Brave new world aldous huxley
Brave new world aldous huxley
Brave New World
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Brave New World, novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932. The book presents a nightmarish vision of a future society.
Plot summary
Bernard Marx, an Alpha, is one of the main characters of the story. He and his love interest, Lenina Crowne, travel to a “savage reservation,” where Marx’s boss (the Director) supposedly lost a female companion some years ago. When the two arrive, they see people living there engaging in unfamiliar rituals. They also stumble upon a woman (Linda) and her son (John, also referred to as the Savage) who Marx correctly assumes to be the lost family mentioned by the Director. The Director had recently been threatening to send Marx away for his antisocial behavior, so Marx decides to bring the two home with him.
Marx presents Linda and John to the Director, and John, the son the Director never knew he had, calls the Director “father.” This provokes the Director’s resignation, as procreation between persons is outlawed, and his crime has been exposed. John is kept in the “brave new world,” as he calls it, as a sort of experiment. Linda, however, is sent to a hospital because of her addiction to “soma,” a drug used by citizens to feel calmer. She eventually dies because of it, which causes John to go on an anti-soma rampage in the hallway of the hospital.
John becomes angrier and angrier with this society, until eventually he runs away to a lighthouse to live in isolation. He is able to evade tourists and reporters for a while, but eventually they find him and gawk as he engages in self-flagellation. The intensity of the crowd increases when John whips not only himself but a woman as well. Crowds descend from helicopters to witness the spectacle. Another woman appears (who is implied to be Lenina), and John attempts to whip her too. John is soon overcome with passion, and, after coming under the influence of soma, he falls asleep. The next morning, appalled at his complicity in the system, he hangs himself.
Historical context
Brave New World was written between World War I and World War II, the height of an era of technological optimism in the West. Huxley picked up on such optimism and created the dystopian world of his novel so as to criticize it. Much of the anxiety that drives Brave New World can be traced to a widespread belief in technology as a futuristic remedy for problems caused by disease and war. Unlike his fellow citizens, Huxley felt that such a reliance was naive, and he decided to challenge these ideas by imagining them taken to their extremes. Huxley’s life was surrounded by science, something that likely helped him to produce the science-heavy Brave New World. His grandfather (Thomas Henry Huxley) was a prominent biologist and an early advocate of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and his brothers also became scientists. Aldous too had hoped to pursue a career in the sciences, but a disease left him partially blind as an adolescent and thus unable to continue on his scientific path.
After Brave New World’s publication, Huxley was accused of plagiarizing the novel My by Yevgeny Zamyatin, written in 1920 and published in English as We in the United States in 1924. Huxley denied having read the book, and the similarities between the novels can be seen as an expression of common fears surrounding the rapid advancement of technology and of the shared opinions of many tech-skeptics during the early 20th century. Following Brave New World came more dystopian novels, including, most prominently, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).
The clearest literary influence on Brave New World can be intuited from the title, which comes from a line in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play preoccupied with what it means to build a new society. John is himself an echo of the play’s character Caliban, who is described as a “savage.” Huxley also signals the Bard of Avon’s influence through John’s education on the reservation, where the curriculum consists primarily of the works of Shakespeare. Some critics considered Brave New World to be, ultimately, a futuristic parody of The Tempest.
Brave new world aldous huxley
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.
«And this,» said the Director opening the door, «is the Fertilizing Room.»
Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse’s mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D. H. C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments.
«Just to give you a general idea,» he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently–though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
«To-morrow,» he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, «you’ll be settling down to serious work. You won’t have time for generalities. Meanwhile …»
Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse’s mouth into the notebook. The boys scribbled like mad.
Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. And anyhow the question didn’t arise; in this year of stability, A. F. 632, it didn’t occur to you to ask it.
Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction–»the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months’ salary»; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa–at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents re-examined; how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovsky’s Process.
«Bokanovsky’s Process,» repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks.
One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.
«Essentially,» the D.H.C. concluded, «bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding.»
He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box, another, rack-full was emerging. Machinery faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few died; of the rest, the least susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to the incubators, where the buds began to develop; then, after two days, were suddenly chilled, chilled and checked. Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol; consequently burgeoned again and having budded–bud out of bud out of bud–were thereafter–further arrest being generally fatal–left to develop in peace. By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos– a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins–but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time.
«Scores,» the Director repeated and flung out his arms, as though he were distributing largesse. «Scores.»
But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay.
«My good boy!» The Director wheeled sharply round on him. «Can’t you see? Can’t you see?» He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. «Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!»
Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.
«Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!» The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. «You really know where you are. For the first time in history.» He quoted the planetary motto. «Community, Identity, Stability.» Grand words. «If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.»
Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.
«But, alas,» the Director shook his head, «we can’t bokanovskify indefinitely.»
Ninety-six seemed to be the limit; seventy-two a good average. From the same ovary and with gametes of the same male to manufacture as many batches of identical twins as possible–that was the best (sadly a second best) that they could do. And even that was difficult.
«For in nature it takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity. But our business is to stabilize the population at this moment, here and now. Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century–what would be the use of that?»
Obviously, no use at all. But Podsnap’s Technique had immensely accelerated the process of ripening. They could make sure of at least a hundred and fifty mature eggs within two years. Fertilize and bokanovskify–in other words, multiply by seventy-two–and you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins, all within two years of the same age.
«And in exceptional cases we can make one ovary yield us over fifteen thousand adult individuals.»
Beckoning to a fair-haired, ruddy young man who happened to be passing at the moment. «Mr. Foster,» he called. The ruddy young man approached. «Can you tell us the record for a single ovary, Mr. Foster?»
«Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre,» Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. He spoke very quickly, had a vivacious blue eye, and took an evident pleasure in quoting figures. «Sixteen thousand and twelve; in one hundred and eighty-nine batches of identicals. But of course they’ve done much better,» he rattled on, «in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It’s quite astonishing, when you’re used to working with European material. Still,» he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), «still, we mean to beat them if we can. I’m working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We’ll beat them yet.»
«That’s the spirit I like!» cried the Director, and clapped Mr. Foster on the shoulder. «Come along with us, and give these boys the benefit of your expert knowledge.»
Mr. Foster smiled modestly. «With pleasure.» They went.
In the Bottling Room all was harmonious bustle and ordered activity. Flaps of fresh sow’s peritoneum ready cut to the proper size came shooting up in little lifts from the Organ Store in the sub-basement. Whizz and then, click! the lift-hatches hew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take the flap, insert, smooth-down, and before the lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the endless band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum had shot up from the depths, ready to be slipped into yet another bottle, the next of that slow interminable procession on the band.
Next to the Liners stood the Matriculators. The procession advanced; one by one the eggs were transferred from their test-tubes to the larger containers; deftly the peritoneal lining was slit, the morula dropped into place, the saline solution poured in … and already the bottle had passed, and it was the turn of the labellers. Heredity, date of fertilization, membership of Bokanovsky Group–details were transferred from test-tube to bottle. No longer anonymous, but named, identified, the procession marched slowly on; on through an opening in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room.
«Eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index,» said Mr. Foster with relish, as they entered.
«Containing all the relevant information,» added the Director.
«Brought up to date every morning.»
«And co-ordinated every afternoon.»
«On the basis of which they make their calculations.»
«So many individuals, of such and such quality,» said Mr. Foster.
«Distributed in such and such quantities.»
«The optimum Decanting Rate at any given moment.»
«Unforeseen wastages promptly made good.»
«Promptly,» repeated Mr. Foster. «If you knew the amount of overtime I had to put in after the last Japanese earthquake!» He laughed goodhumouredly and shook his head.
«The Predestinators send in their figures to the Fertilizers.»
«Who give them the embryos they ask for.»
«And the bottles come in here to be predestined in detail.»
«After which they are sent down to the Embryo Store.»
«Where we now proceed ourselves.»
And opening a door Mr. Foster led the way down a staircase into the basement.
The temperature was still tropical. They descended into a thickening twilight. Two doors and a passage with a double turn insured the cellar against any possible infiltration of the day.
«Embryos are like photograph film,» said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. «They can only stand red light.»
And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon. The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus. The hum and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air.
«Give them a few figures, Mr. Foster,» said the Director, who was tired of talking.
Mr. Foster was only too happy to give them a few figures.
Two hundred and twenty metres long, two hundred wide, ten high. He pointed upwards. Like chickens drinking, the students lifted their eyes towards the distant ceiling.
Three tiers of racks: ground floor level, first gallery, second gallery.
The spidery steel-work of gallery above gallery faded away in all directions into the dark. Near them three red ghosts were busily unloading demijohns from a moving staircase.
The escalator from the Social Predestination Room.
Each bottle could be placed on one of fifteen racks, each rack, though you couldn’t see it, was a conveyor traveling at the rate of thirty-three and a third centimetres an hour. Two hundred and sixty-seven days at eight metres a day. Two thousand one hundred and thirty-six metres in all. One circuit of the cellar at ground level, one on the first gallery, half on the second, and on the two hundred and sixty-seventh morning, daylight in the Decanting Room. Independent existence–so called.
«But in the interval,» Mr. Foster concluded, «we’ve managed to do a lot to them. Oh, a very great deal.» His laugh was knowing and triumphant.
«That’s the spirit I like,» said the Director once more. «Let’s walk around. You tell them everything, Mr. Foster.»
Mr. Foster duly told them.
Told them of the growing embryo on its bed of peritoneum. Made them taste the rich blood surrogate on which it fed. Explained why it had to be stimulated with placentin and thyroxin. Told them of the corpus luteum extract. Showed them the jets through which at every twelfth metre from zero to 2040 it was automatically injected. Spoke of those gradually increasing doses of pituitary administered during the final ninety-six metres of their course. Described the artificial maternal circulation installed in every bottle at Metre 112; showed them the reservoir of blood-surrogate, the centrifugal pump that kept the liquid moving over the placenta and drove it through the synthetic lung and waste product filter. Referred to the embryo’s troublesome tendency to anæmia, to the massive doses of hog’s stomach extract and foetal foal’s liver with which, in consequence, it had to be supplied.
He rubbed his hands. For of course, they didn’t content themselves with merely hatching out embryos: any cow could do that.
«We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future …» He was going to say «future World controllers,» but correcting himself, said «future Directors of Hatcheries,» instead.
The D.H.C. acknowledged the compliment with a smile.
They were passing Metre 320 on Rack 11. A young Beta-Minus mechanic was busy with screw-driver and spanner on the blood-surrogate pump of a passing bottle. The hum of the electric motor deepened by fractions of a tone as he turned the nuts. Down, down … A final twist, a glance at the revolution counter, and he was done. He moved two paces down the line and began the same process on the next pump.
«Reducing the number of revolutions per minute,» Mr. Foster explained. «The surrogate goes round slower; therefore passes through the lung at longer intervals; therefore gives the embryo less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par.» Again he rubbed his hands.
«But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?» asked an ingenuous student.
«Ass!» said the Director, breaking a long silence. «Hasn’t it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?»
It evidently hadn’t occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.
«The lower the caste,» said Mr. Foster, «the shorter the oxygen.» The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.
«Who are no use at all,» concluded Mr. Foster.
Whereas (his voice became confidential and eager), if they could discover a technique for shortening the period of maturation what a triumph, what a benefaction to Society!
«Consider the horse.»
They considered it.
Mature at six; the elephant at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually mature; and is only full-grown at twenty. Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed development, the human intelligence.
«But in Epsilons,» said Mr. Foster very justly, «we don’t need human intelligence.»
Didn’t need and didn’t get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow’s, what an enormous saving to the Community!
«Enormous!» murmured the students. Mr. Foster’s enthusiasm was infectious.
He became rather technical; spoke of the abnormal endocrine co-ordination which made men grow so slowly; postulated a germinal mutation to account for it. Could the effects of this germinal mutation be undone? Could the individual Epsilon embryo be made a revert, by a suitable technique, to the normality of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it was all but solved.
Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head.
Their wanderings through the crimson twilight had brought them to the neighborhood of Metre 170 on Rack 9. From this point onwards Rack 9 was enclosed and the bottle performed the remainder of their journey in a kind of tunnel, interrupted here and there by openings two or three metres wide.
«Heat conditioning,» said Mr. Foster.
Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. «We condition them to thrive on heat,» concluded Mr. Foster. «Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.»
«And that,» put in the Director sententiously, «that is the secret of happiness and virtue–liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.»
In a gap between two tunnels, a nurse was delicately probing with a long fine syringe into the gelatinous contents of a passing bottle. The students and their guides stood watching her for a few moments in silence.
«Well, Lenina,» said Mr. Foster, when at last she withdrew the syringe and straightened herself up.
The girl turned with a start. One could see that, for all the lupus and the purple eyes, she was uncommonly pretty.
«Henry!» Her smile flashed redly at him–a row of coral teeth.
«Charming, charming,» murmured the Director and, giving her two or three little pats, received in exchange a rather deferential smile for himself.
«What are you giving them?» asked Mr. Foster, making his tone very professional.
«Oh, the usual typhoid and sleeping sickness.»
«Tropical workers start being inoculated at Metre 150,» Mr. Foster explained to the students. «The embryos still have gills. We immunize the fish against the future man’s diseases.» Then, turning back to Lenina, «Ten to five on the roof this afternoon,» he said, «as usual.»
«Charming,» said the Director once more, and, with a final pat, moved away after the others.
On Rack 10 rows of next generation’s chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine. The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundred metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. «To improve their sense of balance,» Mr. Foster explained. «Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they’re right way up, so that they’re half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they’re upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they’re only truly happy when they’re standing on their heads.
«And now,» Mr. Foster went on, «I’d like to show you some very interesting conditioning for Alpha Plus Intellectuals. We have a big batch of them on Rack 5. First Gallery level,» he called to two boys who had started to go down to the ground floor.
«They’re round about Metre 900,» he explained. «You can’t really do any useful intellectual conditioning till the foetuses have lost their tails. Follow me.»
But the Director had looked at his watch. «Ten to three,» he said. «No time for the intellectual embryos, I’m afraid. We must go up to the Nurseries before the children have finished their afternoon sleep.»
Mr. Foster was disappointed. «At least one glance at the Decanting Room,» he pleaded.
«Very well then.» The Director smiled indulgently. «Just one glance.»
Brave new world aldous huxley
Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963)
Chapter One
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.
«And this,» said the Director opening the door, «is the Fertilizing Room.»
Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse’s mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D. H. C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments.
«Just to give you a general idea,» he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently–though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
«To-morrow,» he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, «you’ll be settling down to serious work. You won’t have time for generalities. Meanwhile …»
Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse’s mouth into the notebook. The boys scribbled like mad.
Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. And anyhow the question didn’t arise; in this year of stability, A. F. 632, it didn’t occur to you to ask it.
Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction–»the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months’ salary»; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa–at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents re-examined; how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovsky’s Process.
«Bokanovsky’s Process,» repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks.
One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.
«Essentially,» the D.H.C. concluded, «bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding.»
He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box, another, rack-full was emerging. Machinery faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few died; of the rest, the least susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to the incubators, where the buds began to develop; then, after two days, were suddenly chilled, chilled and checked. Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol; consequently burgeoned again and having budded–bud out of bud out of bud–were thereafter–further arrest being generally fatal–left to develop in peace. By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos– a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins–but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time.
«Scores,» the Director repeated and flung out his arms, as though he were distributing largesse. «Scores.»
But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay.
«My good boy!» The Director wheeled sharply round on him. «Can’t you see? Can’t you see?» He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. «Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!»
Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.
«Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!» The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. «You really know where you are. For the first time in history.» He quoted the planetary motto. «Community, Identity, Stability.» Grand words. «If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.»
Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.
«But, alas,» the Director shook his head, «we can’t bokanovskify indefinitely.»
Ninety-six seemed to be the limit; seventy-two a good average. From the same ovary and with gametes of the same male to manufacture as many batches of identical twins as possible–that was the best (sadly a second best) that they could do. And even that was difficult.
«For in nature it takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity. But our business is to stabilize the population at this moment, here and now. Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century–what would be the use of that?»
Obviously, no use at all. But Podsnap’s Technique had immensely accelerated the process of ripening. They could make sure of at least a hundred and fifty mature eggs within two years. Fertilize and bokanovskify–in other words, multiply by seventy-two–and you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins, all within two years of the same age.
«And in exceptional cases we can make one ovary yield us over fifteen thousand adult individuals.»
Beckoning to a fair-haired, ruddy young man who happened to be passing at the moment. «Mr. Foster,» he called. The ruddy young man approached. «Can you tell us the record for a single ovary, Mr. Foster?»
«Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre,» Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. He spoke very quickly, had a vivacious blue eye, and took an evident pleasure in quoting figures. «Sixteen thousand and twelve; in one hundred and eighty-nine batches of identicals. But of course they’ve done much better,» he rattled on, «in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It’s quite astonishing, when you’re used to working with European material. Still,» he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), «still, we mean to beat them if we can. I’m working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We’ll beat them yet.»
«That’s the spirit I like!» cried the Director, and clapped Mr. Foster on the shoulder. «Come along with us, and give these boys the benefit of your expert knowledge.»
Mr. Foster smiled modestly. «With pleasure.» They went.
In the Bottling Room all was harmonious bustle and ordered activity. Flaps of fresh sow’s peritoneum ready cut to the proper size came shooting up in little lifts from the Organ Store in the sub-basement. Whizz and then, click! the lift-hatches hew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take the flap, insert, smooth-down, and before the lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the endless band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum had shot up from the depths, ready to be slipped into yet another bottle, the next of that slow interminable procession on the band.
Next to the Liners stood the Matriculators. The procession advanced; one by one the eggs were transferred from their test-tubes to the larger containers; deftly the peritoneal lining was slit, the morula dropped into place, the saline solution poured in … and already the bottle had passed, and it was the turn of the labellers. Heredity, date of fertilization, membership of Bokanovsky Group–details were transferred from test-tube to bottle. No longer anonymous, but named, identified, the procession marched slowly on; on through an opening in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room.
«Eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index,» said Mr. Foster with relish, as they entered.
«Containing all the relevant information,» added the Director.
«Brought up to date every morning.»
«And co-ordinated every afternoon.»
«On the basis of which they make their calculations.»
«So many individuals, of such and such quality,» said Mr. Foster.
«Distributed in such and such quantities.»
«The optimum Decanting Rate at any given moment.»
«Unforeseen wastages promptly made good.»
«Promptly,» repeated Mr. Foster. «If you knew the amount of overtime I had to put in after the last Japanese earthquake!» He laughed goodhumouredly and shook his head.
«The Predestinators send in their figures to the Fertilizers.»
«Who give them the embryos they ask for.»
«And the bottles come in here to be predestined in detail.»
«After which they are sent down to the Embryo Store.»
«Where we now proceed ourselves.»
And opening a door Mr. Foster led the way down a staircase into the basement.
The temperature was still tropical. They descended into a thickening twilight. Two doors and a passage with a double turn insured the cellar against any possible infiltration of the day.
«Embryos are like photograph film,» said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. «They can only stand red light.»
And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon. The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus. The hum and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air.
«Give them a few figures, Mr. Foster,» said the Director, who was tired of talking.
Mr. Foster was only too happy to give them a few figures.
Two hundred and twenty metres long, two hundred wide, ten high. He pointed upwards. Like chickens drinking, the students lifted their eyes towards the distant ceiling.
Three tiers of racks: ground floor level, first gallery, second gallery.
The spidery steel-work of gallery above gallery faded away in all directions into the dark. Near them three red ghosts were busily unloading demijohns from a moving staircase.
The escalator from the Social Predestination Room.
Each bottle could be placed on one of fifteen racks, each rack, though you couldn’t see it, was a conveyor traveling at the rate of thirty-three and a third centimetres an hour. Two hundred and sixty-seven days at eight metres a day. Two thousand one hundred and thirty-six metres in all. One circuit of the cellar at ground level, one on the first gallery, half on the second, and on the two hundred and sixty-seventh morning, daylight in the Decanting Room. Independent existence–so called.
«But in the interval,» Mr. Foster concluded, «we’ve managed to do a lot to them. Oh, a very great deal.» His laugh was knowing and triumphant.
«That’s the spirit I like,» said the Director once more. «Let’s walk around. You tell them everything, Mr. Foster.»
Mr. Foster duly told them.
Told them of the growing embryo on its bed of peritoneum. Made them taste the rich blood surrogate on which it fed. Explained why it had to be stimulated with placentin and thyroxin. Told them of the corpus luteum extract. Showed them the jets through which at every twelfth metre from zero to 2040 it was automatically injected. Spoke of those gradually increasing doses of pituitary administered during the final ninety-six metres of their course. Described the artificial maternal circulation installed in every bottle at Metre 112; showed them the reservoir of blood-surrogate, the centrifugal pump that kept the liquid moving over the placenta and drove it through the synthetic lung and waste product filter. Referred to the embryo’s troublesome tendency to anæmia, to the massive doses of hog’s stomach extract and foetal foal’s liver with which, in consequence, it had to be supplied.
He rubbed his hands. For of course, they didn’t content themselves with merely hatching out embryos: any cow could do that.
«We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future …» He was going to say «future World controllers,» but correcting himself, said «future Directors of Hatcheries,» instead.
The D.H.C. acknowledged the compliment with a smile.
They were passing Metre 320 on Rack 11. A young Beta-Minus mechanic was busy with screw-driver and spanner on the blood-surrogate pump of a passing bottle. The hum of the electric motor deepened by fractions of a tone as he turned the nuts. Down, down … A final twist, a glance at the revolution counter, and he was done. He moved two paces down the line and began the same process on the next pump.
«Reducing the number of revolutions per minute,» Mr. Foster explained. «The surrogate goes round slower; therefore passes through the lung at longer intervals; therefore gives the embryo less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par.» Again he rubbed his hands.
«But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?» asked an ingenuous student.
«Ass!» said the Director, breaking a long silence. «Hasn’t it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?»
It evidently hadn’t occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.
«The lower the caste,» said Mr. Foster, «the shorter the oxygen.» The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.
«Who are no use at all,» concluded Mr. Foster.
Whereas (his voice became confidential and eager), if they could discover a technique for shortening the period of maturation what a triumph, what a benefaction to Society!
«Consider the horse.»
They considered it.
Mature at six; the elephant at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually mature; and is only full-grown at twenty. Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed development, the human intelligence.
«But in Epsilons,» said Mr. Foster very justly, «we don’t need human intelligence.»
Didn’t need and didn’t get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow’s, what an enormous saving to the Community!
«Enormous!» murmured the students. Mr. Foster’s enthusiasm was infectious.
He became rather technical; spoke of the abnormal endocrine co-ordination which made men grow so slowly; postulated a germinal mutation to account for it. Could the effects of this germinal mutation be undone? Could the individual Epsilon embryo be made a revert, by a suitable technique, to the normality of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it was all but solved.
Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head.
Their wanderings through the crimson twilight had brought them to the neighborhood of Metre 170 on Rack 9. From this point onwards Rack 9 was enclosed and the bottle performed the remainder of their journey in a kind of tunnel, interrupted here and there by openings two or three metres wide.
«Heat conditioning,» said Mr. Foster.
Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. «We condition them to thrive on heat,» concluded Mr. Foster. «Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.»
«And that,» put in the Director sententiously, «that is the secret of happiness and virtue–liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.»
In a gap between two tunnels, a nurse was delicately probing with a long fine syringe into the gelatinous contents of a passing bottle. The students and their guides stood watching her for a few moments in silence.
«Well, Lenina,» said Mr. Foster, when at last she withdrew the syringe and straightened herself up.
The girl turned with a start. One could see that, for all the lupus and the purple eyes, she was uncommonly pretty.
«Henry!» Her smile flashed redly at him–a row of coral teeth.
«Charming, charming,» murmured the Director and, giving her two or three little pats, received in exchange a rather deferential smile for himself.
«What are you giving them?» asked Mr. Foster, making his tone very professional.
«Oh, the usual typhoid and sleeping sickness.»
«Tropical workers start being inoculated at Metre 150,» Mr. Foster explained to the students. «The embryos still have gills. We immunize the fish against the future man’s diseases.» Then, turning back to Lenina, «Ten to five on the roof this afternoon,» he said, «as usual.»
«Charming,» said the Director once more, and, with a final pat, moved away after the others.
On Rack 10 rows of next generation’s chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine. The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundred metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. «To improve their sense of balance,» Mr. Foster explained. «Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they’re right way up, so that they’re half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they’re upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they’re only truly happy when they’re standing on their heads.
«And now,» Mr. Foster went on, «I’d like to show you some very interesting conditioning for Alpha Plus Intellectuals. We have a big batch of them on Rack 5. First Gallery level,» he called to two boys who had started to go down to the ground floor.
«They’re round about Metre 900,» he explained. «You can’t really do any useful intellectual conditioning till the foetuses have lost their tails. Follow me.»
But the Director had looked at his watch. «Ten to three,» he said. «No time for the intellectual embryos, I’m afraid. We must go up to the Nurseries before the children have finished their afternoon sleep.»
Mr. Foster was disappointed. «At least one glance at the Decanting Room,» he pleaded.
«Very well then.» The Director smiled indulgently. «Just one glance.»
Brave New World (1932) is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever written.
Tragically, no. Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any regime of universal happiness.
For sure, Huxley was writing a satirical piece of fiction, not scientific prophecy. Hence to treat his masterpiece as ill-conceived futurology rather than a work of great literature might seem to miss the point. Yet the knee-jerk response of «It’s Brave New World!» to any blueprint for chemically-driven happiness has delayed research into paradise-engineering for all sentient life.
So how does Huxley turn a future where we’re all notionally happy into the archetypal dys topia? If it’s technically feasible, what’s wrong with using biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether?
In Brave New World, Huxley contrives to exploit the anxieties of his bourgeois audience about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism. He taps into, and then feeds, our revulsion at Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning and eugenics. Worse, it is suggested that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most hallowed shibboleths of our culture: «motherhood», «home», «family», «freedom», even «love». The exchange yields an insipid happiness that’s unworthy of the name. Its evocation arouses our unease and distaste.
Huxley, however, has an altogether different agenda in mind. He is seeking to warn us against scientific utopianism. He succeeds all too well. Although we tend to see other people, not least the notional brave new worlders, as the hapless victims of propaganda and disinformation, we may find it is we ourselves who have been the manipulated dupes.
For Huxley does an effective hatchet-job on the very sort of «unnatural» hedonic engineering that most of us so urgently need. One practical consequence has been to heighten our already exaggerated fears of state-sanctioned mood-drugs. Hence millions of screwed-up minds, improvable even today by clinically-tested mood-boosters and anti-anxiety agents, just suffer in silence instead. In part this is because people worry they might become zombified addicts; and in part because they are unwilling to cast themselves as humble supplicants of the medical profession by taking state-rationed «antidepressants». Either way, the human cost in fruitless ill-being is immense.
Fortunately, the Net is opening up a vast trans-national free-market in psychotropics. Online pharmaceutical markets will eventually sweep away the restrictive practices of old medical drug cartels and their allies in the pharmaceutical industry. The liberatory potential of the Net as a global drug-delivery and information network has only just begun.
Of course, Huxley can’t personally be blamed for prolonging the pain of the old Darwinian order of natural selection. Citing the ill-effects of Brave New World is not the same as impugning its author’s motives. Aldous Huxley was a deeply humane person as well as a brilliant polymath. He himself suffered terribly after the death of his adored mother. But death and suffering will be cured only by the application of bioscience. They won’t be abolished by spirituality, prophetic sci-fi, or literary intellectualism.
So what form might this cure take?
In contrast to Brave New World, however, the death of ageing won’t be followed by our swift demise after a sixty-odd year life-span. We’ll have to reconcile ourselves to the prospect of living happily ever after. Scare-mongering prophets of doom notwithstanding, a life of unremitting bliss isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.
In later life, Huxley himself modified his antipathy to drug-assisted paradise. Island (1962), Huxley’s conception of a real utopia, was modelled on his experiences of mescaline and LSD. But until we get the biological underpinnings of our emotional well-being securely encoded genetically, then psychedelia is mostly off-limits for the purposes of paradise-engineering. Certainly, its intellectual significance cannot be exaggerated; but unfortunately, neither can its ineffable weirdness and the unpredictability of its agents. Thus drugs such as mescaline, and certainly LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of nightmarish bad trips and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a regime of selfish-DNA. Uncontrolled eruptions within the psyche must be replaced by the precision-engineering of emotional tone, if nothing else. If rational design is good enough for inorganic robots, then it’s good enough for us.
In Brave New World, of course, there are no freak-outs on soma. One suspects that this is partly because BNW’s emotionally stunted inhabitants don’t have the imagination to have a bad trip. But mainly it’s because the effects of soma are no more intellectually illuminating than getting a bit drunk. In BNW, our already limited repertoire of hunter-gatherer emotions has been constricted still further. Creative and destructive impulses alike have been purged. The capacity for spirituality has been extinguished. The utopians’ «set-point» on the pleasure-pain axis has indeed been shifted. But the axis is flattened at both ends.
To cap it all, in Brave New World life-long emotional well-being is not genetically pre-programmed as part of everyday mental health. Emotional well-being isn’t even assured from birth by euphoriant drugs. For example, juvenile brave new worlders are traumatised with electric shocks as part of the behaviorist-inspired conditioning process in childhood. Toddlers from the lower orders are terrorised with loud noises. This sort of aversion-therapy serves to condition them against liking books. We are told the inhabitants of Brave New World are happy. Yet they periodically experience unpleasant thoughts, feelings and emotions. They just banish them with soma: «One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments».
A more ambitious target would be to make the world’s last unpleasant experience a precisely dateable event some time next century; and from this minimum hedonic baseline, start aiming higher. «Every day, and in every way, I am getting better and better». Coué’s mantra of therapeutic self-deception needn’t depend on the cultivation of beautiful thoughts. If harnessed to the synthesis of smarter mood-enrichers and genetically-enhanced brains, it might even come true.
Of course, it’s easy today to write mood-congruent tomes on how everything could go wrong. This review essay is an exploration of what it might be like if they go right. So it’s worth contrasting the attributes of Brave New World with the sorts of biological paradise that may be enjoyed by our ecstatic descendants.
S t a s i s
Notionally, 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». It is curious to find a utopia where knowledge of the past is banned by the Controllers to prevent invidious comparisons. One might imagine history lessons would be encouraged instead. They would uncover a blood-stained horror-story.
Perhaps the Controllers fear historical awareness would stir dissatisfaction with the «utopian» present. Yet this is itself revealing. For Brave New World is not an exciting place to live in. It is a sterile, productivist utopia geared to the consumption of mass-produced goods: «Ending is better than mending». Society is shaped by a single all-embracing political ideology. The motto of the world state is «Community, Identity, Stability.»
In Brave New World, things do occasionally go wrong. But more to the point, we are led to feel the whole social enterprise that BNW represents is horribly misconceived from the outset. In BNW, nothing much really changes. It is an alien world, but scarcely a rich or inexhaustibly diverse one. Tellingly, the monotony of its pleasures mirrors the poverty of our own imaginations in conceiving of radically different ways to be happy. Today, we’ve barely even begun to conceptualise the range of things it’s possible to be happy about. For our brains aren’t blessed with the neurochemical substrates to do so. Time spent counting one’s blessings is rarely good for one’s genes.
Controller Mustapha Mond himself obliquely acknowledges the dys topian sterility of BNW when he reflects on Bernard’s tearful plea not to be exiled to Iceland: «One would think he was going to have his throat cut. Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he’d understand that his punishment is really a reward. He’s being sent to an island. That’s to say, he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Everyone, in a word, who’s anyone. «
Unlike the residents of Heaven, BNW’s inhabitants don’t worship God. Instead, they are brainwashed into revering a scarcely less abstract and remote community. Formally, the community is presided over by the spirit of the apostle of mass-production, Henry Ford. He is worshipped as a god: Alphas and Betas attend soma-consecrated «solidarity services» which culminate in an orgy. But history has been abolished, salvation has already occurred, and the utopians aren’t going anywhere.
By contrast, one factor of life spent with even mildly euphoric hypomanic people is pretty constant. The tempo of life, the flow of ideas, and the drama of events speeds up. In a Post-Darwinian Era of universal life-long bliss, the possibility of stasis is remote; in fact one can’t rule out an ethos of permanent revolution. But however great the intellectual ferment of ecstatic existence, the nastiness of Darwinian life will have passed into oblivion with the molecular machinery that sustained it.
I m b e c i l i t y
After taking soma, one can apparently drift pleasantly off to sleep. Bernard Marx, for instance, takes four tablets of soma to pass away a long plane journey to the Reservation in New Mexico. When they arrive at the Reservation, Bernard’s companion, Lenina, swallows half a gramme of soma when she begins to tire of the Warden’s lecture, «with the result that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all». Such a response suggests the user’s sensibilities are numbed rather than heightened. In BNW, people resort to soma when they feel depressed, angry or have intrusive 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.
A second and less warlike corrective to the dumb-and-docile stereotype is provided by so-called manic-depressives. One reason that many victims of bipolar disorder, notably those who experience the euphoric sub-type of (hypo-)mania, skip out on their lithium is that when «euthymic» they can still partially recall just how wonderfully intense and euphoric life can be in its manic phase. Life on lithium is flatter. For it’s the havoc wrought on the lives of others which makes the uncontrolled exuberance of frank euphoric mania so disastrous. Depressed or nominally euthymic people are easier for the authorities to control than exuberant life-lovers.
Thus one of the tasks facing a mature fusion of biological psychiatry and psychogenetic medicine will be to deliver enriched well-being and lucid intelligence to anyone who wants it without running the risk of triggering ungovernable mania. MDMA(Ecstasy) briefly offers a glimpse of what full-blooded mental health might be like. Like soma, MDMA induces both happiness and serenity. Unlike soma, MDMA is neurotoxic. But used sparingly, it can also be profound, empathetic and soulfully intense.
Drugs which commonly induce dys phoria, on the other hand, are truly sinister instruments of social control. They are far more likely to induce the «infantile decorum» demanded of BNW utopians than euphoriants. The major tranquillisers, including the archetypal «chemical cosh» chlorpromazine (Largactil), subdue their victims by acting as dopamine antagonists. At high dosages, willpower is blunted, affect is flattened, and mood is typically depressed. The subject becomes sedated. Intellectual acuity is dulled. They are a widely-used tool in some penal systems.
A m o r a l i t y
Yet our ignorance and inertia are receding fast. Molecular neuroscience and behavioural genetics are proceeding at dizzying pace. Better Living Through Chemistry doesn’t have to be just a snappy slogan. Take it seriously, and we can bootstrap our way into becoming smart and happy while biologically deepening our social conscience too. Hopefully, the need for manifestos and ideological propaganda will pass. They must be replaced by an international biomedical research program of paradise-engineering. The fun hasn’t even begun. The moral urgency is immense.
It’s true that morality in the contemporary sense may no longer be needed when suffering has been cured. The distinction between value and happiness has distinctively moral significance only in the Darwinian Era where the fissure originated. Here, in the short-run, good feelings and good conduct may conflict. Gratifying one’s immediate impulses sometimes leads to heartache in the longer term, both to oneself and others. When suffering has been eliminated, however, specifically moral codes of conduct become redundant. On any negative utilitarian analysis, at least, acts of immorality become impossible. The values of our descendants will be predicated on immense emotional well-being, but they won’t necessarily be focused on it; happiness may have become part of the innate texture of sentient existence.
In Brave New World, by contrast, unpleasantness hasn’t been eradicated. That’s one reason its citizens’ behaviour is so shocking, and one reason they take soma. BNW’s outright im morality is all too conceivable by the reader.
F a l s e H a p p i n e s s
There are hints, too, that some of the utopians may feel an ill-defined sense of dissatisfaction, an intermittent sense that their lives are meaningless. It is implied, further, that if we are to find true fulfilment and meaning in our own lives, then we must be able to contrast the good parts of life with the bad parts, to feel both joy and despair. As rationalisations go, it’s a good one.
Yet it’s still wrong-headed. If pressed, we must concede that the victims of chronic depression or pain today don’t need interludes of happiness or anaesthesia to know they are suffering horribly. Moreover, if the mere relativity of pain and pleasure were true, then one might imagine that pseudo-memories in the form of neurochemical artefacts imbued with the texture of «pastness» would do the job of contrast just as well as raw nastiness. The neurochemical signatures of deja vu and jamais vu provide us with clues on how the re-engineering could be done. But this sort of stratagem isn’t on Huxley’s agenda. The clear implication of Brave New World is that any kind of drug-delivered happiness is «false» or inauthentic. In similar fashion, all forms of human genetic engineering and overt behavioural conditioning are to be tarred with the same brush. Conversely, the natural happiness of the handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed Savage on the Reservation is portrayed as more real and authentic, albeit transient and sometimes interspersed with sorrow.
Tomorrow’s neuropharmacology, then, offers incalculably greater riches than souped-up soma. True, drugs can also deliver neurochemical wastelands of silliness and shallowness. A lot of the state-spaces currently beyond our mental horizons may be nasty or uninteresting or both. Statistically, most are probably just psychotic. Yet a lot aren’t. Entactogens, say, [literally, to «touch within»] may eventually be as big an industry as diet pills; and what they offer by way of a capacity for self-love will be far more use in boosting personal self-esteem.
So how well do we understand the sort of happiness Huxley indicts?
This doesn’t normally restrain us. Yet are we rationally entitled to pass a judgement on any drug-based civilisation based on one fictional model?
No, surely not. Underground chemists and pharmaceutical companies alike are likely to synthesise all sorts of «soma» in future. Licitly or otherwise, we’re going to explore what it’s like; and we’ll like it a lot. But to suppose that the happiness of our transhuman descendants will thereby be «false» or shallow is naïve. Post-humans are not going to get drunk and stoned. Their well-being will infuse ideas, modes of introspection, varieties of selfhood, structures of mentalese, and whole new sense modalities that haven’t even been dreamt of today.
Brave New World-based soma-scenarios, by contrast, are highly conceivable. This is one reason why they are so unrealistic.
T o t a l i t a r i a n
Brave New World, then, is centred around control and manipulation. As ever, the fate of an individual depends on the interplay of Nature and Nurture, heredity and environment: but the utopian state apparatus controls both. Naturally, we find this control disquieting. One of our deepest fears about the prospect of tampering with our natural (i.e. selfish DNA-driven) biological endowment is that we will ourselves be controlled and manipulated by others. Huxley plays on these anxieties to devastating effect. He sows the fear that a future world state may rob us of the right to be unhappy.
It must be noted that this right is not immediately in jeopardy. Huxley, however, evidently feels that the threat of compulsory well-being is real. This is reflected in his choice of a quotation from Nicolas Berdiaeff as BNW’s epigraph. «Utopias appear to be much easier to realize than one formerly believed. We currently face a question that would otherwise fill us with anguish: How to avoid their becoming definitively real?» Perhaps not all of the multiple ironies here are intended by BNW’s author.
Yet what will be the price of all this happiness?
A n t h r o p o c e n t r i c
How is it possible to make such predictions with any confidence?
Historically, dominance and winning have been associated with good, even manically euphoric, mood; losing and submission are associated with subdued spirits and depression. Rank theory suggests that the far greater incidence of the internalised correlate of the yielding sub-routine, depression, reflects how low spirits were frequently more adaptive among group-living organisms than manic self-assertion. But in Brave New World, the correlation vanishes or is even inverted. The lower orders are at least as happy as the Alphas thanks to soma, childhood conditioning and their brain-damaged incapacity for original thought. Thus in sleep-lessons on class consciousness, for instance, juvenile Betas learn to love being Betas. They learn to respect Alphas who «work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever.» But they also learn to take pleasure in not being Gammas, Deltas, or the even more witless Epsilons. «Oh no,» the hypnopedia tapes suggest, «I don’t want to play with Delta children.»
There are strong counter-arguments and rebuttals that could be delivered against any specific variant of this scenario. Yet Huxley isn’t interested in details. BNW is a deeply pessimistic blanket-warning against all forms of genetic engineering and eugenics. Shouldn’t we keep the status quo and ban them altogether? Let’s play safe. In the last analysis, Nature Knows Best.
Is this sort of major genetic re-write likely?
OK. But can power-games really be confined exclusively to VR? Won’t tomorrow’s Alphas want to dominate both?
More generally, the whole evolutionary environment of adaptation is poised for a revolution. This is important. When any particular suite of alleles ceases to be the result of random mutation and blind natural selection, and is instead pre-selected by intelligent agents in conscious anticipation of their likely effects, then the criteria of genetic fitness will change too. The sociobiological and popular senses of «selfish» will progressively diverge rather than typically overlap. Allegedly «immutable» human nature will change as well when the genetic-rewrite gathers momentum and the Reproductive Revolution matures. The classical Darwinian Era is drawing to a close.
Unfortunately, its death agonies may be prolonged. Knee-jerk pessimism and outright cynicism abound among humanistic pundits in the press. They are common in literary academia. And of course any competent doom-monger can glibly extrapolate the trends of the past into the future. Yet anti-utopianism ignores even the foreseeable discontinuities that lie ahead of us as we mature into post-humans. Most notably, it ignores the major evolutionary transition now imminent in the future of life. This is the era when we rewrite the genome in our own interest to make ourselves happy in the richest sense of the term. In the meantime, we just act out variations on dramas scripted by selfish DNA.
P h i l i s t i n e
Since the utopians are (largely) contented with their lives, they don’t produce Great Art. Happiness and Great Art are allegedly incompatible. Great Art and Great Literature are very dear to Huxley’s heart. Yet is artistic genius really stifled without inner torment? Is paradise strictly for low-brows?
The nagging question may persist: will posterity’s Art and Literature [or art-forms expressing modes of experience we haven’t even accessed yet] really be Great? To its creators, sure, their handiwork may seem brilliant and beautiful, moving and profound. But might not its blissed-out authors be simply conning themselves? Could they have lost true critical insight, even if they retain its shadowy functional analogues?
Such questions demand a treatise on the nature and objectivity of value judgements. Yet perhaps asking whether we would appreciate ecstatic art of 500 or 5000 years hence is futile in the first place. We simply can’t know what we’re talking about. For we are un happy pigs, and our own arts are mood-congruent perversions. The real philistinism to worry about lies in the emotional illiteracy of the present. Our genetically-enriched posterity will have no need of our condescension.
T h i n g s G o W r o n g
Surely any utopia can go terribly wrong? One thinks of Christianity; the Soviet experiment; The French Revolution; and Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea. All ideas and ideals get horribly perverted by power and its pursuit. So what horrors might we be letting ourselves in for in a global species-project to abolish the biological substrates of malaise?
C o n s u m e r i s t
Is this our destiny too?
So what sort of scenario can we expect? If we opt for gradations of genetically pre-programmed bliss, just what, if anything, is our marvellous well-being likely to focus on?
First, in a mature IT society, the harnessing of psychopharmacology and biotechnology to ubiquitous virtual reality software gives scope for unlimited good experiences for everyone. Any sensory experience one wants, any experiential manifold one can imagine, any narrative structure one desires, can be far better realised in VR than in outmoded conceptions of Real Life.
L o v e l e s s
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.
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 and their braneworld cousins. 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?
And, conceivably, 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.
Gene-Splicers Versus Glue-Sniffers
The molecular biology of paradise
But the Death Of God, or at least his discreet departure to a backstage role, shouldn’t mean we’re doomed to abandon any notion of heaven, and certainly not on Earth. Suffering, whether it’s merely irksome or too terrible for words, doesn’t have to be part of life at all.
That said, the ideological obstacles to genetically pre-programmed mental super-health are actually more daunting than the technical challenges. To be cured, hypo-hedonia must be recognised as a primarily genetic deficiency-disorder. Designer mood-brighteners and anti-anxiety agents to alleviate it are sometimes branded «lifestyle-drugs»; but this is to trivialise a serious medical condition which must be corrected at source. Happily, our hereditary neuropsychiatric disorder is likely to become extinct within a few generations as the Reproductive Revolution unfolds. Aversive experience, and the poisonous metabolic pathways that mediate its textures, will become physiologically impossible once the genes coding its neural substrates have been eliminated. We won’t miss its corrupting effect when it’s gone.
Brave new world aldous huxley
But life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything. In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all. Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator’s business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignoring too many of reality’s qualifying side issues. In this way he may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought.
The subject of freedom and its enemies is enormous, and what I have written is certainly too short to do it full justice; but at least I have touched on many aspects of the problem. Each aspect may have been somewhat over-simplified in the exposition; but these successive over-simplifications add up to a picture that, I hope, gives some hint of the vastness and complexity of the original.
I.
Over-Population
In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behavior in general, and human behavior in particular, it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effective, in the long run, than control through the reinforcement of desirable behavior by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manipulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children. Punishment temporarily puts a stop to undesirable behavior, but does not permanently reduce the victim’s tendency to indulge in it. Moreover, the psycho-physical by-products of punishment may be just as undesirable as the behavior for which an individual has been punished. Psychotherapy is largely concerned with the debilitating or anti-social consequences of past punishments.
Moreover, the yearly increases are themselves increasing. They increase regularly, according to the rules of compound interest; and they also increase irregularly with every application, by a technologically backward society of the principles of Public Health. At the present time the annual increase in world population runs to about forty-three millions. This means that every four years mankind adds to its numbers the equivalent of the present population of the United States, every eight and a half years the equivalent of the present population of India. At the rate of increase prevailing between the birth of Christ and the death of Queen Elizabeth I, it took sixteen centuries for the population of the earth to double. At the present rate it will double in less than half a century. And this fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be taking place on a planet whose most desirable and productive areas are already densely populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic efforts of bad farmers to raise more food, and whose easily available mineral capital is being squandered with the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor getting rid of his accumulated pay.
Will the space that you’re so rich in
Light a fire in the kitchen,
Or the little god of space turn the spit, spit, spit?
The answer, it is obvious, is in the negative. A settlement on the moon may be of some military advantage to the nation that does the settling. But it will do nothing whatever to make life more tolerable, during the fifty years that it will take our present population to double, for the earth’s undernourished and proliferating billions. And even if, at some future date, emigration to Mars should become feasible, even if any considerable number of men and women were desperate enough to choose a new life under conditions comparable to those prevailing on a mountain twice as high as Mount Everest, what difference would that make? In the course of the last four centuries quite a number of people sailed from the Old World to the New. But neither their departure nor the returning flow of food and raw materials could solve the problems of the Old World. Similarly the shipping of a few surplus humans to Mars (at a cost, for transportation and development, of several million dollars a head) will do nothing to solve the problem of mounting population pressures on our own planet. Unsolved, that problem will render insoluble all our other problems. Worse still, it will create conditions in which individual freedom and the social decencies of the democratic way of life will become impossible, almost unthinkable. Not all dictatorships arise in the same way. There are many roads to Brave New World; but perhaps the straightest and the broadest of them is the road we are traveling today, the road that leads through gigantic numbers and accelerating increases. Let us briefly review the reasons for this close correlation between too many people, too rapidly multiplying, and the formulation of authoritarian philosophies, the rise of totalitarian systems of government.
As large and increasing numbers press more heavily upon available resources, the economic position of the society undergoing this ordeal becomes ever more precarious. This is especially true of those underdeveloped regions, where a sudden lowering of the death rate by means of DDT, penicillin and clean water has not been accompanied by a corresponding fall in the birth rate. In parts of Asia and in most of Central and South America populations are increasing so fast that they will double themselves in little more than twenty years. If the production of food and manufactured articles, of houses, schools and teachers, could be increased at a greater rate than human numbers, it would be possible to improve the wretched lot of those who live in these underdeveloped and over-populated countries. But unfortunately these countries lack not merely agricultural machinery and an industrial plant capable of turning out this machinery, but also the capital required to create such a plant. Capital is what is left over after the primary needs of a population have been satisfied. But the primary needs of most of the people in underdeveloped countries are never fully satisfied. At the end of each year almost nothing is left over, and there is therefore almost no capital available for creating the industrial and agricultural plant, by means of which the people’s needs might be satisfied. Moreover, there is, in all these underdeveloped countries, a serious shortage of the trained manpower without which a modern industrial and agricultural plant cannot be operated. The present educational facilities are inadequate; so are the resources, financial and cultural, for improving the existing facilities as fast as the situation demands. Meanwhile the population of some of these underdeveloped countries is increasing at the rate of 3 per cent per annum.
How will this development affect the over-populated, but highly industrialized and still democratic countries of Europe? If the newly formed dictatorships were hostile to them, and if the normal flow of raw materials from the underdeveloped countries were deliberately interrupted, the nations of the West would find themselves in a very bad way indeed. Their industrial system would break down, and the highly developed technology, which up till now has permitted them to sustain a population much greater than that which could be supported by locally available resources, would no longer protect them against the consequences of having too many people in too small a territory. If this should happen, the enormous powers forced by unfavorable conditions upon central governments may come to be used in the spirit of totalitarian dictatorship.
The United States is not at present an over-populated country. If, however, the population continues to increase at the present rate (which is higher than that of India’s increase, though happily a good deal lower than the rate now current in Mexico or Guatemala), the problem of numbers in relation to available resources might well become troublesome by the beginning of the twenty-first century. For the moment overpopulation is not a direct threat to the personal freedom of Americans. It remains, however, an indirect threat, a menace at one remove. If over-population should drive the underdeveloped countries into totalitarianism, and if these new dictatorships should ally themselves with Russia, then the military position of the United States would become less secure and the preparations for defense and retaliation would have to be intensified. But liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government. And permanent crisis is what we have to expect in a world in which over-population is producing a state of things, in which dictatorship under Communist auspices becomes almost inevitable.
II.
Quantity, Quality, Morality
In an underdeveloped and over-populated country, where four-fifths of the people get less than two thousand calories a day and one-fifth enjoys an adequate diet, can democratic institutions arise spontaneously? Or if they should be imposed from outside or from above, can they possibly survive?
And now let us consider the case of the rich, industrialized and democratic society, in which, owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQ’s and physical vigor are on the decline. For how long can such a society maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government? Fifty or a hundred years from now our children will learn the answer to this question.
Meanwhile we find ourselves confronted by a most disturbing moral problem. We know that the pursuit of good ends does not justify the employment of bad means. But what about those situations, now of such frequent occurrence, in which good means have end results which turn out to be bad?
For example, we go to a tropical island and with the aid of DDT we stamp out malaria and, in two or three years, save hundreds of thousands of lives. This is obviously good. But the hundreds of thousands of human beings thus saved, and the millions whom they beget and bring to birth, cannot be adequately clothed, housed, educated or even fed out of the island’s available resources. Quick death by malaria has been abolished; but life made miserable by undernourishment and over-crowding is now the rule, and slow death by outright starvation threatens ever greater numbers.
And what about the congenitally insufficient organisms, whom our medicine and our social services now preserve so that they may propagate their kind? To help the unfortunate is obviously good. But the wholesale transmission to our descendants of the results of unfavorable mutations, and the progressive contamination of the genetic pool from which the members of our species will have to draw, are no less obviously bad. We are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good will.
III.
Over-Organization
We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely and inconspicuously in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Government. But societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life. How have individuals been affected by the technological advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich Fromm:
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.
In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father’s genes into contact with the mother’s. These hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number of ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.
Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.
Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control at the other.
During the past century the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to be matched by complicated social arrangements, designed to work as smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of production. In order to fit into these organizations, individuals have had to deindivid-ualize themselves, have had to deny their native diversity and conform to a standard pattern, have had to do their best to become automata.
The dehumanizing effects of over-organization are reinforced by the dehumanizing effects of over-population. Industry, as it expands, draws an ever greater proportion of humanity’s increasing numbers into large cities. But life in large cities is not conducive to mental health (the highest incidence of schizophrenia, we are told, occurs among the swarming inhabitants of industrial slums); nor does it foster the kind of responsible freedom within small self-governing groups, which is the first condition of a genuine democracy. City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.
Nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused.
Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom. And to these misgivings on ethical and psychological grounds must be added misgivings of a purely scientific character. Can we accept the theories on which the social engineers base their practice, and in terms of which they justify their manipulations of human beings? For example, Professor Elton Mayo tells us categorically that «man’s desire to be continuously associated in work with his fellows is a strong, if not the strongest human characteristic.» This, I would say, is manifestly untrue. Some people have the kind of desire described by Mayo; others do not. It is a matter of temperament and inherited constitution. Any social organization based upon the assumption that «man» (whoever «man» may be) desires to be continuously associated with his fellows would be, for many individual men and women, a bed of Procrustes. Only by being amputated or stretched upon the rack could they be adjusted to it.
Again, how romantically misleading are the lyrical accounts of the Middle Ages with which many contemporary theorists of social relations adorn their works! «Membership in a guild, manorial estate or village protected medieval man throughout his life and gave him peace and serenity.» Protected him from what, we may ask. Certainly not from remorseless bullying at the hands of his superiors. And along with all that «peace and serenity» there was, throughout the Middle Ages, an enormous amount of chronic frustration, acute unhappiness and a passionate resentment against the rigid, hierarchical system that permitted no vertical movement up the social ladder and, for those who were bound to the land, very little horizontal movement in space. The impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system. This revival will be made more acceptable than the original by such Brave-New-Worldian amenities as infant conditioning, sleep-teaching and drug-induced euphoria; but, for the majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude.
IV. Propaganda in a Democratic Society
V.
Propaganda Under a Dictatorship
Since Hitler’s day the armory of technical devices at the disposal of the would-be dictator has been considerably enlarged. As well as the radio, the loudspeaker, the moving picture camera and the rotary press, the contemporary propagandist can make use of television to broadcast the image as well as the voice of his client, and can record both image and voice on spools of magnetic tape. Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God. Nor is it only on the technical front that the hand of the would-be dictator has been strengthened. Since Hitler’s day a great deal of work has been carried out in those fields of applied psychology and neurology which are the special province of the propagandist, the indoctrinator and the brainwasher. In the past these specialists in the art of changing people’s minds were empiricists. By a method of trial and error they had worked out a number of techniques and procedures, which they used very effectively without, however, knowing precisely why they were effective. Today the art of mind-control is in the process of becoming a science. The practitioners of this science know what they are doing and why. They are guided in their work by theories and hypotheses solidly established on a massive foundation of experimental evidence. Thanks to the new insights and the new techniques made possible by these insights, the nightmare that was «all but realized in Hitler’s totalitarian system» may soon be completely realizable.
Hitler made his strongest appeal to those members of the lower middle classes who had been ruined by the inflation of 1923, and then ruined all over again by the depression of 1929 and the following years. «The masses» of whom he speaks were these bewildered, frustrated and chronically anxious millions. To make them more masslike, more homogeneously subhuman, he assembled them, by the thousands and the tens of thousands, in vast halls and arenas, where individuals could lose their personal identity, even their elementary humanity, and be merged with the crowd. A man or woman makes direct contact with society in two ways: as a member of some familial, professional or religious group, or as a member of a crowd. Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called «herd-poisoning.» Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.
Such, then, was Hitler’s opinion of humanity in the mass. It was a very low opinion. Was it also an incorrect opinion? The tree is known by its fruits, and a theory of human nature which inspired the kind of techniques that proved so horribly effective must contain at least an element of truth. Virtue and intelligence belong to human beings as individuals freely associating with other individuals in small groups. So do sin and stupidity. But the subhuman mindlessness to which the demagogue makes his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his victims into action, are characteristic not of men and women as individuals, but of men and women in masses. Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning. In all the world’s higher religions, salvation and enlightenment are for individuals. The kingdom of heaven is within the mind of a person, not within the collective mindlessness of a crowd. Christ promised to be present where two or three are gathered together. He did not say anything about being present where thousands are intoxicating one another with herd-poison. Under the Nazis enormous numbers of people were compelled to spend an enormous amount of time marching in serried ranks from point A to point B and back again to point A. «This keeping of the whole population on the march seemed to be a senseless waste of time and energy. Only much later,» adds Hermann Rauschning, «was there revealed in it a subtle intention based on a well-judged adjustment of ends and means. Marching diverts men’s thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality. Marching is the indispensable magic stroke performed in order to accustom the people to a mechanical, quasi-ritualistic activity until it becomes second nature.»
From his point of view and at the level where he had chosen to do his dreadful work, Hitler was perfectly correct in his estimate of human nature. To those of us who look at men and women as individuals rather than as members of crowds, or of regimented collectives, he seems hideously wrong. In an age of accelerating over-population, of accelerating over-organization and ever more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value of the human individual? This is a question that can still be asked and perhaps effectively answered. A generation from now it may be too late to find an answer and perhaps impossible, in the stifling collective climate of that future time, even to ask the question.
VI.
The Arts of Selling
In commercial propaganda the principle of the disproportionately fascinating symbol is clearly understood. Every propagandist has his Art Department, and attempts are constantly being made to beautify the billboards with striking posters, the advertising pages of magazines with lively drawings and photographs. There are no masterpieces; for masterpieces appeal only to a limited audience, and the commercial propagandist is out to captivate the majority. For him, the ideal is a moderate excellence. Those who like this not too good, but sufficiently striking, art may be expected to like the products with which it has been associated and for which it symbolically stands.
Thanks to compulsory education and the rotary press, the propagandist has been able, for many years past, to convey his messages to virtually every adult in every civilized country. Today, thanks to radio and television, he is in the happy position of being able to communicate even with unschooled adults and not yet literate children.
«I don’t say that children should be forced to harass their parents into buying products they’ve seen advertised on television, but at the same time I cannot close my eyes to the fact that it’s being done every day.» So writes the star of one of the many programs beamed to a juvenile audience. «Children,» he adds, «are living, talking records of what we tell them every day.» And in due course these living, talking records of television commercials will grow up, earn money and buy the products of industry. «Think,» writes Mr. Clyde Miller ecstatically, «think of what it can mean to your firm in profits if you can condition a million or ten million children, who will grow up into adults trained to buy your product, as soldiers are trained in advance when they hear the trigger words, Forward March!» Yes, just think of it! And at the same time remember that the dictators and the would-be dictators have been thinking about this sort of thing for years, and that millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of children are in process of growing up to buy the local despot’s ideological product and, like well-trained soldiers, to respond with appropriate behavior to the trigger words implanted in those young minds by the despot’s propagandists.
Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any particular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a negligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the people, far off at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey. Increasing population and advancing technology have resulted in an increase in the number and complexity of organizations, an increase in the amount of power concentrated in the hands of officials and a corresponding decrease in the amount of control exercised by electors, coupled with a decrease in the public’s regard for democratic procedures. Already weakened by the vast impersonal forces at work in the modern world, democratic institutions are now being undermined from within by the politicians and their propagandists.
The political merchandisers appeal only to the weaknesses of voters, never to their potential strength. They make no attempt to educate the masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely to manipulate and exploit them. For this purpose all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set to work. Carefully selected samples of the electorate are given «interviews in depth.» These interviews in depth reveal the unconscious fears and wishes most prevalent in a given society at the time of an election. Phrases and images aimed at allaying or, if necessary, enhancing these fears, at satisfying these wishes, at least symbolically, are then chosen by the experts, tried out on readers and audiences, changed or improved in the light of the information thus obtained. After which the political campaign is ready for the mass communicators. All that is now needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look «sincere.» Under the new dispensation, political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate and the way he is projected by the advertising experts are the things that really matter.
VII.
Brainwashing
In the course of his epoch-making experiments on the conditioned reflex, Ivan Pavlov observed that, when subjected to prolonged physical or psychic stress, laboratory animals exhibit all the symptoms of a nervous breakdown. Refusing to cope any longer with the intolerable situation, their brains go on strike, so to speak, and either stop working altogether (the dog loses consciousness), or else resort to slowdowns and sabotage (the dog behaves unrealistically, or develops the kind of physical symptoms which, in a human being, we would call hysterical). Some animals are more resistant to stress than others. Dogs possessing what Pavlov called a «strong excitatory» constitution break down much more quickly than dogs of a merely «lively» (as opposed to a choleric or agitated) temperament. Similarly «weak inhibitory» dogs reach the end of their tether much sooner than do «calm imperturbable» dogs. But even the most stoical dog is unable to resist indefinitely. If the stress to which he is subjected is sufficiently intense or sufficiently prolonged, he will end by breaking down as abjectly and as completely as the weakest of his kind.
The fact that every individual has his breaking point has been known and, in a crude unscientific way, exploited from time immemorial. In some cases man’s dreadful inhumanity to man has been inspired by the love of cruelty for its own horrible and fascinating sake. More often, however, pure sadism was tempered by utilitarianism, theology or reasons of state. Physical torture and other forms of stress were inflicted by lawyers in order to loosen the tongues of reluctant witnesses; by clergymen in order to punish the unorthodox and induce them to change their opinions; by the secret police to extract confessions from persons suspected of being hostile to the government. Under Hitler, torture, followed by mass extermination, was used on those biological heretics, the Jews. For a young Nazi, a tour of duty in the Extermination Camps was (in Himmler’s words) «the best indoctrination on inferior beings and the subhuman races.» Given the obsessional quality of the anti-Semitism which Hitler had picked up as a young man in the slums of Vienna, this revival of the methods employed by the Holy Office against heretics and witches was inevitable. But in the light of the findings of Pavlov and of the knowledge gained by psychiatrists in the treatment of war neuroses, it seems a hideous and grotesque anachronism. Stresses amply sufficient to cause a complete cerebral breakdown can be induced by methods which, though hatefully inhuman, fall short of physical torture.
Whatever may have happened in earlier years, it seems fairly certain that torture is not extensively used by the Communist police today. They draw their inspiration, not from the Inquisitor or the SS man, but from the physiologist and his methodically conditioned laboratory animals. For the dictator and his policemen, Pavlov’s findings have important practical implications. If the central nervous system of dogs can be broken down, so can the central nervous system of political prisoners. It is simply a matter of applying the right amount of stress for the right length of time. At the end of the treatment, the prisoner will be in a state of neurosis or hysteria, and will be ready to confess whatever his captors want him to confess.
But confession is not enough. A hopeless neurotic is no use to anyone. What the intelligent and practical dictator needs is not a patient to be institutionalized, or a victim to be shot, but a convert who will work for the Cause. Turning once again to Pavlov, he learns that, on their way to the point of final breakdown, dogs become more than normally suggestible. New behavior patterns can easily be installed while the dog is at or near the limit of its cerebral endurance, and these new behavior patterns seem to be ineradicable. The animal in which they have been implanted cannot be deconditioned; that which it has learned under stress will remain an integral part of its make-up.
Psychological stresses can be produced in many ways. Dogs become disturbed when stimuli are unusually strong; when the interval between a stimulus and the customary response is unduly prolonged and the animal is left in a state of suspense; when the brain is confused by stimuli that run counter to what the dog has learned to expect; when stimuli make no sense within the victim’s established frame of reference. Furthermore, it has been found that the deliberate induction of fear, rage or anxiety markedly heightens the dog’s suggestibility. If these emotions are kept at a high pitch of intensity for a long enough time, the brain goes «on strike.» When this happens, new behavior patterns may be installed with the greatest of ease.
Among the physical stresses that increase a dog’s suggestibility are fatigue, wounds and every form of sickness.
For the would-be dictator these findings possess important practical implications. They prove, for example, that Hitler was quite right in maintaining that mass meetings at night were more effective than mass meetings in the daytime. During the day, he wrote, «man’s will power revolts with highest energy against any attempt at being forced under another’s will and another’s opinion. In the evening, however, they succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will.»
Pavlov would have agreed with him; fatigue increases suggestibility. (That is why, among other reasons, the commercial sponsors of television programs prefer the evening hours and are ready to back their preference with hard cash.)
Illness is even more effective than fatigue as an intensifier of suggestibility. In the past, sickrooms were the scene of countless religious conversions. The scientifically trained dictator of the future will have all the hospitals in his dominions wired for sound and equipped with pillow speakers. Canned persuasion will be on the air twenty-four hours a day, and the more important patients will be visited by political soul-savers and mind-changers just as, in the past, their ancestors were visited by priests, nuns and pious laymen.
Similar but rather less drastic methods were used during the Korean War on military prisoners. In their Chinese camps the young Western captives were systematically subjected to stress. Thus, for the most trivial breaches of the rules, offenders would be summoned to the commandant’s office, there to be questioned, browbeaten and publicly humiliated. And the process would be repeated, again and again, at any hour of the day or night. This continuous harassment produced in its victims a sense of bewilderment and chronic anxiety. To intensify their sense of guilt, prisoners were made to write and rewrite, in ever more intimate detail, long autobiographical accounts of their shortcomings. And after having confessed their own sins, they were required to confess the sins of their companions. The aim was to create within the camp a nightmarish society, in which everybody was spying on, and informing against, everyone else. To these mental stresses were added the physical stresses of malnutrition, discomfort and illness. The increased suggestibility thus induced was skilfully exploited by the Chinese, who poured into these abnormally receptive minds large doses of pro-Communist and anti-capitalist literature. These Pavlovian techniques were remarkably successful. One out of every seven American prisoners was guilty, we are officially told, of grave collaboration with the Chinese authorities, one out of three of technical collaboration.
Throughout the Communist world tens of thousands of these disciplined and devoted young men are being turned out every year from hundreds of conditioning centers. What the Jesuits did for the Roman Church of the Counter Reformation, these products of a more scientific and even harsher training are now doing, and will doubtless continue to do, for the Communist parties of Europe, Asia and Africa.
In politics Pavlov seems to have been an old-fashioned liberal. But, by a strange irony of fate, his researches and the theories he based upon them have called into existence a great army of fanatics dedicated heart and soul, reflex and nervous system, to the destruction of old-fashioned liberalism, wherever it can be found.
VIII.
Chemical Persuasion
The soma of Brave New World had none of the drawbacks of its Indian original. In small doses it brought a sense of bliss, in larger doses it made you see visions and, if you took three tablets, you would sink in a few minutes into refreshing sleep. And all at no physiological or mental cost. The Brave New Worlders could take holidays from their black moods, or from the familiar annoyances of everyday life, without sacrificing their health or permanently reducing their efficiency.
In the Brave New World the soma habit was not a private vice; it was a political institution, it was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. But this most precious of the subjects’ inalienable privileges was at the same time one of the most powerful instruments of rule in the dictator’s armory. The systematic drugging of individuals for the benefit of the State (and incidentally, of course, for their own delight) was a main plank in the policy of the World Controllers. The daily soma ration was an insurance against personal maladjustment, social unrest and the spread of subversive ideas. Religion, Karl Marx declared, is the opium of the people. In the Brave New World this situation was reversed. Opium, or rather soma, was the people’s religion. Like religion, the drug had power to console and compensate, it called up visions of another, better world, it offered hope, strengthened faith and promoted charity. Beer, a poet has written,
And let us remember that, compared with soma, beer is a drug of the crudest and most unreliable kind. In this matter of justifying God’s ways to man, soma is to alcohol as alcohol is to the theological arguments of Milton.
From these classical mind-changes we pass to the latest products of psychopharmacological research. Most highly publicized of these are the three new tranquillizers, reserpine, chlorpromazine and meprobamate. Administered to certain classes of psychotics, the first two have proved to be remarkably effective, not in curing mental illnesses, but at least in temporarily abolishing their more distressing symptoms. Meprobamate (alias Miltown) produces similar effects in persons suffering from various forms of neurosis. None of these drugs is perfectly harmless; but their cost, in terms of physical health and mental efficiency, is extraordinarily low. In a world where nobody gets anything for nothing tranquillizers offer a great deal for very little. Miltown and chlorpromazine are not yet soma; but they come fairly near to being one of the aspects of that mythical drug. They provide temporary relief from nervous tension without, in the great majority of cases, inflicting permanent organic harm, and without causing more than a rather slight impairment, while the drug is working, of intellectual and physical efficiency. Except as narcotics, they are probably to be preferred to the barbiturates, which blunt the mind’s cutting edge and, in large doses, cause a number of undesirable psychophysical symptoms and may result in a full-blown addiction.
Soma was not only a vision-producer and a tranquillizer; it was also (and no doubt impossibly) a stimulant of mind and body, a creator of active euphoria as well as of the negative happiness that follows the release from anxiety and tension.
We see then that, though soma does not yet exist (and will probably never exist), fairly good substitutes for the various aspects of soma have already been discovered. There are now physiologically cheap tranquillizers, physiologically cheap vision-producers and physiologically cheap stimulants.
Under a dictatorship pharmacists would be instructed to change their tune with every change of circumstances. In times of national crisis it would be their business to push the sale of stimulants. Between crises, too much alertness and energy on the part of his subjects might prove embarrassing to the tyrant. At such times the masses would be urged to buy tranquillizers and vision-producers. Under the influence of these soothing syrups they could be relied upon to give their master no trouble.
As things now stand, the tranquillizers may prevent some people from giving enough trouble, not only to their rulers, but even to themselves. Too much tension is a disease; but so is too little. There are certain occasions when we ought to be tense, when an excess of tranquillity (and especially of tranquillity imposed from the outside, by a chemical) is entirely inappropriate.
At a recent symposium on meprobamate, in which I was a participant, an eminent biochemist playfully suggested that the United States government should make a free gift to the Soviet people of fifty billion doses of this most popular of the tranquillizers. The joke had a serious point to it. In a contest between two populations, one of which is being constantly stimulated by threats and promises, constantly directed by one-pointed propaganda, while the other is no less constantly being distracted by television and tranquillized by Miltown, which of the opponents is more likely to come out on top?
As well as tranquillizing, hallucinating and stimulating, the soma of my fable had the power of heightening suggestibility, and so could be used to reinforce the effects of governmental propaganda. Less effectively and at a higher physiological cost, several drugs already in the pharmacopoeia can be used for the same purpose. There is scopolamine, for example, the active principle of henbane and, in large doses, a powerful poison; there are pentothal and sodium amytal. Nicknamed for some odd reason «the truth serum,» pentothal has been used by the police of various countries for the purpose of extracting confessions from (or perhaps suggesting confessions to) reluctant criminals. Pentothal and sodium amytal lower the barrier between the conscious and the subconscious mind and are of great value in the treatment of «battle fatigue» by the process known in England as «abreaction therapy,» in America as «narcosynthesis.» It is said that these drugs are sometimes employed by the Communists, when preparing important prisoners for their public appearance in court.
Meanwhile pharmacology, biochemistry and neurology are on the march, and we can be quite certain that, in the course of the next few years, new and better chemical methods for increasing suggestibility and lowering psychological resistance will be discovered. Like everything else, these discoveries may be used well or badly. They may help the psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the dictator in his battle against freedom. More probably (since science is divinely impartial) they will both enslave and make free, heal and at the same time destroy.
IX.
Subconscious Persuasion
Does this kind of commercial propaganda really work? The evidence produced by the commercial firm that first unveiled a technique for subliminal projection was vague and, from a scientific point of view, very unsatisfactory. Repeated at regular intervals during the showing of a picture in a movie theater, the command to buy more popcorn was said to have resulted in a 50 per cent increase in popcorn sales during the intermission. But a single experiment proves very little. Moreover, this particular experiment was poorly set up. There were no controls and no attempt was made to allow for the many variables that undoubtedly affect the consumption of popcorn by a theater audience. And anyhow was this the most effective way of applying the knowledge accumulated over the years by the scientific investigators of subconscious perception? Was it intrinsically probable that, by merely flashing the name of a product and a command to buy it, you would be able to break down sales resistance and recruit new customers? The answer to both these questions is pretty obviously in the negative. But this does not mean, of course, that the findings of the neurologists and psychologists are without any practical importance. Skilfully applied, Poetzl’s nice little piece of pure science might well become a powerful instrument for the manipulation of unsuspecting minds.
For a few suggestive hints let us now turn from the popcorn vendors to those who, with less noise but more imagination and better methods, have been experimenting in the same field. In Britain, where the process of manipulating minds below the level of consciousness is known as «strobonic injection,» investigators have stressed the practical importance of creating the right psychological conditions for subconscious persuasion. A suggestion above the threshold of awareness is more likely to take effect when the recipient is in a light hypnotic trance, under the influence of certain drugs, or has been debilitated by illness, starvation, or any kind of physical or emotional stress. But what is true for suggestions above the threshold of consciousness is also true for suggestions beneath that threshold. In a word, the lower the level of a person’s psychological resistance, the greater will be the effectiveness of strobonically injected suggestions. The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals.
From the conditions under which we may expect subliminal suggestion to be effective we now pass to the suggestions themselves. In what terms should the propagandist address himself to his victims’ subconscious minds? Direct commands («Buy popcorn» or «Vote for Jones») and unqualified statements («Socialism stinks» or «X’s toothpaste cures halitosis») are likely to take effect only upon those minds that are already partial to Jones and popcorn, already alive to the dangers of body odors and the public ownership of the means of production. But to strengthen existing faith is not enough; the propagandist, if he is worth his salt, must create new faith, must know how to bring the indifferent and the undecided over to his side, must be able to mollify and perhaps even convert the hostile. To subliminal assertion and command he knows that he must add subliminal persuasion.
In the light of what has been said about persuasion-by-association and the enhancement of emotions by subliminal suggestion, let us try to imagine what the political meeting of tomorrow will be like. The candidate (if there is still a question of candidates), or the appointed representative of the ruling oligarchy, will make his speech for all to hear. Meanwhile the tachistoscopes, the whispering and squeaking machines, the projectors of images so dim that only the subconscious mind can respond to them, will be reinforcing what he says by systematically associating the man and his cause with positively charged words and hallowed images, and by strobonically injecting negatively charged words and odious symbols whenever he mentions the enemies of the State or the Party. In the United States brief flashes of Abraham Lincoln and the words «government by the people» will be projected upon the rostrum. In Russia the speaker will, of course, be associated with glimpses of Lenin, with the words «people’s democracy,» with the prophetic beard of Father Marx. Because all this is still safely in the future, we can afford to smile. Ten or twenty years from now, it will probably seem a good deal less amusing. For what is now merely science fiction will have become everyday political fact.
X.
Hypnopaedia
In this context an article by Theodore X. Barber, «Sleep and Hypnosis,» which appeared in The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis for October, 1956, is most enlightening. Mr. Barber points out that there is a significant difference between light sleep and deep sleep. In deep sleep the electroencephalograph records no alpha waves; in light sleep alpha waves make their appearance. In this respect light sleep is closer to the waking and hypnotic states (in both of which alpha waves are present) than it is to deep sleep. A loud noise will cause a person in deep sleep to awaken. A less violent stimulus will not arouse him, but will cause the reappearance of alpha waves. Deep sleep has given place for the time being to light sleep.
A person in deep sleep is unsuggestible. But when subjects in light sleep are given suggestions, they will respond to them, Mr. Barber found, in the same way that they respond to suggestions when in the hypnotic trance.
As we have already seen, the well-known Swedish physician and experimenter, Wetterstrand, was especially successful in the hypnotic treatment of sleeping children. In our own day Wetterstrand’s methods are followed by a number of pediatricians, who instruct young mothers in the art of giving helpful suggestions to their children during the hours of light sleep. By this kind of hypnopaedia children can be cured of bed wetting and nail biting, can be prepared to go into surgery without apprehension, can be given confidence and reassurance when, for any reason, the circumstances of their life have become distressing. I myself have seen remarkable results achieved by the therapeutic sleep-teaching of small children. Comparable results could probably be achieved with many adults.
Genetically, every human being is unique and in many ways unlike every other human being. The range of individual variation from the statistical norm is amazingly wide. And the statistical norm, let us remember, is useful only in actuarial calculations, not in real life. In real life there is no such person as the average man. There are only particular men, women and children, each with his or her inborn idiosyncrasies of mind and body, and all trying (or being compelled) to squeeze their biological diversities into the uniformity of some cultural mold.
Suggestibility is one of the qualities that vary significantly from individual to individual. Environmental factors certainly play their part in making one person more responsive to suggestion than another; but there are also, no less certainly, constitutional differences in the suggestibility of individuals. Extreme resistance to suggestion is rather rare. Fortunately so. For if everyone were as unsuggestible as some people are, social life would be impossible. Societies can function with a reasonable degree of efficiency because, in varying degrees, most people are fairly suggestible. Extreme suggestibility is probably about as rare as extreme unsuggestibility. And this also is fortunate. For if most people were as responsive to outside suggestions as the men and women at the extreme limits of suggestibility, free, rational choice would become, for the majority of the electorate, virtually impossible, and democratic institutions could not survive, or even come into existence.
A few years ago, at the Massachusetts General Hospital, a group of researchers carried out a most illuminating experiment on the pain-relieving effects of placebos. (A placebo is anything which the patient believes to be an active drug, but which in fact is pharmacologically inactive.) In this experiment the subjects were one hundred and sixty-two patients who had just come out of surgery and were all in considerable pain. Whenever a patient asked for medication to relieve pain, he or she was given an injection, either of morphine or of distilled water. All the patients received some injections of morphine and some of the placebo. About 30 per cent of the patients never obtained relief from the placebo. On the other hand 14 per cent obtained relief after every injection of distilled water. The remaining 55 per cent of the group were relieved by the placebo on some occasions, but not on others.
The ideals of democracy and freedom confront the brute fact of human suggestibility. One-fifth of every electorate can be hypnotized almost in the twinkling of an eye, one-seventh can be relieved of pain by injections of water, one-quarter will respond promptly and enthusiastically to hypnopaedia. And to these all too co-operative minorities must be added the slow-starting majorities, whose less extreme suggestibility can be effectually exploited by anyone who knows his business and is prepared to take the necessary time and trouble.
Is individual freedom compatible with a high degree of individual suggestibility? Can democratic institutions survive the subversion from within of skilled mind-manipulators trained in the science and art of exploiting the suggestibility both of individuals and of crowds? To what extent can the inborn tendency to be too suggestible for one’s own good or the good of a democratic society be neutralized by education? How far can the exploitation of inordinate suggestibility by businessmen and ecclesiastics, by politicians in and out of power, be controlled by law? Explicitly or implicitly, the first two questions have been discussed in earlier articles. In what follows I shall consider the problems of prevention and cure.
XI.
Education for Freedom
Education for freedom must begin by stating facts and enunciating values, and must go on to develop appropriate techniques for realizing the values and for combating those who, for whatever reason, choose to ignore the facts or deny the values.
XII.
What Can Be Done?
When we pass from the problems of birth control to the problems of increasing the available food supply and conserving our natural resources, we find ourselves confronted by difficulties not perhaps quite so great, but still enormous. There is the problem, first of all, of education. How soon can the innumerable peasants and farmers, who are now responsible for raising most of the world’s supply of food, be educated into improving their methods? And when and if they are educated, where will they find the capital to provide them with the machines, the fuel and lubricants, the electric power, the fertilizers and the improved strains of food plants and domestic animals, without which the best agricultural education is useless? Similarly, who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation? And how are the hungry peasant-citizens of a country whose population and demands for food are rapidly rising to be prevented from «mining the soil»? And, if they can be prevented, who will pay for their support while the wounded and exhausted earth is being gradually nursed back, if that is still feasible, to health and restored fertility? Or consider the backward societies that are now trying to industrialize. If they succeed, who is to prevent them, in their desperate efforts to catch up and keep up, from squandering the planet’s irreplaceable resources as stupidly and wantonly as was done, and is still being done, by their forerunners in the race? And when the day of reckoning comes, where, in the poorer countries, will anyone find the scientific manpower and the huge amounts of capital that will be required to extract the indispensable minerals from ores in which their concentration is too low, under existing circumstances, to make extraction technically feasible or economically justifiable? It may be that, in time, a practical answer to all these questions can be found. But in how much time? In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us. By the end of the present century, there may, if we try very hard, be twice as much food on the world’s markets as there is today. But there will also be about twice as many people, and several billions of these people will be living in partially industrialized countries and consuming ten times as much power, water, timber and irreplaceable minerals as they are consuming now. In a word, the food situation will be as bad as it is today, and the raw materials situation will be considerably worse.
To find a solution to the problem of over-organization is hardly less difficult than to find a solution to the problem of natural resources and increasing numbers. On the verbal level and in general terms the answer is perfectly simple. Thus, it is a political axiom that power follows property. But it is now a historical fact that the means of production are fast becoming the monopolistic property of Big Business and Big Government. Therefore, if you believe in democracy, make arrangements to distribute property as widely as possible.
Or take the right to vote. In principle, it is a great privilege. In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty. Therefore, if you wish to avoid dictatorship by referendum, break up modern society’s merely functional collectives into self-governing, voluntarily cooperating groups, capable of functioning outside the bureaucratic systems of Big Business and Big Government.
Over-population and over-organization have produced the modern metropolis, in which a fully human life of multiple personal relationships has become almost impossible. Therefore, if you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment of individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the small country community, or alternately humanize the metropolis by creating within its network of mechanical organization the urban equivalents of small country communities, in which individuals can meet and cooperate as complete persons, not as the mere embodiments of specialized functions.
All this is obvious today and, indeed, was obvious fifty years ago. From Hilaire Belloc to Mr. Mortimer Adler, from the early apostles of cooperative credit unions to the land reformers of modern Italy and Japan, men of good will have for generations been advocating the decentralization of economic power and the widespread distribution of property. And how many ingenious schemes have been propounded for the dispersal of production, for a return to small-scale «village industry.» And then there were Dubreuil’s elaborate plans for giving a measure of autonomy and initiative to the various departments of a single large industrial organization. There were the Syndicalists, with their blueprints for a stateless society organized as a federation of productive groups under the auspices of the trade unions. In America, Arthur Morgan and Baker Brownell have set forth the theory and described the practice of a new kind of community living on the village and small-town level.
We see, then, that the disease of over-organization has been clearly recognized, that various comprehensive remedies have been prescribed and that experimental treatments of symptoms have been attempted here and there, often with considerable success. And yet, in spite of all this preaching and this exemplary practice, the disease grows steadily worse. We know that it is unsafe to allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a ruling oligarchy; nevertheless power is in fact being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. We know that, for most people, life in a huge modern city is anonymous, atomic, less than fully human; nevertheless the huge cities grow steadily huger and the pattern of urban-industrial living remains unchanged. We know that, in a very large and complex society, democracy is almost meaningless except in relation to autonomous groups of manageable size; nevertheless more and more of every nation’s affairs are managed by the bureaucrats of Big Government and Big Business. It is only too evident that, in practice, the problem of over-organization is almost as hard to solve as the problem of over-population. In both cases we know what ought to be done; but in neither case have we been able, as yet, to act effectively upon our knowledge.
Meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.
Aldous Huxley
There followed several years of journalism, including music and artistic criticism, articles on architecture and house decoration, and book reviews. In this period he began the writing of poems, essays, and historical pieces which he has continued throughout his literary career, but it was as a satirical novelist that he first caught the public fancy.
For a number of years Mr. Huxley lived in Italy, where he formed a close relationship with D. H. Lawrence, whose letters he edited in 1933. Most of Mr. Huxley’s earlier novels were written in Italy and Southern Prance, the later books in New Mexico and California.
In 1959 Aldous Huxley received the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Mr. Huxley came to the United States in 1937 and was living in California at the time of his death on November 22, 1963.
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«O wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is!O brave new worldThat hath such people in’t!»Miranda’s speech in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
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Мнение читателей
В целом книга мне понравилась, но в ряд со своими любимыми я её не поставлю и перечитывать не стану
Самым сложным в процессе взаимодействия с книгой, было определиться с ее оценкой
Главная проблема для меня была в том, что я очень долго не могла воспринять эту книгу как антиутопию
(я человек-утопист с детства)) И данную книгу я бы не хотела причислять к антиутопиям
Я бы сказала, что впечатление осталось двоякое, но нет
It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of Huxley’s satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time
Мне кажется, или действительно все книги, в названии которых использованы цитаты из Шекспира, получились очень хорошими
Наконец-то я сподобилась написать рецензию сразу после прочтения книги, а не тогда, когнда я уж забуду, как звали главных героев
Однако, мне кажется, что эти строки про мир эмоций возводят книгу в разряд предсказуемых сюжетных линий
Brave new world aldous huxley
B ERNARD had to shout through the locked door; the Savage would not open.
«But everybody’s there, waiting for you.»
«Let them wait,» came back the muffled voice through the door.
«But you know quite well, John» (how difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one’s voice!) «I asked them on purpose to meet you.»
«But you always came before, John.»
«That’s precisely why I don’t want to come again.»
«Just to please me,» Bernard bellowingly wheedled. «Won’t you come to please me?»
«Do you seriously mean it?»
Despairingly, «But what shall I do?» Bernard wailed.
«Go to hell!» bawled the exasperated voice from within.
«But the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury is there to-night.» Bernard was almost in tears.
«Ai yaa tákwa!» It was only in Zuñi that the Savage could adequately express what he felt about the Arch-Community-Songster. «Háni!» he added as an after-thought; and then (with what derisive ferocity!): «Sons éso tse-ná.» And he spat on the ground, as Popé might have done.
In the end Bernard had to slink back, diminished, to his rooms and inform the impatient assembly that the Savage would not be appearing that evening. The news was received with indignation. The men were furious at having been tricked into behaving politely to this insignificant fellow with the unsavoury reputation and the heretical opinions. The higher their position in the hierarchy, the deeper their resentment.
«To play such a joke on me,» the Arch-Songster kept repeating, «on me! «
As for the women, they indignantly felt that they had been had on false pretences–had by a wretched little man who had had alcohol poured into his bottle by mistake–by a creature with a Gamma-Minus physique. It was an outrage, and they said so, more and more loudly. The Head Mistress of Eton was particularly scathing.
Lenina alone said nothing. Pale, her blue eyes clouded with an unwonted melancholy, she sat in a corner, cut off from those who surrounded her by an emotion which they did not share. She had come to the party filled with a strange feeling of anxious exultation. «In a few minutes,» she had said to herself, as she entered the room, «I shall be seeing him, talking to him, telling him» (for she had come with her mind made up) «that I like him–more than anybody I’ve ever known. And then perhaps he’ll say …»
What would he say? The blood had rushed to her cheeks.
«Why was he so strange the other night, after the feelies? So queer. And yet I’m absolutely sure he really does rather like me. I’m sure …»
It was at this moment that Bernard had made his announcement; the Savage wasn’t coming to the party.
Lenina suddenly felt all the sensations normally experienced at the beginning of a Violent Passion Surrogate treatment–a sense of dreadful emptiness, a breathless apprehension, a nausea. Her heart seemed to stop beating.
«Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t like me,» she said to herself. And at once this possibility became an established certainty: John had refused to come because he didn’t like her. He didn’t like her. …
«It really is a bit too thick,» the Head Mistress of Eton was saying to the Director of Crematoria and Phosphorus Reclamation. «When I think that I actually …»
«Yes,» came the voice of Fanny Crowne, «it’s absolutely true about the alcohol. Some one I know knew some one who was working in the Embryo Store at the time. She said to my friend, and my friend said to me …»
«Too bad, too bad,» said Henry Foster, sympathizing with the Arch-Community-Songster. «It may interest you to know that our ex-Director was on the point of transferring him to Iceland.»
«And now, my friends,» said the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury, in that beautiful ringing voice with which he led the proceedings at Ford’s Day Celebrations, «Now, my friends, I think perhaps the time has come …» He rose, put down his glass, brushed from his purple viscose waistcoat the crumbs of a considerable collation, and walked towards the door.
Bernard darted forward to intercept him.
«Must you really, Arch-Songster? … It’s very early still. I’d hoped you would …»
Yes, what hadn’t he hoped, when Lenina confidentially told him that the Arch-Community-Songster would accept an invitation if it were sent. «He’s really rather sweet, you know.» And she had shown Bernard the little golden zipper-fastening in the form of a T which the Arch-Songster had given her as a memento of the week-end she had spent at Lambeth. To meet the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury and Mr. Savage. Bernard had proclaimed his triumph on every invitation card. But the Savage had chosen this evening of all evenings to lock himself up in his room, to shout «Háni!» and even (it was lucky that Bernard didn’t understand Zuñi) «Sons éso tse-ná!» What should have been the crowning moment of Bernard’s whole career had turned out to be the moment of his greatest humiliation.
«I’d so much hoped …» he stammeringly repeated, looking up at the great dignitary with pleading and distracted eyes.
«My young friend,» said the Arch-Community-Songster in a tone of loud and solemn severity; there was a general silence. «Let me give you a word of advice.» He wagged his finger at Bernard. «Before it’s too late. A word of good advice.» (His voice became sepulchral.) «Mend your ways, my young friend, mend your ways.» He made the sign of the T over him and turned away. «Lenina, my dear,» he called in another tone. «Come with me.»
Obediently, but unsmiling and (wholly insensible of the honour done to her) without elation, Lenina walked after him, out of the room. The other guests followed at a respectful interval. The last of them slammed the door. Bernard was all alone.
Lenina and the Arch-Community-Songster stepped out on to the roof of Lambeth Palace. «Hurry up, my young friend–I mean, Lenina,» called the Arch-Songster impatiently from the lift gates. Lenina, who had lingered for a moment to look at the moon, dropped her eyes and came hurrying across the roof to rejoin him.
«A New Theory of Biology» was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: «The author’s mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published. » He underlined the words. «The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary.» A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose–well, you didn’t know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes–make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words «Not to be published» drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, «What fun it would be,» he thought, «if one didn’t have to think about happiness!»
With closed eyes, his face shining with rapture, John was softly declaiming to vacancy:
«Oh! she doth teach the torches to burn bright.
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night,
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear …»
Bernard, by this time, was fast asleep and smiling at the private paradise of his dreams. Smiling, smiling. But inexorably, every thirty seconds, the minute hand of the electric clock above his bed jumped forward with an almost imperceptible click. Click, click, click, click … And it was morning. Bernard was back among the miseries of space and time. It was in the lowest spirits that he taxied across to his work at the Conditioning Centre. The intoxication of success had evaporated; he was soberly his old self; and by contrast with the temporary balloon of these last weeks, the old self seemed unprecedentedly heavier than the surrounding atmosphere.
To this deflated Bernard the Savage showed himself unexpectedly sympathetic.
«You’re more like what you were at Malpais,» he said, when Bernard had told him his plaintive story. «Do you remember when we first talked together? Outside the little house. You’re like what you were then.»
«Because I’m unhappy again; that’s why.»
«Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.»
«I like that,» said Bernard bitterly. «When it’s you who were the cause of it all. Refusing to come to my party and so turning them all against me!» He knew that what he was saying was absurd in its injustice; he admitted inwardly, and at last even aloud, the truth of all that the Savage now said about the worthlessness of friends who could be turned upon so slight a provocation into persecuting enemies. But in spite of this knowledge and these admissions, in spite of the fact that his friend’s support and sympathy were now his only comfort, Bernard continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite genuine affection, a secret grievance against the Savage, to mediate a campaign of small revenges to be wreaked upon him. Nourishing a grievance against the Arch-Community-Songster was useless; there was no possibility of being revenged on the Chief Bottler or the Assistant Predestinator. As a victim, the Savage possessed, for Bernard, this enormous superiority over the others: that he was accessible. One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
Bernard’s other victim-friend was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and asked once more for the friendship which, in his prosperity, he had not thought it worth his while to preserve. Helmholtz gave it; and gave it without a reproach, without a comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same time humiliated by this magnanimity–a magnanimity the more extraordinary and therefore the more humiliating in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to Helmholtz’s character. It was the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday. Bernard was duly grateful (it was an enormous comfort to have his friend again) and also duly resentful (it would be pleasure to take some revenge on Helmholtz for his generosity).
At their first meeting after the estrangement, Bernard poured out the tale of his miseries and accepted consolation. It was not till some days later that he learned, to his surprise and with a twinge of shame, that he was not the only one who had been in trouble. Helmholtz had also come into conflict with Authority.
«It was over some rhymes,» he explained. «I was giving my usual course of Advanced Emotional Engineering for Third Year Students. Twelve lectures, of which the seventh is about rhymes. ‘On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propaganda and Advertisement,’ to be precise. I always illustrate my lecture with a lot of technical examples. This time I thought I’d give them one I’d just written myself. Pure madness, of course; but I couldn’t resist it.» He laughed. «I was curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides,» he added more gravely, «I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I’d felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!» He laughed again. «What an outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate sack. l’m a marked man.»
«But what were your rhymes?» Bernard asked.
«They were about being alone.»
Bernard’s eyebrows went up.
«I’ll recite them to you, if you like.» And Helmholtz began:
«Yesterday’s committee,
Sticks, but a broken drum,
Midnight in the City,
Flutes in a vacuum,
Shut lips, sleeping faces,
Every stopped machine,
The dumb and littered places
Where crowds have been: …
All silences rejoice,
Weep (loudly or low),
Speak–but with the voice
Of whom, I do not know.
Absence, say, of Susan’s,
Absence of Egeria’s
Arms and respective bosoms,
Lips and, ah, posteriors,
Slowly form a presence;
Whose? and, I ask, of what
So absurd an essence,
That something, which is not,
Nevertheless should populate
Empty night more solidly
Than that with which we copulate,
Why should it seem so squalidly?
Well, I gave them that as an example, and they reported me to the Principal.»
«I’m not surprised,» said Bernard. «It’s flatly against all their sleep-teaching. Remember, they’ve had at least a quarter of a million warnings against solitude.»
«I know. But I thought I’d like to see what the effect would be.»
«Well, you’ve seen now.»
Helmholtz only laughed. «I feel,» he said, after a silence, as though I were just beginning to have something to write about. As though I were beginning to be able to use that power I feel I’ve got inside me–that extra, latent power. Something seems to be coming to me.» In spite of all his troubles, he seemed, Bernard thought, profoundly happy.
At his third meeting with the Savage, Helmholtz recited his rhymes on Solitude.
«What do you think of them?» he asked when he had done.
The Savage shook his head. «Listen to this,» was his answer; and unlocking the drawer in which he kept his mouse-eaten book, he opened and read:
«Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be …»
Helmholtz listened with a growing excitement. At «sole Arabian tree» he started; at «thou shrieking harbinger» he smiled with sudden pleasure; at «every fowl of tyrant wing» the blood rushed up into his cheeks; but at «defunctive music» he turned pale and trembled with an unprecedented emotion. The Savage read on:
«Property was thus appall’d,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was call’d
Reason in itself confounded
Saw division grow together …»
«Orgy-porgy!» said Bernard, interrupting the reading with a loud, unpleasant laugh. «It’s just a Solidarity Service hymn.» He was revenging himself on his two friends for liking one another more than they liked him.
In the course of their next two or three meetings he frequently repeated this little act of vengeance. It was simple and, since both Helmholtz and the Savage were dreadfully pained by the shattering and defilement of a favourite poetic crystal, extremely effective. In the end, Helmholtz threatened to kick him out of the room if he dared to interrupt again. And yet, strangely enough, the next interruption, the most disgraceful of all, came from Helmholtz himself.
The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud–reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to the scene of the lovers’ first meeting with a puzzled interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him smile. Getting into such a state about having a girl–it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional engineering! «That old fellow,» he said, «he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly.» The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed by the Savage, Juliet cried out:
«Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O sweet my mother, cast me not away:
Delay this marriage for a month, a week;
Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed
In that dim monument where Tybalt lies …»
when Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.
The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn’t want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but «sweet mother» (in the Savage’s tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his face–quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his book and then, as the laughter still continued, closed it indignantly, got up and, with the gesture of one who removes his pearl from before swine, locked it away in its drawer.
«And yet,» said Helmholtz when, having recovered breath enough to apologize, he had mollified the Savage into listening to his explanations, «I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can’t write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases. But fathers and mothers!» He shook his head. «You can’t expect me to keep a straight face about fathers and mothers. And who’s going to get excited about a boy having a girl or not having her?» (The Savage winced; but Helmholtz, who was staring pensively at the floor, saw nothing.) «No.» he concluded, with a sigh, «it won’t do. We need some other kind of madness and violence. But what? What? Where can one find it?» He was silent; then, shaking his head, «I don’t know,» he said at last, «I don’t know.»
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
10 июля 2022 г. 10:36
3 «Всё к лучшему в этом лучшем из миров»?
Как ни откладывала знакомство с этим романом, он меня всё же настиг))
Конечно, это классика жанра, и многие предсказания 1930-х годов, к сожалению, фактически сбылись. И если современники писателя считали роман страшной сказкой и не верили в столь мрачный сценарий, то мы-то с вами понимаем: нет ничего невозможного в этом «дивном новом мире» (утверждение тоталитарных режимов, кастовости общества; проблемы перенаселения Земли, её экологии; возможность появления «детей из пробирки», манипулирования человеческим сознанием; засилье примитивной массовой культуры; популяризация наркотиков, сексуальной распущенности, потребительского отношения к жизни и т. д. и т. п.). Хаксли с тревогой пишет об обезличивании – уничтожении личностного, индивидуального начала (отсюда масса близнецов, по факту –…
Дотошный Эксперт Лайвлиба
19 мая 2022 г. 19:37
5 Угадываем будущее
17 августа 2022 г. 15:52
4.5 Олдос Хаксли «О дивный новый мир»
31 июля 2022 г. 22:15
13 августа 2022 г. 14:07
4 «Не желающие зла точно так же причиняют боль, как и желающие».
⠀
Лондон далёкого будущего. Теперь здесь совершенно иное государство: люди больше не рождаются, а выращиваются в будылях, причём все они являются представителями пяти различных каст (от гениальных альфа до глупейших эпсилон). Теперь все люди, появляясь на свет таким путём, имеют заранее предначертанный путь, зная, что их ждёт и чем им предстоит заниматься. Больше нет понятия семья, приняты беспорядочные связи, а также отсутствие привязанности. Однако Линайна Краун, медсестра, несмотря на запрет, продолжает встречаться с одним человеком, совершенно не желая менять партнера.
Что ж, ещё одна перечитанная мной антиутопия. Для меня главным после прочтения остался вопрос: оправдывает ли цель средства? Возможно ли ради создания идеального общества пожертвовать индивидуальностью, свободой,…
‘Brave New World’ Overview
Aldous Huxley’s Controversial Dystopian Masterpiece
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Leslie Holland / Chatto and Windus (London)
Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel set in a technocratic World State, a society that rests on the core of community, identity, and stability. The reader follows two main characters, first the disgruntled Bernard Marx, then the outsider John, or “The Savage,” as they question the tenets of the World State, a place where people live on a baseline-state of superficial happiness in order to avoid dealing with the truth.
Fast Facts: Brave New World
Plot Summary
Brave New World follows a few characters as they live their lives in the seemingly utopian World State metropolis of London. It is a society that rests on consumerism and collectivism and has a rigid caste system. Bernard Marx, a petty and depressive psychiatrist who works for the Hatchery, is sent on a mission to the New Mexico Reservation, where “savages” live. He is accompanied by Lenina Crowne, an attractive foetus technician. On the Reservation, they meet Linda, a former citizen of the World State who had stayed behind, and her son John, born through a “viviparous” procreation, a scandal in the World State. When Bernard and Lenina bring the two back to London, John serves as the mouthpiece for the conflicts between the Reservation, which still abides by traditional values, and the technocracy of the World State.
Main Characters
Bernard Marx. The protagonist of the first part of the novel, Marx is a member of the “Alpha” caste with an inferiority complex, which prompts him to question the core values of the regime of the World State. He has an overall bad personality.
John. Known also as “The Savage,” John is the protagonist of the second half of the novel. He grew up in the Reservation and was birthed naturally by Linda, a former citizen of the World State. He bases his world view on Shakespeare’s work and antagonizes the values of the World State. He loves Lenina in a way that is more than lust.
Lenina Crowne. Lenina is an attractive foetus technician who is promiscuous according to the social requirements of the World State, and seems perfectly content with her life. She is sexually attracted to Marx’s melancholy and to John.
Linda. John’s mother, she got accidentally impregnated by the DHC and was left behind following a storm during a mission in New Mexico. In her new environment, she was both desired, since she was promiscuous, and reviled for the very same reason. She likes mescaline, peyotl, and craves the World State drug soma.
Director of Hatchery and Conditioning (DHC). A man devoted to the regime, he at first intends to exile Marx for his less than ideal disposition, but then Marx outs him as the natural father of John, causing him to resign in shame.
Main Themes
Community vs. Individuals. The World State rests on three pillars, which are community, identity, and Stability. Individuals are seen as part of a greater whole, and superficial happiness is encouraged, and difficult emotions are artificially suppressed, for the sake of stability
Truth vs. Self Delusion. Delusion for the sake of stability prevents citizens from accessing the truth. Mustapha Mond claims that people are better off living with a superficial sense of happiness than with facing the truth.
Literary Style
Brave New World is written in a highly detailed, yet clinical style that reflects the predominance of technology at the expense of emotions. Huxley has a tendency to juxtapose and jump between scenes, such as when he interposes Lenina and Fanny’s locker-room talk with the history of the World State, which contrasts the regime with the individuals that dwell in it. Through the character of John, Huxley introduces literary references and Shakespeare quotes.
About the Author
Aldous Huxley authored nearly 50 books between novels and non-fiction works. He was part of the Bloomsbury group, studied the Vedanta, and pursued mystical experiences through the use of psychedelics, which are recurring themes in his novels Brave New World (1932) and Island (1962), and in his memoiristic work The Doors of Perception (1954).
Brave new world aldous huxley
B Y EIGHT O’CLOCK the light was failing. The loud speaker in the tower of the Stoke Poges Club House began, in a more than human tenor, to announce the closing of the courses. Lenina and Henry abandoned their game and walked back towards the Club. From the grounds of the Internal and External Secretion Trust came the lowing of those thousands of cattle which provided, with their hormones and their milk, the raw materials for the great factory at Farnham Royal.
An incessant buzzing of helicopters filled the twilight. Every two and a half minutes a bell and the screech of whistles announced the departure of one of the light monorail trains which carried the lower caste golfers back from their separate course to the metropolis.
Lenina and Henry climbed into their machine and started off. At eight hundred feet Henry slowed down the helicopter screws, and they hung for a minute or two poised above the fading landscape. The forest of Burnham Beeches stretched like a great pool of darkness towards the bright shore of the western sky. Crimson at the horizon, the last of the sunset faded, through orange, upwards into yellow and a pale watery green. Northwards, beyond and above the trees, the Internal and External Secretions factory glared with a fierce electric brilliance from every window of its twenty stories. Beneath them lay the buildings of the Golf Club–the huge Lower Caste barracks and, on the other side of a dividing wall, the smaller houses reserved for Alpha and Beta members. The approaches to the monorail station were black with the ant-like pullulation of lower-caste activity. From under the glass vault a lighted train shot out into the open. Following its southeasterly course across the dark plain their eyes were drawn to the majestic buildings of the Slough Crematorium. For the safety of night-flying planes, its four tall chimneys were flood-lighted and tipped with crimson danger signals. It was a landmark.
«Why do the smoke-stacks have those things like balconies around them?» enquired Lenina.
«Phosphorus recovery,» explained Henry telegraphically. «On their way up the chimney the gases go through four separate treatments. P 2 O 5 used to go right out of circulation every time they cremated some one. Now they recover over ninety-eight per cent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorus every year from England alone.» Henry spoke with a happy pride, rejoicing whole-heartedly in the achievement, as though it had been his own. «Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we’re dead. Making plants grow.»
Lenina, meanwhile, had turned her eyes away and was looking perpendicularly downwards at the monorail station. «Fine,» she agreed. «But queer that Alphas and Betas won’t make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons down there.»
«All men are physico-chemically equal,» said Henry sententiously. «Besides, even Epsilons perform indispensable services.»
«Even an Epsilon …» Lenina suddenly remembered an occasion when, as a little girl at school, she had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware, for the first time, of the whispering that had haunted all her sleeps. She saw again the beam of moonlight, the row of small white beds; heard once more the soft, soft voice that said (the words were there, unforgotten, unforgettable after so many night-long repetitions): «Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one …» Lenina remembered her first shock of fear and surprise; her speculations through half a wakeful hour; and then, under the influence of those endless repetitions, the gradual soothing of her mind, the soothing, the smoothing, the stealthy creeping of sleep. …
«I suppose Epsilons don’t really mind being Epsilons,» she said aloud.
«Of course they don’t. How can they? They don’t know what it’s like being anything else. We’d mind, of course. But then we’ve been differently conditioned. Besides, we start with a different heredity.»
«I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon,» said Lenina, with conviction.
«And if you were an Epsilon,» said Henry, «your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren’t a Beta or an Alpha.» He put his forward propeller into gear and headed the machine towards London. Behind them, in the west, the crimson and orange were almost faded; a dark bank of cloud had crept into the zenith. As they flew over the crematorium, the plane shot upwards on the column of hot air rising from the chimneys, only to fall as suddenly when it passed into the descending chill beyond.
«What a marvellous switchback!» Lenina laughed delightedly.
But Henry’s tone was almost, for a moment, melancholy. «Do you know what that switchback was?» he said. «It was some human being finally and definitely disappearing. Going up in a squirt of hot gas. It would be curious to know who it was–a man or a woman, an Alpha or an Epsilon. …» He sighed. Then, in a resolutely cheerful voice, «Anyhow,» he concluded, «there’s one thing we can be certain of; whoever he may have been, he was happy when he was alive. Everybody’s happy now.»
«Yes, everybody’s happy now,» echoed Lenina. They had heard the words repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years.
Landing on the roof of Henry’s forty-story apartment house in Westminster, they went straight down to the dining-hall. There, in a loud and cheerful company, they ate an excellent meal. Soma was served with the coffee. Lenina took two half-gramme tablets and Henry three. At twenty past nine they walked across the street to the newly opened Westminster Abbey Cabaret. It was a night almost without clouds, moonless and starry; but of this on the whole depressing fact Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware. The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness. «CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS.» From the façade of the new Abbey the giant letters invitingly glared. «LONDON’S FINEST SCENT AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC.»
They entered. The air seemed hot and somehow breathless with the scent of ambergris and sandalwood. On the domed ceiling of the hall, the colour organ had momentarily painted a tropical sunset. The Sixteen Sexophonists were playing an old favourite: «There ain’t no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine.» Four hundred couples were five-stepping round the polished floor. Lenina and Henry were soon the four hundred and first. The saxophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them. Rich with a wealth of harmonics, their tremulous chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder–until at last, with a wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence. Thunder in A flat major. And then, in all but silence, in all but darkness, there followed a gradual deturgescence, a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to a faintly whispered dominant chord that lingered on (while the five-four rhythms still pulsed below) charging the darkened seconds with an intense expectancy. And at last expectancy was fulfilled. There was a sudden explosive sunrise, and simultaneously, the Sixteen burst into song:
«Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted!
Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?
Skies are blue inside of you,
The weather’s always fine;
For
There ain’t no Bottle in all the world
Like that dear little Bottle of mine.»
«Good-night, dear friends. Good-night, dear friends.» The loud speakers veiled their commands in a genial and musical politeness. «Good-night, dear friends …»
Obediently, with all the others, Lenina and Henry left the building. The depressing stars had travelled quite some way across the heavens. But though the separating screen of the sky-signs had now to a great extent dissolved, the two young people still retained their happy ignorance of the night.
«Oh, and that reminds me,» she said, as she came back from the bathroom, «Fanny Crowne wants to know where you found that lovely green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt you gave me.»
A LTERNATE Thursdays were Bernard’s Solidarity Service days. After an early dinner at the Aphroditzeum (to which Helrnholtz had recently been elected under Rule Two) he took leave of his friend and, hailing a taxi on the roof told the man to fly to the Fordson Community Singery. The machine rose a couple of hundred metres, then headed eastwards, and as it turned, there before Bernard’s eyes, gigantically beautiful, was the Singery. Flood-lighted, its three hundred and twenty metres of white Carrara-surrogate gleamed with a snowy incandescence over Ludgate Hill; at each of the four corners of its helicopter platform an immense T shone crimson against the night, and from the mouths of twenty-four vast golden trumpets rumbled a solemn synthetic music.
«Damn, I’m late,» Bernard said to himself as he first caught sight of Big Henry, the Singery clock. And sure enough, as he was paying off his cab, Big Henry sounded the hour. «Ford,» sang out an immense bass voice from all the golden trumpets. «Ford, Ford, Ford …» Nine times. Bernard ran for the lift.
The great auditorium for Ford’s Day celebrations and other massed Community Sings was at the bottom of the building. Above it, a hundred to each floor, were the seven thousand rooms used by Solidarity Groups for their fortnight services. Bernard dropped down to floor thirty-three, hurried along the corridor, stood hesitating for a moment outside Room 3210, then, having wound himself up, opened the door and walked in.
Thank Ford! he was not the last. Three chairs of the twelve arranged round the circular table were still unoccupied. He slipped into the nearest of them as inconspicuously as he could and prepared to frown at the yet later comers whenever they should arrive.
Turning towards him, «What were you playing this afternoon?» the girl on his left enquired. «Obstacle, or Electro-magnetic?»
Bernard looked at her (Ford! it was Morgana Rothschild) and blushingly had to admit that he had been playing neither. Morgana stared at him with astonishment. There was an awkward silence.
Then pointedly she turned away and addressed herself to the more sporting man on her left.
«A good beginning for a Solidarity Service,» thought Bernard miserably, and foresaw for himself yet another failure to achieve atonement. If only he had given himself time to look around instead of scuttling for the nearest chair! He could have sat between Fifi Bradlaugh and Joanna Diesel. Instead of which he had gone and blindly planted himself next to Morgana. Morgana! Ford! Those black eyebrows of hers–that eyebrow, rather–for they met above the nose. Ford! And on his right was Clara Deterding. True, Clara’s eyebrows didn’t meet. But she was really too pneumatic. Whereas Fifi and Joanna were absolutely right. Plump, blonde, not too large … And it was that great lout, Tom Kawaguchi, who now took the seat between them.
The last arrival was Sarojini Engels.
«You’re late,» said the President of the Group severely. «Don’t let it happen again.»
Sarojini apologized and slid into her place between Jim Bokanovsky and Herbert Bakunin. The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alternation round the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.
The President stood up, made the sign of the T and, switching on the synthetic music, let loose the soft indefatigable beating of drums and a choir of instruments–near-wind and super-string–that plangently repeated and repeated the brief and unescapably haunting melody of the first Solidarity Hymn. Again, again–and it was not the ear that heard the pulsing rhythm, it was the midriff; the wail and clang of those recurring harmonies haunted, not the mind, but the yearning bowels of compassion.
The President made another sign of the T and sat down. The service had begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, «I drink to my annihilation,» twelve times quaffed. Then to the accompaniment of the synthetic orchestra the First Solidarity Hymn was sung.
«Ford, we are twelve; oh, make us one,
Like drops within the Social River,
Oh, make us now together run
As swiftly as thy shining Flivver.»
Twelve yearning stanzas. And then the loving cup was passed a second time. «I drink to the Greater Being» was now the formula. All drank. Tirelessly the music played. The drums beat. The crying and clashing of the harmonies were an obsession in the melted bowels. The Second Solidarity Hymn was sung.
«Come, Greater Being, Social Friend,
Annihilating Twelve-in-One!
We long to die, for when we end,
Our larger life has but begun.»
Again twelve stanzas. By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles. Even Bernard felt himself a little melted. When Morgana Rothschild turned and beamed at him, he did his best to beam back. But the eyebrow, that black two-in-one–alas, it was still there; he couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t, however hard he tried. The melting hadn’t gone far enough. Perhaps if he had been sitting between Fifi and Joanna … For the third time the loving cup went round; «I drink to the imminence of His Coming,» said Morgana Rothschild, whose turn it happened to be to initiate the circular rite. Her tone was loud, exultant. She drank and passed the cup to Bernard. «I drink to the imminence of His Coming,» he repeated, with a sincere attempt to feel that the coming was imminent; but the eyebrow continued to haunt him, and the Coming, so far as he was concerned, was horribly remote. He drank and handed the cup to Clara Deterding. «It’ll be a failure again,» he said to himself. «I know it will.» But he went on doing his best to beam.
The loving cup had made its circuit. Lifting his hand, the President gave a signal; the chorus broke out into the third Solidarity Hymn.
«Feel how the Greater Being comes!
Rejoice and, in rejoicings, die!
Melt in the music of the drums!
For I am you and you are I.»
As verse succeeded verse the voices thrilled with an ever intenser excitement. The sense of the Coming’s imminence was like an electric tension in the air. The President switched off the music and, with the final note of the final stanza, there was absolute silence–the silence of stretched expectancy, quivering and creeping with a galvanic life. The President reached out his hand; and suddenly a Voice, a deep strong Voice, more musical than any merely human voice, richer, warmer, more vibrant with love and yearning and compassion, a wonderful, mysterious, supernatural Voice spoke from above their heads. Very slowly, «Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford,» it said diminishingly and on a descending scale. A sensation of warmth radiated thrillingly out from the solar plexus to every extremity of the bodies of those who listened; tears came into their eyes; their hearts, their bowels seemed to move within them, as though with an independent life. «Ford!» they were melting, «Ford!» dissolved, dissolved. Then, in another tone, suddenly, startlingly. «Listen!» trumpeted the voice. «Listen!» They listened. After a pause, sunk to a whisper, but a whisper, somehow, more penetrating than the loudest cry. «The feet of the Greater Being,» it went on, and repeated the words: «The feet of the Greater Being.» The whisper almost expired. «The feet of the Greater Being are on the stairs.» And once more there was silence; and the expectancy, momentarily relaxed, was stretched again, tauter, tauter, almost to the tearing point. The feet of the Greater Being–oh, they heard them, they heard them, coming softly down the stairs, coming nearer and nearer down the invisible stairs. The feet of the Greater Being. And suddenly the tearing point was reached. Her eyes staring, her lips parted. Morgana Rothschild sprang to her feet.
«I hear him,» she cried. «I hear him.»
«He’s coming,» shouted Sarojini Engels.
«Yes, he’s coming, I hear him.» Fifi Bradlaugh and Tom Kawaguchi rose simultaneously to their feet.
«Oh, oh, oh!» Joanna inarticulately testified.
«He’s coming!» yelled Jim Bokanovsky.
The President leaned forward and, with a touch, released a delirium of cymbals and blown brass, a fever of tom-tomming.
«Oh, he’s coming!» screamed Clara Deterding. «Aie!» and it was as though she were having her throat cut.
Feeling that it was time for him to do something, Bernard also jumped up and shouted: «I hear him; He’s coming.» But it wasn’t true. He heard nothing and, for him, nobody was coming. Nobody–in spite of the music, in spite of the mounting excitement. But he waved his arms, he shouted with the best of them; and when the others began to jig and stamp and shuffle, he also jigged and shuffled.
Round they went, a circular procession of dancers, each with hands on the hips of the dancer preceding, round and round, shouting in unison, stamping to the rhythm of the music with their feet, beating it, beating it out with hands on the buttocks in front; twelve pairs of hands beating as one; as one, twelve buttocks slabbily resounding. Twelve as one, twelve as one. «I hear Him, I hear Him coming.» The music quickened; faster beat the feet, faster, faster fell the rhythmic hands. And all at once a great synthetic bass boomed out the words which announced the approaching atonement and final consummation of solidarity, the coming of the Twelve-in-One, the incarnation of the Greater Being. «Orgy-porgy,» it sang, while the tom-toms continued to beat their feverish tattoo:
«Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at 0ne with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.»
«Orgy-porgy,» the dancers caught up the liturgical refrain, «Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, kiss the girls …» And as they sang, the lights began slowly to fade–to fade and at the same time to grow warmer, richer, redder, until at last they were dancing in the crimson twilight of an Embryo Store. «Orgy-porgy …» In their blood-coloured and foetal darkness the dancers continued for a while to circulate, to beat and beat out the indefatigable rhythm. «Orgy-porgy …» Then the circle wavered, broke, fell in partial disintegration on the ring of couches which surrounded–circle enclosing circle–the table and its planetary chairs. «Orgy-porgy …» Tenderly the deep Voice crooned and cooed; in the red twilight it was as though some enormous negro dove were hovering benevolently over the now prone or supine dancers.
They were standing on the roof; Big Henry had just sung eleven. The night was calm and warm.
«Wasn’t it wonderful?» said Fifi Bradlaugh. «Wasn’t it simply wonderful?» She looked at Bernard with an expression of rapture, but of rapture in which there was no trace of agitation or excitement–for to be excited is still to be unsatisfied. Hers was the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and nothingness, but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium. A rich and living peace. For the Solidarity Service had given as well as taken, drawn off only to replenish. She was full, she was made perfect, she was still more than merely herself. «Didn’t you think it was wonderful?» she insisted, looking into Bernard’s face with those supernaturally shining eyes.
«Yes, I thought it was wonderful,» he lied and looked away; the sight of her transfigured face was at once an accusation and an ironical reminder of his own separateness. He was as miserably isolated now as he had been when the service began–more isolated by reason of his unreplenished emptiness, his dead satiety. Separate and unatoned, while the others were being fused into the Greater Being; alone even in Morgana’s embrace–much more alone, indeed, more hopelessly himself than he had ever been in his life before. He had emerged from that crimson twilight into the common electric glare with a self-consciousness intensified to the pitch of agony. He was utterly miserable, and perhaps (her shining eyes accused him), perhaps it was his own fault. «Quite wonderful,» he repeated; but the only thing he could think of was Morgana’s eyebrow.
Brave new world aldous huxley
O UTSIDE, in the dust and among the garbage (there were four dogs now), Bernard and John were walking slowly up and down.
«So hard for me to realize,» Bernard was saying, «to reconstruct. As though we were living on different planets, in different centuries. A mother, and all this dirt, and gods, and old age, and disease …» He shook his head. «It’s almost inconceivable. I shall never understand, unless you explain.»
«This.» He indicated the pueblo. «That.» And it was the little house outside the village. «Everything. All your life.»
«But what is there to say?»
«From the beginning. As far back as you can remember.»
«As far back as I can remember.» John frowned. There was a long silence.
It was very hot. They had eaten a lot of tortillas and sweet corn. Linda said, «Come and lie down, Baby.» They lay down together in the big bed. «Sing,» and Linda sang. Sang «Streptocock-Gee to Banbury-T» and «Bye Baby Banting, soon you’ll need decanting.» Her voice got fainter and fainter …
There was a loud noise, and he woke with a start. A man was saying something to Linda, and Linda was laughing. She had pulled the blanket up to her chin, but the man pulled it down again. His hair was like two black ropes, and round his arm was a lovely silver bracelet with blue stones in it. He liked the bracelet; but all the same, he was frightened; he hid his face against Linda’s body. Linda put her hand on him and he felt safer. In those other words he did not understand so well, she said to the man, «Not with John here.» The man looked at him, then again at Linda, and said a few words in a soft voice. Linda said, «No.» But the man bent over the bed towards him and his face was huge, terrible; the black ropes of hair touched the blanket. «No,» Linda said again, and he felt her hand squeezing him more tightly. «No, no!» But the man took hold of one of his arms, and it hurt. He screamed. The man put up his other hand and lifted him up. Linda was still holding him, still saying, «No, no.» The man said something short and angry, and suddenly her hands were gone. «Linda, Linda.» He kicked and wriggled; but the man carried him across to the door, opened it, put him down on the floor in the middle of the other room, and went away, shutting the door behind him. He got up, he ran to the door. Standing on tiptoe he could just reach the big wooden latch. He lifted it and pushed; but the door wouldn’t open. «Linda,» he shouted. She didn’t answer.
He remembered a huge room, rather dark; and there were big wooden things with strings fastened to them, and lots of women standing round them–making blankets, Linda said. Linda told him to sit in the corner with the other children, while she went and helped the women. He played with the little boys for a long time. Suddenly people started talking very loud, and there were the women pushing Linda away, and Linda was crying. She went to the door and he ran after her. He asked her why they were angry. «Because I broke something,» she said. And then she got angry too. «How should I know how to do their beastly weaving?» she said. «Beastly savages.» He asked her what savages were. When they got back to their house, Popé was waiting at the door, and he came in with them. He had a big gourd full of stuff that looked like water; only it wasn’t water, but something with a bad smell that burnt your mouth and made you cough. Linda drank some and Popé drank some, and then Linda laughed a lot and talked very loud; and then she and Popé went into the other room. When Popé went away, he went into the room. Linda was in bed and so fast asleep that he couldn’t wake her.
Popé used to come often. He said the stuff in the gourd was called mescal ; but Linda said it ought to be called soma ; only it made you feel ill afterwards. He hated Popé. He hated them all–all the men who came to see Linda. One afternoon, when he had been playing with the other children–it was cold, he remembered, and there was snow on the mountains–he came back to the house and heard angry voices in the bedroom. They were women’s voices, and they said words he didn’t understand, but he knew they were dreadful words. Then suddenly, crash! something was upset; he heard people moving about quickly, and there was another crash and then a noise like hitting a mule, only not so bony; then Linda screamed. «Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t!» she said. He ran in. There were three women in dark blankets. Linda was on the bed. One of the women was holding her wrists. Another was lying across her legs, so that she couldn’t kick. The third was hitting her with a whip. Once, twice, three times; and each time Linda screamed. Crying, he tugged at the fringe of the woman’s blanket. «Please, please.» With her free hand she held him away. The whip came down again, and again Linda screamed. He caught hold of the woman’s enormous brown hand between his own and bit it with all his might. She cried out, wrenched her hand free, and gave him such a push that he fell down. While he was lying on the ground she hit him three times with the whip. It hurt more than anything he had ever felt–like fire. The whip whistled again, fell. But this time it was Linda who screamed.
«But why did they want to hurt you, Linda?» he asked that night. He was crying, because the red marks of the whip on his back still hurt so terribly. But he was also crying because people were so beastly and unfair, and because he was only a little boy and couldn’t do anything against them. Linda was crying too. She was grown up, but she wasn’t big enough to fight against three of them. It wasn’t fair for her either. «Why did they want to hurt you, Linda?»
«I don’t know. How should I know?» It was difficult to hear what she said, because she was lying on her stomach and her face was in the pillow. «They say those men are their men,» she went on; and she did not seem to be talking to him at all; she seemed to be talking with some one inside herself. A long talk which she didn’t understand; and in the end she started crying louder than ever.
«Oh, don’t cry, Linda. Don’t cry.»
He pressed himself against her. He put his arm round her neck. Linda cried out. «Oh, be careful. My shoulder! Oh!» and she pushed him away, hard. His head banged against the wall. «Little idiot!» she shouted; and then, suddenly, she began to slap him. Slap, slap …
«Linda,» he cried out. «Oh, mother, don’t!»
«I’m not your mother. I won’t be your mother.»
«But, Linda … Oh!» She slapped him on the cheek.
«Turned into a savage,» she shouted. «Having young ones like an animal … If it hadn’t been for you, I might have gone to the Inspector, I might have got away. But not with a baby. That would have been too shameful.»
He saw that she was going to hit him again, and lifted his arm to guard his face. «Oh, don’t, Linda, please don’t.»
«Little beast!» She pulled down his arm; his face was uncovered.
«Don’t, Linda.» He shut his eyes, expecting the blow.
But she didn’t hit him. After a little time, he opened his eyes again and saw that she was looking at him. He tried to smile at her. Suddenly she put her arms round him and kissed him again and again.
Sometimes, for several days, Linda didn’t get up at all. She lay in bed and was sad. Or else she drank the stuff that Popé brought and laughed a great deal and went to sleep. Sometimes she was sick. Often she forgot to wash him, and there was nothing to eat except cold tortillas. He remembered the first time she found those little animals in his hair, how she screamed and screamed.
The happiest times were when she told him about the Other Place. «And you really can go flying, whenever you like?»
«Whenever you like.» And she would tell him about the lovely music that came out of a box, and all the nice games you could play, and the delicious things to eat and drink, and the light that came when you pressed a little thing in the wall, and the pictures that you could hear and feel and smell, as well as see, and another box for making nice smells, and the pink and green and blue and silver houses as high as mountains, and everybody happy and no one ever sad or angry, and every one belonging to every one else, and the boxes where you could see and hear what was happening at the other side of the world, and babies in lovely clean bottles–everything so clean, and no nasty smells, no dirt at all–and people never lonely, but living together and being so jolly and happy, like the summer dances here in Malpais, but much happier, and the happiness being there every day, every day. … He listened by the hour. And sometimes, when he and the other children were tired with too much playing, one of the old men of the pueblo would talk to them, in those other words, of the great Transformer of the World, and of the long fight between Right Hand and Left Hand, between Wet and Dry; of Awonawilona, who made a great fog by thinking in the night, and then made the whole world out of the fog; of Earth Mother and Sky Father; of Ahaiyuta and Marsailema, the twins of War and Chance; of Jesus and Pookong; of Mary and Etsanatlehi, the woman who makes herself young again; of the Black Stone at Laguna and the Great Eagle and Our Lady of Acoma. Strange stories, all the more wonderful to him for being told in the other words and so not fully understood. Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London and Our Lady of Acoma and the rows and rows of babies in clean bottles and Jesus flying up and Linda flying up and the great Director of World Hatcheries and Awonawilona.
Lots of men came to see Linda. The boys began to point their fingers at him. In the strange other words they said that Linda was bad; they called her names he did not understand, but that he knew were bad names. One day they sang a song about her, again and again. He threw stones at them. They threw back; a sharp stone cut his cheek. The blood wouldn’t stop; he was covered with blood.
The boys still sang their horrible song about Linda. Sometimes, too, they laughed at him for being so ragged. When he tore his clothes, Linda did not know how to mend them. In the Other Place, she told him, people threw away clothes with holes in them and got new ones. «Rags, rags!» the boys used to shout at him. «But I can read,» he said to himself, «and they can’t. They don’t even know what reading is.» It was fairly easy, if he thought hard enough about the reading, to pretend that he didn’t mind when they made fun of him. He asked Linda to give him the book again.
The more the boys pointed and sang, the harder he read. Soon he could read all the words quite well. Even the longest. But what did they mean? He asked Linda; but even when she could answer it didn’t seem to make it very clear, And generally she couldn’t answer at all.
«What are chemicals?» he would ask.
«Oh, stuff like magnesium salts, and alcohol for keeping the Deltas and Epsilons small and backward, and calcium carbonate for bones, and all that sort of thing.»
«But how do you make chemicals, Linda? Where do they come from?»
«Well, I don’t know. You get them out of bottles. And when the bottles are empty, you send up to the Chemical Store for more. It’s the Chemical Store people who make them, I suppose. Or else they send to the factory for them. I don’t know. I never did any chemistry. My job was always with the embryos. It was the same with everything else he asked about. Linda never seemed to know. The old men of the pueblo had much more definite answers.
«The seed of men and all creatures, the seed of the sun and the seed of earth and the seed of the sky–Awonawilona made them all out of the Fog of Increase. Now the world has four wombs; and he laid the seeds in the lowest of the four wombs. And gradually the seeds began to grow …»
Linda was lying on the bed, sipping that horrible stinking mescal out of a cup. «Popé brought it,» she said. Her voice was thick and hoarse like somebody else’s voice. «It was lying in one of the chests of the Antelope Kiva. It’s supposed to have been there for hundreds of years. I expect it’s true, because I looked at it, and it seemed to be full of nonsense. Uncivilized. Still, it’ll be good enough for you to practice your reading on.» She took a last sip, set the cup down on the floor beside the bed, turned over on her side, hiccoughed once or twice and went to sleep.
He opened the book at random.
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty …
The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried; like old Mitsima saying magic over his feathers and his carved sticks and his bits of bone and stone–kiathla tsilu silokwe silokwe silokwe. Kiai silu silu, tsithl–but better than Mitsima’s magic, because it meant more, because it talked to him, talked wonderfully and only half-understandably, a terrible beautiful magic, about Linda; about Linda lying there snoring, with the empty cup on the floor beside the bed; about Linda and Popé, Linda and Popé.
He hated Popé more and more. A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. What did the words exactly mean? He only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on rumbling in his head, and somehow it was as though he had never really hated Popé before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him. But now he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic. These words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken (he couldn’t make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful, wonderful all the same)–they gave him a reason for hating Popé; and they made his hatred more real; they even made Popé himself more real.
One day, when he came in from playing, the door of the inner room was open, and he saw them lying together on the bed, asleep–white Linda and Popé almost black beside her, with one arm under her shoulders and the other dark hand on her breast, and one of the plaits of his long hair lying across her throat, like a black snake trying to strangle her. Popé’s gourd and a cup were standing on the floor near the bed. Linda was snoring.
His heart seemed to have disappeared and left a hole. He was empty. Empty, and cold, and rather sick, and giddy. He leaned against the wall to steady himself. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous … Like drums, like the men singing for the corn, like magic, the words repeated and repeated themselves in his head. From being cold he was suddenly hot. His cheeks burnt with the rush of blood, the room swam and darkened before his eyes. He ground his teeth. «I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him,» he kept saying. And suddenly there were more words.
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed …
The magic was on his side, the magic explained and gave orders. He stepped back in the outer room. «When he is drunk asleep …» The knife for the meat was lying on the floor near the fireplace. He picked it up and tiptoed to the door again. «When he is drunk asleep, drunk asleep …» He ran across the room and stabbed–oh, the blood!–stabbed again, as Popé heaved out of his sleep, lifted his hand to stab once more, but found his wrist caught, held and–oh, oh!–twisted. He couldn’t move, he was trapped, and there were Popé’s small black eyes, very close, staring into his own. He looked away. There were two cuts on Popé’s left shoulder. «Oh, look at the blood!» Linda was crying. «Look at the blood!» She had never been able to bear the sight of blood. Popé lifted his other hand–to strike him, he thought. He stiffened to receive the blow. But the hand only took him under the chin and turned his face, so that he had to look again into Popé’s eyes. For a long time, for hours and hours. And suddenly–he couldn’t help it–he began to cry. Popé burst out laughing. «Go,» he said, in the other Indian words. «Go, my brave Ahaiyuta.» He ran out into the other room to hide his tears.
«You are fifteen,» said old Mitsima, in the Indian words. «Now I may teach you to work the clay.»
Squatting by the river, they worked together.
«First of all,» said Mitsima, taking a lump of the wetted clay between his hands, «we make a little moon.» The old man squeezed the lump into a disk, then bent up the edges, the moon became a shallow cup.
Slowly and unskilfully he imitated the old man’s delicate gestures.
«A moon, a cup, and now a snake.» Mitsima rolled out another piece of clay into a long flexible cylinder, trooped it into a circle and pressed it on to the rim of the cup. «Then another snake. And another. And another.» Round by round, Mitsima built up the sides of the pot; it was narrow, it bulged, it narrowed again towards the neck. Mitsima squeezed and patted, stroked and scraped; and there at last it stood, in shape the familiar water pot of Malpais, but creamy white instead of black, and still soft to the touch. The crooked parody of Mitsima’s, his own stood beside it. Looking at the two pots, he had to laugh.
«But the next one will be better,» he said, and began to moisten another piece of clay.
To fashion, to give form, to feel his fingers gaining in skill and power–this gave him an extraordinary pleasure. «A, B, C, Vitamin D,» he sang to himself as he worked. «The fat’s in the liver, the cod’s in the sea.» And Mitsima also sang–a song about killing a bear. They worked all day, and all day he was filled with an intense, absorbing happiness.
«Next winter,» said old Mitsima, «I will teach you to make the bow.»
He stood for a long time outside the house, and at last the ceremonies within were finished. The door opened; they came out. Kothlu came first, his right hand out-stretched and tightly closed, as though over some precious jewel. Her clenched hand similarly outstretched, Kiakimé followed. They walked in silence, and in silence, behind them, came the brothers and sisters and cousins and all the troop of old people.
They walked out of the pueblo, across the mesa. At the edge of the cliff they halted, facing the early morning sun. Kothlu opened his hand. A pinch of corn meal lay white on the palm; he breathed on it, murmured a few words, then threw it, a handful of white dust, towards the sun. Kiakimé did the same. Then Khakimé’s father stepped forward, and holding up a feathered prayer stick, made a long prayer, then threw the stick after the corn meal.
«It is finished,» said old Mitsima in a loud voice. «They are married.»
«Well,» said Linda, as they turned away, «all I can say is, it does seem a lot of fuss to make about so little. In civilized countries, when a boy wants to have a girl, he just … But where are you going, John?»
He paid no attention to her calling, but ran on, away, away, anywhere to be by himself.
It is finished Old Mitsima’s words repeated themselves in his mind. Finished, finished … In silence and from a long way off, but violently, desperately, hopelessly, he had loved Kiakimé. And now it was finished. He was sixteen.
At the full moon, in the Antelope Kiva, secrets would be told, secrets would be done and borne. They would go down, boys, into the kiva and come out again, men. The boys were all afraid and at the same time impatient. And at last it was the day. The sun went down, the moon rose. He went with the others. Men were standing, dark, at the entrance to the kiva; the ladder went down into the red lighted depths. Already the leading boys had begun to climb down. Suddenly, one of the men stepped forward, caught him by the arm, and pulled him out of the ranks. He broke free and dodged back into his place among the others. This time the man struck him, pulled his hair. «Not for you, white-hair!» «Not for the son of the she-dog,» said one of the other men. The boys laughed. «Go!» And as he still hovered on the fringes of the group, «Go!» the men shouted again. One of them bent down, took a stone, threw it. «Go, go, go!» There was a shower of stones. Bleeding, he ran away into the darkness. From the red-lit kiva came the noise of singing. The last of the boys had climbed down the ladder. He was all alone.
All alone, outside the pueblo, on the bare plain of the mesa. The rock was like bleached bones in the moonlight. Down in the valley, the coyotes were howling at the moon. The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding; but it was not for pain that he sobbed; it was because he was all alone, because he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight. At the edge of the precipice he sat down. The moon was behind him; he looked down into the black shadow of the mesa, into the black shadow of death. He had only to take one step, one little jump. … He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow …
He had discovered Time and Death and God.
«Alone, always alone,» the young man was saying.
The words awoke a plaintive echo in Bernard’s mind. Alone, alone … «So am I,» he said, on a gush of confidingness. «Terribly alone.»
«Are you?» John looked surprised. «I thought that in the Other Place … I mean, Linda always said that nobody was ever alone there.»
Bernard blushed uncomfortably. «You see,» he said, mumbling and with averted eyes, «I’m rather different from most people, I suppose. If one happens to be decanted different …»
«Yes, that’s just it.» The young man nodded. «If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely. They’re beastly to one. Do you know, they shut me out of absolutely everything? When the other boys were sent out to spend the night on the mountains–you know, when you have to dream which your sacred animal is–they wouldn’t let me go with the others; they wouldn’t tell me any of the secrets. I did it by myself, though,» he added. «Didn’t eat anything for five days and then went out one night alone into those mountains there.» He pointed.
Patronizingly, Bernard smiled. «And did you dream of anything?» he asked.
The other nodded. «But I mustn’t tell you what.» He was silent for a little; then, in a low voice, «Once,» he went on, «I did something that none of the others did: I stood against a rock in the middle of the day, in summer, with my arms out, like Jesus on the Cross.»
«I wanted to know what it was like being crucified. Hanging there in the sun …»
«Why? Well …» He hesitated. «Because I felt I ought to. If Jesus could stand it. And then, if one has done something wrong … Besides, I was unhappy; that was another reason.»
«It seems a funny way of curing your unhappiness,» said Bernard. But on second thoughts he decided that there was, after all, some sense in it. Better than taking soma …
«I fainted after a time,» said the young man. «Fell down on my face. Do you see the mark where I cut myself?» He lifted the thick yellow hair from his forehead. The scar showed, pale and puckered, on his right temple.
Bernard looked, and then quickly, with a little shudder, averted his eyes. His conditioning had made him not so much pitiful as profoundly squeamish. The mere suggestion of illness or wounds was to him not only horrifying, but even repulsive and rather disgusting. Like dirt, or deformity, or old age. Hastily he changed the subject.
«I wonder if you’d like to come back to London with us?» he asked, making the first move in a campaign whose strategy he had been secretly elaborating ever since, in the little house, he had realized who the «father» of this young savage must be. «Would you like that?»
The young man’s face lit up. «Do you really mean it?»
«Of course; if I can get permission, that is.»
«Well …» He hesitated doubtfully. That revolting creature! No, it was impossible. Unless, unless … It suddenly occurred to Bernard that her very revoltingness might prove an enormous asset. «But of course!» he cried, making up for his first hesitations with an excess of noisy cordiality.
The young man drew a deep breath. «To think it should be coming true–what I’ve dreamt of all my life. Do you remember what Miranda says?»
But the young man had evidently not heard the question. «O wonder!» he was saying; and his eyes shone, his face was brightly flushed. «How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!» The flush suddenly deepened; he was thinking of Lenina, of an angel in bottle-green viscose, lustrous with youth and skin food, plump, benevolently smiling. His voice faltered. «O brave new world,» he began, then-suddenly interrupted himself; the blood had left his cheeks; he was as pale as paper.
«Are you married to her?» he asked.
«Married. You know–for ever. They say ‘for ever’ in the Indian words; it can’t be broken.»
«Ford, no!» Bernard couldn’t help laughing.
John also laughed, but for another reason–laughed for pure joy.
«O brave new world,» he repeated. «O brave new world that has such people in it. Let’s start at once.»
«You have a most peculiar way of talking sometimes,» said Bernard, staring at the young man in perplexed astonishment. «And, anyhow, hadn’t you better wait till you actually see the new world?»