"BRAVE NEW WORLD"
ALDOUS HUXLEY
For my final primary source I found a letter from Aldous Huxley to George Orwell, the author of another dystopian novel titled “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. I think that this letter really shows his concern of the direction that civilization was headed in when he wrote “Brave New World”. Previously I thought that his main worry was the trade of our freedoms for a safer more secure world. After this letter It’s quite obvious that his main concern was actually our transformation into a civilization dependent on mass production and our desire to become mass consumers. In a world such as the one portrayed in “Brave New World” there is no time for us to decide what we want to do, because we are needed for production. Figuring out what our meaning is and how to chase that meaning takes away from what the world machine needs us for. In his world he has stripped us down to our basic necessities, he get our fix in our sexual world but are no longer encouraged to have deep relationships with loved ones. He has taken our private life and essentially taken what it means to be human away. In his world art is seen as a distraction rather than something beautiful that can inspire us, and history is irrelevant because it is simply another distraction. Henry Ford accomplished an amazing thing with the mass production of the Model T. dissolving costs with assembly lines and simple tasks for many people to complete made transportation, which previously had only been a luxury available to the high class and rich, available to the middle class. Aldous Huxley seemed to base his book around a world that is controlled in a similar fashion, the people of his novel even refer to and praise Henry Ford in the sort of way that people would praise a god. The beginning of the book showed a far more efficient way of bringing new people into the world through a carefully created process of artificial insemination where babies develop and grow in a huge factory where they are exposed to different chemicals and climates in their glass containers so that they can be created into the exact human that the world machine needs. From the moment they start out in early cell development their life is already planned. In this sort of world that is so organized and controlled their is no questioning the way things are. Before reading “Brave New World” we were divided into groups to perform research on things relating to the book. In some of Aldous Huxley’s other written work he expresses his concern that the way the world is headed through new developments in science. He claims that science when applied badly by leaders with their own agenda is extremely dangerous, and the only way to combat that is with a large amount of good science applied for the better of the human race. I wonder what Aldous Huxley would think of the world today, we have fallen into a dependance on technology and science has provided plenty of evidence that the world has fallen victim as a result of this. Aldous Huxley wanted us to think of what sort of world we are creating, and although the book was written in 1932 I believe it is still relevant. With companies getting bigger, wages getting lower, and us consuming goods at an unbelievable rate we are inching closer to a world like the one in “Brave New World”.
Citation:
Usher, Shaun. Letters of Note. Manchester: Letters Of Note, 2013. Print.
Usher, Shaun. Letters of Note. Manchester: Letters Of Note, 2013. Print.