Brave New World

The familiar routine of college life has just started to set in again. As I entered my second year of college life, I resolved to get some good reading done. My first adventure in that direction was reading this post-modernist novel, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. To the uninitiated, this name may not mean anything, but this man was a highly controversial figure of the 1930s-1950s era. He endorsed the use of cocaine, earning him the honour of appearing on the cover of the album, Lucy in the Sky, by the Beatles- an ode to the drug culture of the 70s.

Anyway, that’s enough about the author. The book itself is about this post modern society, where the world is controlled by a group of scientists. Now, these guys have created a society where the only way to create babies is through test tubes. Women no longer have to go through labour. Not only that, the babies are mass produced in laboratories.

Now, you must remember that this book was written in an era where we were still unaware of DNA, and genetics was still mostly about messing around with pea plants.

The babies are then subjected to conditioning- both physical and mental. The entire process rests on the mental conditioning. People are tailored right from birth for some job or the other- so that there are castes in society- but unlike our own caste system, this system derives stability from the artificial conditioning they receive right at birth, so that people will feel happy only if they are working in their own specialized environment. So labourers never have any inclination to get educated and get rich.

Now comes the controversial part: since babies are mass produced, there is absolutely no concept of family. No mother, no father. In fact, people are conditioned to believe that these, and particularly mothers, are bad things- not to be mentioned in polite society. Monogamy is strictly frowned upon- so no marriage. So you must have relationships, preferably physical, with maany people at once. Children, right from ages 7-8, are encouraged to indulge in erotic play, so that they reach maturity faster and start contributing to the society sooner. There is no concept of an individual- the society is supreme.

This entire set-up is based on one fundamental premise- that the aim of human life is the attainment of happiness. So no radical books or poetry is allowed to disturb the public consciousness.

On the face of it, this society is perfect. There is no crime, no want, no sorrow-even if someone dies, for you are never attached to anyone.

Huxley then introduces a man who is like us into this society. He, of course, cudnt manage to adjust, and eventually commits suicide.

The beauty of the book is in how Huxley draws parallels between the modern world and that society. I saw this interview in which Huxley says that the current trend in which we are becoming more and more enslaved to technology is leading us towards a similar society, where we can be controlled by our material desires completely.

I think this is probably the most compelling argument against technology that I know of.

Huxley also talks a lot about mental conditioning. I got interested enough to check it out on wikipedia. Here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_conditioning.
The precursors to this process are the conditioning experiments on dogs carried out by the Russian scientist, Pavlov. It's an extremely potent process- affecting your entire belief system. It leads you to wonder if there is actually any existence of an individual at all. And since all our beliefs are anyway shaped by other forces, what is actually real? Buddhism has a nice answer: the human mind is incapable of grasping true reality.

So there it is. No clear answer at all.