Brave New World Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
- This is the article about the novel by Aldous Huxley. For the Iron Maiden album, see Brave New World.
The term brave new world is also used in print media when refering to a plan of action that may have undesired or negative outcomes. For example:
- The predictions of open source software ruling the world are starting to come with a feeling of inevitability; where is shareware going to fit in this brave new world? [1]
Set in the future, it describes a dystopian society of Huxley's imagination. In this society people are "decanted" into a chemically-enforced and totally conformist caste society. Children are engineered in fertility clinics and artificially gestated. The three lower castes are manufactured in groups of up to 96 clones, and they are chemically stunted and/or deprived of oxygen during their maturation process to control their intelligence level and physical development.
The Alpha caste consists of those destined for leadership positions, with Betas filling professional and administrative posts requiring higher education, but without the leadership responsibilities of the Alphas. These two groups together form the upper castes, with Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons comprising the lower castes, each with a descending degree of intelligence (Epsilons being so stupid as to be described as "semi-morons", and trained to perform the most menial tasks without complaint). People are thus manufactured to fill their jobs, rather than jobs being created for people. Within these classes are sub-groups, plus or minus, which further determines their roles in society (every possible combination appears at least once in the text, with the exception of Delta-Plus). Members of each caste also wear uniforms, the color of which identified which caste they belonged to. Alphas wear grey, Betas mulberry, Gammas green, Deltas khaki, and Epsilons black.
From birth, members of every class are indoctrinatedd, by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep, to believe that their own is the best class to be in. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an anti-depressant and somewhat hallucinogenic drug called soma.
Contrary to what modern readers would expect, the biological techniques used to control the populace in Brave New World do not include genetic engineering. Huxley wrote the book in 1932, twenty years before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA. As the science writer Matt Ridley put it, Brave New World describes an "environmental, not a genetic, hell".
Citizens have no awareness of history except for a vague idea of how terrible things were before the inception of the present society. They know that humans used to be viviparous and what parents and birth were, but these concepts are taboo, and "mother" and "father" are this society's equivalent of dirty words.
However, perhaps the most striking element of the society is the behaviour of its citizens. The lower castes, being cloned and conditioned from birth, exhibit a strong group mentality. Even the more individualistic higher castes, who are also conditioned during infancy and childhood, happily accept the strict social mores. Normal behaviour is to be highly sociable, engage in promiscuous sexual activity, avoid negative thoughts and feelings by regular consumption of soma, practise sports and, in general, be good consumers. This is reinforced in the novel by the characters' frequent repetition of tag-lines from their conditioning such as: "Everyone belongs to everyone" and "A gramme is better than a damn" (referring to soma). It is socially unacceptable to spend time alone, to be monogamous, to refuse to take soma, and to express opinions which conflict with those taught during conditioning.
In the first half of the novel, the two characters of Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx (their name allude to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin and founder of communism Karl Marx) present contrasting viewpoints of this society. Lenina is the perfect (female) citizen, happy and 'pneumatic', conformist in her behaviour, fulfilling her function in society (which seems to be to sleep with as many men as possible) but largely incapable of free thought (she does not even recognise her love for the "Savage" as this conflicts with her conditioning). In contrast, Bernard is something of an outsider; intellectually gifted but physically smaller than is typical for an Alpha, he faces (or at least believes he faces) social problems including rejection by women of his caste and lack of respect from lower castes. As a result, he has become a loner and a social misfit, embarrassed when trying to set up dates with women, uninterested in sports, preferring to be miserable rather than take soma, and often expressing non-conformist opinions. Bernard's unacceptable behaviour lands him in trouble with his boss, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning. But nevertheless, Bernard secures his permission to visit the savage reservation in New Mexico to where he takes Lenina on a date.
The second half of the novel begins with the visit to the reservation. It is here that the other main protagonist of the novel is introduced. John is the son of two citizens of the Brave New World (he is the result of an accidental contraception failure). His parents (we soon learn that his father is Bernard's boss) were visiting the savage reservation when his mother got lost; she was stranded inside the reservation and gave birth to him there. He grew up with the lifestyle of the Zuni Native American tribe and a religion that is a blend of Zuni and Christian beliefs. However, he is also influenced by his mother's education (she taught him to read) and by his discovery of the works of Shakespeare. The culture shock which results when the "savage" is brought into the society of the "Brave New World" as he initially calls it, provides a vehicle for Huxley to contrast the values of the society with our own.
The key moral point of the book revolves around two diametrically opposing problems. The first, and most obvious, is that in order to ensure continuous and universal happiness, society has to be manipulated, freedom of choice and expression curtailed, and intellectual pursuits and emotional expression inhibited. Citizens are happy, but John Savage considers this happiness to be artificial and "soulless". In a pivotal scene he argues with another character, World Controller for Western Europe Mustapha Mond, that pain and anguish are as necessary a part of life as is joy, and that without the former to provide context and perspective, "joy" becomes meaningless. The second problem presented in the novel is that freedom of choice and expression, the recognition of (or rather the inhibition of) emotional expression and the pursuit of intellectual ideas, result in an absence of happiness. This problem is shown primarily through the character of Bernard, but also by the behaviour of John in the final stages of the novel. Unable to fully suppress his desire for Lenina (which he believes is morally unacceptable), but also feeling remorse at the death of his mother which he is not allowed to express, he seeks isolation from society and imposes on himself a regime of privation and self-torture. Finally, he commits suicide after succumbing to an orgy of sex and soma.
In other themes, the book attacks assembly line production as demeaning; feminism and the liberalization of sexual mores as being an affront to love and family; the use of slogans or thought terminating cliches; the concept of a centralised government and the use of science to control people's thoughts and actions. While Huxley attacks the emergence of Socialist and Communist attitudes, he also opposes capitalist consumer society. Indeed, the latter motifs are stronger than the former: in the novel, the legendary founder of the society was Henry Ford, whose writings occupy Mustapha Mond's bookshelves. The letter T (a reference to the Ford Model T) has replaced the cross as a quasi-religious symbol.
The title of the book is a quotation from Miranda in Act V of Shakespeare's The Tempest, when she is joyfully reunited with her family. John Savage is a keen Shakespeare fan, which sets him further apart from the vast majority of humanity in Huxley's dystopia. Like most of the world's artistic and cultural achievements, Shakespeare's works are banned and unknown in this society to everyone but the World Controllers.
In 1993, an attempt was made to remove this novel from a California school's required reading list because it "centered around negative activity."
As a method of underscoring similarities to his fictional dystopia and his own contemporary culture, Huxley incorporates several sly, satirical references to targets such as the Church of England, the BBC or British tabloid The Daily Mirror ("The Delta Mirror"), Henry Ford, George Bernard Shaw and Sigmund Freud.
Brave New World and George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are both often used in political discussions of government actions perceived to be anti-libertarian. However, a key difference between 1984 and Brave New World is that while in 1984 people are kept from knowledge perceived to be "dangerous" by means of continual mass surveillance and coercion, in Brave New World the characters are physically engineered to not desire "dangerous" knowledge in the first place. One could say that while in 1984 the people are dehumanized by the state controlling their natural instincts such as sex or free thought, in Brave New World the "state" infantilizes the masses by giving free rein to basic human instincts such as sex and ceding responsibility to herd mentality.
Both novels incorporate a class of people (in 1984 the "proles" (proletariat) and in Brave New World those who live on "reservations") who exist on the periphery of the dystopian society in a state of relative physical squalor, but with little to no societal interference, outside of an enforced state of non-education. While both classes as such are peripheral to their respective milieux, they serve as an important device for delineating contrast between the dystopian society in question and what the author perceives as being a more ideal society.
In addition, the society presented in Brave New World is, to some extent, tolerant of outsiders, in so much as it respects the idea of there being an "outside". While the dystopian world of 1984 is all-encompassing, the world Brave New World includes "savage reservations" and "the islands". The latter are effectively places of exile for freethinkers, but they are also to some extent a "safe haven". No such places exist in 1984.
Brave New World--Revisited (Harper & Row, 1958, 1965) is a companion book (also by Huxley) which gives considerable additional detail about the society of Brave New World. In many ways it is different in tone and impact to the original novel, due to Huxley's evolving thought and his conversion to Buddhism between the two books.
This is an Article on Brave New World. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Brave New World Synopsis
Characters
Of the Fordian society
Of the savage reserve, particularly in Malpais
Historical characters
These are fictional and factual characters who died before the events in this book, but are of note in the novel.
Satire of 1930s society
Comparison with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Brave New World--Revisited
Related readings
External links
Publications