Brave New World Novel

Brave New World:

Oh Wonder! That Has Such Similar People (to us) in it!

Aldous Huxley is often cited as an architect of a society that is eerily prescient of our own future. "In a number of specifics Huxley's prophecies are tellingly accurate," writes literary critic Kirkpatrick Sale, such as "the ubiquity of sports, television in hotel and hospital rooms, a general ignorance of history," and "psychology and chemistry as important change agents," as opposed to religion. (Sale, 2000, p.3) This new world of the future, however, is often depicted as a world of falsehood, in contrast to the truth embodied by the savage John. However, perhaps Huxley's distopia it is not so much a society where truth and happinees are incomensurate, but a place where personal choice and freedom are impossible to experience at the same time as one is perfectly happy. To take responsibility for one's present actions and one's failures in the past often means one must experience pain -- and thus, everything must be decided for the citizens of Brave New World.

The title of the novel Brave New World comes from a quote of Shakespeare from "The Tempest." The savage John quotes this phrase "O Brave new world! O. Wonder!" upon meeting individuals from civilization, and observes his personal sense of 'wonder' upon meeting individuals from an entirely new land. John, however, does not really know the 'truth' of either the present or the past. He has been educated in a romantic and fictional version of the past, through his mother's memories and books. In contrast, the individuals of the future have come from a land where there is no sense of a past, where the past and truth have been eliminated from the collective consciousness for the sake of societal happiness and agreement. But neither the savage John nor the scientist Bernard Marx has a complete picture of 'truth.' Rather, both only have subjective ideas of what the world should be like, either like a false vision of history or like a romantic vision of tomorrow.

To truly seek an unromantic past implies reconstructing something in its factual reality, rather than merely reading Shakespeare. Remembering something also implies that one is looking back, perhaps with regret at a lost opportunity, or perhaps with joy. Either way, it implies having a sense of loss, as even a joyful past moment cannot be recaptured. Thus, remembering is always a source of learning but also of pain and potential disagreement with those who remember history differently. And all pain, reflective or otherwise, has been eliminated by a society of soma and commercialization. The fact that the past is so subjective and cannot be standardized, as everyone remembers it differently also means that remembering the past can cause conflicts, which stifle happiness -- another reason for the total elimination of a sense of the past. To attempt to seek truth, especially the truth of the past, implies a choice of a particular version of the past over another, and any choice creates a sense of loss and thus, harmony-destroying unhappiness. I want chocolate, you want vanilla -- this creates conflict. Clearly, it is better to make us want the same thing, to create happiness, rather than to tolerate potential disorder and disagreement.

Thus even if the reader sees John's commitment to old ideals such as marriage and fiedelity and the subjgation of female desire as a kind of falsehood, John's faulty but unique sense of truth and the past also demostrates that to seek intellectual autonomy from the collective sense of 'enjoying the moment' implies a dangeous and individualistic commitment that runs contrary to the dictated and agreed upon values of society. To seek the past and to even find a happy, false sense of truth may not only result in mistaken views of the past, as it does with John, but create a sense of questioning that sows doubt in the social order. Even a disagreement about something of the moment creates a lack of harmony -- to question the past would be to question the entire project of the new world.

Instead, individuals in the future society of Huxley are always happy with what they are experiencing in the present moment, and their only desires are for what can be bough quickly and cheaply and easily, not for any ideology. Even for children, "the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games."(Huxley, Chapter 3) In Brave New World, it is not simply truth that is eschewed -- rather it is individuality, which cannot be purchased in the form of consumer goods. There is no sense of choice and responsibility for one's individual actions and opinions in a world of constant happiness. This Brave New World "is a tranquil and hygienic place in which human beings have been scientifically re-engineered to remove unhappiness and the pain of personal choice," and the desire to have what one does not. (Gray, 2002, p.1)

This is the nexus real conflict of Brave New World -- the conflict not of truth vs. happiness but personal responsibility and immediate happiness. The gains gotten from personal responsibility are hard-won, and do not always produce immediate or certain rewards, or even a certain sense of the past or of truth. Personal responsibility means that one is not satisfied with the present moment, and one desires something different or more than one has. But in a constant and consistently happy society, everything is decided for one's self by the government, from one's occupation to the manner of one's death. No one has any commitments or responsibilites to children or has to do unpleasant work one does not like. But one has no freedom of choice. "Many people see Orwell's 1984 as the ultimate dystopian future to fear. It is not," says Kirkpatrick Sale, who believes Huxley's Brave New World to be far more threatening, "partly because we're already beginning to live it. (Sale, 2000, p.1) The lack of a sense of personal responsibility might by why, "to read Brave New World" caries such a resonance with our own world. "We may imbibe Prozac and not Huxley's soma to relieve our distress, and rely on surveillance cameras and electronic tagging rather than the administration of electric shocks to keep the peace, but if we believe in anything, it is that unhappiness and social disorder are problems that can be solved by technical fixes." (Sale, 2000, p.1)