Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

1. Brave New Worldby Aldous Huxley A satirical piece of fiction, not scientific prophecy

2. Satire: • A piece of literature designed to ridicule the subject of the work. • While satire can be funny, its aim is not to amuse, but to arouse contempt. • Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and several other techniques are almost always present.

3. As satire, the book’s purpose is to examine the failings of man’s behavior in order to encourage him to reform. • It may be painful to recognize today’s faults through the literature. • Pain and growth are part of the human condition, and prove that Huxley’s prophesies have not come true.

4. Many of the cultural concerns seen in the novel are still matters of great importance. In the years since Huxley first published this book, some of his prophesies seem far more plausible than they did in 1932.

5. Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place

6. What does this mean? • “Reading Brave New World elicits the same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has vanquished.”

7. This novel presents a world … • … of sexual promiscuity • … with a drug culture in the most literal sense of the word • … in which the traditional family has been rendered taboo • … in which religion has been reduced to rituals of physical expression • … in which art panders to the sensations of mass communications • … in which the positive values of western democracy have been converted into a rigid caste system

8. Huxley exploits anxieties about Soviet Communism and American capitalism. • The price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of honored shibboleths of our culture: “motherhood,”“home,”“family,”“freedom,” even “love.”

9. Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western Europe, governs a society where all aspects of an individual's life are determined by the state, beginning with conception and conveyor-belt reproduction. • A government bureau, the Predestinators, decides all roles in the hierarchy. • Children are raised and conditioned by the state bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families. • There are only 10,000 surnames. • Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids.

10. Brave New World, then, is centered around control and manipulation • He instills the fear that a future world state may rob us of the right to be unhappy.

11. time and place written: 1931, England • date of first publication: 1932 • settings (place): England, Savage Reservation in New Mexico

12. settings (time): 2540 AD; referred to in the novel as 632 years AF (“After Ford”), meaning 632 years after production of the first Model T car • narrator: Third-person omniscient • point of view: Narrated in the third person from the point of view of Bernard or John, but also from the point of view of Lenina, Helmholtz Watson, and Mustapha Mond

13. Happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex, “the feelies,” and most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma.

14. Soma • People resort to soma when they feel depressed, angry or have 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.

15. Soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It gives rise to only a shallow and intellectually uninteresting well-being. It provides a mindless “imbecile happiness” -- an escapism which makes people comfortable with their lack of freedom.

16. Why use soma? • Huxley foresees a culture in which widespread and addictive use of drugs offers another way of assuring a controlled society. • This is in addition to the pleasure of frequent and promiscuous sexual activity, used to distract the population and dissuade them from rebelling.

17. Keep in mind: • The sole function of pleasure is to guarantee the happiness in the Brave New World, and assure a stable, controllable population • State-encouraged promiscuity assures that loyalty to a lover or family will not undermine one’s loyalty to the state

18. This is satire! • Please keep that in mind as you read • Huxley does not offer this world as an ideal

19. Huxley seeks to warn the reader against scientific utopianism (impracticable perfectionism)

20. Creative and destructive impulses have been purged. The capacity for spirituality has been extinguished.

21. 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."

22. Life-long emotional well-being is not genetically pre-programmed. It isn't even assured from birth by the soma. • For example, babies are traumatized with electric shock conditioning.

23. Toddlers from the lower orders are terrorized with loud noises. This sort of aversion-therapy serves to condition them against liking books. We are told the inhabitants of the Brave New World are happy. Yet they experience unpleasant thoughts, feelings and emotions.

24. The Brave New World is a totalitarian welfare-state. • There is no war, poverty or crime. • Society is genetically predestined by caste. Alphas, the most intellectual, are the top-dogs. Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons toil away at the bottom. The lower orders are necessary because Alphas, even when they take soma, could never be happy doing menial jobs.

25. 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.” In this utopia, knowledge of the past is banned by the Controllers.

26. The Brave New World is not an exciting place to live in. • It is geared to the consumption of mass-produced goods: “Ending is better than mending.” • Society is shaped by a single political ideology. The motto of the world state is “Community, Identity, Stability.”

27. There is no depth of feeling, no growth of ideas, and no artistic creativity. • Individuality is suppressed. Intellectual discovery has been abolished. • Clones, the BNW inhabitants, are laboratory-grown and bottled from the hatchery. • They are conditioned and brainwashed, even in their sleep. They are never educated to prize thinking for themselves.

28. What do you think serve as the narrative hook in this novel? the conflict? • You’re right. It will have critics from both within and without • We will meet Bernard Marx, who will show that human imperfection has not been completely eliminated • We will meet John the Savage, who belongs to neither the progressive Brave New World or to a traditional society

29. propaganda, censorship, conformity, genetic engineering, social conditioning, and mindless entertainment. • This novel is more applicable today than it was in 1932. This is a time of: • This was what Huxley saw in our future. His book is a warning.

30. Do we have a modern soma? • Consider the number of ads for prescription drugs, which are permitted only in the United States and New Zealand • Doctors and consumer advocates believe these ads drive up health-care costs and seduce millions into asking their MDs for drugs they don’t need for diseases they had never before heard of, like restless leg syndrome

31. Whatever is wrong, there’s a drug for you, or so TV ads say

32. Catching patients’ eyes • Lipitor: Dr. Robert Jarvik, inventor of the artificial heart, rowing on a beautiful lake • Lamisil: ugly yellow creatures tucking themselves under your toenails • Lunesta: a luna moth

33. In 2005, drug companies spent more than $4 billion on what is termed direct-to-consumer advertising, according to the Government Accountability Office. • That is about 1/7 of the amount the companies spent on research and development • Nearly 1/3 of that TV ad money was for what type of medication? Sleeping aids

34. Gauging ads’ impact • 78 percent of MDs said patients asked them to prescribe drugs they had seen on TV • Patients most often asked for advertised drugs for acid reflux, impotence, allergies and insomnia, the mainstay of TV ad lineups • Source: Consumer Reports survey of doctors on direct-to-consumer advertising

35. Essential Questions to connect the literature to today’s culture: • Is it better to be free than to be happy? • Is freedom compatible with happiness? • Is the collective more important than the individual? • Can children be taught effectively to think in only one certain way? • Can young people be taught so well that they never question their teachings later? • Is stability more important than freedom? • Can alterations made by advanced science to mankind be made permanent at the DNA-level? • Can mankind be conditioned by science? • Should the individual be limited/controlled for the greater good? If so, how much?

36. “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.”Aldous Huxley

37. "The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation – a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka

38. Now let’s get into the text!You have 25 on-task reading points with this text as well. Stay focused! Stay awake! Keep your head up!