book report

Brave New World, written by Huxley in 1932, is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature.

How will the future be? In 1932, people had just been through the Great Recession, they anticipated a brave new world with highly-advanced technology and contented people. Yet their spontaneous response of "It's Brave New World!" to any blueprint for chemically-driven happiness had delayed research into “paradise-engineering”. Thus, Huxley depicted his version of the new world to turn the future where we're all notionally happy into a nightmare which is technically feasible. It’s like a curse on the modern society, and the curse is coming true.

Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features that are anticipated by most people.

BNW has highly-advanced biotechnology to get rid of physical and mental pain. To avoid the pain of giving to birth, people “hatch” and make babies. To avoid mental pain like stress and grief, they provide drugs like “soma” to everyone in BNW. To avoid the aging problem, their “aging genes” are erased so they’ll stay young and dynamic. 

BNW developed a caste system to maintain the absolute stabilization, people are differentiated even before they were born. Their gene were edited to adapt to all kinds of job. They were brainwashed to love their hierarchy.

BNW encouraged people to enjoy the pleasure of promiscuous sex, "Everyone belongs to everyone else", but both romantic love and love of family are taboo. The family itself has been abolished throughout the civilized world. These affections are considered to be unstable and do no good to humans.

BNW is a "Fordist" utopia based on production and consumption. Thus, people could and needed to consume numberless goods every day. Like people are all longing for nowadays, residents in BNW never wear out clothes. They aren’t emotionally attached to items they use because there’s always something new.

The brave new world possessed all the elements people expect the future world to have, the stabilization, the rich resources, the painless life experiences…But reading BNW elicits disturbing feelings, not a sense of joyful anticipation. What went wrong ?

Though BNW fits all the assumptions of the future, it does abandon something that modern people value the most. It suggested that the price of universal happiness would be the sacrifice of the most hallowed shibboleths of our culture: "motherhood", "home", "family", "freedom", even "love". The exchange resultsin an insipid happiness that's unworthy of the name.

The brave new world Huxley depicted terrifies most of us, what’s more terrifying is that the society is developing in the direction Huxley indicated. Modern people are becoming more suspicious about love and drown themselves in meaningless recreation activities. Class solidification is more severe, a society lacking in vitality is ahead of us.

The BNW doesn't, and isn't intended by Huxley to, evoke just how wonderful our lives could be if the human genome were intelligently rewritten, or how advanced our technology were. Instead, he contrives to exploit the anxieties of his readers about Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism.

Huxley is trying to warn us to be aware of the risks and challenges hidden behind the booming economy and developing technology. If we don’t set the right direction for our society, there’s a possibility that it will ultimately become a “nightmare”.

2019-12-29

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