellectually
  uninteresting well-being.

It provides a mindless imbecile happiness -- an
escapism which makes people comfortable with
their lack of freedom.
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• Huxley seeks to warn the reader against
  scientific utopianism (impracticable
  perfectionism)

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• Creative and destructive impulses have been
  purged. The capacity for spirituality has been
  extinguished.

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• 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."

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• Life-long emotional well-being is not genetically
  pre-programmed. It isn't even assured from birth
  by the soma.
• For example, babies are traumatized with electric
  shock conditioning.

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• Toddlers from the lower orders are terrorized
  with loud noises. This sort of aversion-therapy
  serves to condition them against liking books.

We are told the inhabitants of the Brave New
World are happy. Yet they experience unpleasant
thoughts, feelings and emotions.
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• The Brave New World is a totalitarian
  welfare-state.
• There is no war, poverty or crime.
• Society is genetically predestined by caste.
  Alphas, the most intellectual, are the top-dogs.
  Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons toil away at the
  bottom. The lower orders are necessary because
  Alphas, even when they take soma, could never be
  happy doing menial jobs.

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• BNW is set in the year 632 AF (After Ford). Its
  biotechnology is highly advanced.

• Yet the society itself has no historical dynamic
  History is bunk. In this utopia, knowledge of
  the past is banned by the Controllers.

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• The Brave New World is not an exciting place to
  live in.
• It is geared to the consumption of mass-produced
  goods Ending is better than mending.
• Society is shaped by a single political ideology.
  The motto of the world state is Community,
  Identity, Stability.

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• There is no depth of feeling, no growth of ideas,
  and no artistic creativity.
• Individuality is suppressed. Intellectual
  discovery has been abolished.

• Clones, the BNW inhabitants, are laboratory-grown
  and bottled from the hatchery.
• They are conditioned and brainwashed, even in
  their sleep. They are never educated to prize
  thinking for themselves.

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• This novel is more applicable today than it was
  in 1932. This is a time of

propaganda, censorship, conformity, genetic
engineering, social conditioning, and mindless
entertainment.

• This was what Huxley saw in our future. His book
  is a warning.

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Essential Questions to connect the literature to
todays culture

• Is it better to be free than to be happy?
• Is freedom compatible with happiness?
• Is the collective more important than the
  individual?
• Can children be taught effectively to think in
  only one certain way?
• Can young people be taught so well that they
  never question their teachings later?
• Is stability more important than freedom?

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• Can alterations made by advanced science to
  mankind be made permanent at the DNA-level?
• Can mankind be conditioned by science?
• Should the individual be limited/controlled for
  the greater good? If so, how much?

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• Universal happiness keeps the
  wheels steadily turning truth and beauty cant.
  Aldous Huxley

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Now lets get into the text!