Comparing the Brave New World and Todays World - Term Paper Example

A Brave New World 26 February Introduction Man has always wondered since time immemorial about his ultimate place in the big universe. He had attempted to find meaning in this scheme of things without much success. A key repeated theme is seeming failure to find that true meaning that will justify his existence. What usually happens is that the more Man goes deeper into the search for ultimate meaning, the more he finds nothing. This is confounding, to say the least, and goes to show how useless the search could be. Many people had been doing this search several times and came up with nothing. Out of this seeming hopelessness and uselessness came the philosophical idea of the absurd – that Mans search for individual meaning is bound to end in absolute failure. Man has studied the cosmos and tracked the movement of celestial bodies in an attempt to find any meaning that can somehow alleviate his worries about what happens next when the real world (as he perceives it) is left behind and he enters perhaps another world where no one returned. In other words, Man tried to achieve immortality but apparently failed in his search. It has as a central idea that whatever else Man does will ultimately end up as nothing. This is the central precept of absurdism as a branch of philosophy – the deeper you dig does not guarantee you will find anything underneath, for there is nothing there in the first place. A way to somehow reconcile this meaninglessness had been proposed by some philosophers but all of them do not give anyone complete satisfaction. The first is to reject ones existence and find some way to escape it entirely. The second is to believe in a power higher than us that is better equipped to understand something beyond Mans limited comprehension. The third and last option is to be resigned to the inevitable and accept an absurdity of things and live with it. A cynic once remarked that Man somehow has to invent religion if there was none yet. The point of this observation is that Mans entire existence is viewed as an absurd event. It is even considered as something of an anomaly, a freak occurrence of nature in which a living organism happened to acquire a high level of intelligence and instead of happily going about the business of living, started to question the things around him. Man soon acquired sentience which is the ability to feel pain and pleasure; this is a subjective experience rather than just an entirely objective experience. This is why Man is called Homo sapiens as a concession to his extraordinary level of intelligence but that is also subjective in itself. But despite his supposed high intelligence, Man simply cannot find meaning that answers his curiosity and quest. This seems to be a main point of Franz Kafka in his novella The Metamorphosis in which the protagonist ends up becoming an insect of some sorts, definitely not human. Franz Kafka could have been influenced by the many revolutionary ideas fermenting during his own time – primary of which is Charles Darwins Theory of Evolution. In this monumental work that is still being debated today, Darwin proposed in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species that all living things came from common ancestors and over long periods of time branched out into different life forms through a natural process of selection he called survival of the fittest. Kafkas novel combines perhaps this idea of evolution and absurdism by the storys backward progression – Man descending into a lower life form instead of evolving into a higher form. It is an event that is truly absurd and defies all logic and conventional wisdom at that time or at any other time. No living thing had ever evolved backwards based on scientific knowledge. It is also a metaphor about the entire human existence and The Metamorphosis is a perfect sort of example to describe illogical human behaviors. The best way to enjoy the story and to have some lessons derived from reading it is to suspend disbelief, or to even believe in the story as something that actually happened and feasible without questioning its major assumptions. Discussion The Metamorphosis is not only an excellent novella but also an attempt by the author to depict the times when the story was written. Besides the theory of evolution, one other very important occurred at around Kafkas lifetime – the Industrial Revolution coming from Great Britain. It was one of the greatest upheavals of all time that upended society and the way that people view their lives. It also gave rise to the rise of a new ruling class, the capitalists. These were originally the landed aristocracy who saw the value of their landholdings diminish in its importance. Society itself, and perhaps the entire human civilization, had evolved. Masses of poor workers who were originally tenured serfs flocked the cities in search of new jobs and became exploited in the process. Communism was also on the rise to counteract the massive abuses perpetrated by greedy capitalists on the poor workers (Foner, 126). This is an allegory implicit in the very title of the novel. A metamorphosis is an abrupt change or marked transformation in the human living conditions at that time. All things were changing real fast. The novels story is an abstract representation of the major turning point in human history – a transformation so massive it affected all aspects of daily life. For someone who was observant of the times, it was both exciting and frightening. There was no way of correctly predicting where all these changes will lead to in the foreseeable future. Some of the leading thinkers at that time questioned the very desirability of societal changes occurring due to the Industrial Revolution where slums arose in places where there were none before. Child labor also became rampant and there were no safety nets for the workers such as a minimum pay, regulated number of working hours, humane working conditions or fringe benefits. It was what Gregor Samsa had despaired about one morning when he turned into a vermin and had thought “O God, what a demanding job Ive chosen! Day in, day out on the road. . . . . . The stresses of trade are much greater than the work going on at head office.” (Kafka, 2). Ironically, Gregor was more concerned about being absent or late for work than the horrible thing that had happened to him upon waking up. A reader can be excused totally for believing the story of a man turned into an insect, for after all, this is an absurd story that has all logic and sense turned upside down. It is not entirely clear why or how he turned into such an insect and it is not important anyway the reasons behind it. The attitude of being concerned with the more mundane things in life is also what Kafka tried to illustrate with society at that time – a preoccupation with material things like wealth accumulation than the more sublime issues facing Man, that of answering the deeper question of the meaning of his existence. The rate at which changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution had transformed society was certainly dizzying for people accustomed to doing the same things over and over. No doubt it was a great epoch unprecedented in recorded history in terms of upheavals for the people who lived in those times. In the words of the report issued by the International Labor Organization, it was exactly that, a revolution: “a violent and rapid change in society” which was an extraordinary and contradictory event or phenomenon (ILO, 9). In short, some people were confused at all the changes going on and cannot comprehend their implications on them. At first, the people welcomed the progress brought about by the so-called revolution in many things like improved production and the rise of the factory system. But that hope soon turned into disillusionment with poorly-paid workers reduced into virtual slavery to lead short and sad lives due to ceaseless toil under harsh working conditions. In the same report, the ILO termed it as “a vision of hell” (ibid. 10) and the rise of labor union organizations became inevitable to prevent or curb abuses by the businessmen, capitalists and landed proprietors who grew very rich on the backs and sweat of these poor masses. This is a poignant example also of what Grete had undergone when she first cared for Gregor after his transformation but got tired of the task and eventually abandoned him to his fate. When viewed within the context and polity of the Industrial Revolution, the story very much reflects the conflicts going on in so many spheres of everyday life. The new production processes had resulted in people becoming alienated from each other and the work performed in what Karl Marx collectively termed as alienation, species being and reification. He even explained further by giving four types of alienation brought about the new industrial modes of production (Marx, Mandel & Fernback, 87). Although it is now largely discredited, Marxism was a strong ideological force in the few years after his death and even afterwards up to this day. Marx et al. argued that Man became separated from his work and lost his humaneness in the whole process of industrializing. This alienation of feelings is what characterized the often difficult relationships Gregor had with his family, in particular his lazy father. As a foremost materialist, Marx realized most social problems are only categories of thought (Kitching, 55). An implication is starvation and malnutrition became problems only because some realistic solutions are now available where before these conditions were not regarded or categorized as problems in the first place but an entirely true process of natural selection through survival of the fittest. Even the great Karl Marx was himself confused and there are many loopholes and errors in his theories. In particular, he did not understand fully what capitalism is about because it was something entirely new for everybody at that time. It was the first time such a political and economic system came into practice after feudalism. The Metamorphosis is a story about family, fatherhood, wise men, tired men, the work of drudgery, exploitation and insects. Gregors father is the real insect in the story, living off on his sons efforts by borrowing money from the Chief Clerk and therefore a social parasite and perhaps no better than the same capitalists who grew fat from the work done by masses of laborers toiling under hazardous working conditions. There was father-son antagonism in the story similar to what capitalists and exploited workers had for each other; no love lost. Conclusion When Gregor became an insect, Grete replaced him as the sole breadwinner and was forced to work as a saleslady to augment the familys income in addition to taking in lodgers at their home. That is often the way how capitalism works also, by replacing injured or sick or old workers with newer and younger ones willing to take on backbreaking work for pennies. The anguish of Gregors father upon seeing him turned into an insect was perhaps due to the fact that their family sole income source is now gone and perhaps forever with no hope of any respite from their poverty. The working class in those times of Kafka when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing (there were actually two revolutions, the first was in the use of mechanized equipment in food production on the farms and a second more powerful was the extensive use of the internal combustion engine on steamships, railroads, power generation) had virtually no hope of uplifting their economic and social conditions. So when examined in the light of the Industrial Revolution and the advent of theories questioning Mans ultimate origins as something not preordained by a Supreme Being, it is only natural that people were confused, anxious, apprehensive and at a loss on what they need to do where everything about them had changed at a fast pace in which values and cultures are no longer sacred. For the uneducated masses, the revolution was nothing but dystopia. There is no doubt rapid changes in cultural, economic and political organizations can bring also the dangers of social irresponsibility such as what happened in the 18th and 19th centuries that saw people exploited to the maximum. New technological changes that we are experiencing today in medicine, genetic engineering, nano-engineering, new computer technology, some artificial intelligence and many other fields might also bring social dangers we cannot yet foresee at the moment. What happened in the Industrial Revolution can seem far off now but it requires all to be vigilant against abuses in which our moral code of ethics has lagged behind (Unger, 61). Works Cited Foner, Philip Sheldon. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The T.U.E.L., 1925-1929. New York, NY: International Publishers Co., 1991. Print. International Labor Organization. The ILO in the Service of Social Progress: A Workers Education Manual. Geneva, Switzerland: ILO, 1995. Print. Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. MT, USA: Kessinger Publishing, 2004. Print. Kitching, Gavin N. Karl Marx and the Philosophy of Praxis. London, UK: Taylor & Francis, 1988. Print. Marx, Karl, Mandel, Ernest & Fernback, David. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 1992. . This book is a re-issue only. Unger, Stephen H. Controlling Technology: Ethics and the Responsible Engineer. New York, NY: Wiley-IEEE, 1994. Print. Read More