Last year, I joined an online book club, and I decided that at the beginning of each year I would set myself a list of all the books I want to read within that year. I only managed to get through half of the books on my 2011 list. I'm hoping that I get to tick off all the books on my 2012 list. One of the books on this year's reading list was "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. And oh man, it was amazing.
.jpg)
"Brave New World" is set in an imagined future world (called the World State) where human beings are created in laboratories (Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres) to be a certain class (ranging from Alpha, the best class, to Epsilon, the lowest class) and thus fulfil certain predetermined positions and roles in society. They are bred and conditioned to be think in certain ways, to behave in certain ways and to desire certain things. Consumption is extolled and people worship an entity they call "Our Ford", evidently the being who pioneered this new world and lifestyle. Recreational sex (and recreational sex only, not reproductive sex) is an essential part of life, whereas the concept of family and parenthood are outlawed as being "unnatural". People are encouraged to socialise and pursue entertainment; solitude is considered to be terrible. Conformity is good, individualism is bad. There is no literature, no poetry, no genuine art. The ultimate good in this world is happiness, and people regularly take a drug called soma to experience hallucinogenic pleasure. Outside the boundaries of this world, there exist "Reservations" which are populated by "Savages": people who live primitively in indigenous communities, without soma, and reproduce naturally. Bernard Marx, an Alpha psychologist, feels like an outsider in society despite being in the highest social class. In order to impress a fellow alpha named Lenina Crowne, Bernard asks his friend Helmholtz Watson to arrange a trip for the two of them to a nearby Savage Reservation. To their surprise, they discover two Savages who belong to the World State: Linda, a former lover of the Director of the Hatcheries and Conditioning Centre where Bernard works, and their naturally conceived son, John. Bernard brings Linda and John back to the World State, where John (who becomes known as "the Savage") becomes an instant commodity. However, John becomes disillusioned with this society, and after struggling with Lenina's sexual advances (he comes to both adore and hate her) and seeing his mother die of a soma overdose, he instigates a riot, getting Bernard and Helmholtz into trouble as well. Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller for Western Europe, exiles Bernard and Helmholtz from the World State as punishment. John retreats to a lighthouse outside the city for a life of solitude, but is constantly plagued by people from the civilised world who want to get a sight of the Savage. One day, a whole bunch of people including Lenina visit him, and at the sight of her, John loses his mind and attacks her, which drives the people wild and escalates to crowd violence and an orgy. The next day, John hangs himself in shame and self-loathing.
I really enjoyed reading this book. It hit me with all these questions and thoughts about what it means to be human and what it means to live well. I think I particularly like dystopian novels (though "Brave New World" doesn't technically isn't a dystopian story, more like a false utopian story, but anyway) because they highlight these issues by presenting a society where people are no longer fully human nor living well because certain values and ideals are missing (e.g. liberty, free speech), and make you realise that those absent values and ideals must be essential aspects of the truly human, good life. In the England of "Brave New World", there is happiness and pleasure, but these are enjoyed at the cost of true freedom and choice. While happiness and pleasure are important elements or goals of human life, they are not genuine here. If someone isn't happy, s/he is considered to be strange. Pleasure is rammed down people's throats - quite literally, in the form of soma - so that they are constantly, artificially kept happy. The book portrays the consequences of taking Jeremy Bentham's hedonistic utilitarianism to the utmost extent: do what feels good and what makes you feel happy, because that's the ultimate good and the meaning of life.
Philosophies clash in the intriguing conversation about the good life between John the Savage and Mustapha Mond, which takes place after the riot. The Savage champions liberty/freedom, while the Controller esteems happiness/stability, and these values are presented as being incompatible, as freedom is seen as being causatively linked to pain, suffering and unhappiness.
"[O]ur world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel - and you can't make tragedies without social instability. 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 hey practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!"
"You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art ... Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."
People don't know any better than the lot they are dealt with at the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. They neither want more nor less than what they are created to want. And they always get what they want. There is no such thing as individual thought or preference, no colour or texture in life. No choice. No depth. No real significance.
The Savage challenges the Controller about the importance of God. "[G]od's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic..." But the Controller argues otherwise.
"My dear young friend," said Mustapha Mond, "civilisation has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended - there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. and there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is."
The Savage responds thus: "But the tears are necessary ... Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. ... But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy. ... What you need is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here."
The culmination of their philosophic clash comes at the end of their conversation. The Savage argues that there is something in living dangerously, quite apart from God, and the Controller actually agrees with him: people must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time, hence the compulsory Violent Passion Surrogate treatments once a month.
"... We flood the whole system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences."
"But I like the inconveniences."
"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."
"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want good ness. 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 tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I clam them all," said the Savage at last.
While I appreciated the intellectual value of this debate, I wasn't quite convinced of the truth of it. Why does the Savage only get to choose between living according to the rules of the World State or the primitive world of the Reservation? Isn't there a middle ground between these two extremes? I realised after I finished reading the book that Huxley addresses this very point in the foreword:
"In the meantime, however, it seems worth while at lesat to mention the most serious defect in the story, which is this. The Savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal. At the time the book was written this idea, that human beings are given free will in order ot choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true ... To-day I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to se emore of it ... If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity ... In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle - the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: 'How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible numbe rof other individuals, of man's Final End?' ... [T]he Savage (in this hypothetical new version of the book) would not be transported to Utopia until he had had an opportunity of learning something at first hand about the nature of a society composed of freely co-operating individuals devoted to the pursuit of sanity. Thus altered, Brave New World would possess an artistic and ... a philosophical completeness, which in its present form it evidently lacks."
Ignoring this possibility of a middle ground, if I had to choose between Mustapha Mond's world and John the Savage's world, I think I'd have to choose the latter. The former is cosy yet artificial and meaningless. A life worth living inevitably involves pain, suffering and unhappiness. After I came to this conclusion, I then got to thinking, does that mean pain, suffering and unhappiness are goods? I don't think so. They are inevitable elements of a life truly lived in our broken world, but that doesn't mean pain, suffering and unhappiness are to be desired or pursued as goods. They weren't ever meant to be a part of the good life in the first place. However, in saying that, the world that I believe is to come, which will be absent of all these things, won't be at all like the Brave New World. The key difference between these worlds being the substance that holds everything together. The glue of the Brave New World is mindless selfish pleasure and preset destinies; the glue in the world that I believe is to come is other-focused love and freedom.
Conclusion: I'd highly recommend "Brave New World". Thanks for reading this long, rambling post, you're a trooper.
G.
.jpg)