Perfil
Nombre: Leticia Badía Torrente
Edad: 21 años
Carrera: Filología Inglesa, 4º
año
E-mail: lele@alumni.uv.es
Second Paper
Subject: #14206 Literatura Anglesa i Discurs Polític – grup A
Student's name: Badía Torrente, Leticia
Title of the paper: Utopia, Dystopia and Reality
Author: Aldous Huxley
Abstract: In this paper I have analyzed the tree utopian novels written by Huxley: Brave New World (1931), Ape and Essence (1948) and Island (1962). The analysis contains a short summary, a description of how each society works and how it came to be, and its relationship to the political, literary and philosophical trends of that time. Besides those three works, I have also summarized and discussed the first three chapters of the essay Brave New World Revisited, applying Huxley’s thesis and opinions to the three novels analyzed.
Table of contents:
1. Introduction
2. The Three Utopian Novels
2.1. Brave New World
2.2. Ape and Essence
2.3. Island
3. Brave New World Revisited
3.1. Foreword
3.2. Overpopulation
3.3. Quantity, Quality, Morality
3.4. Over-organization
4. Conclusion
Bibliography
Auto-evaluation: Notable.
1. Introduction
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a very prolific writer with a total of eleven novels, several short stories and poetry collections, articles, and a large number of essays that dealt with themes such as philosophy, religion, sociology and even biology and drugs.
His most well-known novel is Brave New World, written in 1931 and published in 1932. It depicts a world in which technology is used to control every area of society, resulting in a total loss of freedom but a total gain in happiness. Brave New World is the first of his three utopian novels.
The second is Ape and Essence, published in 1948. This time, technology has been the cause of world destruction, and the few survivors have degenerated into primitive devil worshippers.
The last utopian novel was written in 1962, one year before his death, and is the only desirable utopia of the series. Island describes a perfectly balanced society in which technology is subordinated to humans and not the other way around.
Worth mentioning is Brave New World Revisited, an essay written in 1958 in which he analyses his first utopia, criticises the totalitarian direction the world has taken and sketches an ideal society that he would later complete in Island.
In the next section I’ve written a basic introduction of each novel that contains a summary of the story, the principles of society and their relation to the historical events and philosophical trends of the time.
2. The Three Utopian Novels
2.1. Brave New World
The vast majority of the inhabitants of the planet live under the control of The World State, a global organization that exercises a strict control over every aspect of their lives by means such as artificial reproduction, behavioural conditioning, use of drugs and an inviolable class-based society. However, as discouraging as it may seem, people are actually happy with the status quo because they are free to do whatever they want; that is, whatever the government has conditioned them to want. That way, all citizens, regardless of their social class, are spoiled with countless leisure activities that prevent any chance of spiritual development, and become slaves of material pleasure, which keeps the wheels of consumerism turning.
Unfortunately for the government, some people grow a conscience and pose a threat for stability. That is the case of Bernard Marx, an Alpha (a member of the highest class) who is shorter than the rest of his class due to a mistake during his decantation. This mistake makes him insecure and leads him to question the ideology of The World State. Marx convinces Lenina, the woman he loves, to make a short trip to the Reservation, the antithesis of the world in which they live. The Reservation is a completely different ecosystem: untamed, ancient, obscure and wild, inhabited by the savages, uncivilized humans who grow old, fall ill, and whose beliefs and lifestyles are anchored to the old world. There they meet John and his mother, Linda, who was once a citizen of The World State before she lost sight of her group and ended up in the Reservation, pregnant and all by herself. Linda told John stories about her culture and gave him a technical book that he couldn’t understand but that allowed him to become literate. Both of them were often discriminated against by the savages, and the distance between John and the rest of the world grew even bigger when he found a book written by Shakespeare with which he became obsessed.
On discovering the identity of John’s father, Marx convinces Linda and John to visit London. The inhabitants of The World State are shocked at the sight of a fat and old woman like Linda, who has become everything The World State teaches its citizens to repudiate, especially a mother. Hence, the passionate reaction of Linda and John to the familiar reunion constitutes a public shaming for the father, Bernard’s boss.
Linda dies some days later consumed by soma, and John can’t get used to his new life. He is in love with Lenina, but Lenina has been conditioned not to love, and so she is confused when she tries to cope with John’s rejection, who understands love in the Shakespearean way. After a failed revolt by John, Bernard and the equally frustrated Helmholtz, the three are seen by Mustapha Mond, one of the state controllers. Mond speaks sincerely to them and recognizes the tricks and the hypocrisy of the government. The novel ends with Bernard and Helmholtz being sent to a colony of dissenters and with John committing suicide.
Before World War I, science fiction writers like H.G. Wells imagined positive utopian worlds in a similar fashion to Thomas More, but the outbreak and aftermath of World War I proved them wrong. The use of advanced technology as deadly weapons and the big economic depression, combined with the rise of totalitarian movements like communism and fascism erased their optimism.
One of the main philosophical trends in the beginning of the 20th century was the relationship between individuals and power. In a world in which democratic societies were mutating into totalitarian states, the utopian dream of freedom and happiness under the control of a centralized power seemed somewhat ironic. A series of novels that parodied old utopian dreams arose from this contradiction: Huxley parodied capitalism, Orwell focused in communism, Zamyatin in Lenin’s socialism…what all these writers have in common is the criticism of the societies they live in, and they do so by projecting them into the future so that we can make a more or less unbiased judgement of what we may become if we conform to their authority.
Before Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, many other philosophers like Max Weber and Bertrand Russell had wondered about how technology might affect politics. Bertrand Russell was Huxley’s teacher and his views influenced Huxley’s works. He thought that technology would be used by the government to control people and that power would end in the hand of few scientific experts. He also thought that education, reproduction and every other area would be regulated by science. These views, published in The Scientific Outlook in 1931, match Huxley’s prediction that the future rulers will be social engineers (Brave New World Revisited, Chapter 3)
2.2. Ape and essence
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones". This quotation by Albert Einstein is the most fitting explanation of what happened to humanity after World War III. The colossal buildings, the advanced laboratories and the millenial libraries; all of them still stand tall on the ground, once green and fertile but now barren and eroded. Humans too have been affected by nuclear radiation (having up to three pairs of nipples or seven fingers on each hand is perfectly normal), and the few people – or baboons, as Huxley calls them – that survived have to resort to burning books to light a fire and exhuming corpses to steal their clothes. Human race has regressed more than a thousand years and the cult of Belial, the devil, reigns in the colony to which the expedition from New Zealand has come.
World War III has condemned humanity to obscurity, but there were two zones unaffected by the bombings due to their geographical remoteness. The first was Equatorial Africa, whose inhabitants are now advancing north towards Southern Europe, and New Zealand, which still counts with educated people such as biologist, botanists and other scientists and humanists. One of those scientists is Dr. Poole, a botanist in his late thirties that is held captive by the savages short after landing on West California.
Dr. Poole faces a primitive community in which the Church (of Belial, of course) has the power to decide who should live and who should die, who should be punished or when should the mating season begin and end. Dr. Poole falls in love with a young woman called Loola, who appears to be the most human among them. During his stay, he meets the Arch-Vicar, who discusses with him the events that led to this situation: man’s excessive ego and disrespect for nature, craving for power, the use of progress as a deadly weapon, totalitarianisms…His point is that Belial has emerged victorious in the fight. But as the Arch-Vicar said, the unearthly fight never comes to an end, so Dr. Poole convinces Loola to run away together to a more open, human colony, to begin their fight on God’s side.
Being published in 1948, it is obvious that the main inspirations for this novel were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the atrocities carried out by both sides. Once again, Huxley’s inspiration for this story comes from a novel published by H.G. Wells in 1933, The Shape of Things to Come, which was also adapted as a film. In Wells’ story, World War II lasts ten years and ends with no victor. The end is followed by an economic crisis and a plague called the "wandering sickness" that kills most part of humanity. Those who are still infected are shot to eradicate the sickness, but the method fails when people revolt. In the same year an advanced plane arrives with a team of equally advanced scientists on board. The hero is kidnapped by the locals, who force him to help them find a cure for the sickness.
2.3. Island
Life is ideal in the island of Pala. Created in the 19th century as a synthesis of Oriental spiritualism and Occidental industrialization, Palanese society combines the best characteristics of each. Its community is based on Eastern transtheistic religions like Mahayana Buddhism that highlight the importance of leading an altruistic life and liberating oneself from suffering. From Western civilizations, the Palanese have imported technology to solve the earthly downsides of a man-made utopia: health science, food preservation…but the industrialization stops once the most basic and indispensable areas of society have been covered.
Such is not the case of Rendang, a neighbouring island ruled by the ruthless dictator Colonel Dipa. Rendang is the opposite of Pala: it is heavy industrialized and self-sufficient in arms, while Pala doesn’t even have an army and has no interest in exploiting or commercing with its oil reservations.
Will Farnaby, the main character of the novel, is sent to Pala by the boss of the newspaper company he works for, an oil magnate who negotiates with Colonel Dipa the usurpation of the island. Will had recently lost his wife and was feeling very emotionally drained, but he gradually recovers after spending many days talking to the natives, until he finally grows to appreciate the mentality of the Palanese.
However, time has run out and an invasion of Pala at the hands of Colonel Dipa is about to occur. No matter how perfect a community, it cannot be shut off from the outside world and the corruption of human nature. In this case the corruption comes from the rulers of Pala, the Rani and her young son, the Raja. The last Raja had married a princess from Rendang, the current Rani, who dislikes the lifestyle of the Palanese and has influenced her son to do the same. Because the Palanese are reluctant to sell the natural resources of their island, the Rani and the Raja betray their people and sell Pala to Colonel Dipa. The invasion is quick since the Palanese put up no resistance, even when the Rendang army is firing and the Raja is walking with them telling the Palanese to remain calm. And with this ends the utopian dream of Pala.
Some years before the publication of Island, Huxley had become deeply interested in spiritualism and Eastern cultures and religions. He had also experimented with hypnosis and mind-enhancing drugs such as mescaline and LSD. More than their hallucinatory effects, he valued the mystical state they aided him to reach. He published two essays about drugs and mysticism: The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956).
It seems ironic that Huxley gave such big importance to drugs, given that he criticised their use in Brave New World. But the last years of his life were not much fortunate: his wife died, his home and library were burnt in a fire and he was diagnosed with cancer, which he refused to treat.
Brave New World may be his most famous work, but Island is the most complete, the one that synthesizes the overly perfect heaven of Brave New World and the overly nightmarish hell of Ape and Essence. It is a synthesis of his beliefs, of his earlier years as a critic of materialism and capitalism and his later years as a mystic.
3. Brave New World Revisited
3.1. Foreword
Huxley laments the brevity of his essay, but assures that he has addressed the most important points of each aspect, without ignoring crucial explanations or telling "dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths".
An example of a quarter-truth in Huxley’s utopian series would be the concept of "family" as explained to students by The World State. The advantages of having a family are ignored and only the negative consequences are considered:
"Home, home–a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells." (BNW, Chapter 3)
He illustrates his digressions with his thoughts about current or recent events as compared to his predictions in Brave New World. For example, regarding the issue of war he refers to soldiers as "those endless columns of uniformed boys, white, black, brown, yellow, marching obediently toward the common grave."
This crude opinion about nationalism can be seen in Ape and Essence:
"Vertical stripes, horizontal stripes, noughts and crosses, eagles and hammers. Mere arbitrary signs. But every reality to which a sign has been attached is thereby made subject to its sign. Goswami and Ali used to live at peace. But I got a flag, you got a flag, all Baboon-God’s children got flags. So even Ali and Goswami got flags; and because of the flags it immediately became right and proper for the one with the foreskin to disembowel the one without a foreskin, and for the circumcised to shoot the uncircumcised, rape his wife and roast his children over slow fires." (AaE, Part II, The Script)
3.2. Overpopulation
Huxley admits that he is shocked at how fast his predictions are becoming real. Brave New World was written in 1931, two years after the Wall Street Crash that marked the beginning of the Great Depression, which would last until the outbreak of World War II. Huxley says that "ours was a nightmare of too little order", of what he calls "the disorderly world of liberalism". Here he is referring to classical liberalism, which opposed economic interventionism by the state in favour of a free market. The biggest flaw of this philosophy were its recurrent depressions that grew bigger each time and that culminated in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The immediate reaction to the social misery established after the economic collapse was the rise of nationalistic feelings and an inclination towards a stricter government control that maintained stability with the administration of the most productive areas of economy. "In the West," Huxley says, "individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those countries that have a tradition of democratic government, this freedom and even the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane". With more than a quarter of the population being unemployed, many families who had become impoverished were forced to migrate to the West Coast to find seasonal jobs, and many more people in the same situation were more than ready to let the government step in and take control. This, for Huxley, was the first step towards a "[nightmare] of too much [order]".
And that was the line of events that followed the Nine Years’ War in Brave New World. The economic crisis that resulted after the war culminated in extreme poverty and violent episodes of social unrest all over the world that were put to a halt only when the world leaders reunited and proclaimed The World State. "People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since" (BNW, Chapter 16).
Huxley goes on to explain why a world similar to Brave New World seems now more possible to achieve than a world like Orwell’s 1984. He bases his thesis on the latest behavioural experiments which show that conditioning through rewards is more successful than conditioning through fear. Orwell’s novel was written when the two biggest enemies of freedom, Fascism and Communism, based their loyalty on fear and punishment, a system destined to fail because "tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change". But in the late 1950s Russia underwent a process of de-Stalinization that not only attacked the dictator’s cult of personality, but also his excessive repressions, introducing "a more up-to-date form of tyranny."
Even though Huxley recognizes that it is still too soon for decanting babies and that "for a long time to come we shall remain a viviparous species breeding at random", he states that post-natal control is taking a turn from Orwell’s punishment towards his own rewarding system. He puts Soviet Russia as an example of how increasing the salaries and lowering the taxes of the intellectual elite constitutes an incentive for a better performance. The rest of the population is still controlled by violent manipulation, which is not as effective.
Another example of the lower efficiency of control through punishment appears in Ape and Essence: disobedience results in public whipping, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to escape to other colonies.
Tackling the problem of overpopulation, it is clear that the problem lies in the increasing disparity between birth and death rates. But, why can’t they be levelled? Huxley points to economic and religious reasons: the instruments for lowering death rates are cheap and depend only on their purchasing and supplying by a few technicians, whereas birth control is more expensive and must be used by people who either don’t have enough "intelligence and will power than most of the world’s teeming illiterate possess" or are influenced by religious ideas that see the use of contraceptives as a sin. Up until now, no ideology has been able to come up with a solution to the world’s central problem, overpopulation.
"In the Brave New World of my fable, the problem of human numbers in their relation to natural resources had been effectively solved. An optimum figure for world population had been calculated and numbers were maintained at this figure (a little under two billions, if I remember rightly) generation after generation."
For Huxley, the colonization of space is an utopia as well. He compares migrating to the Moon or Mars to the migration to America. It has been done, and it hasn’t solved anything. It would only be of "military advantage to the nation that does the settling", he says. Meanwhile, world population would continue doubling as resources become more and more limited, which will result in more hunger, wars and deaths. This would be profitable to governments because "it will create conditions in which individual freedom and the social decencies of the democratic way of life will become impossible, almost unthinkable".
"Whenever the economic life of a nation becomes precarious, the central government is forced to assume additional responsibilities for the general welfare. It must work out elaborate plans for dealing with a critical situation; it must impose ever greater restrictions upon the activities of its subjects; and if, as is very likely, worsening economic conditions result in political unrest, or open rebellion, the central government must intervene to preserve public order and its own authority."
Huxley suggests that governments create their own crisis to reinforce their power. This idea is developed on Island as well:
"We don’t want the Communists; but neither do we want the capitalists. Least of all do we want the wholesale industrialization that both parties are so anxious to impose on us–for different reasons, of course. The West wants it because our labor costs are low and investors’ dividends will be correspondingly high. And the East wants it because industrialization will create a proletariat, open fresh fields for Communist agitation and may lead in the long run to the setting up of yet another People’s Democracy." (Island, 131)
This paragraph also conveys the idea that all ideologies, however fair their principles, degenerate into corruption and totalitarianism. Huxley includes this vision in Ape and Essence as well:
"There is another yelp of command from the Marshalissimos. Among the booted apes in charge of either army’s supply of Genius there is a violent cracking of whips, a tugging of leashes.
Close shot of the Einsteins as they try to resist.
"No, no. . . I can’t."
"I tell you I can’t."
"Disloyal!"
"Unpatriotic!"
"Filthy Communist!"
"Stinking bourgeois-Fascist!"
"Red Imperialist!"
"Capitalist-Monopolist!"
"Take that!"
"Take that!"
Kicked, whipped, half throttled, each of the Einsteins is finally dragged toward a kind of sentry box. Inside these boxes are instrument boards with dials, knobs and switches." (AaE, Part II, The Script)
The chapter on overpopulation ends with a prediction that has not become true. Huxley feared that when overpopulation hit underdeveloped countries they would grow totalitarian and become allies with the totalitarian half of the Cold War, Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union only four Communist states are left: China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam and, for some people, North Korea (Juche) and Tibet.
3.3. Quantity, Quality, Morality
In this second chapter, Huxley discusses a very controversial topic: eugenics. Several members of the Huxley family were biologists who studied and theorized about eugenics. The most famous was his brother Julian Huxley, a fervent supporter of eugenics and transhumanism who believed that human race could be improved through science. One of his most controversial quotations is the following:
"The lowest strata are reproducing too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilisation […] Since a high degree of intellect and imagination, of scientific and artistic ability and other qualities, cannot be adequately expressed or utilized … in the great majority of the lower strata, it is useless to plan for their genetic increase in these strata. Indeed, it is more than useless, it is dangerous; for the frustration of inherent capacity leads to discontent and revolution in some men, to neurosis and inefficiency in others. The case is strictly analogous to that of cattle in Africa; in an unfavorable environment, too drastic genetic improvement is worse than none." (J. Huxley, The uniqueness of Man, 1941)
This opinion is very similar to the arguments postulated by The World State in favour of the Bokanovsky process, a dysgenic method for producing batches of genetically equal humans that is used in Brave New World to fabricate members of the lower stratas. They receive less oxygen so that their intelligence decreases, and are conditioned to tolerate heat so that they are prepared to work at mines or factories. With that, cheap entertainment and generous doses of soma, the possibility of revolution drops to zero.
As for the first part of the quotation, the popularization of birth-control has been deemed impossible by Huxley because of their low intelligence and cultural and religious beliefs. Returning to Brave New World Revisited, Huxley exposes the problem once again:
"In the bad old days children with considerable, or even with slight, hereditary defects rarely survived. Today, thanks to sanitation, modern pharmacology and the social conscience, most of the children born with hereditary defects reach maturity and multiply their kind. Under the conditions now prevailing, every advance in medicine will tend to be offset by a corresponding advance in the survival rate of individuals cursed by some genetic insufficiency. In spite of new wonder drugs and better treatment (indeed, in a certain sense, precisely because of these things), the physical health of the general population will show no improvement, and may even deteriorate."
His prediction is that not only health, but also intelligence, will deteriorate. He fears that the more overpopulated the world becomes, the more pronounced this decline will be, and the more it will affect the development of democracy:
"In an underdeveloped and over-populated country, where four-fifths of the people get less than two thousand calories a day and one-fifth enjoys an adequate diet, can democratic institutions arise spontaneously? Or if they should be imposed from outside or from above, can they possibly survive? […] For how long can such a society maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government?"
A very crude method of improving human race appears in Ape and Essence, and represents the most shocking experience for Dr. Poole, who faints after the sight of deformed babies being impaled with a knife and sacrificed to Belial.
In Island, the solution appeals to people’s moral sense. When the Experimental Station that improved plantations and food production was built, hunger declined and in a few years the population increased. If this was to continue,
"Pala would be transformed into the kind of festering slum that Rendang is today […] Food production increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically. Man has only two choices: he can either leave the matter to Nature, who will solve the population problem in the old familiar way, by famine, pestilence and war: or else he can keep down his numbers by moral restraint." (Island, 97-98)
Because the Palanese have been educated in Buddhism, they can understand and use methods of birth-control:
"Every good Buddhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven’s sake don’t go about putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel. For a good Buddhist, birth control makes metaphysical sense. And for a village community of rice growers, it makes social and economic sense." (Island 98)
The population understood the dangers of overpopulation, so the only thing the government had to do was to make contraceptives accessible to everyone: "In the end they decided that contraceptives should be like education–free, tax-supported and, though not compulsory, as nearly as possible universal." (Island, 99)
Huxley prefers not to be specific about his solution, and instead qualifies the situation as a "most disturbing moral problem", "an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good will."
3.4. Over-Organization
The technological advances of which one should feel so proud about are being used against freedom. Huxley states that "these amazing and admirable advances have had to be paid for". This same idea of sacrificing a great good for a greater good appears in Brave New World, when Mustapha Mond explains that "one can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for" (BNW, Chapter 16)
According to Huxley, the price that the Western individual has to pay for all these technological advantages is freedom and individualism. He uses an analogy of a Little Man and a Big Man to criticise the capitalist tendency by which power ends up in the hands of the elite. This has been the most criticised aspect of capitalism in the long run:
"As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive – and so less available to the enterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. In competition with the Big Man, he loses his money and finally his very existence as an independent producer; the Big Man has gobbled him up. As the Little Men disappear, more and more economic power comes to be wielded by fewer and fewer people. Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State – that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders."
The Big Man has become a god in Brave New World. We are talking about Henry Ford, the man that has replaced the traditional Christian God even in the counting of years, which in the novel begins in 1908 AD, the year in which the automobile became popular thanks to the launching of Ford Model T.
This tendency towards disparity in wealth condensation becomes accentuated after economic crisis, when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In this way, Huxley compares totalitarian states and their ruthless methods to capitalist states and their "polite" and "inconspicuous" ways.
Huxley moves on to the next topic: uniform societies. He affirms that "societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life". Those are the principles of social contract formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, that a government is only legitimate as long as its authority comes from the consensus of its people, who have given up part of their freedom in order to leave the state of nature and enter society. The problem is that authority comes from the consensus of the elite, but few people are aware of it, and the few who actually do suffer from despair, depression and other mental illnesses. Quoting Dr. Erich Fromm, "Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting". It is often thought that those kind of people are abnormal, but the truth is that they are the most humanly normal, and are thus the one who suffer at the sight of mass deindividualization. For Huxley and Dr. Fromm, the abnormal are those who appear normal:
"Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness […] Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed."
Huxley goes on to connect the dangers of dehumanization with the dangers of overpopulation. A combination of the two, as happen in city life, can result in individuals feeling "lonely and insignificant", their existence "ceases to have any point or meaning". This would be dehumanization taken to the extreme, individuals becoming automatons, like robots, but with feelings.
In Brave New World, Bernard is depressed because he is more or less aware of the dehumanization process. Lenina, however, is perfectly normal and reacts hysterically when Bernard tries to make her think. Her mind just shuts off in self-preservation. Later, when she sees in John an individual man, she falls into a depression and now it is her who grows irritated when someone offers her soma. Hemholtz, too, suffers from loneliness because he feels that his potential is being wasted. The most obvious case is John, who comes from a primitive culture based on the organization of individuals where freedom is still respected. He ends up committing suicide because his romantic ideals are in conflict with social uniformity.
The same way science groups individuals to make their study easier, governments group individuals into uniform masses to control them more easily. Huxley calls this tendency to group things "Will to Order". He warns about the danger of this concept applied to politics and economics: "The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism".
4. Conclusion
Many have speculated about the future of the human race, but Huxley is the writer whose predictions are materializing.
The order of probability of actually happening of his novels is the order in which they were published, with the earliest being the most plausible. It is striking how much similar to the current times a novel written eighty years ago can be. Some days ago I posted a piece of news about an American school banning Brave New World because it was "racist". The woman argued that what was the deal, if nobody really cared about it, the same way nobody in The World State would have really cared about Shakespeare if they had known him. Besides ignoring the past, we are still being treated as an uniform mass, with creativity being cut down to fit the capitalist jail.
The second option would be a big, deadly nuclear blast. It doesn’t seem so probable right now, when the world is playing the game of who has nuclear weaponry and should be invaded and who does not and is thus irrelevant.
The utopian island of Pala seems to be the least possible of the tree, since being a small paradise full of natural resources would result in the invasion of any Rendang-esque country.
Well, we’d rather be happy morons than a bunch of bones or satanic worshippers.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Huxley, Aldous. Ape and Essence. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. ‹http://mural.uv.es/vicordo/firstpaper/etexts›.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Aldous Huxley : Brave New World. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. ‹http://www.huxley.net/bnw/index.html›.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World Revisited. Aldous Huxley : Brave New World. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. ‹http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/index.html›.
Huxley, Aldous. Island. Aldous Huxley : Brave New World. Web. 1 Dec. 2010. ‹http://www.huxley.net/island/aldoushuxley-island.html›.
Secondary sources
Barfoot, Cedric Charles. Aldous Huxley between East and West. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001.
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Wikipedia. Web. ‹http://wikipedia.org/›.
Aldous Huxley : Brave New World. Web. ‹http://www.huxley.net/›.
© Leticia Badía Torrente desde 2009