Brave New World?

Once upon a time I could actually write things that interest me. That is before I became a cog in the great governmental machine. Here is an old essay I dug up and it surprises me that it is better than I remembered it..







Machines and Stability:
In a ‘Brave New World’
by Bill Arends


The slogan of Huxley’s Brave New World is “Community, Identity [and] stability” (Huxley 1). On the eve of World War Two, Huxley saw the growth of German totalitarianism, and the growth of science. With science and control being the prime movers of society, Huxley made a logical connection between the two. He thus created a world where to create stability, science served control, and man became its victim. Ford is the embodiment of the machine, the pseudo-God of Huxley’s Brave New World, and the symbol of science in action. The machine is the only civilizing aspect of society, as the character Bernard says “these people have never heard of Our Ford, and they aren’t civilized” (Huxley 98).
Nell Eurich in Science in Utopia, analyses the role and position of Science in utopian and dystopian literature. According to Eurich, Huxley believes “science and technology should be used and controlled by man: Man should not be enslaved by them” (259). Science in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is the back bone of society. As Huxley states in his Foreword to the novel, the theme of Brave New World is “The advancement of science as it effects human individuals” (Huxley IV). The science of social control is, the means to which society has turned to create a stable state. Social control is applied in a mechanical way, to create a mechanical world. While other writers have interpreted Huxley’s Brave New World as showing the “absurdity of utopian dreams’(La Bossiere 290) it is possible that Huxley did not create his Brave New World as an example of “absurdity,” but more as a warning about the dangers of enslavement by science and control. Therefore an exploration of aspects of social stability, through the science of mechanical social control will prove that Huxley, was more concerned with science’s threat than the absurdity of its abuses.
It is also viable to argue, that the savage reservation offered a kind of stability based on the acceptance of life, death, and a recognized social order. While society on the reservation creates a sense of stability through voluntary acceptance, society off the reservation creates stability by enforced acceptance. The world is programmed like a machine and functions in a mechanical way. The machine like nature of life is enforced, even sometimes violently as Mustapha Mond proudly tells his students “eight hundred Simple Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green”(Huxley 44). The individual life becomes unimportant to the machine like whole.
The simple life idea, where man lives in a natural state is easy to villainize in a society of manufactured humans that never grow old, and die only to be recycled as a source of phosphorus. The human simply becomes an element in a social machine, and the human corpse as part of this machine is, “socially useful even after [death]” (Huxley 65), in fertilizer plants making plants grow. In essence the body truly feeds the machine in Huxley’s distopic society. While Huxley’s society is highly stratified, each part is only valued by its usefulness, and in the end “All men are Physico-chemically equal ” (Huxley 65). Like cogs in the machine as Lenina remembers from her hypnopaedic programing “Everyone works for everyone else. We can’t do without anyone”(Huxley 66). As much as a cog is a slave to the machine, so are the people in Huxley’s Brave New World. In turning man into an element in a machine, the machine has turned man into a slave to itself
The world governed society, attempts to overcome worrisome aspects of life through science, and removes the fear of them, creating a false stability. Thus stability is created by removing fear as much as possible, and not by simply accepting that fear is inevitable. The attractiveness of the character John Savage, to the citizens of this brave new world, shows how Stability is marginal in the society. The Factor that science can’t fully control is man himself. Even with the removal of difference, difference still attracts society, as the citizens descend on Savage in a living “Swarm of helicopters” (Huxley 236) as moths to a flame.
One question that still arises is, why Mustapha Mond allows Savage to remain in society as long as he did. Savage’s suicide at the end of the novel leaves one to assume that little has changed or will change, society has become too great to be influenced by the individual. Stability is linked in Huxley’s Brave New World to science which attempts to create maximum efficiency, by reducing society to a type of social functioning machine. In the face of this massive and growing machine the individual has been eliminated, even if man’s innate nature shows some signs of life.

Huxley also saw the machine as becoming the replacement for God, and not the tool it was meant to be. In his personal letters we find that this view was not only an interpretation of his work, but his real intent. Writing to Simon Blumenfeld, Huxley states that he was “ greatly struck recently by a Russian film [called] ‘Earth’” (Huxley in Begnoche p 52) in which was the anti-religion slogan “there is no God. Alas, there is always a tractor or something else to take his place.”(Huxley in Begnoche p 52) In the Russian film Huxley observes how the tractor is worshiped as a God. In His Brave New World Huxley is not simply placing Ford as a god, but the Idea of the machine as the god. The assembly line that was characteristic of Fords means of production is seen in Huxley’s Hatcheries and Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms. The machine is the product of science in Huxley’s mind, and the machine is the tool that science uses to make man in its own image.
The development of a religion of science and the machine, in Huxley’s opinion dehumanized society. His work was not simply a novel of what could happen if we let the absurdity of unlimited scientific progress continue, but a warning of what he saw as possible. As Krishan Kumar points out in his book Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, the period in which Huxley was writing was the “classic era of the Utopia in the negative”(Kumar 224). He describes the times as the “devil’s decades”(Kumar 224). As brutal dictatorships, and the rise of state social control appeared on the European continent, it would be hard to imagine that Huxley would not be influenced by this depressing trend. The rhetoric of the rising German totalitarian state can be seen in the first pages of Brave New World, as Huxley refers to his conditioned children as, not all “pink and Aryan”(Huxley 16). As Frederick Turner points out in his article “Future Shocks,” “there is no better guide to worried regard of the future than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” (Turner 21) As science was finding greater and greater ways of eliminating mankind, and better ways of controlling him and conditioning him, as Pavlov was suggesting that programing could improve a species there was obviously need to worry as Huxley believed.
Again in Huxley’s personal writings we see that this uncontrolled scientific progress, was of grave concern if not morbid interest to him. In his letters to Author E.M. Forster we find one account of his unique awareness of the frightening progress of science in a somewhat amoral world:
Bertie Russell, whom I’ve have just been lunching with, says one oughtn’t to mind about the superficial things like ideas, manners, politics, even wars - that the really important things, conditioned by scientific technique, go steadily on and up . . . in a straight un-undulating trajectory. It’s nice to think so; but meanwhile there the superficial undulations are, and one lives superficially; and who knows if that straight trajectory isn’t aiming directly for some fantastic denial of humanity?
Aldous Huxley to E.M. Forster, 17 February 1935. (Kumar 224)

The denial of humanity and deference to the machine are aspects that would be hard to avoid in Brave New World. If imitation is the greatest form of flattery, this flattery can be seen in Huxley’s society which sounds and behaves like a machine. In the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, life imitates the rhythmic nature of the machine as “ The Dynamos purred in the sub-basement, the lifts rushed up and down. On all the eleven floors of Nurseries it was feeding time” (Huxley 132). It is interesting to note that Huxley’s society, the glorious machine like world, is also programed like a machine, a computer that is continuously instructed in the betterment of itself. Every evening the youth of the society are given repetition after repetition, of words of wisdom designed to make them function better in society. It would have been hard to imagine that Huxley foresaw computers, when he was writing but it would seem he could see the nature of the machine age as it developed along this path.
Even with this development though, Huxley saw the superficially undulations personified in mankind. These undulations are arguably personified in the person of John Savage. This is not to say that Huxley believed that a ‘brave new world’ was not possible but, simply that undulations such as John Savage where not a bad thing.
Aspects of a mix of science and control can also be seen in the Central London Hatchery, with its science of eugenics, the Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning rooms, and the solidarity services that replace religion in this machine like world (Huxley 16). This machine world, uses science as Sybil Bedford points out to, “dominate people by social, educational and pharmaceutical methods” (Bedford, 249). The drug Soma the universal instiller of happiness in the world feeds the machine. In this new world it is Happiness rather than truth and beauty that matter[s] (Huxley 208) It is “universal happiness [in Huxley’s distopia that] keeps the wheels steadily turning”(Huxley 208).
Not all writers of Huxley’s time agreed with his negative view of the world. The progress of science was not universally viewed as a bad thing and in truth some saw it as beneficial. H.G. Wells while he was apprehensive about the future as his Novel The Time Machine would attest to, was not wholly convinced that it was science that was the problem. Kingsley Martin, recalls Well’s reaction to Huxley’s Brave New World, in which he states;
I remember his talking to me about Aldous Huxley, whom he regarded as the degenerate descendant of a noble grandfather. He spoke with bitterness of Brave New World; it was blasphemy against the religion of science. It suggested that knowledge might be the path, not to the modern Utopia, but to a new kind of servile Hell. (Kumar 224)

This servile hell was obviously not something that Well’s saw as the progress of science. To writers like Wells science was as he stated the path to a “modern Utopia”(Kumar 224) not the evil distopia of Huxley’s Brave new World.
Other writers of the day had impressions of just how science was going to save civilization. This religion of science, this worship of the machine, was not simply something that Huxley created within his own mind. J.D. Bernal in his book, The World, The Flesh, And The Devil, published in 1929 had already foreseen the things that Huxley was writing about, but saw them in a much more positive light. For Bernal science was the savior and saw that “scientists would have a dual function: to keep the world going as an efficient food and comfort machine, and to worry out the secrets of nature for themselves”(Kumar 238). Huxley, with his conditioned and programed society would hardly argue with this fact, but did not see it as positive, as we have seen he saw it as dehumanizing and in the novel he shows it as destructive.
Huxley goes one step farther in saying that science its self becomes self defeating, as control grows in a society. While to Huxley’s programmed citizens, “Science is everything”(Huxley 205), as Mustapha Mond points out, science is “dangerous; [in society] we have to keep most carefully chained and muzzled”(Huxley 205). If science solves all problems and frees mankind to live in a utopic condition, what is mankind to do. Mond states, and with a degree of truth, that labour saving devices are not entirely good, “For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure”(Huxley 205). A science that can’t solve the problem of the human element (and never will) is as Mond points out as “dangerous as it’s been beneficent”(Huxley 207).

With Science as the means, stability as the end, and happiness as the path it would appear that Huxley’s Brave New World, is putting the cart before the horse. He thus creates a world nightmare in which ignorance and drug induced happiness create a stable world, that neither degenerates nor progresses. This condition is kind of like a car in neutral, stable but somewhat useless, and entirely pointless. Humanity in this Brave New World achieves nothing, feels nothing, and in essence does nothing. The product of this society is the total dehumanization of mankind.

Huxley’s Brave New World may be an ‘absurdity’ but it is more a warning about the dangers of enslavement by science and control. Social stability through the science of mechanical social control is as we have seen more of a social nightmare than a Utopia. If Wells was truly thinking that a religion of science, was something to be praised , then Huxley has created a successful argument in defense of the opposite. Once truth was eliminated it would seem in Huxley’s Brave New World so was humanity, and all that remains is the machine.

Bibliography

Bedford, Sybill. Aldous Huxley. New York: Harper and Row. 1974.

Eurich, Nell. Science in Utopia. London: Oxford University Press. 1967.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Flamingo. 1994.

La Bossiere C. R. “Sunken Atlantis and the Utopian Question.” Science-Fiction Studies. 4
(1974): 290-297.

Begnoche, Suzanne R. “Aldous Huxley’s Soviet Source Material: An Unpublished Letter.”
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Varricchio, Mario. “Power of Images/Images of Power in Brave New World and Nineteen
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Turner, Frederick. “Future Shocks.” Reason. 31 (1999) 20-27

Kumar, Krishan . Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.
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