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.

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