Brave New World Revisited

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Her name is a in-joke reference to John Keate, the notorious 19th century flogging headmaster of Eton.

George Orwell believed that Brave New World must have been partly derived from the 1921 novel We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. [55] However, in a 1962 letter to Christopher Collins, Huxley says that he wrote Brave New World long before he had heard of We. [56] According to We translator Natasha Randall, Orwell believed that Huxley was lying. [57] Kurt Vonnegut said that in writing Player Piano (1952), he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We". [58] Murray, Nicholas (13 December 2003). "Nicholas Murray on his life of Huxley". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 13 April 2020. Surely this is a powerful indictment of all synthetic pleasures? Shouldn't we echo the Savage's denunciation of soma to the Deltas: "Don't take that horrible stuff. It's poison, it's poison...Poison to the soul as well as the body...Throw it all away, that horrible poison". Likewise, don't all chemical euphoriants rob us of our humanity?H. G. Wells, "Dr. Wells", British writer and utopian socialist, whose book Men Like Gods was a motivation for Brave New World. "All's well that ends Wells", wrote Huxley in his letters, criticising Wells for anthropological assumptions Huxley found unrealistic. Reuben Rabinovitch, the Polish-Jew character on whom the effects of sleep-learning, hypnopædia, are first observed. The Arch-Community-Songster, the secular equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the World State society. He takes personal offense when John refuses to attend Bernard's party. The last chapter of the book aims to propose action which could be taken to prevent a democracy from turning into the totalitarian world described in Brave New World. In Huxley's last novel, Island, he again expounds similar ideas to describe a utopian nation, which is generally viewed as a counterpart to Brave New World. [ citation needed] Censorship [ edit ] Christopher Hitchens, "Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History." Harper's Magazine. November 1998, pp. 37–47.

Still, Huxley argues, the future will look more like Brave New World than 1984. In the West, pleasure and distraction, used by those in power, control people's spending, political loyalties, and even their thoughts. Control through reward poses a greater threat to human freedom because, unlike punishment, it can be introduced unconsciously and continued indefinitely, with the approval and support of the people being controlled. a b Office of Intellectual Freedom (9 September 2020). "Top 100 Most Banned and Challenged Books: 2010-2019". American Library Association. Archived from the original on 27 September 2020 . Retrieved 17 June 2021.

Similarly, in 1944 economist Ludwig von Mises described Brave New World as a satire of utopian predictions of socialism: "Aldous Huxley was even courageous enough to make socialism's dreamed paradise the target of his sardonic irony." [39] Fordism and society [ edit ] Goldberg, Lesley (5 May 2015). "Steven Spielberg's Amblin, Syfy Adapting Classic Novel 'Brave New World' (Exclusive)". The Hollywood Reporter. In place of the Nine Years' War — the calamity that brought the society of Brave New World into being — Huxley points to the danger of overpopulation as the trigger for tyranny. Just as the fictional war brought the call for a totalitarian World State, the chaos caused by overpopulation may be demanding control through over organization. Instead of many little businesses producing necessities, an over-organized society allows big business to mass-produce anything and everything saleable, while controlling consumer spending through commercials and social pressure. The resulting programmed consumption — "Ending is better than mending" — of Brave New World had already begun to take over the post-war world, at least in the West. a b Office of Intellectual Freedom (26 March 2013). "Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009". American Library Association. Archived from the original on 24 September 2020 . Retrieved 17 June 2021.

After the Age of Utopias came what we may call the American Age, lasting as long as the Boom. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to many to have solved the social riddle and made capitalism the common good. But it was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say blatant optimism, which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Much more than Victorian righteousness, or even Victorian self-righteousness, that optimism has driven people into pessimism. For the Slump brought even more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness, and a new bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and art. It was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old Socialism. Brave New World is more of a revolution against Utopia than against Victoria. [38]The novel opens in the World State city of London in AF (After Ford) 632 (AD 2540 in the Gregorian calendar), where citizens are engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programmes into predetermined classes (or castes) based on intelligence and labour. Lenina Crowne, a hatchery worker, is popular and sexually desirable, but Bernard Marx, a psychologist, is not. He is shorter in stature than the average member of his high caste, which gives him an inferiority complex. His work with sleep-learning allows him to understand, and disapprove of, his society's methods of keeping its citizens peaceful, which includes their constant consumption of a soothing, happiness-producing drug called "soma". Courting disaster, Bernard is vocal and arrogant about his criticisms, and his boss contemplates exiling him to Iceland because of his nonconformity. His only friend is Helmholtz Watson, a gifted writer who finds it difficult to use his talents creatively in their pain-free society. In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. [3] In 2003, Robert McCrum writing for The Observer included Brave New World chronologically at number 53 in "the top 100 greatest novels of all time", [4] and the novel was listed at number 87 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. [5] For Huxley does an effective hatchet-job on the very sort of "unnatural" hedonic engineering that most of us so urgently need. One practical consequence has been to heighten our already exaggerated fears of state-sanctioned mood-drugs. Hence millions of screwed-up minds, improvable even today by clinically-tested mood-boosters and anti-anxiety agents, just suffer in silence instead. In part this is because people worry they might become zombified addicts; and in part because they are unwilling to cast themselves as humble supplicants of the medical profession by taking state-rationed "antidepressants". Either way, the human cost in fruitless ill-being is immense.