Term Paper on "Brave New World Aldous Huxley's Novel"

Term Paper 4 pages (1664 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World has permanently and profoundly influenced our view of the idea of utopia. The cold, cheerless, stale society he depicts, in which all creativity is stifled, all individuality outlawed, and all aspects of every person's life mapped out in advance, has become a paradigm of the dangers that lurk behind any attempt to apply scientific notions to dictate every detail of the nature and purpose of human life. The message of Brave New World is clear: a utopian society built around the notion that perfect happiness can be engineered for all will deliver only a soulless dystopia.

At the heart of Brave New World is the conflict between two very different views of the essence of man. The Utopian vision is summed up by Mustapha Mond, one of the Ten World Controllers that govern the World Society:

The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. (Brave New World, Chapter 16)

The essence of man, that the Utopians believe they have succeeded in creating a society shaped to serve, is stability and predictability, and is based on the concept that contentment is to be achieved through the satisfaction of bodily wants. The things that threaten that condition - emotions, beliefs, longings, strong attachments - are controlled and banished. Human nature is regarded as a machine, and the World Society creates the conditions in which it can run efficiently and consistently, without anything throwing it off-balance or causing it to behave unpredictably. Stability is the highest human virtue. If anything should occur to make these human machines seize up, or run too fast, or slip from their carefully engineered tracks, the drug 'soma' is available to tranquilize them until the problem has been dealt with and the danger is past. People do not even grow old any more.

Against this vision stands the 'savage' view represented by the characters of John the Savage and Helmholtz Watson. Both, in different ways, see stability as a form of defeat: the defeat of the human spirit's capacity to strive, struggle, fight, and grow. Savage accuses the Utopians of 'Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it' (ch. 17). For Savage the essence of humanity is, in a sense, never to be satisfied, never to find comfort, safety, perfect health and the lack of desire enough:

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

Not to mention 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 to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

A claim them all," said the Savage at last. (ch. 17)

Helmholtz is less sure of himself than Savage, being compromised by his position within the World Society and the norms with which, whatever his inward doubts, he has grown up. He finds an outlet for his dissatisfaction in poetry and the forbidden ideas it articulates, and finally achieves his own resolution when he literally takes up arms for Savage, fighting alongside him when he goes 'berserk' in the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying: 'And suddenly there was Helmholtz at his side - "Good old Helmholtz!"- also punching -"Men at last!" (ch. 15).

For the Savage and Helmholtz, truth lies in emotion, imagination, yearning and suffering. For the Utopians, it lies in a condition undistracted by these things. It is only by freeing humanity from the falseness of passion and pain that the truth can be found; and the truth is that human beings require stability, comfort, and satisfaction of their desires. The ideal is, in Mond's words, the 'happy, hard-working, goods-consuming citizen' (ch. 17). The notion of justice that the Utopians possess, while never fully spelled out in the book, is the very limited one of fairness to all within the constraints of the path dictated for them from before they are born (or rather, before they are 'hatched'). Authority acts in accordance with what the Controllers know to be the good of society, and reserves the right and power to act against those who disrupt that good: '"Stability," said the Controller, "stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability." (ch. 3). The ultimate in enforced stability and conditioning is the biological separation of human beings into distinct castes suitable for performing functions at different levels of society. This is the most profound violation of the individual human soul and the ultimate denial of the free choice that makes life worth living, in Savage's and Helmholtz's view. The elevation of stability above all can never do justice to the creative instability that is the essence of human nature. The needs of the human body may be satisfied, but the needs of the human spirit itself are denied.

Huxley's World Society is not a democracy. It is basically a technocracy, in which an oligarchic group of paternalistic 'Controllers' guide every aspect of society: 'Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment' (ch. 3). The people accept their rule because they are conditioned, culturally and psycho-chemically, to do so. Democracy brings discontent and instability; war and violent oppression, too, while they were used by the World Controllers in the past, are now seen as inefficient and destabilizing. The Controllers now operate solely through indoctrination and by applying the tools of science: "In the end," said Mustapha Mond, "the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia..."

The ultimate aim of the World Society is to defeat time itself by creating a society in which nothing ever changes. No-one grows old, no-one becomes sick, no-one ever gets tired or bored with anything, no-one ever yearns for anything different. There is no invention, no innovation, no fresh thought or action, because people already have all they need. Universal contentment leads inevitably and, the Utopians believe, virtuously to a universal stagnation.

It might appear by the end of the book that Utopia has succeeded; the dissidents are exiled, the Savage is dead by his own hands, and the conveyor belts in the hatcheries roll on. But the Savage's suicide is, in a sense, a sign that Utopia has not triumphed. As a hermit in the abandoned lighthouse he tried his utmost to free himself of the taint of the Brave New World, and in that very striving he proves himself to be free. Huxley's implication is that there will always be opponents of the ideas of the Brave New World, that critics will always remain. The fact that the Controllers find it necessary to rely on drugs and conditioning demonstrates the falseness of the view of human nature upon which they rely - and the truth and beauty that they seek to crush… READ MORE

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