Post Industrial Society: A Brave New World? Essay, Research Paper
Post Industrial Society: A Brave New World?
Aldous Huxley was born on July 26, 1894 in Surrey, England. He was born to a really scholarly household, most notably his gramps T.H. Huxley, a well-known life scientist and foremost advocator for Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Aldous? upbringing was shaped by many diverse influences, from his brother Julian, a noteworthy life scientist, to his female parent’s uncle Matthew Arnold, a well-known English poet and literary critic. This mix of subjects led to Huxley’s eclectic involvements, which ranged from anthropology to fauna and from literature to mysticism. These involvements finally drove Huxley into a chase of a medical calling as a pupil at Eton. Soon after he chose this as his life profession, nevertheless, Huxley was stricken with keratitis, an oculus disease, and went about blind, coercing him to rethink his ends. Eventually Huxley would return to school at Balliol College at Oxford to analyze English Literature and Philology. It was at Oxford Huxley met his womb-to-tomb friend, D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence would assist promote the freedom of idea and originality that would qualify Huxley’s hereafter works. Though Huxley took rapidly to his surveies of literature he ever regreted that he could non prosecute his dream to be a physician, and took great involvement in the scientific disciplines in his trim clip. Huxley would subsequently see his close loss of sight as the best thing that of all time happened to him, learning him the importance of the mundane facets of life, most notably personal freedoms. It was in this province of forced isolation and limitation due to his close sightlessness that Huxley was most stirred to believe critically of his milieus and the mundane actions of normal people. Huxley’s sightlessness excused him from military service in World War I, though he was really much topic to the emotional effects of the war on
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England. In 1919 Huxley married Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee, and fathered a kid, Matthew. Maria would turn out to be an priceless plus to Huxley, typing all of his manuscripts and correspondence. Maria would decease in 1955 and Huxley would get married Laurel Archera, a taking concert fiddler of the clip.
Soon after his first matrimony, Huxley began his professional authorship calling, foremost with essays and reviews, so with his first aggregation of verse forms, Limbo ( 1920 ) , and his first novel, Crome Yellow ( 1921 ) . In all, Huxley would travel on to author a huge figure of novels, essays, verse forms, short narratives, articles, reappraisals, forwards, debuts, and forewords runing in topic from Hinduism ( Bhagavad-Gita, the Story of God ) , to deliver control ( Birth Control and Catholic Doctrine ) , to Braille ( Studies in Hand-Reading ) , to art ( The Complete Etchings of Goya ) . These subjects show non merely the broad scope of Huxley’s thoughts and involvements, but besides the concerns he felt compelled to notice on. Throughout Huxley’s life he was obsessed with the demand to pass on his thoughts and strong beliefs. On November 22, 1963 Huxley died, hours before John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Huxley’s most read and discussed novel, Brave New World ( 1932 ) , is really typical of his work, showing bluffly the concerns and beliefs of its writer. Huxley greatly feared the loss of individuality in society at the terminal of World War I due to a assortment of political motions such as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the absolutism of Mussolini in Italy, and the Nazi Party in Germany. These motions spawned such political forces as Communism, Fascism, and Socialism, each of which
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demand an commitment to the State above the person and entire commitment to the philosophies of the government. Besides, with the rise in power of capitalist economy in America, Huxley saw an enemy of originality and work ethic that threatened the individuality of the person. This rise took topographic point in the signifier of the Industrial Revolution, where mass production became indispensable to increased net incomes. With mass production came corporations, which Huxley believed destroy personal individuality by sing persons as mere consumers and manufacturers, or merely portion of the machine of capitalist economy. Taking this farther, Huxley believes that people so become comfy as a simple statistic to industry, and lose their sense of duty, regard, and necessarily, their really humanity. Brave New World is Huxley’s call to weaponries against all these horrors of his modern-day universe.
In the novel, society has? progressed? past decease, poorness, disease, old age, hurting, fright, hungriness, and enduring. The atrocious truth, nevertheless, is that this province has been accomplished at a much greater cost than the consequence virtues. A individual World State governs and controls the full universe’s public. Peoples are no longer conceived but about manufactured in groups of up to 95 indistinguishable worlds from a individual female egg. Specified work forces are allowed to donate sperm which will be chemically conditioned so injected into a specified female egg to make the coveted features in the progeny. Even after birth, these worlds are conditioned for a full 8 old ages to believe, believe, and act precisely the manner the authorities dictates. They are split into castes dwelling of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. The Epsilon category is mass-produced and made to be stupid? sub-humans? that are conditioned to be happy to execute median undertakings for
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their life-time without inquiry. At the other terminal of the spectrum, Alphas are separately produced to busy leading functions and conditioned with the intelligence and deficiency of emotion to take expeditiously. Different mixtures of intelligence and other accomplishments are given to each of the other castes in order to supply them with a set topographic point in society. High categories fear the manual work of lower castes while lower castes fear the complexness of higher castes, keeping balance by extinguishing any desire for societal mobility. Orders are put in day-to-day for certain Numberss of each caste and accomplishment to exactly make full the demands of the World State. Each response of all persons in every state of affairs is dictated by the authorities through the conditioning procedure. Genuine fulfilment through the chase of truth and beauty has been replaced by mindless contentment. The World State has banned faith and the Bible as these things promote God and heaven, unlogical ideals that would transfuse fright of the hereafter into the citizens. In the topographic point of God, the people worship Ford, a clear representation of Henry Ford who pioneered the Industrial Revolution with his assembly line. Ford’s autobiography of expressions related to the virtuousnesss of work is the secular? bible? of the universe. Work force and Womans are kept in optimum physical and emotional form until the age of 60 when they are quickly killed. Peoples are conditioned to see this as a simple procedure of the functioning World State. Like a broken piece of machinery, they merely wear? t map any longer and therefore must discontinue to be in order to advance order and functionality. Huxley presents a clear position of how adult male is now a slave to engineering, and uses his characters to demo how this progressed from our present twenty-four hours society.
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Huxley has frequently been criticized for holding really unworldly characters in Brave New World. I believe, nevertheless, that it is the mastermind of making shoal, easy to understand characters that illustrates his point absolutely. Get downing with Lenina Crowe and traveling backwards to John the Savage, Huxley illustrates how the World State formed natuarally from the state of affairs beginning in the universe of 1923.
Lenina Crowe is an allusion to Nikolai Lenin, who played a cardinal function in the formation of the USSR and the growing of communism. It is therefore suiting that her character would stand for the mean citizen in the World State, which seems to encompass many of the ideals of communism. Lenina holds a occupation at the Predestination Center where she helps status embryos and kids for their hereafter functions in society. She is a really immature and desirable adult female. She embraces the velocity, productiveness, and functionality of her universe, as s
he is conditioned to make so. Her character is invariably muttering the phrases and propaganda forced on her during her conditioning as a kid, reenforcing the thoughts of the World State to herself at every bend. She views decease as a map of society. She has no original idea and follows her conditioning without inquiry. The lone inconsistent component in her life is her inclination towards monogamousness, which is uneven in the World State as sex is non used for reproduction but as an mercantile establishment for emotion, and therefore promiscuousness is encouraged and revered. We find subsequently that this state of affairs brings her guilt nevertheless, and she attempts to reengage in the normal process though she has a unusual yearning for familiarity or even love that does non suit with the order of the World State.
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Overall, nevertheless, Lenina is the ultimate consequence of a proper conditioning and therefore represents the concluding consequence of Huxley’s frights of scientific discipline and engineering.
The following character, Bernard Marx, is an obvious mention to Karl Marx, a cardinal figure in the development of socialism, which would take to the thought of communism. Bernard represents the stage of society straight before the realisation of the World State. He has been partly programmed and conditioned. He hears the reverberations of his conditioning procedure but wants to avoid them. In the terminal, nevertheless, he is merely every bit much a marionette of the World State as any other normal adult male. He feels a broad scope of emotions, but does non hold the rational ability to decode the significance of these emotions due to his conditioning. Much like Karl Marx who merely wrote of revolution without really moving it out, Bernard has romantic urges of altering the system but refuses to move on these urges. Though he feels hurting, depression, and guilt, he is resigned to move out his conditioning anyhow alternatively of disputing the position quo for his ain good being. Bernard is the first character to have a huge sum of attending in the novel and seems to be an foreigner to society and a possible hero of the novel. However, Huxley uses Bernard to do the point that even in the concluding phases of the creative activity of this World State, there is no hope for adult male to alter. It seems as if Bernard is the novel’s hope to alter things, but merely as his existent emotions are finally suppressed by directing him to Iceland, so Huxley thinks the small hope we may hold to salvage our individualism in the late phases will turn out futile.
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The following of import character in the novel is Mustapha Mond, a cardinal authorization figure in the World State. Mond, which is besides the Latin root for? universe? , is one of a smattering of World Controllers in the World State. As a World Controller, Mond is allowed an instruction of history which is purely out to anyone else. This means he is really knowing in all the countries of idea which are considered unsafe to the common adult male. Though he is a power figure of the evil World State, Huxley makes him an admirable character who is willing to discourse the ideals and logical thinking of the World State with John the Savage. Mond, though he means good and acts with kindness and regard towards the other characters, is still first and foremost the owner of the bondage of the universe’s population. He is cognizant of what used to be world and the current world in the World State. Mond therefore represents the following aside back closer to our present, and finally represents the sentiments of the scientific community of their part to destroying the individualism of adult male. Just like Mond, scientific discipline is conditioned to believe with pure mind about wholly barren of emotion. Huxley is connoting that it is this inability to emotionally near what they call advancement that makes them unable to see the errors they are doing and the persons it effects.
The following character is Helmholtz Watson, possibly the most ideal of the characters and possibly the best personification of Huxley himself in the novel. Watson was overconditioned and as a consequence is more rational which leads to his development of creativeness and imaginativeness. These traits allow him to see the world of the World State and he wants to alter it. Unlike Bernard who is afraid to move on his emotions, Watson
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protests the bondage of the multitudes in a verse form he publishes. He shortly realizes the dissatisfactory world of the state of affairs, though, when the conditioned people fail to grok his constructs of individualism, creativeness, and imaginativeness. Recognizing the destiny of the multitudes is sealed, Watson accepts an offer from Mond to be sent off from society to an island where others similar to him could portion his demand for sorrow and hurting as parts of the freedom of populating your ain life. Watson has therefore brought the reader all the manner back to the reader’s nowadays in the development of the future World State. He is Huxley, who thought he could see something that the general population could non in the tendency towards our complete loss of humanity at the custodies of engineering. Just like Watson, Huxley thinks that this state of affairs is ineluctable, as people can non grok or make non desire to grok the coming state of affairs and the mass revolution it would take to avoid it. The ground the common adult male can non determine this lies in the concluding character, John the Savage.
John the Savage is the bogus kid of an illicit relation between Tomikin and Linda. Upon her unsupervised gestation, Linda is exiled off from the World State and settees with a group of indigens who live outside of the World State. John is the polar antonym of the Alphas of the World State in about every manner. He has a faith, differentiates between right and incorrect ( a conscious ) , and shuns sexual dealingss before matrimony. These huge differences conflict with each of the other characters in their ain manner. Mond seems stimulated by John’s ability to discourse subjects with him but finally shuns him and exiles him from society. Bernard enjoys the enigma that John holds in his
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covering with the same emotions Bernard himself sometimes feels, but Bernard ends up rejecting these thoughts in favour of the comfort of the World State. John falls in love with Lenina who can non understand his feelings and therefore treats him as another automaton sex spouse. John, in bend, can non understand Lenina’s deficiency of feelings which finally drives him to subject himself to the civilization of the World State, which he can non bear to populate in and therefore putting to deaths himself. John represents the common adult male in the reader’s present twenty-four hours. Huxley is indicating out that unlike himself, the enlightened few who realize the deductions of current tendencies, the common adult male can non believe about or grok what the true deductions of a World State are. Due to this inability to understand, Huxley believes the multitudes will likely disregard the job, which perpetuates the inevitable creative activity of the World State at the disbursal of the very humanity of the multitudes who had the chance to halt it and did non.
The novel, Brave New World, is so much more effectual than critics will acknowledge. Huxley believed that the function of scientific discipline in engineering following the Industrial Revolution will necessarily take concentrate off from the person and all his creativeness and imaginativeness, and put it in the custodies of the engineering itself. He proves his theory excellently by demoing the inevitable phases he believes that scientific discipline will take, utilizing really streamlined characters who are simple and therefore easy to tie in with his theory. And overlying this whole sequence of inevitable events is the vertex of the events, the distopia of the World State. Huxley has created a work of political commentary in the pretense of a scientific discipline fiction novel that will trouble oneself the witting of anyone who reads it. His end is to edify those
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who refuse to be enlightened on the approaching hereafter, which he admits through the novel is a ineffectual pursuit. But nevertheless two dimensional his characters are ; nevertheless much he replaces literary licence with blatancy ; Aldous Huxley can set his head at easiness cognizing he tried to warn the universe of the immoralities of scientific discipline and engineering.
