Talk:Brave New World/archive

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Zamyatin

I believe it's dishonest to cite only 1984 as a similar novel. You seem to forget that Zamyatin's "We" came in 1920's and was taken as the base by Huxley and Orwell. If Orwell openly admitted this in his comments to 1984, Huxley never said about such connection. But it's evident that he read "We", they are very similar in many facets and I believe "We" is actually more complex than "Brave New World".

Ford

We need a consensus on which Henry Ford the book refers to. The first that comes to mind, Henry Ford, is often mentioned here, but the book refers to "Our Ford's 'My Life And Work'", a book written by Henry Jones Ford. If anyone thinks there is a separate mention of Henry Ford the automaker, say so now. Otherwise, I'll be forced to remove any mention of the automaker.Deltabeignet 23:12, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

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There are several references to Henry Ford: the first Year of Our Ford is the date when the Model-T was first produced. The Ford worshipped in the story is an amalgamation of Henry Ford, Henry Jones Ford, and Sigmund Freud. All three are explicitly referenced: Henry Ford's mass production, Henry Jones Ford's writings and Freud's oedipal theories.

-Dan

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It appears that A Brave New World is a better depiction of the future than anything Orwellian, if it isn't much scarier. Leon Kass, of Yale, has been working his heart out, with a New Republic essay and a new book, on getting Huxley's all-too-accurate "drug me, love me" future into the minds of people still considered with the still-all-too-possible dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The problem is that while we actively seek out threats to our liberties, PATRIOT II for example, we readily accept benefits to our well being, i e medicine. I plan to review Kass' work as well as Francis Fukuyama's and add a good bit to the entry, though hopefully someone will beat me to it as I am a bit of a snail on promises.


Ry R.


Short of the genetic engineering, its already here. Seriously. The end of the book, with the reporters harassing Savage was too close to reality for me.

--Alan D

In a BBC Radio 4 documentary in the past week, it was stated that dispite the book's dystopian view Huxley was actually an advocate of eugenics. Andy G 19:29 24 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I feel that Brave New World was about Huxleys opposition to philosophy as he saw it, namely utilitarianism or some political theory such as marx and the rest, and tried to paint a world where everyone had equal happiness. There are several clues of this, the biggest being that all the characters last names where based on philosophers which presumably he controllers had chosen due to their respect towards them.

Maybe someone can add something about this to the main page? I don't feel comfortable enough to do it myself :)

-Anon


This is exactly the thesis of the essay I'm writing.. the question is: what devices did he use to voice his opposition?

-Smkatz 22:34, 14 Jan 2004 (UTC)


The following paragraph doesn't sit quite right with me.

The title of the book is a quotation from Miranda in Act V of Shakespeare's The Tempest, when she is joyfully reunited with her family. In Brave New World, the "savage", John, is a keen Shakespeare fan, which sets him further aside from the vast majority of humanity in Huxley's dystopia, as most of them are illiterate, and Shakespeare's works are banned and unknown in this society to everyone but the World Controllers.

I'm removing the comment about most of the population being illiterate. Huxley doesn't give us detailed census figures, so we can't tell whether the Epsilons comprise a numerical majority of the population. If we look at the castes which we know are literate—i.e., from Delta to Alpha—we miss Huxley's message if we attribute their lack of comprehension to "practical" issues, like the rarity of Shakespeare's works. The dialogue between Mustapha Mond and John Savage makes clear that, even if antique art "like Othello" were available, the Brave New World's superb conditioning would make sure that no one understood them.

On a slightly different tack, does anyone else get the feeling that Brave New World describes an ideal Objectivist state? Perhaps I'm missing a key point in Ayn Rand's theory of sex, but I can certainly see that the "horror scenario" its detractors imagine looks pretty much like the world Huxley describes: dissolution of families; free and unlimited coupling; heck, everything except prostitution—and only because it isn't necessary. . . .

One of my friends described the hard-core Objectivists in our circles as "pre-Nash, pre-Keynes economists who don't want to change their theories, so they change reality to fit the theories instead." Funny that—sounds exactly like what the World Hatcheries do: developmentally modify human beings so that they become perfect participants in laissez-faire capitalism. The only activity we see the World Controllers conducting is the suppression of scientific research; most of everything else seems to be taken care of, hypnopaedically. For example, the lower classes are conditioned to "consume transport", through the simple expident of making country vacations psychologically compulsory. Biological regulation renders governmental regulation obsolete.

And soma is the perfect tool for handling Rand's issues with Christianity. . . .

I see some problems with the article, based on my recent reading of the book. In particular, I would disagree with a couple of paragraphs. Firstly:

"The protagonist, named John, is the son of two citizens of the Brave New World (he is the result of an accidental contraception failure). His parents were visiting a "savage reservation" when his mother got lost; she was stranded inside the reservation and gave birth to him there. He grew up with the lifestyle of the Zuni Native American tribe and a religion that is a blend of Zuni and Christian beliefs. The culture shock which results when the "savage" is brought into regimented society provides the vehicle by which Huxley points out that society's flaws."

Firstly, I believe it is incorrect to describe John as the protaganist. Bernard Marx is an equally important character. Indeed John doesn't even appear until half-way through the book.

Secondly (and related to the above point), I don't agree that John is the only vehicle which Huxley uses to point out the flaws of the society. Surely, the character of Bernard Marx is also such a vehicle. The character of Bernard, and to a lesser extent Helmholtz Watson too, shows both the rigidity of the society (unable to change) and its inability to entertain differences in individual behaviour. Indeed, it is Bernard's inability to "fit in" (and the subsequent threat by the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning to exile him to Iceland) that spurs him to take "the Savage" back to England with him.

Thirdly, I believe that the culture shock experienced by "the Savage" is not primarily a device to point out the flaws of the society. Many of those flaws have already been shown through Bernard's experiences. This brings me the following parapraph in the article:

"The key moral point of the book revolves around the problem that the people in the society appear, and state that they are, generally happy. John Savage, however, considers this happiness to be artificial and "soulless". In a pivotal scene he argues with another character, world controller Mustapha Mond, that pain and anguish are as necessary a part of life as is joy, and that without the former to provide context and perspective, "joy" becomes meaningless."

The happiness of the population is NOT the problem. The problem is that in order to ensure continuous and (near) universal happiness, society has to be manipulated, freedom of choice and expression curtailed, intellectual pursuits and emotional expression inhibited.

My reading of the dialogue between John and Mustapha Mond (and indeed John's subsequent self-imposed isolation and suicide) was that the moral messages in the book are more complex than stated above; indeed, I would say that Huxley was presenting too opposing extremes (on the one hand universal happiness which is nevertheless "soulless" and unfulfilling, and on the other hand a world of "noble" virtues such as heroism, love and faith which can only exist side-by-side with suffering and pain). In the end, there appears to be no middle way between Lenina's innocent drug-dependent joy and John's noble and rather pointless despair. Unless, it is to be found in the island exile which Bernard and Helmholtz choose.

So, actually, we have two problems. The second is the opposite of the first: freedom of choice and expression (witness the experimental Alpha society in Cyprus), the recognition of (or rather the inhibition of) emotional expression (witness John's self-torture and suicide) and the pursuit of intellectual ideas, result in an absence of happiness.

During the dialogue Mustapha Mond brings a couple of religious treatises out of his safe, and demonstrates point-by-point how religion is incompatible with and unnecessary in a society where everyone is happy, free from disease, strife and suffering, and able to fully and freely enjoy hedonistic pleasures until the very point of death. Surely the moral point of the book, is to present a number of questions: what is the relative value which society attaches to happiness? Is a "meaningful" or fulfilling life compatible with a happy one? Is it moral for an elite to impose values on the rest of society which lead to reduced happiness? Scott Moore 14:13, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Satire of 1930s society

I tried to clean up the "satire of 1930s society" section, so that it flows a little more smoothly and uses fewer ampersands. In the process, I toned down a couple statements (some Americans do understand what "the Crown" can be a reference to) and removed the line that most of Huxley's references are overlooked nowadays. I certainly picked up on the Marxes, the Trotskys and the Rothschilds, when I was a not-very-remarkable teenager reading the book for the first time. (Overall, I'd say the capitalists are a touch more obscure than their counterparts—Alfred Mond versus Vladimir Lenin—but this is only an argument from my own ignorance.)

I also deleted the paragraph about Huxley's use of the word "pneumatic". Not out of prudery, I assure you; it just read like an unnecessary elaboration. Firstly, when we encountre the word, say when Bernard and Lenina are flying through the night—

"Everyone says I'm awfully pneumatic," said Lenina reflectively, patting her own legs.

—Huxley makes the meaning pretty clear through the context. Second, I've seen it plenty of other places, as far away as Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Huxley wasn't even the first to use "pneumatic" to describe a woman's figure; the OED gives a 1919 example from T. S. Eliot's Whispers of Immortality in Poems:

 Grishkin is nice. . . Uncorseted, her friendly bust
 Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.

I would also suggest that Helmholtz Watson is an allusion to Hermann von Helmholtz, a German physicist who co-discovered the conservation of energy. Helmholtz was very interested in the physics and physiology of sensory perception, and did major work on both color vision and the nature of hearing. His notions of materialism and his conception of psychology as an empirical science distinct from philosophy seem in keeping with the psychology practiced in Huxley's dystopia.

Anville 14:50, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)