March 2, 2005 – Realizing Huxley’s Brave New World

March 2, 2005 – Realizing Huxley’s Brave New World

I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in high school. I was captivated by the book and felt great affinity for its main character, the young man called John (and “the Savage”). Huxley envisioned a futuristic world in which Ford has become the god that everyone worshipped. Children are born in test tubes and raised in nurseries by childcare professionals. And as I recall, every person is separated into classes by intelligence and ability. At the top of the order are the alphas, followed by betas, etc. A product of a well-to-do, intellectual English family, had Huxley lived in his brave new world, he would have been an Alpha--his grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley was a prominent naturalists of the 19th Century; his brother Julian, a biologist noted for his evolutionary theories, and his father, a writer and professional herbalist. Freed from the whole problem of child rearing parents spend their days drugged up on a regime of pharmaceuticals that regulate every aspect of their daily lives. Soma, the one most recognizable from the book, is a recreational escape drug, widely used by all.

Once the author describes the "brave new world," with a center in London, the plot begins to build around the young man, John, born of a Beta-Minus named Linda of an Alpha father Tomakin, who is called Director in most of the story. Tomakin is the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, the man in charge of giving birth and raising the children of the Brave New World. The young man John is called the Savage because of being born and raised on the Savage Reservation. Years before John's story begins, Linda and Tomakin had been visiting the Savage Reservation in New Mexico when she got lost in the wild and abandoned by Tomakin. The inhabitants of Malpais, the name given the village by its inhabitance, rescued her. John, who would have otherwise been born in the hatchery in the civilized world, was born by natural childbirth in Malpais.

There is a place in New Mexico called El Malpais--the badlands--which has seen human habitation for more than 10,000 years. The land now hosts the Puebloan peoples of Acoma, Laguna, and Zuni, and the Ramah Navajo, who continue their ancestral uses of the El Malpais including gathering herbs and medicines, paying respect, and renewing ties. In 1987, the land became part of the National Park System and is now called the El Malpais National Monument and Conservation Area.

"Brave New World" is a study in alienation. John’s promiscuous mother Linda—promiscuity is the norm in the civilized world—is considered a harlot in the monogamous world of Malpais. Her insatiable appetite for Mescal—her substitute for Soma, which she dearly misses—and promiscuous behavior causes the village to treat her and her son as outcasts from the mainstream of village life. Nevertheless, John grows up adopting the norms of the village. Years later, two visitors to Malpais, Bernard Marx from the Psychology Bureau and Lenina Crowne, his current female partner, discover Linda and John. When Mustapha Mond, The Resident Controller for Western Europe realizes that one of their own and her alpha-fathered offspring are in the Savage Reservation, he has Marx return them to London.

Once back in London, Linda quickly resumes her longed-for life, one filled with all the drugs needed to eliminate all her human suffering. John, who has been outcast by his mother’s behavior and their hair and skin color, in the village of Malpais, finds himself an even greater outcast in this civilized world that lacks all the elements of life he hold of value. The most poignant passage in the work reads as follows with John—the Savage beginning:

"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 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.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

As a young teenager, I identified so completely with the plight of the Savage for all the reason a young teenager feels alienated from the adult world that he or she cannot comprehend. (And neither can that adult world understand the young person’s world, having been removed so long in time from it.)

John’s alienation is one of being prevented from experiencing life, as he knew it growing up in Malpais. In the civilized world, all the inconveniences and discomforts that made life meaningful in Malpais has been eliminated. I’m beginning to see in our world the realization of Huxley’s fictional world. Science and technology are attempting to eliminate all the inconveniences and discomforts of our world. If you are an alpha in our world— loaded with money, there are surgical procedures that will eliminate fat, signs of age, unattractive features of the face and body. There are drugs that will take away pain, return lost libido, modify behavior—make you happy, reduce your euphoric states, etc. There are drugs that will enhance your physical performance, enable you to sleep, keep you awake, etc. Everything being produced in our modern culture is to make individuals less connected to the natural world.

Perhaps the reason Huxley picked Ford, as the god in his work was the U.S. industrialist was best known for mass producing automobiles and enabling “everyman” to own a car. There’s this great passage in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance” that goes as follows:

"The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet... He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky..."

Modern contrivances, according to Emerson, have taken away our ability to do for ourselves in the world. This is what John, (the savage), sees wrong with the civilized world and what we can likewise bemoan of our own modern world.

I am guilty of being a practicing member of this modern world. I love cars and I have a collection of computers and other modern gadgets like cell phones, DVD players, and other electronic toys. As I’ve grown older, my memory has become less sharp and I find myself increasingly turning to Google and Yahoo to find information, rather than searching my own memory. I’m guilty of taking drugs, though far fewer than most of my contemporaries. I routinely refuse to fill prescriptions I’m given for painkillers and other medications to treat symptoms that will eventually go away of their own accord. After rereading parts of Brave New World, I plan to reexamine what I should be doing for myself like simple math without a calculator.