Embarrassed by the disclosure of his socially unacceptable emotion, the D.H.C. Scorned by women, Bernard nevertheless manages to engage the attention of Lenina Crowne, a "pneumatic" beauty who agrees to spend a vacation week with him at the remote Savage Reservation in New Mexico, a place far from the controlled, technological world of London.īefore Bernard leaves, his superior, the D.H.C., spontaneously reveals that long ago he, too, visited the Savage Reservation, and he confesses in sorrow that he lost the woman who accompanied him there. The natural processes of birth, aging, and death represent horrors in this world.īernard Marx, an Alpha-Plus (or high-caste) psychologist, emerges as the single discontented person in a world where material comfort and physical pleasure - provided by the drug soma and recreational sex - are the only concerns. The first scene, offering a tour of a lab where human beings are created and conditioned according to the society's strict caste system, establishes the antiseptic tone and the theme of dehumanized life.
Human life has been almost entirely industrialized - controlled by a few people at the top of a World State. It is a world without awe, without love, without profound beauty, it is a world without struggle and overcoming, it is a world where people will never realize their true potential, and never experience the furthest heights of human nature.Brave New World opens in London, nearly six hundred years in the future ("After Ford"). It is a world that does not nurture the greatest parts of what it means to be human. The sorts of pleasures people pursue in that world are of little substance, they are base and fleeting. However, the world of Brave New World does not seem like that great of a world to me.
It is a much nicer world than the one presented in 1984. And those who cannot enjoy this hedonistic lifestyle get sent to some isolated colony where they can live their lives as they please. From this point of view, the world Huxley created is a pretty good world indeed, most peoples live their lives with minimum suffering and with loads of pleasure. Utilitarianism is all about trying to maximize utility, with pleasure being positive utility and pain being negative utility. From the utilitarian point of view it’s actually a pretty good world, utilitarianism is roughly defined as “the greatest good for the greatest number” with “good” being pleasure and “bad” being pain. I’m pretty sure Huxley meant it to be a dystopia, however I really appreciated how it was ambiguous at to how “bad” of a dystopia it actually was, and how certain ethical views could even view it as a utopia.
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