Category: Review

Things change rapidly in the later part of the book.  Finally, we get into what is going on and more importantly the why of it.  

A lot happens in the latter part of the book.  John interacts with society, Bernard rises and falls as a celebrity, and of course, the finale.  I am not going to spoil what happens and how for you.  But, this is definitely where all the action is particularly chapters 16 and 17.

Science and Art vs Society  – To me this is the central theme of the book.  From a philosophical point of view, there can only be truth when there is also untruth and there can only be beauty when there is also not.  Science and art lead to truth and beauty which often times can be in contrast to happiness.  And when there is unhappiness, there is instability in society. 

The poignant conversation with Mustapha Mond reveals science has ceased advancing in AF632.  Without truth, there is also no beauty.  I used to believe the phrase that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.  And I am not saying that I have completely thrown that belief out however, I do think that the antithesis that there are standards that are universally recognized.   Those standards can change but only if truth changes.

Back when I was in high school, we had a days long debate with our Latin Teacher who was also trained in philosophy about this subject.  His stance was that there was an absolute definition of beauty.  That flew in the face of us young, doe eyed high schoolers.  I think it was us revolting to the idea that we all saw ourselves as “mommy and daddies’ little gems”.  The truth of it was that we had not seen enough of the world to understand that the full picture had not been revealed.  In that Latin class, most were successful in life but in the larger graduating class some became drug addicts and criminals, some died in car crashes and some got ‘knocked up’ shortly after leaving high school; hardly a beautiful ending.

In the eye of the beholder is a filter that we use to justify our choices and it is perfectly fine.  But, it doesn’t mean that it fits the definition of beauty.  I don’t know if this is true but Mustapha cited that only 1/9 can be Alpha.  The other 8/9 are not.  That is the science (or statistical analysis, a form of science) or truth.  When we are in the lower eight, we don’t want to believe it and that makes us unhappy.

Age and solidarity draw toward religion – The wildcard in the trinity above is religion.  Civilization in AF632 has edited out god, therefore it is handled in a separate conversation between John and Mustapha.  I suppose you could say that religion influences truth and beauty but it could have it’s on effect on happiness as well.

The claim is that as we age and get closer to death, we are looking for answers to the unknown in life.  In Brave New World no one ages, death has been normalized throughout all life and no one is solitary.  I suppose that is one technique to prevent looking for God in the first place. 

But I think in a larger sense, religion has a more powerful role than either truth or beauty.  It can cause us to do things and live life in contrast to societal norms or dare I say even laws.  For instance, despite religion being illegal in China there are still churches.  Religion has always survived persecution or even on the fringes of permission.  Clearly, a powerful motivator and society disrupter.

Nobility and Heroism = Political inefficiency – This is a minor point but a quote that I thought was interesting.  What it is saying is that when the population holds some individuals (or fictional characters) to a different level, then the current propaganda has failed.  I think that this is one to watch out for in the future actually.  

We see this all the time in the villainization of individuals in media circles.  It could be Trump or AOC and to a lessor extent Antonio Brown or John Gruden. One side pushing an agenda to discredit the other side.  The part that has yet to be perfected is when this doesn’t happen at all it means total control has been assumed.  The other thing to watch out for here is don’t get trapped on one side.

Humanity is the right to be Unhappy – Here is the punchline to what Huxley was delivering.  Again, this is the result of concept one today.  I think that it is interesting that even in the 1930s, Huxley recognized the trend to give up freedom for the sake of comfort.  

I will use a completely unrelated example to illustrate this.  Many companies are pushing this acronym SaaS.  That stands for Software as a Service.  The premise is that you sign up for a reoccurring payment to retain access to the service.  You don’t pay it every month (or period), you are charged automatically.  I have always bristled at this in that as it puts it on auto-pilot.   It stops becoming a subscription and become an everbearing revenue stream for the companies providing the service. No wonder it is popular.  The prevailing attitude of most people is that it is better to give up control than to have to deal with it.

What we lose here is the analysis of whether we want the service or not.  Is the payment market appropriate? Are we using the service enough to justify the cost? Do we even know that we are paying for the service?  We are abdicating choice for comfort in this case.  

My wrap-up next week will conclude this review.  I will do some comparisons with teacher and student to 1984.  I think Huxley provided some pretty strong conclusions late in the book.  The thing that I really appreciated with this section was the reminder that I don’t have to agree with what is happening in the world, the fact that it is happening and I know about it there is still hope that we have not been completely brainwashed or sanitized.

End Your Programming Routine:  Freedom requires maturity.  Maturity contains the ability to accept that there is truth that contrasts what we want in life or that we may not fit into every definition of beauty.  We do not have maturity if we put convenience over freedom in the long run.  The ability to make the decision in the first place is freedom. Without a continued questioning of whether we made the right decision or the results still fit is truth.   

We are now in the mid section of the book.  All of the newness has worn off and this section is largely about plot development.    Sticking with the idea concepts rather than revealing the story, I have compiled a more concise and less chapter by chapter analysis.

The truth is, as I am writing this I have already finished to book.  I suppose I am now able to stand back a little better and take a higher level look at things rather that trying to see everything as it is happening.   However, my notes I took before I finished the book so hopefully it is non-bias enough.

My book is 220 pages long.  In my opinion, the story really doesn’t start until Chapter 8 which begins on page 104.  While some of the preceding pages are interesting, it makes for a very slow beginning.  This is where John, aka The Savage tells Bernard his life story.  John was born to Linda who was abandoned on the reservation by her boyfriend (and father of John), the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, Tomakin.

If you haven’t read the book, then that is enough spoilers.  But suffice to say, the rest of the book is about John’s interaction with London’s civilized society and how the clash of his upbringing is irreconcilable to the rest of civilization.  Below are the concepts I observed in this chapter group.

Acceptance in Society – The Reservation is not succinctly described, however it seems to be a combination of Native, Latino, possibly Asian or Indian as well people.  They believe in God, perform Native American rituals and speak in a non-English language. They seem to eat southwestern or Mexican food, drink alcohol like mescal and live a life that we might recognize as compared to rocket travel and scent organ indulgence.

John being born to an English woman did not fit in to the reservation with blond hair and blue eyes.  Linda accepted her fate as there was nothing she could do to leave seemed to survive as a call girl.  I think this concept is perfectly understandable to us.  If you don’t look like us and are not from here, then you are an outsider.  John and Linda were outsiders at the reservation.  But they were also outsiders in civilization as well.  

Linda had grown old.  Despite being 44, she is described as someone of eighty,  Without access to the drugs and hormones, the natural aging process happened, apparently so did poor hygiene and lack of medical care.  John would never be accepted in civilization as he was born and not hatched as the rest of the people.  Living in society no matter how detached we may want to be is imperative survival.  It is the same reason why living out your days in a bunker is ultimately a failure.  We are meant to be some degree of social creatures.

Coping through medication – Despite Linda’s desire to be re-introduced into society, she would never be accepted.  Her looks and many years on the reservation had made it impossible for her to fit back in.  Supposedly, Soma was non-addictive but essentially Linda checked out with the drug as soon as she realized that this was not going to be the reunion fantasy that she had in her mind.  We will find out her fate later in the book but she is as good as gone at this point. 

Again, there is nothing too earth shattering about self-medication.  Both Bernard and John shunned the practice preferring to feel emotion and pain rather than push it away.  This is what makes this concept significant.  Humanness needs to feel both sides of emotion, not just the high side.  That was the whole point of providing the drug in the first place, to dehumanize civilization.

Division of the family unit – The book is written in a fashion that sort of portrays John as codependent.   He seems to simultaneously have love and rage for Linda.  The fact that all civilized humans are hatched and the words mother and father are titled pornographic.  I think that means shockingly vulgar, like a racial slur rather than our current definition.

Despite that, John clearly has love for Linda and he wanted to have the same with Tomakin.  That puts him at odds with society and of course has consequences to to the director.  There is extensive talk about this later in the book but this is where I first realized it was going to be a theme.  

Power of the State and Disobedience –  I would call this foreshadowing.  But there is strong indication that Bernard, Helmholtz and John are going to have a clash with the state before this book is over.  Helmholtz is some kind of English Professor and is having treasonous thoughts to borrow from 1984.  You can’t be alone, write about it or even talk about it.  

Good thing the book is short because I was starting to struggle.  I didn’t really get a sense of where things were going until we got there.  I will talk more about this in my wrap-up in a couple of weeks.  The first three concepts today are really very strong in dystopian fiction and are good tools of totalitarian governments.  Divide the society if you disobey, drug them if they don’t fit and weaken the family unit.

End Your Programming Routine:  I am going to take this back to masks for a minute.  Do you know what I never see when out and about?  I never see a child wearing a mask and a parent not or vice versa.  It is always parent and child acting in the same fashion. It isn’t until they get to the age of my children (teenagers) that you start to see a divergence.  My kids actually hassle me to the point that they don’t want to be seen with me not wearing a mask.  How does this happen?  They have been separated and socialized in a way that makes them shun if you are not fitting the social norm.  Think about that.

So, I miscounted the number of chapters, there are actually 18. Divide by three and that should be six chapters per week.  Today, I will be reviewing the first six chapters of “Brave New World”.

If we think about the world in 1931, when this book was written and apply our critical thinking and knowledge of history,  we know that the world is in the beginning of the Great Depression, there is the rise of Fascism with the election of Mussolini in 1922 and the writing of Mein Kampf in 1925 and with it came the pseudo-science of eugenics.  That is a good place to start since this is really how the book starts.  Eugenics is the manipulation of human reproduction to have more desired traits and less undesired traits.

The book begins with a tour of the factory where babies are created.  It follows through with raising after they are born and then character development begins.  Some good stuff happens while touring the factory, here are some concepts from Chapter 1.

• Slogans – A unified population is an obedient population.  That is done by having people believe the same things.  To do that, they use a motto or slogan ‘Community, Identity, Stability’.
• Classification of people –  The concept of Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon and Gamma (including + and – of each) individuals is introduced.  Knowing and accepting your place in society helps maintain order and stability.
• Matching mental and physical maturity and purpose – Huxley is proposing through the director’s character that when the body is physically mature but the mind is not it leaves more time for a person to think.  This is an undesirable gap in that it could lead to rebellion or acting or learning or believing out of class.

In chapter 2, the babies are in the world.  There is a aversion to using the word born because that implies a natural childbirth which is not how they came to be.  This chapter is all about how the children are trained into class.  Including what clothes they wear, what stories they hear and what propaganda they are continuously looped.  

• Learning + Nature = Wild = Ungovernable – There is a distinct attempt to keep people away from nature and natural experiences.  Too many and they start to rebel because they start to understand that this life is not right (proper).
• Science requires understanding, Morality is programming – This one jumped out at me because I didn’t realize how true it was.  The spirit is that morality can be trained/taught/programed whereas truth cannot.  

Chapter 3 gets a little fuzzy as it is a series of flashbacks and character introductions.  It is a little hard to follow when it is a series of short sentences and jumping back and forth between different character groups.  Nevertheless there are some good new concepts.

• Eroticism – Whether it is culturally expected promiscuity or something called ‘erotic play’ it seems like there is an supernatural focus on sexuality that is missing in a culture of test tube babies.  I think that it is further emphasized with the next concept.
• Drugs – It seems that women are taking hormones for regularity or ‘Soma’ for feeling more or Soma for feeling less.  They are even required contraceptives so that women don’t end up pregnant.  There is also reference to abortion clinics so it must not be completely effective, pregnancy is definitely not permitted.

Chapters 4-6 are character and plot line development.  We find that there are some doubts in to complete belief in utopia.  The main character Bernard Marx opens up with a friend Helmholtz Watson and girlfriend Lenina.  He might have an ally in Helmholtz but Lenina cannot overcome her programming to even indulge in the fact that there might be more to life.

End Your Programming Routine: I am trying to get through the concepts that make this work a great text to end your programming, not spoil the book.  So, I could write more about the later chapters but they require more setup in terms of explaining what is happening in the plot rather than in your face mechanisms of control.  I did find it interesting that technology such as helicopters, rockets and television was mentioned in the 1930s.  I didn’t know that such technology existed at the time.  Stay tuned to chapters 7-12.