Aldous Huxley's Brave New World utilizes a dystopian society, layered with complex symbols and motifs which Huxley uses to discuss the various topics of the book. One message is more dominant and provocative than the rest: Are true peace and happiness worth the sacrifices they demand? Huxley's novel is set in a world that was almost nearly destroyed by a massive world war. Frightened by the prospect of extinction, the human race united under one World State, and handed over complete control to the government. Over time, this control began to reach farther and farther, until it reached a point at which free thinking human beings ceased to exist in the civilized world. Babies are hatched from bottles, love between two people is abolished while sex celebrated and socialized, genetic traits are predetermined, people are categorized into social castes based on the intelligence levels they are assigned, and children have their government's morals and values drilled into their head through sleep conditioning. Literature, religion, history, science, and art only exist in twisted or perverted forms, and have all been repurposed to meet the needs of the World State. All in the name of happiness. Mustapha Mond, one of the World Controllers, and one of the only characters in the book who can truly think for himself, explains, "Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. And of course whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered" (228). Essentially, in order to prolong its existence into eternity, the human race eliminates all forms of higher thinking.
Huxley elaborates on this concept with an extended metaphor throughout the book, in which he compares this new society to a horde of insects. Much as ants and bees exist only as tools to serve for the good of their colony, the people of this civilization are "just a cell in the social body" (90). Nobody's life has any distinction from anyone else's. People work their jobs and mingle with one another until they die. Those who, for whatever reason, are unable to adjust, become outcast from the rest of the horde. What Huxley is saying through the use of this insect metaphor, is that without art, literature, science, and god, humans achieve nothing beyond their own survival. They remain fixed in a perpetual and unchanging state, where people live, work and die. No anthill ever became anything more than just an anthill, because insects don't have the capacity to think, create, or act beyond their natural instincts. So what does this mean Huxley is saying about truth, beauty, and happiness? Using John, who grew up outside of the World State and was raised by the ancient works of Shakespeare, as his mouthpiece, Huxley discusses what it means to be human. Disgusted by civilization's abundance of comfort and instant gratification, John protests that part of being human is being unhappy. It is "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" that make living worthwhile (240). Without these things, humans can't have aspirations beyond their primal urges to survive and reproduce. Truth and unhappiness, Huxley argues, are what set us apart from the insects.
Brave New World is a book that I highly recommend everyone reading at least once. This is a book that has made me consider the fundamental roles of art and government from perspectives I never before considered. Huxley's writing style is incredibly eloquent while not at all overbearing, and while some portions of the book border on science fiction, I think this is a book that anyone can pick up. The story is rich with philosophical and moral questions that constantly provoke the thoughts of the reader. The book is also fascinating when one looks at the context in which it was written. It was first published in 1939, predating Adolf Hitler's rise to power by a year. In some ways Huxley foretold many of the dangers that could arise from a totalitarian government, an issue that would mold history from World War II all the way up to modern day.
I really enjoyed reading all of these posts. I haven't read the book, but I feel like you really got what was happening and what this author was trying to say (and even if you didn't, you did a good job convincing me you did). One recommendation I have to not put so much summary at the beginning of each post. It was fine in the first one, but the fact that there was a full summary paragraph in all four posts was a bit much and got kind of repetitive. Besides that, you did a really good job of following the motifs and coming up with a good theme for the book. This was very well written, and this last post in particular did a great job of tying up all loose ends from your other posts and bringing it all together.
ReplyDeleteI liked how you found that the author compared people to bugs. That's a negative thing so it adds more meaning to the story and helps argue that this kind of society is bad. I thought the part about this book being published a year before Hitler came into power was really interesting. We also have a lot of stories similar to this today (like “The Hunger Games”), so it shows that its message is important for any time period to remember. The society in the book seems a lot like communism too, which makes sense because the communist revolutions in Russia happened a little bit before this book was published. Another thing sounded interesting was how one of the character’s says that unhappiness is part of being human and that he has the right to have diseases or be ugly, because with unhappiness comes bigger aspirations. We talked about this in my economics class when we learned about the problems with communism and socialism. One of the major problems is that no one is motivated to innovate or work harder, like the character says in”Brave New World.” The book sounds pretty abstract, so it’s cool that it has real world connections too.
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