BRAVE NEW WORLD ?
A Defence Of Paradise-Engineering
Brave New World (1932) is one of the most insidious
works of literature ever written.
An exaggeration?
Tragically, no. Brave New World has come to
serve as the false symbol for any regime of
universal happiness.
For sure, Huxley was writing a satirical piece
of fiction, not scientific prophecy. Hence to treat
his writing as ill-conceived futurology rather than a
work of great literature might seem to miss the
point. Yet the knee-jerk response of "It's Brave New
World!" to any blueprint for chemically-driven
happiness has delayed research into
paradise-engineering for all sentient life.
So how does Huxley turn a future where we're
all notionally happy into the archetypal dystopia? If
it's technically feasible, what's wrong with using
biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether?
Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless
and even sinister place. This is because Huxley
deliberately endows his "ideal" society with features
likely to alienate his audience. Typically, reading
BNW elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the
reader which the society it depicts has notionally
vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation.
Thus BNW doesn't, and isn't intended by its
author to, evoke just how wonderful our lives could
be if the human genome were rewritten. Let's say
our DNA will be spliced and edited so we can all
enjoy life-long bliss, awesome peak experiences,
and a spectrum of outrageously good
designer-drugs. Nor does Huxley's comparatively
sympathetic account of the life of the Savage on
the Reservation convey just how nasty the old
regime of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. If
you think it does, then you enjoy an enviably
sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. For
it's all sugar-coated pseudo-realism.
In Brave New World, Huxley contrives to
exploit the anxieties of his bourgeois audience
about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American
capitalism. He taps into, and then feeds, our
revulsion at Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning
and eugenics. Worse, it is suggested that the price
of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the
most hallowed shibboleths of our culture:
"motherhood", "home", "family", "freedom", even
"love". The exchange yields an insipid happiness
that's unworthy of the name. Its evocation arouses
our unease and distaste.
In BNW, happiness derives from consuming
mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf
and Centrifugual Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex,
"the feelies", and most famously of all, a supposedly
perfect pleasure-drug, soma.
As perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma
underwhelms. It's not really a utopian wonderdrug
at all. It does make you high. Yet it's more akin to a
hangoverless tranquilliser or an opiate - or a
psychic anaesthetising SSRI like Prozac - than a
truly life-transforming elixir. Third-millennium
neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a
vastly richer product-range of designer-drugs to
order.
For a start, soma is a very one-dimensional
euphoriant. It gives rise to only a shallow,
unempathetic and intellectually uninteresting
well-being. Apparently, taking soma doesn't give
Bernard Marx, the disaffected sleep-learning
specialist, more than a cheap thrill. Nor does it
make him happy with his station in life. John the
Savage commits suicide soon after taking soma
[guilt and despair born of serotonin depletion!?].
The drug is said to be better than (promiscuous)
sex - the only sex the brave new worlders practise.
But a regimen of soma doesn't deliver anything
sublime or life-enriching. It doesn't catalyse any
mystical epiphanies, intellectual breakthroughs or
life-defining insights. It doesn't in any way promote
personal growth. Instead, it provides a mindless,
inauthentic "imbecile happiness" - a vacuous
escapism which makes people comfortable with their
lack of freedom.
If Huxley had wished to tantalise, rather than
repel, emotional primitives like us with the biological
nirvana soon in prospect, then he could have
envisaged utopian wonderdrugs which reinforced or
enriched our most cherished ideals. In our
imaginations, perhaps we might have been allowed -
via chemically-enriched brave new worlders - to
turn ourselves into idealised versions of the sort of
people we'd most like to be. In this scenario,
behavioural conditioning, too, could have been used
by the utopians to sustain, rather than undermine,
a more sympathetic ethos of civilised society and a
life well led. Likewise, biotechnology could have
been exploited in BNW to encode life-long fulfilment
and super-intellects for everyone - instead of
manufacturing a rigid hierarchy of
genetically-preordained castes.
Huxley, however, has an altogether different
agenda in mind. He is seeking to warn us against
scientific utopianism. He succeeds all too well.
Although we tend to see other people, not least
the notional brave new worlders, as the hapless
victims of propaganda and disinformation, we may
find it is we ourselves who have been the
manipulated dupes.
For Huxley does an effective hatchet-job on
the very sort of "unnatural" hedonic engineering
that most of us so urgently need. One practical
consequence has been to heighten our already
exaggerated fears of state-sanctioned mood-drugs.
Hence millions of screwed-up minds, improvable
even today by clinically-tested mood-boosters and
anti-anxiety agents, just suffer in silence instead.
In part this is because people worry they might
become zombified addicts; and in part because they
are unwilling to cast themselves as humble
supplicants of the medical profession by taking
state-rationed "antidepressants". Either way, the
human cost in fruitless ill-being is immense.
Fortunately, the Net is opening up a vast
trans-national free-market in psychotropics. It will
eventually sweep away the restrictive practices of
old medical drug cartels and their allies in the
pharmaceutical industry. The liberatory potential of
the Net as a global drug-delivery and information
network has only just begun.
Of course, Huxley can't personally be blamed
for prolonging the pain of the old biological order.
Citing the ill-effects of Brave New World is not the
same as impugning its author's motives. Aldous
Huxley was a deeply humane person as well as a
brilliant polymath. He himself suffered terribly after
the death of his adored mother. But death and
suffering will be cured only by the application of
bioscience. They won't be abolished by spirituality,
prophetic sci-fi, or literary intellectualism.
So what form will this cure take?
In the future, it will be feasible technically -
at the very least - for pharmacotherapy and
genetic science to re-engineer us so that we can
become - to take one example among billions - a
cross between Jesus and Einstein. Transhumans will
be endowed with a greater capacity for love,
empathy and emotional depth than anything
neurochemically accessible today. Our
selfish-gene-driven ancestors - in common with the
cartoonish brave new worlders - will strike posterity
as functional psychopaths by comparison; and
posterity will be right.
In contrast to Brave New World, however, the
death of ageing won't be followed by our swift
demise after a sixty-odd year life-span. We'll have
to reconcile ourselves to the prospect of living
happily ever after. Scare-mongering prophets of
doom notwithstanding, a life of unremitting bliss
isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.
The good news gets better. Drugs - not least
the magical trinity of empathogens, entactogens
and entheogens - and eventually genetic
engineering will open up revolutionary new state
spaces of thought and emotion. Such modes of
consciousness are simply unimaginable to the
drug-innocent psyche. Today, their metabolic
pathways lie across forbidden gaps in the
evolutionary fitness landscape. They have
previously been hidden by the pressure of natural
selection: for Nature has no power of anticipation.
Open such spaces up, however, and new modes of
selfhood and introspection become accessible. The
Dark Age of primordial Darwinian life is about to pass
into history.
In later life, Huxley himself modified his
antipathy to drug-assisted paradise. Island,
Huxley's conception of a real utopia, was modelled
on his experiences of mescaline and LSD. But until
we get the biological underpinnings of our emotional
well-being securely encoded genetically, then
psychedelia is mostly off-limits for the purposes of
paradise-engineering. Certainly, its intellectual
significance cannot be exaggerated; but
unfortunately, neither can its ineffable weirdness
and the unpredictability of its agents. Thus
mescaline, and certainly LSD and its congeners, are
not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of
nightmarish bad trips and total emotional
Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are
constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA.
Uncontrolled eruptions within the psyche must be
replaced by the precision-engineering of emotional
tone, if nothing else. If rational design is good
enough for robots, then it's good enough for us.
In Brave New World, of course, there are no
freak-outs on soma. One suspects that this is
partly because BNW's emotionally stunted
inhabitants don't have the imagination to have a
bad trip. But mainly it's because the effects of
soma are no more intellectually illuminating than
getting a bit drunk. In BNW, our already limited
repertoire of hunter-gatherer emotions has been
constricted still further. Creative and destructive
impulses alike have been purged. The capacity for
spirituality has been extinguished. The utopians'
pleasure-pain axis has indeed been shifted. But it's
flattened at both ends.
To cap it all, in Brave New World life-long
emotional well-being is not genetically
pre-programmed as part of everyday mental health.
It isn't even assured from birth by euphoriant drugs.
For example, juvenile brave new worlders are
traumatised with electric shocks as part of the
behaviorist-inspired conditioning process in
childhood. Toddlers from the lower orders are
terrorised with loud noises. This sort of
aversion-therapy serves to condition them against
liking books. We are told the inhabitants of Brave
New World are happy. Yet they periodically
experience unpleasant thoughts, feelings and
emotions. They just banish them with soma: "One
cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments".
Even then, none of the utopians of any caste
come across as very happy. This seems credible:
more-or-less chronic happiness sounds so
uninteresting that it's easy to believe it must feel a
bit uninteresting too. For sure, the utopians are
mostly docile and contented. Yet their emotions
have been deliberately blunted and repressed. Life
is nice - but somehow a bit flat. In the words of the
Resident Controller of Western Europe: "No pains
have been spared to make your lives emotionally
easy - to preserve you, as far as that is possible,
from having emotions at all."
A more ambitious target would be to make the
world's last unpleasant experience a precisely
dateable event; and from this minimum baseline
start aiming higher. "Every day, and in every way, I
am getting better and better". Coué's mantra of
therapeutic self-deception needn't depend on the
cultivation of beautiful thoughts. If harnessed to
the synthesis of smarter mood-enrichers and
genetically-enhanced brains, it might even come
true.
Of course, it's easy today to write
(mood-congruent) tomes on how everything could
go wrong. This review essay is an exploration of
what it might be like if they go right. So it's worth
contrasting the attributes of Brave New World with
the sorts of biological paradise that may be enjoyed
by our ecstatic descendants.
S t a s i s
Brave New World is a benevolent dictatorship: a
static, efficient, totalitarian welfare-state. There is
no war, poverty or crime. Society is stratified by
genetically-predestined caste. Intellectually
superior Alphas are the top-dogs. Servile, purposely
brain-damaged Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons toil
away at the bottom. The lower orders are
necessary in BNW because Alphas - even
soma-fuelled Alphas - could allegedly never be
happy doing menial jobs. It is not explained why
doing menial work is inconsistent - if you're an
Alpha - with a life pharmacological hedonism - nor,
for that matter, with genetically-precoded wetware
of invincible bliss. In any case, our descendants are
likely to automate menial drudgery out of existence;
that's what robots are for.
Notionally, BNW is set in the year 632 AF
(After Ford). Its biotechnology is highly advanced.
Yet the society itself has no historical dynamic:
"History is bunk". It is curious to find a utopia where
knowledge of the past is banned by the Controllers
to prevent invidious comparisons. One might imagine
history lessons would be encouraged instead. They
would uncover a blood-stained horror-story.
Perhaps the Controllers fear historical
awareness would stir dissatisfaction with the
"utopian" present. Yet this is itself revealing. For
Brave New World is not an exciting place to live in.
It is a sterile, productivist utopia geared to the
consumption of mass-produced goods: "Ending is
better than mending". Society is shaped by a single
all-embracing political ideology. The motto of the
world state is "Community, Identity, Stability."
In Brave New World, there is no depth of
feeling, no ferment of ideas, and no artistic
creativity. Individuality is suppressed. Intellectual
excitement and discovery have been abolished. Its
inhabitants are laboratory-grown clones, bottled
and standardised from the hatchery. They are
conditioned and indoctrinated, and even
brainwashed in their sleep. The utopians are never
educated to prize thinking for themselves. In Brave
New World, the twin goals of happiness and stability
- both social and personal - are not just prized but
effectively equated.
This surprisingly common notion is
ill-conceived. The impregnable well-being of our
transhuman descendants is more likely to promote
greater diversity, both personal and societal, not
stagnation. This is because greater happiness, and
in particular enhanced dopamine function, doesn't
merely extend the depth of one's motivation to act:
the hyper-dopaminergic sense of things to be done.
It also broadens the range of stimuli an organism
finds rewarding. By expanding the range of potential
activities we enjoy, enhanced dopamine function
will ensure we will be less likely to get stuck in a
depressive rut. This rut leads to the kind of learned
helplessness that says nothing will do any good,
Nature will take its revenge, and utopias will always
go wrong.
In Brave New World, things do occasionally go
wrong. But more to the point, we are led to feel the
whole social enterprise that BNW represents is
horribly misconceived from the outset. In BNW,
nothing much really changes. It is an alien world,
but scarcely a rich or inexhaustibly diverse one.
Tellingly, the monotony of its pleasures mirrors the
poverty of our own imaginations in conceiving of
radically different ways to be happy. Today, we've
barely even begun to conceptualise the range of
things it's possible to be happy about. For our
brains aren't blessed with the neurochemical
substrates to do so. Time spent counting one's
blessings is rarely good for one's genes.
BNW is often taken as a pessimistic warning
of the dangers of runaway science and technology.
Scientific progress, however, was apparently frozen
with the advent of a world state. Thus ironically it's
not perverse to interpret BNW as a warning of what
happens when scientific inquiry is suppressed. One
of the reasons why many relatively robust optimists
- including some dopamine-driven transhumanists -
dislike Brave New World, and accordingly distrust
the prospect of universal happiness it symbolises, is
that their primary source of everyday aversive
experience is boredom. BNW comes across as a
stagnant civilisation. It's got immovably stuck in a
severely sub-optimal state. Its inhabitants are too
contented living in their rut to extricate themselves
and progress to higher things. Superficially, yes,
Brave New World is a technocratic society. Yet the
free flow of ideas and criticism central to science is
absent. Moreover the humanities have withered
too. Subversive works of literature are banned.
Subtly but inexorably, BNW enforces conformity in
innumerable different ways. Its conformism feeds
the popular misconception that a life-time of
happiness will [somehow] be boring - even when
the biochemical substrates of boredom have
vanished.
Controller Mustapha Mond himself obliquely
acknowledges the dystopian sterility of BNW when
he reflects on Bernard's tearful plea not to be exiled
to Iceland: "One would think he was going to have
his throat cut. Whereas, if he had the smallest
sense, he'd understand that his punishment is really
a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to
say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the
most interesting set of men and women to be found
anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one
reason or another, have got too self-consciously
individual to fit into community life. All the people
who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got
independent ideas of their own. Everyone, in a
word, who's anyone..."
Admittedly, Huxley's BNW enforces a much
more benign conformism than Orwell's terrifying
1984. There's no Room 101, no torture, and no war.
Early child-rearing practices aside, it's not a study
of physically violent totalitarianism. Its riot-police
use soma-vaporisers, not tear-gas and trucheons.
Yet its society is as dominated by caste as any
historical Eastern despotism. BNW recapitulates all
Heaven's hierarchies (recall all those angels,
archangels, seraphim, etc.) and few of its promised
pleasures. Its satirical grotesqueries and
fundamental joylessness are far more memorably
captured than its delights - with one pregnant
exception, soma.
Unlike the residents of Heaven, BNW's
inhabitants don't worship God. Instead, they are
brainwashed into revering a scarcely less abstract
and remote community. Formally, the community is
presided over by the spirit of the apostle of
mass-production, Henry Ford. He is worshipped as a
god: Alphas and Betas attend soma-consecrated
"solidarity services" which culminate in an orgy. But
history has been abolished, salvation has already
occurred, and the utopians aren't going anywhere.
By contrast, one factor of life spent with
even mildly euphoric hypomanic people is pretty
constant. The tempo of life, the flow of ideas, and
the drama of events speeds up. In a Post-Darwinian
Era of universal life-long bliss, the possibility of
stasis is remote; in fact one can't rule out an ethos
of permanent revolution. But however great the
intellectual ferment of ecstatic existence, the
nastiness of Darwinian life will have passed into
oblivion.
I m b e c i l i t y
Some drugs dull, stupefy and sedate. Others
sharpen, animate and intensify.
After taking soma, one can apparently drift
pleasantly off to sleep. Bernard Marx, for instance,
takes four tablets of soma to pass away a long
plane journey to the Reservation in New Mexico.
When they arrive at the Reservation, Bernard's
companion, Lenina, swallows half a gramme of soma
when she begins to tire of the Warden's lecture,
"with the result that she could now sit, serenely not
listening, thinking of nothing at all". Such a
response suggests the user's sensibilities are
numbed rather than heightened. In BNW, people
resort to soma when they feel depressed, angry or
have intrusive negative thoughts. They take it
because their lives, like society itself, are empty of
spirituality or higher meaning. Soma keeps the
population comfortable with their lot.
Soma also shows physiological tolerance.
Linda, the Savage's mother, takes too much: up to
twenty grammes a day. Taken in excess, soma acts
as a respiratory depressant. Linda eventually dies of
an overdose. This again suggests that Huxley
models soma more on opiates than the sort of
clinically valuable mood-brightener which subverts
the hedonic treadmill of negative feedback
mechanisms in the CNS. The parallel to be drawn
with opiates is admittedly far from exact. Unlike
soma, good old-fashioned heroin is bad news for
your sex life. But like soma, it won't sharpen your
wits.
Even today, the idea that chemically-driven
happiness must dull and pacify is demonstrably
false. Mood-boosting psychostimulants are likely to
heighten awareness. They increase
self-assertiveness. On some indices, and in low
doses, stimulants can improve intellectual
performance. Combat-troops on both sides in World
War Two, for instance, were regularly given
amphetamines. This didn't make them nicer or
gentler or dumber. Dopaminergic power-drugs tend
to increase willpower, wakefulness and action.
"Serenics", by contrast, have been researched by
the military and the pharmaceutical industry. They
may indeed exert a quiescent effect - ideally on the
enemy. But variants could also be used on, or by,
one's own troops to induce fearlessness.
A second and less warlike corrective to the
dumb-and-docile stereotype is provided by
so-called manic-depressives. One reason that many
victims of bipolar disorder, notably those who
experience the euphoric sub-type of (hypo-)mania,
skip out on their lithium is that when "euthymic"
they can still partially recall just how wonderfully
intense and euphoric life can be in its manic phase.
Life on lithium is flatter. For it's the havoc wrought
on the lives of others which makes the uncontrolled
exuberance of frank euphoric mania so disastrous.
Depressed or nominally euthymic people are easier
for the authorities to control than exuberant
life-lovers.
Thus one of the tasks facing a mature fusion
of biological psychiatry and psychogenetic medicine
will be to deliver enriched well-being and lucid
intelligence to anyone who wants it without running
the risk of triggering ungovernable mania.
MDMA(ecstasy) briefly offers a glimpse of what
full-blooded mental health might be like. Like soma,
it induces both happiness and serenity. Unlike soma,
it is neurotoxic. But used sparingly, it can also be
profound, empathetic and soulfully intense.
Drugs which commonly induce dysphoria, on
the other hand, are truly sinister instruments of
social control. They are far more likely to induce the
"infantile decorum" demanded of BNW utopians than
euphoriants. The major tranquillisers, including the
archetypal "chemical cosh" chlorpromazine
(Largactil), subdue their victims by acting as
dopamine antagonists. At high dosages, willpower is
blunted, affect is flattened, and mood is typically
depressed. The subject becomes sedated.
Intellectual acuity is dulled. They are a widely-used
tool in some penal systems.
A m o r a l i t y
Soma doesn't merely stupefy. At face value, the
happiness it offers is amoral; it's "hedonistic" in the
baser sense. Soma-fuelled highs aren't a function of
the well-being of others. A synthetic high doesn't
force you to be happy for a reason: unlike people, a
good drug will never let you down. True,
soma-consumption doesn't actively promote
anti-social behaviour. Yet the drug is all about
instant gratification.
Drug-naive John the Savage, by contrast, has
a firm code of conduct. His happiness - and sorrow
- don't derive from taking a soul-corrupting
chemical. It is based on reasons - though these
reasons themselves presumably have a
neurochemical basis. Justified or unjustified, his
happiness, like our own today, will always be
vulnerable to disappointment. Huxley clearly feels
that if a loved one dies, for instance, then one will
not merely grieve: it is appropriate that one
grieves, and there is good reason to do so. It would
be wrong not to go into mourning. A friend who said
he might be sad if you died, but he wouldn't let it
spoil his whole day - for instance - might strike us
as quite unfeeling, if rather droll: not much of a
friend at all.
By our lights, the utopians equally show poor
taste. They don't ever grieve or treat each others'
existence as special. They are conditioned to treat
death as natural and even pleasant. As children,
they are given sweets to eat when they go to
watch the process of dying in hospital. Their
greatest kick comes from taking a drug. Life on
soma, together with early behavioural conditioning,
leaves them oblivious to the true welfare of others.
The utopians are blind to the tragedy of death; and
to its pathos.
Surely this is a powerful indictment of all
synthetic pleasures? Shouldn't we echo the
Savage's denunciation of soma to the Deltas: "Don't
take that horrible stuff. It's poison, it's
poison...Poison to the soul as well as the
body...Throw it all away, that horrible poison". Don't
all chemical euphoriants rob us of our humanity?
Not really; or only on the most
malaise-sodden conception of what it means to be
human. Media stereotypes of today's crude
psychopharmacy are not a reliable guide to the next
few million years. It is sometimes supposed that all
psychoactive drug-taking must inherently be
egotistical. This egotism is exemplified in the
contemporary world by the effects of power-drugs
such as cocaine and the amphetamines, or by the
warm cocoon of emotional self-sufficiency afforded
by opium and its more potent analogues and
derivatives. Yet drugs - not least the empathogens
such as ecstasy - and genetic engineering can in
principle be customised to let us be nicer; to
reinforce our idealised codes of conduct. The
complex role of the "civilising neurotransmitter"
serotonin, and its multiple receptor sub-types, is
hugely instructive - if still poorly understood. If we
genetically re-regulate its receptors, we can make
ourselves kinder as well as happier.
The crucial point is that, potentially,
long-acting designer-drugs needn't supplant our
moral codes, but chemically predispose us to act
them out in the very way we would wish.
"Personality pills" permit us to become the kind of
people we'd most like to be - to fulfil our
second-order desires. Such self-reinvention is an
option that our genetic constitution today
frequently precludes. Altruism and self-sacrifice for
the benefit of anonymous strangers - including
starving Third World orphans whom we acknowledge
need resources desperately more than we do - is
extraordinarily hard to practise consistently.
Sometimes it's impossible, even for the most
benevolent-minded of the affluent planetary elite.
Self-referential altruism is easier; but it's also
different - narrow and small-scale. Unfortunately,
the true altruists among our (non-)ancestors got
eaten or outbred. Their genes perished with them.
More specifically; in chemical terms, very
crudely, dopaminergics fortify one's will-power,
while certain serotonergics can deepen one's
empathy and social conscience. Safe, long-lasting
site-specific hybrids will do both. Richer designer
cocktails spiced with added ingredients will be far
better still. It is tempting to conceptualise such
cocktails in terms of our current knowledge of, say,
oxytocin, phenylethylamine, substance P
antagonists, selective mu-opioid agonists and
enkephalinase-inhibitors etc. But this is probably
naive. Post-synaptic receptor antagonists block
their psychoactive effects, suggesting it's the
post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades they trigger
which form the heartlands of the soul. Our inner
depths haven't yet been properly explored, let alone
genetically re-regulated.
But our ignorance and inertia are receding
fast. Molecular neuroscience and behavioural
genetics are proceeding at dizzying pace. Better
Living Through Chemistry doesn't have to be just a
snappy slogan. Take it seriously, and we can
bootstrap our way into becoming smart and happy
while biologically deepening our social conscience
too. Hopefully, the need for manifestos and
ideological propaganda will pass. They must be
replaced by an international biomedical research
program of paradise-engineering. The fun hasn't
even begun. The moral urgency is immense.
It's true that morality in the contemporary
sense may no longer be needed when suffering has
been cured. The distinction between value and
happiness has distinctively moral significance only in
the Darwinian Era where the fissure originated.
Here, in the short-run, good feelings and good
conduct may conflict. Gratifying one's immediate
impulses sometimes leads to heartache in the longer
term, both to oneself and others. When suffering
has been eliminated, however, specifically moral
codes of conduct become redundant. On any
utilitarian analysis, at least, acts of immorality
become impossible. The values of our descendants
will be predicated on immense emotional well-being,
but they won't necessarily be focused on it;
happiness may have become part of the innate
texture of sentient existence.
In Brave New World, by contrast,
unpleasantness hasn't been eradicated. That's one
reason its citizens' behaviour is so shocking, and
one reason they take soma. BNW's outright
immorality is all too conceivable by the reader.
Typically, we are indignant when we see the
callous way in which John the Savage is treated, or
when we witness the revulsion provoked in the
Director by the sight of John's ageing mother - the
companion he had himself long ago abandoned for
dead after an ill-fated trip to the Reservation.
Above and beyond this, all sorts of sour
undercurrents are endemic to the society as a
whole. Bernard is chronically discontented. The
Alpha misfits in Iceland are condemned to a bleak
exile. Feely-author Helmholz is frustrated by a
sense that he is capable of greater things than
authoring repetitive propaganda. The Director of
Hatcheries is utterly humiliated by the
understandably aggrieved Bernard. Boastful Bernard
is himself reduced to tears of despair when the
Savage refuses to be paraded in front of assorted
dignitaries and the Arch-Community-Songster of
Canturbury. Lesser problems and unpleasantnesses
are commonplace. And appallingly, the utopians
come to gawp at John in his hermit's exile and
watch his suffering for fun.
Brave New World is a patently sub-standard
utopia in need of some true moral imagination - and
indignation - to sort it out.
F a l s e H a p p i n e s s
Huxley implies that by abolishing nastiness and
mental pain, the brave new worlders have got rid of
the most profound and sublime experiences that life
can offer as well. Most notably, they have
sacrificed a mysterious deeper happiness which is
implied, but not stated, to be pharmacologically
inaccessible to the utopians. The metaphysical
basis of this presumption is obscure.
There are hints, too, that some of the
utopians may feel an ill-defined sense of
dissatisfaction, an intermittent sense that their
lives are meaningless. It is implied, further, that if
we are to find true fulfilment and meaning in our
own lives, then we must be able to contrast the
good parts of life with the bad parts, to feel both
joy and despair. As rationalisations go, it's a good
one.
But it's still wrong-headed. If pressed, we
must concede that the victims of chronic
depression or pain today don't need interludes of
happiness or anaesthesia to know they are suffering
horribly. Moreover, if the mere relativity of pain and
pleasure were true, then one might imagine that
pseudo-memories in the form of neurochemical
artefacts imbued with the texture of "pastness"
would do the job of contrast just as well as raw
nastiness. The neurochemical signatures of deja vu
and jamais vu provide us with clues on how the
re-engineering could be done. But this sort of
stratagem isn't on Huxley's agenda. The clear
implication of Brave New World is that any kind of
drug-delivered happiness is "false" or inauthentic. In
similar fashion, all forms of human genetic
engineering and overt behavioural conditioning are
to be tarred with the same brush. Conversely, the
natural happiness of the Savage on the Reservation
is portrayed as more real and authentic, albeit
transient and sometimes interspersed with sorrow.
The contrast between true and false
happiness, however, is itself problematic. Even if
the notion is both intelligible and potentially
referential, it's not clear that "natural",
selfish-DNA-sculpted minds offer a more authentic
consciousness than precision-engineered euphoria.
Highly selective and site-specific designer drugs
[and, ultimately, genetic engineering] won't make
things seem weird or alien. On the contrary, they
can deliver a greater sense of realism, verisimilitude
and emotional depth to raw states of biochemical
bliss than today's parochial conception of Real Life.
Future generations will "re-encephalise" emotion to
serve us, sentient genetic vehicles, rather than
selfish DNA. Our well-being will feel utterly natural;
and in common with most things in the natural
world, it will be.
If desired, too, designer drugs can be used to
trigger paroxysms of spiritual enlightenment - or at
least the phenomenology thereof - transcending the
ecstasies of the holiest mystic or the
hyper-religiosity of a temporal-lobe epileptic. So
future psychoactives needn't yield only the ersatz
happiness of a brave new worlder, nor will their use
be followed by the proverbial Dark Night Of The
Soul. Just so long as neurotransmitter activation of
the right sub-receptors triggers the right
post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades regulated by
the right alleles of the right genes in the right way
indefinitely - and this is a technical problem with a
technical solution - then we have paradise
everlasting, at worst. If we want it, we can enjoy a
liquid intensity of awareness far more compelling
than our mundane existence as contemporary
sleepwalking Homo sapiens. It will be vastly more
enjoyable to boot.
If sustained, such modes of consciousness
can furnish a far more potent definition of reality
than the psychiatric slumlands of the past. Subtly
or otherwise, today's unenriched textures of
consciousness express feelings of depersonalisation
and derealisation. Such feelings are frequently
nameless - though still all too real - because they
are without proper contrast: anonymous
angst-ridden modes of selfhood that, in time, will
best be forgotten. "True" happiness, on the other
hand, will feel totally "real". Authenticity should be
a design-specification of conscious mind, not the
fleeting and incidental by-product of the workings
of selfish DNA.
Tomorrow's neuropharmacology, then, offers
incalculably greater riches than souped-up soma.
True, drugs can also deliver neurochemical
wastelands of silliness and shallowness. A lot of the
state-spaces currently beyond our mental horizons
may be nasty or uninteresting or both. Statistically,
most are probably just psychotic. But a lot aren't.
Entactogens, say, [literally, to "touch within"] may
eventually be as big an industry as diet pills; and
what they offer by way of a capacity for self-love
will be far more use in boosting personal
self-esteem.
"Entactogens", "empathogens", "entheogens"
- these are fancy words. Until one is granted
first-person experience of the states they open up,
the phraseology invoked to get some kind of
intellectual handle on Altered States may seem
gobbledygook. What on earth does it all mean? But
resort to such coinages isn't a retreat into
obscurantism or mystery-mongering. It's a bid to
bring some kind of order to unmapped exotica way
beyond the drug-naive imagination.
One can try to hint at the properties of even
seriously altered states by syntactically shuffling
around the lexical husks of the old order. But the
kind of consciousness disclosed by these
extraordinary agents provides the basis for new
primitive terms in the language of a conceptual
apparatus that hasn't yet been invented. Such
forms of what-it's-likeness can't properly be defined
or evoked within the state-specific resources of the
old order. Ordinarily, they're not neurochemically
accessible to us at all. Genetically, we're
action-oriented hunter-gatherers, not introspective
psychonauts.
So how well do we understand the sort of
happiness Huxley indicts?
Even though we find the nature of BNW-issue
"soma" as elusive as its Vedic ancestor, we think
we can imagine, more-or-less, what taking "soma"
might be like; and judge accordingly. Within limits,
plain "uppers" and "downers" are intelligible to us in
their effects, though even here our semantic
competence is debatable - right now, it's hard to
imagine what terms like "torture" and "ecstasy"
really denote. When talking about drugs with (in
one sense) more far-reaching effects, however, it's
easy to lapse into gibbering nonsense. If one has
never taken a particular drug, then one's
conception of its distinctive nature derives from
analogy with familiar agents, or from its behavioural
effects on other people, not on the particular
effects its use typically exerts on the texture of
consciousness. One may be confident that other
people are using the term in the same way only in
virtue of their physiological similarity to oneself, not
through any set of operationally defined criteria.
Thus until one has tried a drug, it's hard to
understand what one is praising or condemning.
This doesn't normally restrain us. But are we
rationally entitled to pass a judgement on any
drug-based civilisation based on one fictional
model?
No, surely not. Underground chemists and
pharmaceutical companies alike are likely to
synthesise all sorts of "soma" in future. Licitly or
otherwise, we're going to explore what it's like; and
we'll like it a lot. But to suppose that the happiness
of our transhuman descendants will thereby be
"false" or shallow is naive. Post-humans are not
going to get drunk and stoned. Their well-being will
infuse ideas, modes of introspection, varieties of
selfhood, structures of mentalese, and whole new
sense modalities that haven't even been dreamt of
today.
Brave New World-based soma-scenarios, by
contrast, are highly conceivable. This is one reason
why they are so unrealistic.
T o t a l i t a r i a n
BNW is a benevolent dictatorship - or at least a
benevolent oligarchy, for at its pinnacle there are
ten world controllers. We get to meet its
spokesman, the donnish Mustapha Mond, Resident
Controller of Western Europe. He governs a society
where all aspects of an individual's life, from
conception and conveyor-belt reproduction
onwards, are determined by the state. The
individuality of BNW's two billion hatchlings is
systematically stifled. A government bureau, the
Predestinators, decides a prospective citizen's role
in the hierarchy. Children are raised and conditioned
by the state bureaucracy, not brought up by
natural families. There are only ten thousand
surnames. Value has been stripped away from the
person as an individual human being; respect
belongs only to society as a whole. Citizens must
not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids. This
would seduce their allegiance away from the
community as a whole by providing a rival focus of
affection. The individual's loyalty is owed to the
state alone. By getting rid of potential sources of
tension and anxiety - and dispelling residual
discontents with soma - the World State controls
its populace no less than Big Brother.
Brave New World, then, is centred around
control and manipulation. As ever, the fate of an
individual depends on the interplay of Nature and
Nurture, heredity and environment: but the utopian
state apparatus controls both. Naturally, we find
this control disquieting. One of our deepest fears
about the prospect of tampering with our natural
(i.e. selfish DNA-driven) biological endowment is
that we will ourselves be controlled and manipulated
by others. Huxley plays on these anxieties to
devastating effect. He sows the fear that a future
world state may rob us of the right to be unhappy.
It must be noted that this right is not
immediately in jeopardy. Huxley, however, evidently
feels that the threat of compulsory well-being is
real. This is reflected in his choice of a quotation
from Nicolas Berdiaeff as BNW's epigraph. "Utopias
appear to be much easier to realize than one
formerly believed. We currently face a question that
would otherwise fill us with anguish: How to avoid
their becoming definitively real?" Perhaps not all of
the multiple ironies here are intended by BNW's
author.
Huxley deftly coaxes us into siding with John
the Savage as he defends the right to suffer illness,
pain, and fear against the arguments of the
indulgent Controller. The Savage claims the right to
be unhappy. We sympathise. Intuitively but
obscurely, he shouldn't have to suffer enforced
bliss. We may claim, like the Savage, "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
tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to
be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind".
Yet the argument against chemical enslavement
cuts both ways. The point today - and at any other
time, surely - is that we should have the right not
to be unhappy. And above all, when suffering
becomes truly optional, we shouldn't force our toxic
legacy wetware on others.
But what will be the price of all this
happiness?
It's not what we might intuitively expect.
Perhaps surprisingly, freedom and individuality can
potentially be enhanced by chemically boosting
personal well-being. Vulnerable and unhappy people
are probably more susceptible to brainwashing - and
the subtler sorts of mind-control - than active
citizens who are happy and psychologically robust.
Happiness is empowering. In real life, it is notable
that mood- and resilience-enhancing drugs, such as
the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, tend to
reduce submissiveness and subordinate behaviour.
Rats and monkeys on SSRIs climb the pecking order,
or transcend it altogether. They don't seem to try
and dominate their fellows - loosely speaking, they
just stop letting themselves be messed around. If
pharmacologically and genetically enriched, we may
all aspire to act likewise.
Admittedly, this argument isn't decisive. It's a
huge topic. Humans, a philosopher once observed,
are not rats. Properly-controlled studies of altered
serotonin function in humans are lacking. The
intra-cellular consequences of fifteen-plus serotonin
receptor sub-types defy facile explanation. But we
do know that a dysfunctional serotonin system is
correlated with low social-status. Enhancing
serotonin function - other things being equal - is
likely to leave an individual less likely to submit to
authority, not docile and emasculated. Brave New
World is exquisite satire, but the utopia it imagines
is sociologically and biologically implausible. Its
happy conformists are shallow cartoons.
Of course, any analysis of the state's role in
future millennia is hugely speculative. Both
minimalist "night-watchman" states and extreme
totalitarian scenarios are conceivable. In some
respects, any future world government may indeed
be far more intrusive than the typical nation-state
today. If the ageing process and the inevitability of
death is superseded, for instance, then decisions
about reproduction - on earth at least - simply
cannot be left to the discretion of individual couples
alone. This is because we'd soon be left with
standing room only. The imminence of widespread
human cloning, too, makes increased regulation and
accountability inevitable - quite disturbingly so. But
challenges like population-control shouldn't
overshadow the fact that members of a happy,
confident, psychologically robust citizenry are far
less likely to be the malleable pawns of a ruling elite
than contented fatalists. A chemically-enslaved
underclass of happy helots remains unlikely.
A n t h r o p o c e n t r i c
Brave New World is a utopia conceived on the basis
of species-self-interest masquerading as a universal
paradise. Most of the inhabitants of our planet don't
get a look-in, any more than they do today.
Strong words? Not really. Statistically, most
of the suffering in the contemporary world isn't
undergone by human beings. It is sometimes
supposed that intensity and degree of
consciousness - between if not within species - is
inseparably bound up with intelligence. Accordingly,
humans are prone to credit themselves with a
"higher" consciousness than members of other taxa,
as well as - sometimes more justifiably - sharper
intellects. Non-human animals aren't treated as
morally and functionally akin to human infants and
toddlers i.e. in need of looking after. Instead, they
are wantonly abused, exploited, and killed.
Yet it is a striking fact that our most primitive
experiences - both phylogenetically and
ontogenetically - are also the most vivid. For
physical suffering probably has more to do with the
number and synaptic density of pain cells than a
hypertrophied neocortex. The extremes of pain and
thirst, for example, are excruciatingly intense. By
contrast, the kinds of experience most associated
with the acme of human intellectual endeavour,
namely thought-episodes in the pre-frontal region,
are phenomenologically so anaemic that it is hard to
introspect their properties at all.
Hardcore paradise-engineering - and not the
brittle parody of paradise served up in BNW - will
eradicate such nastiness from the living world
altogether. None of Huxley's implicit criticism of the
utopians can conceivably apply to the rest of the
animal kingdom. For by no stretch of the
imagination could the most ardent misery-monger
claim animal suffering is essential for the production
of great art and literature - a common rationale for
its preservation and alleged redeeming value in
humans. Nor would its loss lead to great spiritual
emptiness. Animal suffering is just savage, empty
and pointless. So we'll probably scrap it when it
becomes easy enough to do so.
Whether pain takes the form of the eternal
Treblinka of our Fordist factory farms and
conveyor-belt killing factories, or whether it's
manifested as the cruelties of a living world still
governed by natural selection, the sheer
viciousness of the Darwinian Era is likely to horrify
our morally saner near-descendants. A few
centuries hence - the chronological details are
sketchy - hordes of self-replicating nanorobots
armed with retroviral vectors and the power of
on-board quantum supercomputers will hunt out the
biomolecular signature of aversive experience all the
way down the phylogenetic tree; and genetically
eliminate it. Meanwhile, depot-contraception, not
merciless predation, will control population in our
wildlife parks. Carnivorous killing-machines - and
that includes dear misunderstood kitty, a beautiful
sociopath - will be reprogrammed or phased out.
Down on the farm, tasty, genetically-engineered
ambrosia will replace abused sentience. For
paradise-engineering entails global veganism. Utopia
cannot be built on top of an ecosystem of pain and
fear. Unfortunately, this is an issue on which Brave
New World is silent.
How is it possible to make such predictions
with any confidence?
Properly speaking, one can't, or at least not
without a heap of caveats. But as science
progressively gives us the power to remould matter
and energy to suit our desires - or whims - it would
take an extraordinary degree of malice for us to
sustain the painfulness of Darwinian life indefinitely.
For as our power increases, so does our complicity
in its persistence.
Even unregenerate humans don't tend to be
sustainably ill-natured. So when
genetically-engineered vat-food tastes as good as
dead meat, we may muster enough moral courage
to bring the animal holocaust to an end.
C a s t e - b o u n d
In BNW, genetic engineering isn't used
straightforwardly to pre-code happiness. Instead, it
underwrites the subordination and inferiority of the
lower orders. In essence, Brave New World is a
global caste society. Social stratification is
institutionalised in a five-way genetic split. There is
no social mobility. Alphas invariably rule, Epsilons
invariably toil. Genetic differences are reinforced by
systematic conditioning.
Historically, dominance and winning have been
associated with good, even manically euphoric,
mood; losing and submission are associated with
subdued spirits and depression. Rank theory
suggests that the far greater incidence of the
internalised correlate of the yielding sub-routine,
depression, reflects how low spirits were frequently
more adaptive among group-living organisms than
manic self-assertion. But in Brave New World, the
correlation vanishes or is even inverted. The lower
orders are at least as happy as the Alphas thanks
to soma, childhood conditioning and their
brain-damaged incapacity for original thought. Thus
in sleep-lessons on class consciousness, for
instance, juvenile Betas learn to love being Betas.
They learn to respect Alphas who "work much
harder than we do, because they're so frightfully
clever." But they also learn to take pleasure in not
being Gammas, Deltas, or the even more witless
Epsilons. "Oh no," the hypnopedia tapes suggest, "I
don't want to play with Delta children."
One might imagine that progress in
automation technology would eliminate the menial,
repetitive tasks so unsuitable for big-brained
Alphas. But apparently this would leave the lower
castes disaffected and without a role: allegedly a
good reason for freezing scientific progress where it
is. It might be imagined, too, that one solution here
would be to stop producing oxygen-starved morons
altogether. Why not stick to churning out Alphas?
The Controller Mustapha Mond informs us that an
all-Alpha society was once tried on an island. The
result of the experiment was civil war. 19 000 of
the 22 000 Alphas perished. Thus the lower castes
are needed indefinitely. The happiness that they
derive from their routine-bound lives guarantees
stability for society as a whole. "The optimum
population", the Controller observes, "is modelled on
the iceberg - eight-ninths below the waterline,
one-ninth above".
There are evidently (strong!)
counter-arguments and rebuttals that could be
delivered against any specific variant of this
scenario. But Huxley isn't interested in details. BNW
is a deeply pessimistic blanket-warning against all
forms of genetic engineering and eugenics.
Shouldn't we keep the status quo and ban them
altogether? Let's play safe. In the last analysis,
Nature Knows Best.
As it stands, this argument is horribly facile.
The ways in which bioscience can be abused are
certainly manifold. Bioethics deserves to become a
mainstream academic discipline. But the idea that a
living world organised on principles of blind genetic
selfishness - the bedrock of the Darwinian Era - is
inherently better than anything based on rational
design is surely specious. Selfishness, whether in
the technical or overlapping popular sense, is a
spectacularly awful principle on which to base any
civilisation. Sooner or later, simple
means-ends-analysis, if nothing else, will dictate
the use of genetic engineering to manufacture
constitutionally happy mind/brains. Reams of
philosophical sophistry and complication aside,
that's what we're all after, obliquely and under
another description or otherwise; and biotechnology
is the only effective way to get it.
For despite how frequently irrational we may
be in satisfying our desires, we're all slaves to the
pleasure-principle. No one ever leaves a
well-functioning pleasure-machine because they get
bored: unlike the derivative joys of food, drink and
sex, the delightfulness of intra-cranial
self-stimulation of the pleasure-centres shows no
tolerance. Natural selection has "encephalised"
emotion to disguise our dependence on the
mesolimbic dopamine circuitry of reward. Since raw,
unfocused emotion is blind and impotent, its axonal
and dendritic processes have been recruited into
innervating the neocortex. All our layers of cortical
complexity conspire to help self-replicating DNA
leave more copies of itself. Thus we fetishise all
sorts of irrelevant cerebral bric-a-brac ["intentional
objects": loosely, what we're happy or upset
"about"] that has come to be associated with
adaptively nice and nasty experiences in our past.
But the attributes of power, status and money, for
instance, however obviously nice they seem today,
aren't inherently pleasurable. They yield only a
derivative kick that can be chemically edited out of
existence. Their cortical representations have to be
innervated by limbically-generated emotions in the
right way - or the wrong way - for them to seem
nice at all.
Rationally, then, if we want to modulate our
happiness so that it's safe and socially sustainable,
we must genetically code pre-programmed
well-being in a way that shuts down the old
dominance-and-submission circuits too. Such a
shut-down is crudely feasible today on
serotonergics, both recreational and clinical. But
the shut-down can be comprehensive and
permanent. Germ-line gene therapy is better than
drugs.
Is this sort of major genetic re-write likely?
Yes, probably. But in the meantime, any
unreconstructed power-trippers can get a far bigger
kick in immersive VR than they can playing primate
party-politics. If one wants to be Master Of The
Universe, then so be it: a chacun son gout. The
narrative software which supports such virtual
worlds can even be pharmacologically enhanced in
the user so that virtual world mastery is always
better than The Real Thing - relegated one day,
perhaps, to a fading antiquarian relic. The fusion of
drugs and computer-generated worlds will yield
greater verisimilitude than anything possible in
recalcitrant old organic VR - the dynamic
simulations which perceptual naive realists call the
world. For we live in a messy and frustrating regime
which passes itself off as The Real World, but is
actually a species-specific construct coded by DNA.
OK. But can power-games really be confined
exclusively to VR? Won't tomorrow's Alphas want to
dominate both?
This question needs a book, not the obiter
dicta of a literary essay. But if one can enjoy
champagne, why drink meths, or even be tempted
to try it in the first place? In common with
non-human animals, we respond most powerfully to
hot-button supernormal stimuli. Getting turned-on
by the heightened verisimilitude of drugs-plus-VR
from a very young age is likely to eclipse anything
else on offer.
This isn't to deny that in any transitional era
to a mature post-Darwinian paradise, there will
have to be huge safeguards - no less elaborate
than the multiple failsafe procedures surrounding
the launch codes for today's nuclear weaponry. In
the near future, for instance, prospective
candidates for political leadership in The Real World
will probably have their DNA profiles scrutinised no
less exhaustively than their sexual peccadillos. For
it will be imprudent to elect unenriched primitives
endowed with potentially dangerous genotypes. If
one is going to put oneself and one's children into,
say, ecstasy-like states of loving empathy and
trust, then one is potentially more vulnerable to
genetic cavemen. But this is all the more reason to
design beautifully enhanced analogues of ecstasy
and coke which fuse the best features of both.
Even if a power-tripper's fantasy
wish-fulfilment is confined to private universes, we
are still likely to view it as an unnerving prospect.
One of the reasons we find the very thought of
being dominated and controlled and manipulated à
la BNW so aversive is that we associate such
images with frustration, nastiness and depression.
For sure, the Brave New Worlders are typically
happy rather than depressed. Yet they are all, bar
perhaps the Controllers, manipulated dupes. The
worry that we ourselves might ever suffer a similar
fate is unsettling and depressing. Brave New World
gives happiness a bad name.
But it's misery that deserves to be
stigmatised and stamped out. Brave New World
dignifies unpleasantness in the guise of noble
savagery just when it's poised to become
biologically optional. And on occasion
unpleasantness really can be horrific - too bad to
describe in words. Some forms of extreme pain, for
instance, are so terrible to experience that one
would sacrifice the whole world to get rid of the
agony. Pain just this bad is happening in the living
world right now. It's misguided to ask whether such
pain is really as bad as it seems to be - because
the reality is the very appearance one is trying
vainly to describe. The extremes of so-called
"mental" pain can be no less dreadful. They may
embody suicidal despair far beyond everyday
ill-spirits. They are happening right now in the living
world as well. Their existence reflects the way our
mind/brains are built. Unless the vertebrate central
nervous system is genetically recoded, there will be
traumas and malaise in utopia - any utopia - too.
No behavioural account of even moderately
severe depression, for instance, can do justice to
its subjective awfulness. But a spectrum of
depressive signs and symptoms will persist within
even a latter-day Garden of Eden - in the absence
of good drugs and better genes. We can
understand why depressive states evolved in terms
of the selective advantage of depressive behaviour
in reinforcing adaptive patterns of dominance and
subordination, avoiding damaging physical fights
with superior rivals, or of inducing hypercholinergic
frenzy of reflective thought when life goes badly
wrong - for one's genes. Likewise, intense and
unpleasant social anxiety was sometimes adaptive
too. So was an involuntary capacity for the
torments of sexual jealousy, fear, terror, hunger,
thirst and disgust. Our notions of dominance and
subordination are embedded within this stew of
emotions. They are clearly quite fundamental to our
social relationships. They pervade our whole
conceptual scheme. When we try to imagine the
distant future, we may of course imagine hi-tech
gee-whizzery. Yet emotionally, we also think in
primitive terms of dominance and submission, of
hierarchy and power structures, superiority and
inferiority. Even when we imagine future computers
and robots, we are liable to have simple-minded
fantasies about being used, dominated, and
overthrown. Bug-eyed extra-terrestrials from the
Planet Zog, too, and their legion of hydra-headed
sci-fi cousins, are implicitly assumed to have the
motivational structure of our vertebrate ancestors.
Superficially they may be alien - all those tentacles
- but really they're just like us. Surely they'll want
to dominate us, control us, invade earth etc?
Huxley's vision of control and manipulation is
(somewhat) subtler; but it belongs to the same
atavistic tradition.
For the foreseeable future, these concerns
aren't idle. We may rightly worry that if some of us
- perhaps most of us - are destined to get
drugged-up, genetically-rewritten and plugged into
designer worlds, then might not invisible
puppet-masters be controlling us for their own
ends, whatever their motives? Who'll be in charge
of the basement infrastructure which sustains all
the multiple layers of VR - and thus ultimately
running the show? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
as we say here in Brighton.
Admittedly, sophisticated and intellectually
enriched post-humans are unlikely to be naive
realists about "perception"; so they'll recognise that
what their ancestors called "real life" was no more
privileged than what we might call, say, "the
medieval world" - the virtual worlds instantiated by
medievals. But any unenriched primitives still living
in organic VR could still be potentially dangerous,
because they could bring everything else tumbling
down. In certain limited respects, their virtual
worlds, like our own, would causally co-vary with
the mind-independent world in ways that blissed-up
total-VR dwellers would typically lack. So can it
ever be safe to be totally nice and totally happy?
These topics deserve a book - many books -
too. The fixations they express are doubtless still of
extreme interest to contemporary humans.
Sado-masochistic images of
domination-and-submission loom large in a lot of our
fantasies too. The categories of experience they
reflect were of potent significance on the African
savannah, where they bore on the ability to get the
"best" mates and leave most copies of one's genes.
But they won't persist for ever. A tendency to such
dominance-and-control syndromes is going to be
written out of the genome - as soon we gain
mastery of rewriting the script. For on the whole,
we want our kids to be nice.
More generally, the whole "evolutionary
environment of adaptation" is poised for a
revolution. This is important. When any particular
suite of alleles ceases to be the result of random
mutation and blind natural selection, and is instead
pre-selected by intelligent agents in conscious
anticipation of their likely effects, then the criteria
of genetic fitness will change too. The
sociobiological and popular senses of "selfish" will
progressively diverge rather than typically overlap.
Allegedly "immutable" human nature will change as
well when the genetic-rewrite gathers momentum.
The classical Darwinian Era is drawing to a close.
Unfortunately, its death agonies may be
prolonged. Knee-jerk pessimism and outright
cynicism abound among humanistic pundits in the
press. They are common in literary academia. And
of course any competent doom-monger can glibly
extrapolate the trends of the past into the future.
Yet anti-utopianism ignores even the foreseeable
discontinuities that lie ahead of us as we mature
into post-humans. Most notably, it ignores the
major evolutionary transition now imminent in the
future of life. This is the era when we rewrite the
genome in our own interest to make ourselves
happy. In the meantime, we just act out variations
on dramas scripted by selfish DNA.
P h i l i s t i n e
Brave New World is a stupid society. For the most
part, even the Alphas don't do anything more
exalted than play Obstacle Golf. A handful of the
Alphas are well-delineated. They are truly clever.
Huxley is far too brilliant to write a novel with
convincingly dim-witted lead characters. The
Savage, in particular, is an implausibly articulate
vehicle for Huxley's own sympathies. But in the
main, brave new worlders are empty-headed mental
invalids in the grip of terminal mind-rot - happy pigs
rather than types of unhappy Socrates.
Since the utopians are (largely) contented
with their lives, they don't produce Great Art.
Happiness and Great Art are allegedly incompatible.
Great Art and Great Literature are very dear to
Huxley's heart. But is artistic genius really stifled
without inner torment? Is paradise strictly for
low-brows?
There is a great deal of ideological baggage
that needs to be picked apart here; or preferably
slashed like a Gordian knot. The existence of great
art, unlike (controversially) great science, is not
state-neural fact about the world. Not least, "great
art" depends on the resonances it strikes in its
audience. Today we're stuck with legacy wetware
and genetically-driven malaise. It's frequently nasty
and sometimes terrible. So we can currently
appreciate only too well "great" books and plays
about murder, violence, treachery, child abuse,
suicidal despair etc. Such themes, especially when
"well"-handled in classy prose, strike us as more
"authentic" than happy pap. Thus a (decaying)
Oxbridge literary intelligentsia can celebrate, say,
the wonderful cathartic experience offered by Greek
tragedies - with their everyday tales of bestiality,
cannibalism, rape and murder among the Greek
gods. It's good to have one's baser appetites
dressed up so intelligently.
Yet after the ecstatic phase-change ahead in
our affective states - the most important
evolutionary transition in the future of life itself -
the classical literary canon may fall into obscurity.
Enriched minds with different emotions encephalised
in different ways are unlikely to be edified by the
cultural artefacts of a bygone era. Conversely, we
might ourselves take a jaundiced view if we could
inspect the artistic products of a civilisation of
native-born ecstatics. This is because any future
art which explores lives predicated on gradations of
delight will seem pretty vapid from here. We find it
hard enough to imagine even one flavour of
sublimity, let alone a multitude.
The nagging question may persist: will
posterity's Art and Literature [or art-forms
expressing modes of experience we haven't even
accessed yet] really be Great? To its creators,
sure, their handiwork may seem brilliant and
beautiful, moving and profound. But might not its
blissed-out authors be simply conning themselves?
Could they have lost true critical insight, even if
they retain its shadowy functional analogues?
Such questions demand a treatise on the
nature and objectivity of value judgements. Yet
perhaps asking whether we would appreciate
ecstatic art of 500 or 5000 years hence is futile in
the first place. We simply can't know what we're
talking about. For we are unhappy pigs, and our
own arts are mood-congruent perversions. The real
philistinism to worry about lies in the emotional
illiteracy of the present. Our genetically-enriched
posterity will have no need of our condescension.
T h i n g s G o W r o n g
Even by its own criteria, BNW is not a society
where everyone is happy. There are asylums in
Iceland and the Falklands for Alpha-male misfits.
Bernard Marx is disaffected and emotionally
insecure; a mistake in the bottling-plant left him
stunted. Lenina has lupus. If you run out of soma, a
fate which befalls Lenina when visiting the
Reservation, you feel sick: well-being is not truly
genetically pre-programmed. On a global scale, the
whole society of the world state is an abomination -
science gone mad - in most people's eyes, at any
rate.
Surely any utopia can go terribly wrong? One
thinks of Christianity; the Soviet experiment; The
French Revolution; and Pol Pot. All ideas and ideals
get horribly perverted by power and its pursuit. So
what horrors might we be letting ourselves in for in
a global species-project to abolish the biological
substrates of malaise?
There is an important distinction to be drawn
here. In a future civilisation where aversive
experience is genetically impossible - forbidden not
by social diktat but because its biochemical
substrates are absent - then the notion of what it
means for anything to go wrong will be different
from today. If this innovative usage is to be
adopted, then we're dealing with a separate and
currently ill-defined - if not mystical - concept; and
we run a risk of conflating the two senses. For if we
are incapable of aversive experience, then the
notion of things going wrong with our lives - or
anyone else's - doesn't apply in any but a
Pickwickian sense. "Going wrong" and "being terrible"
as we understand such concepts today are
inseparable from the textures of nastiness in which
they had their origin. Their simple transposition to
the Post-Darwinian Era doesn't work.
Perhaps functional analogues of things going
wrong will indeed apply - even in a biological
heaven where the phenomenology of nastiness has
been wiped out. So the idea isn't entirely fanciful.
For the foreseeable future, functional analogues of
phenomenal pain will be needed in early
transhumans no less than in silicon robots to alert
their bodies to noxious tissue damage etc. Also,
functional analogues of "things going wrong", at
least in one sense, are needed to produce great
science and technology, so that acuity of critical
judgement is maintained; uncontrolled euphoric
mania is not a recipe for scientific genius in even
the most high-octane supermind. Yet directly or
indirectly, the very notion of "going wrong" in the
contemporary sense seems bound up with a
distinctive and unpleasant phenomenology of
consciousness: a deficiency of well-being, not a
surfeit.
This doesn't stop us today from dreaming up
scenarios of blissed-out utopias which strike us as
distasteful - or even nightmarish - when
contemplated through the lens of our own darkened
minds. This is because chemically-unenriched
consciousness is a medium which corrupts anything
that it seeks to express. The medium is not the
message; but it leaves its signature indelibly upon
it. We may imagine future worlds in which there is
no great art, no real spirituality, no true humanity,
no personal growth through life-enriching traumas
and tragedies, etc. We may conjure up notional
future worlds, too, whose belief-systems rest on a
false metaphysic: e.g. an ideal theocracy - is it a
real utopia if it transpires there's no God? But it's
hard to escape the conclusion that "ill-effects" from
which no one ever suffers are ontological flights of
fancy. The spectre of happy dystopias may trouble
some of us today rather than strike us as a
contradiction on terms. But like Huxley's Brave New
World, they are fantasies born of the very
pathology that they to seek warn us against.
This is not to deny that the transition to the
new Post-Darwinian Era will be stressful and
conflict-ridden. We learn from the Controller that
the same was true of Brave New World - civilisation
as we know it today was destroyed in the Nine
Years' War. One hopes, on rather limited evidence,
that the birth-pangs of the new genetic order will
be less traumatic. But the supposition that a
society predicated on universal bliss engineered by
science is inherently wrong - as Huxley wants us to
believe - rests on obscure metaphysics as well as
questionable ethics. Sin is a concept best left to
medieval theologians.
C o n s u m e r i s t
Brave New World is a "Fordist" utopia based on
production and consumption. It would seem,
nonetheless, that there is no mandatory work-place
drug-testing for soma; if there were, its detection
would presumably be encouraged. In our own
society, taking drugs may compromise a person's
work-role. Procuring illicit drugs may divert the user
from an orthodox consumer life-style. This is
because the immediate rewards to be gained from
even trashy recreational euphoriants are more
intense than the buzz derived from acquiring more
consumer fripperies. In BNW, however, the
production and consumption of manufactured goods
is (somehow) harmoniously integrated with a
life-style of drugs-and-sex. Its inhabitants are
given no time for spiritual contemplation. Solitude is
discouraged. The utopians are purposely kept
occupied and focused on working for yet more
consumption: "No leisure from pleasure".
Is this our destiny too?
Almost certainly not. Productivist visions of
paradise are unrealistic if they don't incorporate an
all-important biological revolution in hedonic
engineering. Beyond a bare subsistence minimum,
there is no inherent positive long-term correlation
between wealth and happiness. Windfalls and
spending-sprees do typically bring short-term highs.
Yet they don't subvert the hedonic treadmill of
inhibitory feedback mechanisms in the brain. Each
of us tends to have a hedonic set-point about
which our "well"-being fluctuates. That set-point is
hard to recalibrate over a lifetime without
pharmacological or genetic intervention. Interlocking
neurotransmitter systems in the CNS have been
selected to embody both short- and long-term
negative feedback loops. They are usually efficient.
Unless they are chemically subverted, such
mechanisms stop most of us from being contented -
or clinically depressed - for very long. The endless
cycle of ups and downs - our own private
re-enactment of the myth of Sisyphus - is an
"adaptation" that helps selfish genes to leave more
copies of themselves; in Nature, alas, the restless
malcontents genetically out-compete happy
lotus-eaters. It's an adaptation that won't go away
just by messing around with our external
environment.
This is in no way to deny that our
descendants will be temperamentally ecstatic. They
may well consume lots of material goods too. Yet
their well-being cannot depend on an unbridled orgy
of personal consumption. It depends on dismantling
the hedonic treadmill itself.
So what sort of scenario can we expect? If
we opt for genetically pre-programmed bliss, just
what, if anything, is our marvellous well-being likely
to focus on?
First, in a mature IT society, the harnessing
of psychopharmacology and biotechnology to
ubiquitous virtual reality software gives scope for
unlimited good experiences for everyone. Any
sensory experience one wants, any experiential
manifold one can imagine, any narrative structure
one desires, can be far better realised in VR than in
outmoded conceptions of Real Life.
At present, society is based on the
assumption that goods and services - and the good
experiences they can generate - are a finite scarce
resource. But ubiquitous VR can generate (in
effect) infinite abundance. An IT society
supersedes the old zero-sum paradigm and Fordist
mass-manufacture. It rewrites the orthodox laws of
market economics. The ability of immersive
multi-modal VR to make one - depending on the
software title one opts for - Lord Of Creation,
Cassanova The Insatiable etc puts an entire
universe at one's disposal. This can involve owning
"trillions of dollars", heaps of "status-goods", and
unlimited wealth and resources - in today's archaic
terminology. In fact one will be able to have all the
material goods one wants, and any virtual world one
wants - and it can all seem as "unvirtual" as one
desires. A few centuries hence, we may rapidly take
[im]material opulence for granted. And this virtual
cornucopia won't be the prerogative of a tiny elite.
Information isn't like that. Nor will it depend on
masses of toiling workers. Information isn't like that
either. If we want it, nanotechnology promises
old-fashioned abundance all round, both inside and
outside synthetic VR.
Nanotechnology is not magic. The
self-replicating molecular robots it will spawn are
probably more distant than their enthusiasts
suppose, perhaps by several decades. We may
have to wait a century or more before nanorobots
can get to work remoulding the cosmos - to make it
a home worth living in and call our own. Details of
how they'll be programmed, how they'll navigate,
how they'll be powered, how they'll locate all the
atoms they reconfigure, etc, are notoriously
sketchy. But the fact remains: back in the boring
old mind-independent world, applied nanoscience
will deliver material superabundance beyond
measure.
For the most part, admittedly, vast material
opulence may not be needed thanks to VR. This is
because we can all have the option of living in
immersive designer-paradises of our own choosing.
At first, our customised virtual worlds may merely
ape and augment organic VR. But the classical
prototype of an egocentric virtual world is parochial
and horribly restrictive; the body-image it gives us
to work with, for instance, is pretty shoddy and
flawed by built-in obsolescence. Unprogrammed
organic VR can be hatefully cruel as well - Nature's
genetic algorithms are nastily written and very
badly coded indeed. Ultimately, artificial VR may
effectively supersede its organic ancestor no less
(in)completely than classical macroscopic worlds
emerged from their quantum substrate. The
transition is conceivable. Whether it will happen,
and to what extent, we simply don't know.
Heady stuff. But is it sociologically plausible?
Doesn't such prophecy just assume a naive
technological determinism? For it might be
countered that synthetic drugs-and-VR experiences
- whether interactive or solipsistic, deeply soulful or
fantasy wish-fulfilment - will always be second-rate
shadows of their organically-grown predecessors.
Why will we want them? After a while, won't we get
bored? For surely Real Life is better.
On the contrary, drugs-plus-VR can
potentially yield a heightened sense of
verisimilitude; and exhilarating excitement. Virtual
worlds can potentially seem more real, more lifelike,
more intense, and more compelling than the lame
definitions of reality on offer today. The experience
of this-is-real - like all our waking- or dreaming
consciousness - comprises a series of
neurochemical events in the CNS like any other. It
can be amped-up or toned-down. Reality does not
admit of degrees; but our sense of it certainly does.
Tone, channel and volume controls will be at our
disposal. But once we've chosen what we like, then
the authentic taste of paradise is indeed addictive.
Thus in an important sense Brave New World
is wrong. Our descendants may "consume"
software, genetic enhancements and designer
drugs. But the future lies in bits and bytes, not as
workers engaged in factory mass-production or cast
as victims of a consumer society. In some ways,
BNW is prescient science fiction - uncannily
prophetic of advances in genetic engineering and
cloning. But in other ways, its depiction of life in
centuries to come is backward-looking and quaint.
Our attempts to envision distant eras always are.
The future will be unrecognisably better.
L o v e l e s s
BNW is an essentially loveless society. Both
romantic love and love of family are taboo. The
family itself has been abolished throughout the
civilised world. We learn, however, that the priggish
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning was guilty
of an indiscretion when visiting the Reservation
twenty years ago. When John the Savage falls on
his knees and greets him as "my father", the
director puts his hands over his ears. In vain, he
tries to shut out the obscene word. He is
embarrassed. Publicly humiliated, he then flees the
room. Pantomime scenes like this - amusing but
fanciful - contribute to our sense that a regime of
universal well-being would entail our losing
something precious. Utopian happiness, we are led
to believe, is built on sacrifice: the loss of love,
science, art and religion. Authentic
paradise-engineering, by contrast, can enhance
them all; not a bad payoff.
In BNW, romantic love is strongly discouraged
as well. Brave new worlders are conditioned to be
sexually promiscuous: "Everyone belongs to
everyone else." Rather than touting the joys of
sexual liberation, Huxley seeks to show how sexual
promiscuity cheapens love; it doesn't express it.
The Savage fancies lovely Lenina no less than she
fancies him. But he loves her too. He feels having
sex would dishonour her. So when the poor woman
expresses her desire to have sex with him, she gets
treated as though she were a prostitute.
Thus Huxley doesn't offer a sympathetic
exploration of the possibility that prudery and
sexual guilt has soured more lives than sex. In a
true utopia, the counterparts of John and Lenina
will enjoy fantastic love-making, undying mutual
admiration, and live together happily ever after.
Fantastical? The misappliance of science? No.
It's just one technically feasible biological option. In
the light of what we do to those we love today, it
would be a kinder option too. At any rate, we
should be free to choose.
The utopians have no such choice. And they
aren't merely personally unloved. They aren't
individually respected either. Ageing has been
abolished; but when the utopians die - quickly, not
through a long process of senescence - their bodies
are recycled as useful sources of phosphorus. Thus
Brave New World is a grotesque parody of a
utilitarian society in both a practical as well as a
philosophical sense.
This is all good knockabout stuff. The problem
is that some of it has been taken seriously.
Science is usually portrayed as dehumanising.
Brave New World epitomises this fear. "The more we
understand the world, the more it seems completely
pointless" (Steven Weinberg). Certainly science can
seem chilling when conceived in the abstract as a
metaphysical world-picture. We may seem to find
ourselves living in a universe with all the human
meaning stripped out: participants in a soulless
dance of molecules, or harmonics of pointlessly
waggling superstrings. Nature seems loveless and
indifferent to our lives. What right have we to be
happy?
Yet what right have we to sneeze? If
suffering has been medically eradicated, does
happiness have to be justified any more than the
colour green or the taste of peppermint? Is there
some deep metaphysical sense in which we ought
to be weighed down by the momentous gravity of
the human predicament?
Only if it will do anyone any good. The
evidence is lacking. Paradise-engineering, by
contrast, can deliver an enchanted pleasure-garden
of otherworldly delights for everyone. Providentially,
the appliance of biotechnology offers us the
unprecedented prospect of enhancing our humanity
- and the biological capacity for spiritual
experience. When genetically-enriched, our pursuit
of such delights won't be an escape from some
inner sense of futility, a gnawing existential angst
which disfigures so many lives at present. Quite the
opposite: life will feel self-intimatingly wonderful.
Wholesale genetic-rewrites tweaked by rational
drug-design give us the chance to enhance
willpower and motivation. We'll be able to enjoy a
hugely greater sense of purpose in our lives than
our characteristically malfunctioning dopamine
systems allow today. Moreover this transformation
of the living world, and eventually of the whole
cosmos, into a heavenly meaning-steeped nirvana
will in no way be "unnatural". It is simply a disguised
consequence of the laws of physics playing
themselves out.
And it will be a loving world. Until now,
selection pressure has ensured we're cursed with a
genome that leaves us mostly as callous brutes,
albeit brutes with intermittently honourable
intentions. We are selfish in the popular as well as
the technical genetic sense. Love and affection are
often strained even among friends and relatives.
The quasi-psychopathic indifference we feel toward
most other creatures on the planet is a by-product
of selfish DNA. Sociobiology allied to evolutionary
psychology shows how genetic dispositions to
conflict are latent in every relationship that isn't
between genetically identical clones. Such potential
conflicts frequently erupt in overt form. The cost is
immense suffering and sometimes suicidal anguish.
This isn't to deny that love is real. But its
contemporary wellsprings have been poisoned from
the outset. Only the sort of love that helps selfish
DNA to leave more copies of itself - which enable it
to "maximise its inclusive fitness" - can presently
flourish. It is fleeting, inconstant, and shaped by
cruelly arbitrary criteria of physical appearance
which serve as badges of reproductive potential. If
we value it, love should be rescued from the genes
that have recruited and perverted the states which
mediate its expression in blind pursuit of
reproductive success. Contra Brave New World,
love is not biologically inconsistent with lasting
happiness.
This is because good genes and good drugs
allow us, potentially, to love everyone more deeply,
more empathetically and more sustainably than has
ever been possible before. Indeed, there is no
fundamental biological reason why the human
genome can't be rewritten to allow everyone to be
"in" love with everyone else - if we should so
choose. But simply loving each other will be
miraculous enough; and will probably suffice. An
empty religious piety can be transformed into a
biological reality.
Love is versatile; so we needn't turn
ourselves into celibate angels either. True love does
not entail that we become disembodied souls
communing with each other all day. "Promiscuous"
sex doesn't have to be loveless. Bonobos ("pygmy
chimps") are a case in point; they would appreciate
a "Solidarity Service" rather better than we do.
When sexual guilt and jealousy - a pervasive
disorder of serotonin function - are cured, then
bed-hopping will no longer be as morally reckless as
it is today. Better still, designer love-philtres and
smarter sex-drugs can transform our concept of
intimacy. Today's ill-educated fumblings will seem
inept by comparison. Sensualists may opt for
whole-body orgasms of a frequency, duration and
variety that transcends the limp foreplay of their
natural ancestors. Whether the sexual adventures
of our descendants will be mainly auto-erotic,
interpersonal, or take guises we can't currently
imagine is a topic for another night.
Profound love of many forms - both of oneself
and all others - is at least as feasible as the
impersonal emotional wasteland occupied by
Huxley's utopians.
Gene-Splicers Versus
Glue-Sniffers
The molecular biology of paradise
The prospect of a lifetime of
genetically-engineered sublimity strikes some
contemporary Savages as no less appalling than
getting high with drugs. The traditional conception
of living happily-ever-after in Heaven probably
hasn't thrilled them unduly either; but the unusual
eminence of its Author has discouraged overt
criticism. In any event, the consensus seems to be
that God's PR representatives did a poor job in
selling The Other Place to his acolytes. Today,
many people find the idea of winning the national
lottery far more appealing; and in fairness, it
probably offers better odds. Possibly His
representatives on earth should have tried harder
to make Heaven sound more appealing. One worries
that an eternity spent worshipping Him might begin
to pall.
But the Death Of God, or at least his discreet
departure to a backstage role, shouldn't mean we're
doomed to abandon any notion of heaven, and
certainly not on earth. Suffering, whether it's
irksome or too terrible for words, doesn't have to be
part of life at all.
Unfortunately, the proposal that aversive
experience should be eliminated in toto via
biotechnology tends to find itself assimilated to two
stereotypes:
1.The image of an intra-cranially
self-stimulating rat. Its degraded frenzy of
lever-pressing is eventually followed by death
from inanition and self-neglect.
2.Soma and visions of Brave New World.
And just as during much of the Twentieth Century,
any plea for greater social justice could be
successfully damned as Communist, likewise today,
any strategy to eradicate suffering is likely to be
condemned in similar reactionary terms: either
wirehead hedonism or revamped Brave New World.
This response is not just facile and simplistic. If it
gains currency, the result is morally catastrophic.
Of course, the abolitionist issue rarely arises.
Typically, universal bliss is still more-or-less
unthinkingly dismissed as technically impossible.
Insofar as the prospect is even contemplated -
grudgingly - it is usually assumed that the new
regime would be underwritten day-by-day with
drugs or, more crudely, electrodes in the
pleasure-centres.
These techniques have their uses. Yet in the
medium-to-long-term, stopgaps won't be enough.
All use of psychoactive drugs may be conceived as
an attempt to correct something pathological with
one's state of consciousness. There's something
deeply wrong with our brains. If what we had now
was OK, we wouldn't try to change it. But it isn't,
so we do. Mature biological psychiatry will recognise
inadequate bliss as a pandemic form of mental
ill-health: good for selfish DNA in the ancestral
environment where the adaptation arose, but bad
for its throwaway vehicles, notably us. The whole
gamut of behavioural conditioning, socio-economic
reform, talk-therapies - and even euphoriant
superdrugs - are just palliatives, not cures, for a
festering global illness. Its existence demands a
global eradication program, not idle philosophical
manifestos and scientific belles lettres.
But one does one's best. The ideological
obstacles to genetically pre-programmed mental
super-health are actually more daunting than the
technical challenges. To be cured, hypo-hedonia
must be recognised as a primarily genetic
deficiency-disorder. Designer mood-brighteners and
anti-anxiety agents to alleviate it are sometimes
branded "lifestyle-drugs"; but this is to trivialise a
serious medical condition which must be corrected
at source. Happily, our hereditary neuropsychiatric
disorder is likely to become extinct within a few
generations. Aversive experience, and the
poisonous metabolic pathways that mediate its
textures, will become physiologically impossible once
the genes coding its neural substrates have been
eliminated. We won't miss its corrupting effect
when it's gone.
In the medium-term, the functional equivalent
of aversive experience can help animate us instead.
Late in the Third Millennium and beyond, its
functional successor will be expressed as gradients
of majestic well-being. Our descendants will enjoy a
civilisation based on pleasure-gradients: whether
steep or shallow, we simply don't know. Such a
global species-project does not have the desperate
moral urgency of eliminating the phenomenon of
pain - both "mental" and "physical", human and
non-human alike. Abolishing raw nastiness -
sometimes vile beyond belief - remains the
over-riding ethical priority. One doesn't have to be
an outright negative utilitarian to acknowledge that
getting rid of agony takes moral precedence over
maximising pleasure. But both genetic
fundamentalists and gung-ho advocates of Better
Living Through Chemistry today agree on one
crucial issue. There is no sense in sustaining a
legacy of mood-darkening metabolic pathways out
of superstitious deference to our savage past.
* * *
When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will
try to secure permission for him and his mother to
visit the Other Place, John is initially pleased and
excited. Echoing Miranda in The Tempest, he
exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people
in it." Heavy irony. Like innocent Miranda, he is
eager to embrace a way of life he neither knows nor
understands. And of course he comes unstuck. Yet
if we swallow such fancy literary conceits, then
ultimately the joke is on us. It is only funny in the
sense there are "jokes" about Auschwitz. For it is
Huxley who neither knows nor understands the glory
of what lies ahead. A utopian society in which we
are sublimely happy will be far better than we can
presently imagine, not worse. And it is we, trapped
in the emotional squalor of late-Darwinian antiquity,
who neither know nor understand the lives of the
god-like super-beings we are destined to become.
Found in:
WTA
HedWeb
Future Opioids
BLTC Research
Huxley Hotlinks
Wirehead Hedonism
The Good Drug Guide
The Hedonistic Imperative