Brave New World Revisited

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Even then, none of the utopians of any caste come across as very happy. This seems all too credible: more-or-less chronic happiness sounds so uninteresting that it's easy to believe it must feel uninteresting too. For sure, the utopians are mostly docile and contented. Yet their emotions have been deliberately blunted and repressed. Life is nice - but somehow a bit flat. In the words of the Resident Controller of Western Europe: "No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy - to preserve you, as far as that is possible, from having emotions at all." In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number 5 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. [3] In 2003, Robert McCrum, writing for The Observer, included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", [4] and the novel was listed at number 87 on The Big Read survey by the BBC. [5] Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged since its original publication. It has landed on the American Library Association list of top 100 banned and challenged books of the decade since the association began the list in 1990. [6] [7] [8] Title [ edit ] 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. 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.

a b McCrum, Robert (12 October 2003). "100 greatest novels of all time". Guardian. London . Retrieved 10 October 2012. Miss Keate, Head Mistress of Eton Upper School. Bernard fancies her, and arranges an assignation with her. [30] Others [ edit ] According to American Library Association, Brave New World has frequently been banned and challenged in the United States due to insensitivity, offensive language, nudity, racism, conflict with a religious viewpoint, and being sexually explicit. [45] It landed on the list of the top ten most challenged books in 2010 (3) and 2011 (7). [45] The book also secured a spot on the association's list of the top one hundred challenged books for 1990-1999 (54), [6] 2000-2009 (36), [7] and 2010-2019 (26). [8] a b Office of Intellectual Freedom (9 September 2020). "Top 100 Most Banned and Challenged Books: 2010-2019". American Library Association. Archived from the original on 27 September 2020 . Retrieved 17 June 2021. Postman, Neil (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. USA: Penguin USA. ISBN 0-670-80454-1.a b Office of Intellectual Freedom (26 March 2013). "Top 10 Most Challenged Books Lists". American Library Association. Archived from the original on 28 July 2017 . Retrieved 17 June 2021. In BNW, happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma. Even today, the idea that chemically-driven happiness must dull and pacify is demonstrably false. Mood-boosting psychostimulants are likely to heighten awareness. They increase self-assertiveness. On some indices, and in low doses, stimulants can improve intellectual performance. Combat-troops on both sides in World War Two, for instance, were regularly given amphetamines. This didn't make them nicer or gentler or dumber. Dopaminergic power-drugs tend to increase willpower, wakefulness and action. "Serenics", by contrast, have been researched by the military and the pharmaceutical industry. They may indeed exert a quiescent effect - ideally on the enemy. But variants could also be used on, or by, one's own troops to induce fearlessness. Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:

From birth, members of every class are indoctrinated by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep (called "hypnopædia" in the book) to believe their own class is superior, but that the other classes perform needed functions. Any residual unhappiness is resolved by an antidepressant and hallucinogenic drug called soma. Thus BNW doesn't, and isn't intended by its author to, evoke just how wonderful our lives could be if the human genome were intelligently rewritten. In the era of post-genomic medicine, our DNA is likely to be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long bliss, awesome peak experiences, and a spectrum of outrageously good designer-drugs. Nor does Huxley's comparatively sympathetic account of the life of the Savage on the Reservation convey just how nasty the old regime of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. If you think it does, then you enjoy an enviably sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. For it's all sugar-coated pseudo-realism. The good news gets better. Drugs - not least the magical trinity of empathogens, entactogens and entheogens - and eventually genetic engineering will open up revolutionary new state spaces of thought and emotion. Such modes of consciousness are simply unimaginable to the drug-innocent psyche. Today, their metabolic pathways lie across forbidden gaps in the evolutionary fitness landscape. They have previously been hidden by the pressure of natural selection: for Nature has no power of anticipation. Open such spaces up, however, and new modes of selfhood and introspection become accessible. The Dark Age of primordial Darwinian life is about to pass into history.a b Huxley, Aldous (1932). Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers. p.253. ISBN 978-0-06-085052-4. Huxley, Aldous (1932). Brave New World. New York: Harper & Brothers. p.101. ISBN 978-0-06-085052-4.

Huxley implies that by abolishing nastiness and mental pain, the brave new worlders have got rid of the most profound and sublime experiences that life can offer as well. Most notably, brave new worlders have sacrificed a mysterious deeper happiness which is implied, but not stated, to be pharmacologically inaccessible to the utopians. The metaphysical basis of this presumption is obscure. Reuben Rabinovitch, the Polish-Jew character on whom the effects of sleep-learning, hypnopædia, are first observed. Huxley, Aldous (1998). Brave New World (First Perennial Classicsed.). New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-092987-1.

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Leonard Lopate Show". WNYC. 18 August 2006. Archived from the original on 5 April 2011. {{ cite news}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link) (radio interview with We translator Natasha Randall) In 1982, Polish author Antoni Smuszkiewicz, in his analysis of Polish science-fiction Zaczarowana gra ("The Magic Game"), presented accusations of plagiarism against Huxley. Smuszkiewicz showed similarities between Brave New World and two science fiction novels written earlier by Polish author Mieczysław Smolarski, namely Miasto światłości ("The City of Light", 1924) and Podróż poślubna pana Hamiltona ("Mr Hamilton's Honeymoon Trip", 1928). [59] Smuszkiewicz wrote in his open letter to Huxley: "This work of a great author, both in the general depiction of the world as well as countless details, is so similar to two of my novels that in my opinion there is no possibility of accidental analogy." [60] The Arch-Community-Songster, the secular equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the World State society. He takes personal offense when John refuses to attend Bernard's party. a b "100 Best Novels". Random House. 1999 . Retrieved 23 June 2007. This ranking was by the Modern Library Editorial Board of authors.

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. a b Naughton, John (22 November 2013). "Aldous Huxley: the prophet of our brave new digital dystopia | John Naughton". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 October 2018. Bernard, Helmholtz, and John are all brought before Mustapha Mond, the "Resident World Controller for Western Europe", who tells Bernard and Helmholtz that they are to be exiled to islands for antisocial activity. Bernard pleads for a second chance, but Helmholtz welcomes the opportunity to be a true individual, and chooses the Falkland Islands as his destination, believing that their bad weather will inspire his writing. Mond tells Helmholtz that exile is actually a reward. The islands are full of the most interesting people in the world, individuals who did not fit into the social model of the World State. Mond outlines for John the events that led to the present society and his arguments for a caste system and social control. John rejects Mond's arguments, and Mond sums up John's views by claiming that John demands "the right to be unhappy". John asks if he may go to the islands as well, but Mond refuses, saying he wishes to see what happens to John next. Andreeva, Nellie (17 September 2019). "NBCU Streamer Gets Name, Sets Slate of Reboots, 'Dr. Death', Ed Helms & Amber Ruffin Series, 'Parks & Rec' ". Deadline . Retrieved 17 September 2019. Typically, we are indignant when we see the callous way in which John the Savage is treated, or when we witness the revulsion provoked in the Director by the sight of John's ageing mother - the companion whom he had long ago abandoned for dead after an ill-fated trip to the Reservation. Above and beyond such nasty incidents, all sorts of sour undercurrents are endemic to the society as a whole. Bernard is chronically discontented, even "melancholy". The Alpha misfits in Iceland are condemned to a bleak exile. Feely-author Helmholtz Watson is frustrated by a sense that he is capable of greater things than authoring repetitive propaganda. The Director of Hatcheries is humiliated by the understandably aggrieved Bernard. Boastful Bernard is himself reduced to tears of despair when the Savage refuses to be paraded in front of assorted dignitaries and the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury. Lesser problems and unpleasantnesses are commonplace. And appallingly, the utopians come to gawp at John in his hermit's exile and watch his suffering for fun.

H. G. Wells' novel The First Men in the Moon (1901) used concepts that Huxley added to his story. Both novels introduce a society consisting of a specialized caste system, new generations are produced in jars and bottles where their designated caste is decided before birth by tempering with the fetus' development, and individuals are drugged down when they are not needed. [54] The Daily Telegraph, 5 February 1932. Reprinted in Donald Watt, "Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage. London; Routledge, 2013 ISBN 1136209697 (pp. 197–201). Alfred Mond, British industrialist, financier and politician. He is the namesake of Mustapha Mond. [32]