This novel was written by Aldous Huxley in 1932. It is a fable about a world state in the 7th century A. F. (after Ford), where social stability is based on a scientific caste system. Human beings, graded from highest intellectuals to lowest manual workers, hatched from incubators and brought up in communal nurseries, learn by methodical conditioning to accept they social destiny.
The action of the story develops round Bernard Marx, and an unorthodox and therefore unhappy alpha- plus ( something had presumably gone wrong with his antenatal treatment), who vivits a new Mexican Reservetion and brings a savage back to London.
The savage is at first fascinated by the New World, but finally revolted, and his argument with Mustafa Mond, world controller, demonstrate the incompability of individual freedom and a scientifically trouble- free society. In Brave New World Revisted 1958, Huxley reconsiders his prophecies and fears that some of this might be coming true much sooner than he thought. In Brave New World, he turned to the apologue. It was a descion that has profound consequences upon his novels and upon his critical reputation.
In a 1961 interview Huxley explained his conception of Brave New World. “The new forces of technology , pharmaceutics, and social conditioning can iron modern humans into a kind of uniformity, if you were able to manipulate their genetic background. if you had a government unscrupulous enough you could do these things without any doubt. we are getting more and more into a position where these things can be achieved. And it is extremely important to realize this, and to take every possible precaution to see they shall be not achieved”.
One of the novel’s chief rethorical strategies is to make all readers recognize what so few characters can comprehend : that preserving freedom and diversity is necessary to avoid suffering the repressions fostered by shallow ideas of progress. Huxley makes his ironic stance clear from the beginning by contrasting the book’s title with the action of his first scene : counterpoint to the novel’s opening at the central London Hatchering and Conditioning Center, a factory that creates on a conveyor belt the citizens for the Brave New World.
BNW is one more memorable and successful for its overall portrayal of a society that for its delination of plot or psychologically individualized characters. In this world the method of “Bokanouski budding” allows the creation of 96 persons from one sperm and owon. Different chasses exist- Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and so on- but their relations to each other and to society as awhole are stabilized by the painless technique of “sleep teaching” that demonstrates to each individual the manifest rightness of his or her place in the world.
Huxley,Leonard Aldous Tall, witty, charismatic, conspicuosly handsome, a polymath, Aldous Huxley was an intellectual lighthouse for more than forty years. He wrote poetry ; drama ; screenplays ; journalism ; biography ; social, scientific and intellectual history ; he was a distinguished essayist, but above all else, he was a novelist. Judged early by critics and by a large popular audience as an original lamp of modern fiction, Huxley’s work is now best undestoos as a mirror that creatively distorts and reshapes two lines of the narrative tradition.
He was born in Godalming 1894,Surrey,and studied in Eton and Oxford University. He worked in various neewspaper and published four books of poems before appers his first published fictoin, Limbo (1920), which includes six stories and a brief play. In 1921 Huxley wrote his first novel, Crome Yellow. For the next 8 years Huxley published three novels. Each was followed by a collection of stories : Antic hay (1923), by Little Mexican (1924). The novel confirmed Huxley’s relationship with the postwae generation ; Those BarrenLeaves (1925) by Two or Three Graces (1926) ; (1930).
Point counter point (1928), by Brief Candles that ilustrates the nihilist decade of 20’s, and Brave New World (1932), dehumanize vision, and an utopia from future, give him fame. During this period he lived in Italy and French. In 1937 he went to United states. He wrote more than 45 books and some of them are : Jesting pilate (1926),Brief candles(1930), Ape and esence (1948) and Island (1962). During the last ten years of his life, Huxley engaged in experiments with the hallucinogenic drugs mescaline and LSD, under the supervision of a physician friend.
In The doors of perception(1954), he wrote about the insights and heightened perceptions he experienced under the influence of the drugs. Huxley was considered a citizen of the world and an inveterate traveller and a passionet student of all cultures. Science as power Technology has changed our lives, but science still waits. What has been taken to science by political, social and economical sources is a very small part of the actual science and a smaller part is taken to the science of future. Manhood, most of it, ignore science and don’t get involved on it.
It is hard for a scientist to believe that science won’t play a more important role in society and that won’t participate in the education training,in the modification of economic and social relationships and, of course, in production and development. But all of this let us think about the pourpose of it… We have thought of a better society and if is possible to define a better society. Scientificist ideology generates violence by itself, it is opressive and alienating and fossilize the social body. A New Civilization
An utopian society where everything is controled by a scientific education and life is based on a technocratic system. Here is the beginning of mass reproduction : men and women are standarized in uniform groups, workers of a same firm are borned from the same ovule in ordered to obtain an objective : Stability, Identity and a perfect community… An utopian society. At the very beginning Huxley give us, to the readers, a trail, through the description he does of a Center’s room, of what we are going to imagine as a reality of a bad dream..
Brave New World is a benevolent dictatorship: static, efficient, totalitarian welfare-state. There is no war, poverty or crime. Society is stratified by genetically predestined-caste. Intellectually superior Alphas are the top-dogs. Servile, purposely, brain-damaged Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons toil away at the bottom. The lower orders are necessary in BNW because Alphas could allegedly never be happy doing menial jobs. It is not explained why doing menial work is inconsistent with a life pharmacological hedonism precoded wetware with invincible bliss. Notionolly, BNW is set in the year 632 AF (after Ford).
Its biotechnology is highly advanced. Society does not have an historical basis because is banned by the controllers. It does not interest to the society stability. They would uncover a blood-stained horror-story. BNW is a sterile productivist utopia geared to the consumption of mass-produced goods. Society is shaped by a single all-embracing political ideology where world state is Community, Identity, Stability. Technocracy :theoretical system of government and gestion based in principles determinated by scientifics and profesional technics, and administated as well by them.
This technocratic movement starts in United States of America after first World War, basing it in the believes that the scientific advances and technology had been transformed in obsolete the traditional economic system. Instead . It offered an alternative politic system stablished in physic and scientific laws and an economic system foundated in unities of “productive energy”. Neither-feelings nor emotions Here there is a kind of civilization where feelings or emotions are set apart, Why ? As the Controllers said “It is not good”, so humans are grown up conditionated to refuse books, they don’t test thoughts and feelings.
Individuallity is suppresed and all Brave New Worlders act in order to others, it means that they are organized as a social group of people that work and live together but without any complexity of emotions on relationships and nothing that could complicate their “boring” lives. Because og it history is banned by Controllers to prevent invidious comparisons. It seems that they don’t know lonliness, but at the same time readers (our civilization)see that thereis a countrpoint in this aspect. They have to follow a sort of rules very rigid and this must provoke a gap in them, an interior lonliness.
This people are conditionated and indoctrinated and even brainwashed in their sleep- Hipnopedia-. They are never educated to prize thinking for themselves. It seems that happiness means personal and social stability and both terms are effictivaly equated. This point that aludes to feelings and emotions,makes me think of human nature and that there are some aspects that are innate to human beings such as the power of individual thought and reason, also we could add curiosity. Imagine that a society like this realy exist,we are all conditionated since young to refuse books, history…
Would all of us followed strictly this technocratic system and not to break any Controler’s rule ? wouldn’t be an emancipation against it ? I am sure something would happen, at least not to suffer such boredom. BNW is a kind of alien world. The monotony of its pleasures mirrors, the poverty of our own imagination in conceiving of radically different ways to be happy. It is a society that deny the nature of human beings ; feelings,the search of happiness and pleasures,to do things by ourselves and individuallity. BNW is often taken as a pesimistic warning of the dangers of runaway science and technology.
The universal happiness symbolised, for us means the experience of an everyday beredom. It is very interesting to see how the controllers reject our society to the eyes of their students and how this students react getting surprised and even scared to what was before with all of that “weird” feelings, families etc… Inestability. BNW come across as a stagnant civilization. Its inhabitants are to contented living in their rut to extricate themselves and progress to higher things. Brave New World is a technocratic society. Yet the free flow of ideas and criticism central to science is absent.
Soma and “happiness” During the last ten years of his life,Huxley engaged in experiments with the hallucinogenic drugs mescaline and LSD, under the supervision of a phisician friend. In our society there is some special things that make us happy and are an important elements of our society :motherhood, home, family, freedom and love, and we look for these things to be happy. In BNW happiness derives from mass-produced goods, sports, promiscuous sex and aperfect drug called “Soma”. This drug, supposedly, make you high in a state of pleasure. Soma is a very-one dimentional euphoriant.
The drug is said to be better that promiscuous sex. But it doesn’t in any way promote personal growth, instead it provokes a maindless that keep this sitizens ia an unreal happiness. It is a substitute of the lack of freedom. Huxley is seeking to warm us against scientific utopia. In BNW there is not bad sensations on Soma but maybe because they don’t even have the capability to have a bad trip, or maybe because Soma is not a drug strong enough . Controllers can manipulate their citizens with this drug. If there is somebody that does not feel alright or think too much Controllers will give him/her some Soma.
In BNW life-long emotional well-being is not genetically preprogramed as part of everyday mental health. It isn’t even assured from birth by euphoriant drugs. For example, juvenile brave new worlders are traumatised with electric shoks as part of the behaviourist-inspired conditioning process in childhood, kids are terrorised with loud noises and this kind of therapy is to condition them against books. Periodically they experience unpleasant thoughts, feelinfs and emotionsand then theu banish them with Soma : “one cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments.