Brave New World

Having read it several times before, I decided to consider Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first for this project, as I already had an idea of its content.

Since my last time through Brave New World, I have read 1984, and my feelings this time were informed by the difference between the two dystopias. I'd forgotten just how utopian many of Huxley's ideas are. Even within the theme of technology, most of the advances are actually a benefit to the individual citizen of the World State. The advances in eugenics and ectogenesis (the growing of foetuses outside of the womb) paired with early conditioning techniques mean that living in A.F. 632 is perfectly easy. As long as one never rebels, happiness, health and comfort are guaranteed until old age. Indeed, judging by the ending, even if one rebels, there is no horrifying Orwellian torture chamber - a rebel is sent off to relatively civilised Iceland instead.

My first thought after realising this was - how am I going to write a comparison between the supposed dystopia of Brave New World and all the most worrying elements of the modern day? It would be difficult to argue that getting to your destination faster or staying physically youthful for longer are truly terrible features in the modern day.

There are some less idealistic technological advances in Brave New World though. For instance, humans in the 21st century are drawn to the idea of natural, organic foods and clothing, where the World State favours surrogates and synthetic materials; we mostly avoid drugs when we can, where citizens of the World State turn to soma at every opportunity; we value emotional lows because we know they contrast with and intensify the highs, where any emotional extreme is rejected in the novel for infantile contentment. These are probably the angles I will take when writing that final essay: are we moving towards the drugged stupor of Brave New World's population? Where synthetics are concerned, what of our inexhaustible supplies of plastic bags, our faux-fur, dietary supplements and E-numbers? Questions hang over the need for medication in treating emotional disorders like bi-polar and ADHD, yet medications are prescribed nevertheless; alcohol and cigarettes keep us drugged of choice. As for the rejection of emotional extremes, why else do we watch over four hours of television a day? It may be unfair to class television as a completely emotionally detached process, but added to the hours spent on the internet and listening to the radio, how much of our time are we spending inactive and pleasantly unconcerned with our own lives, switching on the TV to tune out our problems in the same way Huxley's people would take a "half-gramme holiday"?

(Of course, my stats on the media there come from The Mail Online and The Guardian, and newspapers have a terrific reputation for having fun with facts. I sense my research into the modern world will be one long series of checking unverifiable claims, but, hey, it has to be done.)

The ethically contentious ideas of eugenics and scientifically implemented conditioning will also be interesting to examine in the context of the Western world. In Brave New World, social tiers have been created, from Alphas to Epsilons, and each tier has its own unique set of jobs, its own average height; each type is provided with differently-coloured clothing and treated differently. An interesting site called Human Genetics Alert attempts to address the ethics of real-life developments in eugenics, and keep advances in the public eye, so that legislation taking us closer to dystopian eugenics cannot be implemented covertly. The Nazis put paid to a century of eugenics when they took it to prejudicial levels well before the world was ready, but it seems the ideas are coming back, particularly with the popularisation of IVF treatments, questions on "designer babies" and cloning, and scientific sex-selection techniques. As for more general conditioning, it is one of the things the human race has always been pretty good at, though it must be getting easier to condition a population due to the aforementioned presence of the media in our lives and the reverence for science that recent secularisation has encouraged.


This is a very interesting video. It's a discussion from 'Daybreak' in 2010 about a couple choosing to genetically engineer their child. Perhaps, somewhere now, there is a blue-eyed, brown-haired little boy with two dads who was 'incubated' in a surrogate mother in Los Angeles, and who knows? maybe they dress him in khaki.

Zamyatin, Huxley and Orwell: Science in Dystopian Fiction

In dystopian literature, one of the principle themes is technology. The soulless, miserable worlds depicted in the books are often soundtracked by the unthinking hum of machines. Listening to my computer hum right now, instant parallels suggest themselves; but did Huxley, Orwell and Zamyatin really have a point when they implied that the fruits of technology will lead us to a dystopian world?

Just before George Orwell was born, the first radio receiver had received its first transmission. To think, that was just over a century ago, and since then, the speed of scientific advance has, well, rocketed. The Wright brothers came along with their plane in 1903; Einstein thought up his theory of relativity in 1905, a year after the first tractor was patented. In 1908, the first Model T car was sold, followed in 1910 by Edison's Kinetoscope, an early film projector. Then of course there were tanks, zippers, gas masks and stainless steel, toasters, circuits and early robots - and all before 1920.

New inventions were flooding the market, making daily chores easier, entertainment easier, warfare easier. With this speed of advance, the average person had barely a moment to rest between buying the newest time-savers. Governments trialled their newest weapons during the destructive First World War, and at the same time, plied their people with all the most inventive methods of propaganda. It was certainly a time of great change, but with any change, there comes a backlash.

Dystopian literature can be seen, partly, as the backlash to this rapid technological change. Added to this, developments in political ideology that came with Marx's socialism and developments in economics that came with mass production and importation also had to have their backlash. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells had brought us the first recognisably modern European Science Fiction in the 19th century, but nothing quite rivalled the explosion of dystopian concepts in the early 20th century: suddenly, writers were clamouring to portray unpleasant worlds as a comment on their rapidly changing reality. A global disregard for human life during the First and then the Second World War was bound to leave the individual feeling marginalised, and with emotionless technology increasingly favoured over human hard work, there was nothing for it but to speak up.

One of the earlier texts I am studying came from Russian-born author Yevgeny Zamyatin. A student of naval engineering and a Bolshevik, Zamyatin took part in the Russian socialist revolution of 1905, and so experienced immense political change first-hand. His novel We was written in 1921, after he had witnessed the devastating effects of World War One. The book depicted a world in which no individuality was permitted, with numbers instead of names, propaganda keeping people in line and the whole world governed by One State. This is a clear precursor of books such as Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984.

Aldous Huxley, born in the UK in 1894, claims that he had not so much as heard of We when he wrote his career-defining Brave New World (1932), though satirical writer Kurt Vonnegut insisted that its plot must have been "cheerfully ripped off" from Zamyatin's work. Huxley's book is perhaps more confused in its intentions than We, because in many ways, the reality of the World State is utopian. There is no illness, misery or suffering. Yet, one cannot help but feel that its restrictive, unchanging blandness is grotesque. The world he portrays is defined by its technological advances - all the drugs and entertainment and synthetic materials - and yet it restricts all future development to maintain the new social equilibrium.

George Orwell, by contrast, cannot be said to have created any sort of utopia in 1984 (1949). Orwell proved himself a critic of a whole host of ideologies across his writing, but 1984 is one of his most disturbing and lastingly relevant novels. Airstrip One, or England, is a dirty, miserable world of paranoia and unending war. People are 'vaporised' and erased from history if they overstep any of the government's many lines. Thinking anything unorthodox is punishable by death. Through the use of constant surveillance technology and perpetual revision of history, freedom has become slavery.

These are the three texts I am going to focus on during my study, though Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, This Perfect Day by Ira Levin, Anthem by Ayn Rand and The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster are all useful references as far as technological advance is concerned. Since that radio received that first transmission in 1901, how much closer to an Orwellian dystopia has science brought us? Medicine, computer, AI and war technology have advanced beyond those authors' wildest dreams, but were their predictions about the effects correct? Are we living in a scientific dystopia?

Dystopia in the Modern World

To understand what a dystopia is, it is a good idea to examine its antithesis, the utopia. A utopia is 'any visionary system of political or social perfection' (Dictionary.com): it is an ideal state, a place of no suffering, of political and economic stability where everyone is happy. Explored by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 book Utopia, the concept has been followed up in much political ideology and literature. The word 'utopia' is actually a highbrow pun, as when spoken, it could be translated from the Greek to mean "good place", but also "no place", suggesting that perhaps these idylls could not exist in the real world.

The word 'dystopia', on the other hand, uses no such word play. Also known as cacotopias or anti-utopias, dystopias present worlds characterised by oppression, misery and extreme political ideologies, with states which exert a worrying amount of control over the human race or let violent criminals run amok. Unlike utopian ideas, which can often seem quite banal to the intense and thrill-seeking mind, dystopias play on our very deepest fears - the fears of losing our identity, feeling nothing, loosening our grip on love and religion, letting go of all our political or personal power. Sometimes, the worlds presented are almost utopian in their perfect organisation and sustainability, but they still reflect our collective fears, the reasons we are so reluctant to embrace change. That kind of perfection can be seen as mechanical and emotionally detached.

After reading a utopian novel, you can close the book. You can wistfully return to a reality with its little niggles, its faults and its irritations - problems you know how to cope with, despite resentment. It's not quite the same with dystopias. While buying a copy of Orwell's 1984, heading to a café to read it, you're probably being watched by a series of security guards in CCTV offices; when you search for Brave New World on Google, it is being saved in some computer's omniscient and unlimited memory. Even the victims of crimes can have their unique DNA profile stored on a system run by the state. Laws which resemble those in dystopian fiction are being implemented all the time. Concepts which shock us when we read these books are gradually creeping into our lives, some more than others. This project is intended to explore just how many of those ideas exist in today's reality, and whether they really are as dystopian as they seemed to Orwell, Huxley and Zamyatin.