Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a fictitious story about a future utopian society where people are mass-produced in laboratories. People have no emotions in this world where drugs and promiscuous sex are greatly encouraged. People are given labels according to their pre-natal intelligence assignment. These different classes all have specific roles within society and nobody is unhappy with their place. The Brave New World he was a fictitious story that sets up a symbolic mirror to our world that shows the reader what our world is slowly evolving to. As young children, the utopians are conditioned to practice certain rituals, to later benefit society as a whole through the stability that these practices bring.
One of the acts that the children are taught to do is begin to experiment sexually at a very young age. This will prevent sexual anxiety in their adult years. Sexual play is greatly encouraged to the point that a special time is set for children to experience an erotic play. “In the garden it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running” (Huxley 30).
As they grow older, sexual promiscuity becomes a requirement among the adults.
In order for them to keep a stable society, the utopians cannot risk strong emotions among its people, if it is allowed people will be preoccupied with emotion thus leading to under production. The attitudes of the utopians support ideas of no monogamy. As one character said, “You ought to be careful. It’s such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man” (Huxley 41).
The Essay on Brave New World A Sterile Society
Cleanliness is next to Fordliness, was an attitude impressed upon the people of Aldous Huxleys, Brave New World. A society free of disease and suffering was achieved through a technique of conditioning called hynopaedia. Civilization is sterilization, was a hynopaedic slogan used to achieve the ideal society. This idea was manifested through the anesthetizing peoples emotions, the sterilization of ...
Huxley commented on his story’s relevance to the current time (Huxley’s book was published in 1932), with respect to the sexual attitudes of the people of the Brave New World. He said “Nor does the sexual promiscuity of Brave New World seem so very distant.
There are already certain American cities in which the number of divorces is equal to the number of marriages” (Huxley forward).
Huxley is saying that although our society would like to think that it is sexually stable, there is a lack of monogamy among the general population. Another aspect of the Brave New World culture that is symbolically similar to our own culture, is the very distinct caste system. People of the Brave New World are “born” with a specified intelligence level. This level of superiority (or inferiority) is group into different castes. For example, Alphas are the smart superior individuals, where as the Gammas are among the lower castes that are mass-produced to be almost identical.
This is their way of classifying people according to each individual’s biological makeup. Huxley comments on the biological caste system in his forward, “the equivalents of… the scientific caste system [of the Brave New World] are probably not more than three or four generations away.” Looking at our society today, we can see many ways in which biology determines personal worth. Many of today’s highest paying jobs go to those of biological superiority. Biologically superior supermodels receive millions of dollars because they were born with a pretty face. Athletes get respect and money for playing sports.
Biology helps the football player because it makes him fast. By giving them physical superiority, such as height, basketball and volleyball players are assisted by biology. Colleges and universities are discriminate against those who are biologically inferior because they only allow people that are extremely intelligent into their facilities. Even though we haven’t begun making people with a specified biology, we are using the biology that a person inherits to place them in, above, or below everyone else. Although Huxley doesn’t believe that we are close to creating people in the laboratories, as he said in part of his forward, “technically and ideologically we are still a long way from bottled babies,” however, Joseph Needham believes we are close to this “bottled baby.” In his 1932 review of Brave New World in “Scrutiny”, he wrote that, “successful experiments are even now being made in the cultivation of embryos of small mammals in vitro, and one of the most horrible of Mr.
The Essay on Aldous Huxley And His Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, said to have created the best utopian novel of all time, did not start out his career as a writer. He began his life in the midst of a sea of social pressure, not unlike most teenagers today. However by the age of 16 Huxley was already studying medicine and planning to be a doctor. Things were going very well for Huxley until he contracted a disease, which left him temporarily blind ...
Huxley’s predictions, the production of numerous low-grade workers of precisely identical genetic constitution from one egg, is perfectly possible.” Today there is significant advancements being made everyday in the fields of genetic engineering. We ” ve cloned a sheep, how soon before we clone humans Another very close to home ritual among the people of this utopia is the use of drugs. The people of Brave New World use a drug called soma to clear the mind of everything bad and make themselves feel happy. In his forward, Huxley also wrote about soma. He said, “the equivalents of some… are probably not more than three or four generations away.” In current society there are many escapes from reality that allow a person to be happy when they ” re down, Prozac is just one of many drugs with this purpose.
Prozac is advertised as something that can solve any and all everyday blues. Many people in the world use Prozac in order to make them happy and to take away their problems, just the same way the people of Brave New World do with soma. Through out this story, Huxley uses the practices these people do as an example to show modern day readers by mirroring what our society could become if we ” re not careful. Huxley uses these comparisons to show that the Brave New World could happen. He writes about this also in his forward, “All things considered it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined.” Bibliography Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1932.
