7/16/2023 0 Comments Brave new world book review![]() ![]() Even he isn’t truly unhappy – he just wishes he had the freedom to think a little more. From Lenina, the gentle Beta girl who is happy to be had by all comers and to have as many men as she wants, to Bernard, the somewhat-unhappy philosopher type who forgets all his malcontent when he is rocketed to fame and fortune, to Bernard’s friend Helmholtz Watson, who questions the underlying world assumptions just enough to get himself exiled to Iceland. In Huxley’s world, the people traded those freedoms for happiness, peace, and civil society.īut unlike other dystopian societies where a seedy underbelly is eventually revealed or where the controlling body leads to oppression, rather than comfort, in BRAVE NEW WORLD, everyone seems largely content. But it’s been very good for happiness.” This is particularly oppositional to our current political climate – where we fight for our freedoms, whether it be the freedom to have an abortion or the right to bear arms, with ferocity. It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. Right up to the time of the Nine Years’ War…People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Later, the one of the World Controllers (one of the highest positions an Alpha can hope to achieve) notes that, in the old days, “People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Early in the book the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning makes the point that, “moral education ought never, in any circumstances, be rational.” Compare this with our own system of ethics, which is based on logic and law (and in some cases religion) and is considered to be ultimately derived from humanity’s facility for rationality. This brave new world stands in stark contrast to our own. The Alphas at the top of the pile are proud and dignified in their position, physiologically strong, intellectually secure the Epsilons at the bottom, deformed, small little people, are equally happy to be doing their simple, mindless tasks, for they are programmed to be content with their world. ![]() There’s a caste structure, but everyone’s happy with it because they are conditioned from birth to be so. Everything is systematically structured everything is scientifically rigorous and yet mindlessly stagnated at the same time. Set in a futuristic London where worship of God has been replaced with worship of Henry Ford (and expressions like “our Ford” and “Ford!” as an exclamation abound the dating system is not in After Death but in After Ford), passion have been replaced with happiness, humans are programmed from birth and conditioned through childhood to believe certain truths and to feel certain ways about their caste. So naturally, I dug in eagerly, always ready to read a classic and a book that I can potentially learn from.īRAVE NEW WORLD is a story that ducks and weaves through multiple narratives, through multiple characters, each of whom has a tale to tell and a role to play in the world. ![]() I was told that I had to read it because of the immense similarities between it and my own debut novel, THE SOWING. BRAVE NEW WORLD is considered a classic in literature, a book students are often required to read in high school, a story that shows the limitations and complexities of utopian/dystopian society. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |