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.
 
 

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