Brave New World: A Sterile Dystopia Built on Seemingly Noble Intentions - Essay Example

of the English of the Concerned 22 October Brave New World: A Sterile Dystopia built on Seemingly Noble Intentions There is no denying that one of the salient themes in the novel Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley is the detachment and the severing of the human life from the world of nature, the reasons behind this disassociation and its possible long term consequences. As the new cultural movements pervade the contemporary world and the science becomes the prominent lens through which the humanity tends to observe the society and its institutions, the consequences imminent in Brave New World not only become a pertinent possibility but also seem to be life like and real. The first chapter tends to introduce the responder to the society portrayed in Brave New World, as the Director tries to make the students familiar with Bokanovskification, an utterly scientific world; it immediately creates the impression that this highly scientific and sophisticated world is utterly oblivious to the natural considerations and the natural world. The hallmark of the society depicted in Brave New World is to give way to a human form that is starkly divested of its inner urges and yearnings and merely acts as an organic receptacle to the generalized social norms and practices. Thereby in Brave New World the intention of Aldous Huxley is to convey that considering the current direction in which the modern society is advancing, it will eventually distort and alter the human nature itself. Brave New World tends to offer a satirical vision of a future that is sans any flavor and happens to be innately sterile. In that context this science fiction novel happens to be anti-utopian or dystopian in its form and intent. The novel unravels a world that is not only starkly stultified by a marked lack of originality, but is also immensely oppressive in terms of the control that the authorities tend to exercise over the common people. Though the novel deals with a futuristic dystopia, yet it has marked links to the modern history in the sense that it resorts to a profuse usage of irony and paradox to bring out the bleak consequences of the scientific and technological development wrought by mankind in the last few decades. The theme of the novel is the impact of scientific development on mankind and the human interaction with nature that eventually gives way to a regimented world where the denizens are homogenized and categorized as five casts that are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon, each cast fixed in its own set ways and incapable of any impromptu and impulsive inclinations and yearnings. This abominable strict social regimentation gets reflected in the feelings of Bernard, “The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one. … A chromic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity (Huxley 65).” Brave New World presents a society that essentially accepts the incompatibility between a shallow and drab sense of happiness and the reality that the human beings are required to contend with on a daily basis by legalizing the consumption of a research drug that is ‘Soma’ that is used by the inhabitants of this futuristic world to escape the drabness and challenges marking the real world. In that sense it is indeed intriguing and disturbing to see that Mustapha Mond, the most intelligent and most accomplished benefactor of the world state regards the drug soma as an immaculate tool to assure social harmony and peace. His thoughts regarding soma become obvious in his conversation with John where he assures John that the world state will rescue him from the dire consequences of an interaction with reality by giving him doses of soma. The soma is shown to be having the power to induce a pacific state in the people inhabiting the world state at the cost of depriving them of their individuality and innate personality. It is the cherished and legalized panacea in the consumption driven world drawn by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World that ushers in a make believe sense of hallucination and poise, while at the same time sheltering its consumers from the pain and discomfort associated with accepting the life with its inherent facts and realities. The novel Brave New World brings to fore the fact that for a utopian society to achieve a sense of stability that is perfect and immaculate, it is not only imperative to divest the humanity of its individuality and confine it to a straight jacketed cast system, but it is also a must to sterilize humanity of its natural inclinations and tendencies. The ability to engineer such a world through the exploitation of science, as shown in Brave New World, does actually give way to a scenario where people are always happy, but this happiness comes at a great cost. The character of Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson immaculately portray the human ordeal and sense of alienation that happens to be a natural consequence of divesting the human personality of its natural inclinations and propensities. Compared to them the partly savage John is more natural and believable who is able to recognize his feelings of sensuousness and love for Lenina and is willing to suffer for them. In that context the society depicted in Brave New World is highly controlled and regimented that is administered by its ten controllers. It is a synthetic world where the children are produced in hatcheries and are assigned to a particular cast role for the rest of their life. The Brave New World of Aldous Huxley is a world given to social engineering and eugenics, a world that believes in selective breeding where words like human destiny, ethics, individuality, free will hold no meaning. It is a synthetic world which treats human sex organs as any other industrial resource that is to be used and exploited to maximize human consumerist tendencies at the cost of doing away with human sentiments, and social institutions like love, marriage, family, communities and neighborhoods. The human fertility in the brave new world is strictly controlled by making the females adorn Malthusian belts that facilitate the measured doses of hormones to make them and keep them sterile. No wonder the words like love, family and procreation tend to be a taboo in this new world and the people like Linda who do accidently manage to give expression to their essential humanness by giving birth to a child are considered to be outcasts that ought to live amongst the savages. The world depicted in this science fiction novel neither recognizes the inherent impulsiveness of human sexuality nor is receptive of social concepts like religion, morality and ethics. The other thing that needs to be noted about the dystopia portrayed in the Brave New World is that the world state abjectly resorts to psychological conditioning to generalize, standardize and homogenize the social preferences, choices and likes and dislikes. The whole purpose of the psychological conditioning resorted to be the world state is to make people shun the notions, ideas and concepts that are abhorred in the world state and to be content with a sense of induced complacence, being happy with the things that are common to their class and avoiding the things that belong to other class status. Thereby, this scientifically induced social conditioning not only deprives people of the negative feelings like greed, jealousy and covetousness, but also makes them incapable of evincing noble feelings and sentiments like love, fellowship and kindness. The world state has even resorted to conditioning the most fundamental notions as to birth and death, making people incapable of envisioning a state of existence that is different from or contrary to the ideals propagated by the world state. It is primarily owing to this scientific conditioning that the world state is able to run its affairs in a smooth and hassle free manner, without facing any resistance from any section of the society. Perhaps it is much easier to make people feel happy about a state of pervasive generalization if they innately believe that they are getting the best in the world. The thing that deserves the attention of the readers is that Brave New World not only intends to warn people as to what can happen if a blind reliance on science goes wrong, but the novel also satirizes the consumerist society that exited in the times of Aldous Huxley and is still existent today. The Brave New World portrays the eventual future of a society where the gratification of personal needs is given precedence over human originality, individuality and human emotions and feelings. It warns the readers against espousing a value system that upholds success or personal satisfaction. This sterile state of human existence becomes clear as the Director says, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue- liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny (Huxley 16).” By creating a dystopian society in the Brave New World, Aldous Huxley intends to make the contemporary readers virtually feel and experience the consequences of a way of life that is abjectly scientific, consumerist and regimented. By creating a standardized, planned and innately sterile world, the purpose of the writer is to make the readers appreciate the value of human individuality, creativity and independence. Hence, in a way, in Brave New World the writer has tried to project a futuristic world by imaginatively extrapolating the social, ethical and scientific developments taking place in the past few decades. Works Cited Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Print. Read More