Brave New World: For I Found I’m Bound, Only Too Late

Brave New World: For I Found I’m Bound, Only Too Late Feraco Myth to Science Fiction 6 May 2013

I’ve freely criticized Huxley for some of his choices during this unit, but I want to pause and give him credit for creating Mustapha Mond. I think that lesser writers would have botched Mond’s characterization in any number of ways; how easy is it to make a World Controller into an evil, unreasonable villain, a oppressive avatar of cruelty, or an abusive, cackling figure driven mad by power? For that matter, how easy would it have been to portray the leaders of the World State as soulless? Huxley does the opposite: he gives Mond a rich inner life, an understandable past, and – most importantly – the ability to perceive, reason, and explain. He opposes John, which I suppose makes him the book’s antagonist…and yet he’s not opposed, not personally, to the things John values and seeks. This makes him a tough figure on whom to affix a label, and while we may get frustrated with him – wouldn’t it be nice to believe we’d behave differently if we knew what Mond did and enjoyed his influence to boot? – I don’t think Brave New World ends up in your twenty-first-century curriculum without the nuance and ambiguity his presence lends the text.

And his discussion with John, in its sweeping evaluation of the course humanity charted in order to reach the modern world, touches on just about all of our curriculum’s pet concerns – not just the need for enlightenment, security, identity, independence, and love, but the meaning of life and death, the nature of the human soul, the construction of morality and belief systems, the pursuit of happiness, the merits of both free choice and responsibility, and the necessity of embracing change even as we celebrate our histories and leave behind our legacies. Just as with Chapter 16, I find it difficult to stop excerpting it; in these chapters and these chapters alone, I find myself nodding my head at what Huxley writes – not just at the Savage’s words, but at Mond’s as well.

I like that, when it comes time to talk about God, John is struck dumb at first: “not even Shakespeare” contains the words he wants. After calmly noting that art, science, and religion were the cost of human happiness – give those up, and you’ll be blissful – Mond confesses that God interests him as well, revealing a collection of “pornography” (religious texts and writings) that rivals his collection of orthodox literature. As he wryly puts it, he’s put “God in the safe and Ford on the shelves,” and when John protests the current arrangement, Mond says something that still resonates in our modern times.

“But if you know about God, why don’t you tell them?” asked the Savage indignantly. “Why don’t you give them these books about God?” “For the same reason as we don’t give them Othello: they’re old; they’re about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now.” “But God doesn’t change.” “Men do, though.” “What difference does that make?” “All the difference in the world.”

We focus a great deal in Myth to Science Fiction on stories, from the fictions we write and pass on to our children to the elaborate backstories and “mythologies” of our memories (not to mention the archetypal patterns we unconsciously organize those memories into, forming the foundations of our identities). But we do so in a way that pays particular attention to the ways in which these stories persist, echoing quietly in the background of our thoroughly modern tellings. At the same time, we’ve emphasized the need for you to look forward as you claim more and more of this world for yourselves – looking backward for guidance and inspiration, looking around to identify the causes to champion and problems to solve, and looking forward as you dream of a world reshaped in the wake of those problems’ passing. What we haven’t emphasized – purposefully, at least – are the ways people themselves will change along with the world around them…how they will come to define themselves in a modern age that grows simultaneously faster, louder, and colder.

Mond’s not saying that God’s fictional; he’s pointing out that our relationship with the divine, our conduit, our only means of communication with it, has been through stories, through writings, through words. When the language changes, when human experience changes, those same words suddenly ring more hollowly: the message is just as profound as ever, but the audience has lost the capacity to appreciate it. You can see this same phenomenon playing out in the way we relate to other types of art: our films, our music, and yes, our literature, are all so different from their former forms that audiences conditioned to accept them reject their predecessors. We changed, Mond says, and in changing lost the Word; lost it because we lost our ability to understand it and, in doing so, lost our need for it as well. For the reason we once understood the divine was due to need…and as Mond says at the end of his readings of Newman and de Biran, we don’t need it anymore.

Newman: ‘We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God’s property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way – to depend on no one – to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man – that it is an unnatural state – will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …’

De Biran: ‘A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false – a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.’

Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ‘You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ‘The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? Of consolation, when we have soma? Of something immovable, when there is the social order?”

“Then you think there is no God?” “No, I think there quite probably is one.” “Then why?...” Mustapha Mond checked him. “But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that’s described in these books. Now…” “How does he manifest himself now?” asked the Savage. “Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all.” “That’s your fault.” “Call it the fault of civilization. God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That’s why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe. They’re smut.”

From here, John and Mond go back and forth, with John growing increasingly agitated. You’ll notice that Mond doesn’t need to interrupt John, and that he routinely – almost unfailingly – speaks in paragraphs. John is restricted to sharp rejoinders, probing questions, and various one-liners. He’s not Mond’s intellectual equal, which would matter more if the stakes were higher. It’s amazingly easy to forget, while reading this chapter, that there are no stakes: the Controller’s already made his decision, and it’s not as though John’s trying to talk him out of it.

As the Savage and the Controller spar over virtually everything – the worthiness of instinct and the worthlessness of conditioning, the virtue of solitude and the necessity of its prevention – the conversation slides inevitably to Shakespeare. I’m fascinated by the Bard’s influence on the text, and impressed by the sheer number of ways Huxley finds to work him in. Readers of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet will recognize the familiar touchstones of those earlier works, from the “foolish lover who cannot understand his own emotions” to the Lear figure raging and screaming against the injustices inflicted by a perverse universe. Yet it is The Tempest that provides Brave New World with its name – a very different play from those blood-soaked tragedies that preceded it. The Tempest was mystical, wondrous, bitterly funny and poignant; it was probably Shakespeare’s last solo venture as a playwright, and critics have long argued that he consciously wrote it as a swan song.

Brave New World is also bitterly funny and poignant, but its mysticism and wonder are intentionally curdled. John, like the main characters in The Tempest, is a shipwreck survivor in two directions, stranded outside of the State that unintentionally but irrevocably produced him and the Reservation that housed him. He walks not so much between both worlds as apart from them, stranded in a mindset that only fits a time that faded long ago. Where he sees degradation, Mond sees entertainment; where he sees God, Mond sees a vacuum. And where he sees virtue in self-denial, Mond sees the unnatural and unstable forces that tore apart his society’s predecessors, the mad passions and twisted urges that unleashed war for a good decade on a global scale. The only way to be safe, Mond argues, is to pursue “self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.” And as for God?

“But God’s the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God…” “My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended – there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.”

“But the tears are necessary. Don’t you remember what Othello said? ‘If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.’ There’s a story one of the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mátaski. The young men who wanted to marry her had to do a morning’s hoeing in her garden. It seemed easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn’t stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could – he got the girl.” “Charming! But in civilized countries,” said the Controller, “you can have girls without hoeing for them, and there aren’t any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago.” The Savage nodded, frowning. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them…but you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.”

He was suddenly silent, thinking of his mother. In her room on the thirty-seventh floor, Linda had floated in a sea of singing lights and perfumed caresses – floated away, out of space, out of time, out of the prison of her memories, her habits, her aged and bloated body. And Tomakin, ex-Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, Tomakin was still on holiday – on holiday from humiliation and pain, in a world where he could not hear those words, that derisive laughter, could not see that hideous face, feel those moist and flabby arms round his neck, in a beautiful world… “What you need,” the Savage went on, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.” (“Twelve and a half million dollars,” Henry Foster had protested when the Savage told him that. “Twelve and a half million–that’s what the new Conditioning Centre cost. Not a cent less.”) “Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that?” he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond. “Quite apart from God – though of course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”

“There’s a great deal in it,” the Controller replied. “Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.” “What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending. “It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.” “V.P.S.?” “Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.” “But I like the inconveniences.” “We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” “In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.” “All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” “Not to mention 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 to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence. “I claim them all,” said the Savage at last. Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome,” he said.

That question John asks – “Isn’t there something in living dangerously?” – is, of course, the question that we’ve grappled with all semester – all year, really, if you read The Inferno (Dante descends), Gilgamesh (losing a friend), and Arthur C. Clarke (leaving the planet at Childhood’s End) last semester with me. It’s not an easy question to answer. Living dangerously (literally speaking) appeals more to people with no responsibilities, for obvious reasons: the childless 22-year-old can kill himself bungee-jumping with minimal consequences to the rest of the world (I promise that sounds harsher than I intend), but the father of four has no business leaving his children fatherless just so he can get an adrenal kick and the feeling of falling, falling, falling… And from a figurative standpoint, you might remember clutching a coin you’d been perfectly happy to flip ten minutes earlier as you watched me write that extra set of numbers next to your own, the 7 and 3 representing your hypothetical children’s hypothetical fates, and putting it away.

While that’s an understandable impulse, it’s also one that we must – and here I pause to re-emphasize – must control if we are to move forward. Our lives as adults come to be defined by the tension between what we want, what we fear, and what we believe. We do not always navigate that tension well: look at Cady Heron’s naked scheming costing her every human connection she valued, Oceania’s waking nightmare crushing its people into powder, and Tommy’s desperate bid to save his wife robbing him of their last moments together. And just as our individual decisions stem from that tension, as well as our increasing mastery of it – it gets easier to make decisions when we come to want less with age – our society mirrors our actions, wishes, and wants.

Progress depends on risk because any move forward is risky: we don’t know when we’ll die, just that we’re alive in the present and dead in the future. With every passing second, we get closer to making that “future” a present; we don’t get safer with any passing second because all of them take us closer to death. Yet rather than sit paralyzed by the fear of what may come, we find it necessary to go out and live our lives – because every moment that doesn’t contain our death is one that should be spent on life. Some moments should be spent on study, on work, on play, on love, on searching, on longing…and on planning, in the hopes that future moments can be spent just as well.

Society’s planners must take risks, or society stagnates: God goes in the safe, science becomes the enemy, and the “individual” disappears along with the things that once defined him. Caution can minimize tragedy, but we’ll never be safe enough to be invulnerable: no one can stop the clock, and no one can control all the myriad factors that influence our existences. So while it’s important to be cautious, it’s equally important to be curious; the person who can balance both is the person who can be courageous, because he knows what to risk and what to protect. He’s the person who knows to leave the lab and take the walk in the snow. He’s the person who knows to fall in love, even if the price is eventual heartbreak. And he’s the person who, having come face to face with the World Controller, does not fall, groveling, to the floor, begging helplessly to change what can’t be changed: he stands, toe to toe with power and intellect personified, and speaks his mind, because that’s the decision that the moment calls for.

No one, try as we might, knows exactly how another person can learn to navigate that balance; experience is a firm teacher, and philosophy a stern tutor. It’s difficult to avoid the assumption that you’ve learned everything you’ll need to learn; it’s equally difficult to avoid choking yourself off from possibilities just because you’re satisfied with what you’ve obtained or achieved. After all, you have to be satisfied at some point if you want a stable marriage, if you want to hold a job for any length of time, if you want to own a home, or if you want to be a consistent, responsible presence in the lives of your friends, family members, and community at large. For those of you who’ve read Siddhartha, I can say: you have to break the samsara cycle somehow.

More than anything else, Brave New World warns against reaching that point of satisfaction too soon, of ending all exploration because you assume you’ve solved everything you needed to solve. The oddly Buddhist-nightmare-vision of the World State sees people leading meaningless lives defined only by the temporary and ephemeral, by pleasure instead of profundity. A world without growth isn’t just a false safety: it’s fundamentally at odds with everything we choose to perceive about human nature.

If we are to grow, if we are to make progress, if we are to build a better world, we won’t do so simply by doing what we’ve always done, or by doing what we used to do. That’s no better than writing the same stories we’ve always written. During the first semester, I spoke about the angst my freshmen-with-an-asterisk Creative Writing students felt when I told them about the Seven Stories, about how purposeless they felt when it seemed like “everything had been written already.” But that’s not true.

The point of the archetype is not to allow the author to be lazy; it’s to allow him to tap into something larger, into a foundation from which he can reach ever greater heights. Our stories stand on the shoulders of Gilgamesh, on Dante, and, yes, on Brave New World and 1984; you cannot conceive of how differently your generation would seek entertainment had the Dystopians never published their works. Yet the authors whose works can’t help but be influenced by Huxley and Orwell don’t do either gentleman a disservice. When echoes of Brave New World and 1984 ring out in the V for Vendettas of the world, the old stories are revived, rejuvenated, given new purpose; one can’t help but think of the tale Izzi tells in The Fountain about Moses Morales’s father.

Our stories rest on the foundations our forefathers laid down – working “into the wood, into the bloom” – only to become the foundation for those who follow them. When Huxley writes Brave New World, Shakespeare flies with the birds. And that, tragically, is the price the World State pays: not just art, religion, and science, but definition,foundation, and meaning. That is the cost John rejects, and with good reason.

So claim the right to be unhappy because, in doing so, you claim the right to be happy, the right to seek truths for yourself, the right to live life organically and truthfully, the right to earn what you receive, the right to produce something piercing, the right to tap into whatever’s larger than yourself, the right to be more than a body composed of chemicals that the World State would recycle after your death. We must embrace the life we’ve chosen, not the life we’ve been conditioned to choose…and do the best we can in the time we’re allotted, never knowing when we’ll run out of time to open our arms and eyes.

Like I said earlier, if Brave New World ends there, at the close of the final battle, I think the novel concludes perfectly. There’s just enough closure to let the reader feel like he witnessed a complete story, and just enough ambiguity to let that same reader ponder what he’s just absorbed for a few days. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel this way if I hadn’t disliked Chapter 18 so profoundly the first time I read it. I understand why Huxley ends the book the way he does, but I had a visceral negative response to John’s ultimate downfall.

Honestly, I don’t know what you do with the Savage after that conversation with Mond that’s any better than what Huxley came up with. But I don’t think you need to do anything with him. Some stories don’t demand closure; in other cases, the imagined consequence proves superior to the explicit one. In Brave New World’s case, I think Huxley’s run up against both: he crafted a story that doesn’t demand an ending (it’s not like there’s much of a plot or sense of suspense!) and grafted an unsatisfying one on anyway.

To be fair, Huxley’s ending does have thematic resonance. Huxley ultimately decides to force John to confront the knowledge that a) he’ll never be left alone while he’s in the World State, b) that he’s not strong enough to keep all of his desires in check, and c) that he’s unable to deal with violating his principles in order to satisfy his desires. John’s defining characteristic is inner turmoil, and it makes sense that his defeat would lie in his own inability to grapple with something (which recalls the “broken coping skills” motif). But I didn’t want John’s story to end that way – not because I like the character (I never grew as fond of him as I did of Winston; John’s too unstable and prone to violence for me to identify with him), but because it’s the opposite of 1984’s ending. It’s interesting – I don’t feel like Winston’s defeat betrays the character because I feel everything in that story crescendos towards a single conclusion, and the fact that we don’t want to accept that conclusion as inevitable just adds to Orwell’s themes.

With Brave New World, I felt like you could go anywhere after Chapter 17 – like John doesn’t have to die or even be defeated. That’s why I don’t feel like the ending is necessary – it’s perfunctory, and I can’t convince myself that Huxley picked the best, most profound, or even most interesting possibility. Even Huxley later admitted that he messed up his ending. As a young man, he says, he was blind to the third option in front of John – that he could find a middle ground in a society where science can be reined in until it serves man once more instead of the other way around. This was one of the reasons he came full circle, ideologically speaking, over the course of his career, and why Island was so different from Brave New World.

Ending issues aside, there’s a lot to like in Brave New World. It’s a huge literary touchstone, inspiring scores of tributes and knock-offs. As far as our curriculum is concerned, it’s a perfect counterpart to 1984 – not simply because its author had such a profound effect on Orwell’s career, but because it allows us to continue looking at that book’s ideas and even reassess its conclusions. As we move into the last month of the year, our final book (Never Let Me Go) will finish our study of these themes, and will (hopefully!) help you enter the next phase of your lives with a richer and more comprehensive framework of beliefs, ideas, and philosophies. And we’ll try our own hand at making a brave new world – because it’s your generation’s turn to try!

Brave New World: For I Found I’m Bound, Only Too Late