Brave New World in Utopian and Dystopian Reading Group

Aug 09, 2012 Shawn rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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In the distant future capitalism has run amok. Taylor’s methods of achieving efficiency and productivity supplant religion. Or wait, actually Fordism, has replaced religion and Henry Ford has become God. Oh my Ford. Science is stagnant and a sin, unless it’s enlisted to innovate social control strategies. Spermatozoa and ovaries are manipulated not so much as organic matter, but as the building blocks to create elite clones to perform the intellectual functions of society while the lo description

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In the distant future capitalism has run amok. Taylor’s methods of achieving efficiency and productivity supplant religion. Or wait, actually Fordism, has replaced religion and Henry Ford has become God. Oh my Ford. Science is stagnant and a sin, unless it’s enlisted to innovate social control strategies. Spermatozoa and ovaries are manipulated not so much as organic matter, but as the building blocks to create elite clones to perform the intellectual functions of society while the lower classes of clones are conditioned before birth to happily engage in the most mind-numbing tasks. Test-tube babies are harvested by the thousands. Nutrients are withheld from some in order to create lower life forms fit for every purpose conceivable in a capitalistic-consumer-production based society. Some are tall, handsome, brilliant and beautiful, while others are squat, powerful, and possess intellects similar to the great apes. From the moment of birth to the end of the clone’s school years, Pavlovian and Skinnerian techniques ensure happiness, blind obedience, stability and not even an iota of a chance of rebellion. Those who do somehow manage even a twinge of individuality are shipped off to some remote island, divorced from the comforts of a meaningless existence based on consumerism, hedonism, sensuality, promiscuity and drug-induced bliss. Freud surmised that the family is the cause of too much anguish, so, the family has been eliminated. The words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have parallels to the most offensive of curse words. In the Brave New World there is no suffering, no tragedy, no letdowns, no drama; thus, there is no need for art or literature, with the exception of performances that harness the five senses and create a sensory overload designed to give the participant a mindgasm and superficial sense of neuronal, physiological release. In this world there will be no epiphanies. Empathy is not required. No food shortages, no lack of clothes and no lack of housing. Everything one could possibly need is provided. The state is God now, so there is no longer a need for religion. Man has moved beyond such ancient, quaint notions.

Three characters emerge, though, in Huxley’s narrative and all three represent potential threat, a potential subversion of the system. Brave New World is not about how they overcome the system, but how in the end, the system defeats them. Or does it?

Huxley’s dystopian novel, like so many others, is long on explication, and short on narrative. Indeed, the importance of narrative is overshadowed by the function of explication. As such, the average reader will find this a boring read. It’s not a page-turner and the chapters and cliff-hangers. The characters are not sympathetic, but, rather, annoying. I would only recommend this to history buffs (Huxley must have had lots of fun messing around with the characters names: ‘Lenina,’ ‘Bernard Marx,’ etc.), political scientists, and to all the geeks that are fascinated by utopias. If you liked ‘The Matrix’ or ‘Twelve Monkeys’ or virtually any other dystopic film, you’ll want to read this, as so many modern dystopic authors owe many of their ideas to Huxley. Anyway, it’s a short book and can easily be consumed in an afternoon just as The Ford would have us do.
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