Brave New World Essay, Research Paper

email: [email protected] New WorldBrave New World takes place in the year 632 A.F. (After Ford). After a few very long wars, a dictatorship gained control, beginning the era of Our Ford. The society is kept stable by controlling population, types of people and by strongly regulating supply and demand. There are five artificially created castes of people. The alphas are the highest, ruling caste. They are permitted to think freely (within the guidelines of utopia). The epsilons are the lowest class; they are just workers, much like machines. In between the alphas and the epsilons are the betas, gammas and deltas. There are different levels in each caste distinguished by plus or minus. The minds of the citizens are controlled by conditioning them to a certain way of thinking when they are very young. The motto of the society is “Community, Identity, Stability” and happiness is its main goal. At the beginning of the book, the students are being given a guided tour of the London Hatcheries and Conditioning center by the director (D.H.C.), Tomakin. As the novel progresses, two of the characters, Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx take a vacation to the savage reservation. At the reservation, they stumble upon John The Savage, and his mother Linda. After much searching, Bernard and Lenina determine that once, long ago, the D.H.C. Tomakin brought Linda to the savage reservation and abandoned her. She then gave birth to his son, a crime preventing her return to ‘civilization’. After this discovery, Bernard got permission from the local world controller to bring Linda and John back to civilization. When they returned, Bernard found out that the D.H.C. was about to exile him. He brought Linda and John to the D.H.C. and they greeted Tomakin as wife and son. The D.H.C. resigned in disgrace. Bernard and a friend, Helmholtz Watson, took the savage in and tried to convert him to utopian ways. John is immediately disgusted by this way of life. Following the death of his mother, John goes into a rage and tries to convert the citizens of utopia to his way of In 1932, when Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, all of the things he talked about were so far fetched and such science fiction that no one could ever imagine them to be true. Despite the fact that the contents of the book were merely the work of a fertile imagination, many of them have come true.

One example of this is the method used for the creation of citizens. The citizens of utopia are created artificially in test tubes on an assembly line. Natural birth is forbidden and words like father, mother, sister and brother make people sick. Although we are not mass producing people in factories and everyone still has a mother and a father, we have begun experimenting with some of these methods of in vitro fertilization. Another somewhat common elment between Huxley’s utopian society and our society is soma. Soma is a mind and mood altering drug. It suppresses anger and hate, and it creates an artificial form of happiness. We do not have soma today, but we do have many psychotropic drugs. The number of mood altering drugs on the market is growing at an alarming rate. Although our society as a whole is not totally dependant on these drugs, it is conceivable to imagine a society entirely dependant on Prozac or another mood altering drug. In Brave New World, the concept of exile as a result of disagreeing with the government was not unusual. Although in this day and age exile and segregation based on political beliefs is uncommon, in the 1930’s the Russians were exiling political dissidents to Siberia and other prison labor camps. Sleep conditioning, the main method for controlling the thoughts of citizens of utopia, has been proven ineffective by modern science as a method of teaching and behavior modification. In addition, modern genetic engineering is being targeted toward correcting physical problems (i.e., disease, mental defects, hair loss etc.). However, there may come a time when it is simply more efficient to create whole new individuals without any physical or mental problems no matter how minute and insignificant. When that happens, Huxley’s fantasy will become reality. Although it may seem unlikely that the extremes of Aldous Huxley’s utopia will ever happen, we must not forget how unlikely any of Huxley’s predictions seemed to the people of his time; yet it is beginning to occur in our generation. We have to be careful that we don’t go overboard in trying to perfect society to the point that it causes more defects than we ever imagined possible..