Transcript Slide 1

Brave New World:
For I Found I’m Bound,
Only Too Late
Feraco
Myth to Science Fiction + SDAIE
3 April 2015
I’ve freely criticized Huxley for some of his
choices, but I want to pause and give him credit for
creating Mustapha Mond.
I think that lesser writers would have botched
Mond’s characterization in any number of ways; how
easy is it to make a World Controller into an evil,
unreasonable villain, a oppressive avatar of cruelty,
or an abusive, cackling figure driven mad by power?
For that matter, how easy would it have been to
portray the leaders of the World State as soulless?
Huxley does the opposite: he gives Mond a rich
inner life, an understandable past, and – most
importantly – the ability to perceive, reason, and
explain.
He opposes John, which I suppose makes him the
book’s antagonist…and yet he’s not opposed, not
personally, to the things John values and seeks.
This makes him a tough figure on whom to affix a
label, and while we may get frustrated with him –
wouldn’t it be nice to believe we’d behave differently
if we knew what Mond did and enjoyed his influence
to boot? – I don’t think Brave New World ends up in
your twenty-first-century curriculum without the
nuance and ambiguity his presence lends the text.
And his discussion with John, in its
sweeping evaluation of the course humanity
charted in order to reach the modern world,
touches on just about all of our curriculum’s
pet concerns – not just the need for
enlightenment, security, identity,
independence, and love, but the meaning of
life and death, the nature of the human soul,
the construction of morality and belief
systems, the pursuit of happiness, the merits of
both free choice and responsibility, and the
necessity of embracing change even as we
celebrate our histories and leave behind our
legacies.
Just as with Chapter 16, I find it difficult to
stop excerpting it; in these chapters and these
chapters alone, I find myself nodding my head
at what Huxley writes – not just at the Savage’s
words, but at Mond’s as well.
I like that, when it comes time to talk
about God, John is struck dumb at first:
“not even Shakespeare” contains the
words he wants.
After calmly noting that art, science,
and religion were the cost of human
happiness – give those up, and you’ll be
blissful – Mond confesses that God
interests him as well, revealing a
collection of “pornography” (religious
texts and writings) that rivals his
collection of orthodox literature.
As he wryly puts it, he’s put “God in
the safe and Ford on the shelves,” and
when John protests the current
arrangement, Mond says something
that still resonates in our modern times.
“But if you know about God, why
don’t you tell them?” asked the
Savage indignantly.“Why don’t you
give them these books about God?”
“For the same reason as we don’t
give them Othello: they’re old;
they’re about God hundreds of
years ago. Not about God now.”
“But God doesn’t change.”
“Men do, though.”
“What difference does that
make?”
“All the difference in the world.”
We focus a great deal in Myth to Science Fiction
on stories, from the fictions we write and pass on to
our children to the elaborate backstories and
“mythologies” of our memories (not to mention the
archetypal patterns we unconsciously organize
those memories into, forming the foundations of
our identities).
But we do so in a way that pays particular
attention to the ways in which these stories persist,
echoing quietly in the background of our
thoroughly modern tellings.
At the same time, we’ve emphasized the need
for you to look forward as you claim more and more
of this world for yourselves – looking backward for
guidance and inspiration, looking around to
identify the causes to champion and problems to
solve, and looking forward as you dream of a world
reshaped in the wake of those problems’ passing.
What we haven’t emphasized – purposefully, at
least – are the ways people themselves will change
along with the world around them…how they will
come to define themselves in a modern age that
grows simultaneously faster, louder, and colder.
Mond’s not saying that God’s fictional; he’s
pointing out that our relationship with the divine,
our conduit, our only means of communication
with it, has been through stories, through writings,
through words.
When the language changes, when human
experience changes, those same words suddenly
ring more hollowly: the message is just as profound
as ever, but the audience has lost the capacity to
appreciate it.
You can see this same phenomenon playing out
in the way we relate to other types of art: our films,
our music, and yes, our literature, are all so
different from their former forms that audiences
conditioned to accept them reject their
predecessors.
We changed, Mond says, and in changing lost
the Word; lost it because we lost our ability to
understand it and, in doing so, lost our need for it
as well.
For the reason we once understood the divine
was due to need…and as Mond says at the end of
his readings of Newman and de Biran, we don’t
need it anymore.
Newman: ‘We are not our own any more
than what we possess is our own. We did not
make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over
ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are
God’s property. Is it not our happiness thus to
view the matter? Is it any happiness or any
comfort, to consider that we are our own? It
may be thought so by the young and
prosperous. These may think it a great thing to
have everything, as they suppose, their own
way – to depend on no one – to have to think of
nothing out of sight, to be without the
irksomeness of continual acknowledgment,
continual prayer, continual reference of what
they do to the will of another. But as time goes
on, they, as all men, will find that
independence was not made for man – that it is
an unnatural state – will do for a while, but will
not carry us on safely to the end …’
De Biran: ‘A man grows old; he feels in himself that
radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort,
which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus,
imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the
notion that this distressing condition is due to some
particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes
to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a
horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and
of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion
as they advance in years. But my own experience has given
me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or
imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we
grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm,
as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less
excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working,
less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in
which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as
from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the
source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now
that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and
charms has begun to leak away from us, now that
phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by
impressions from within or from without, we feel the need
to lean on something that abides, something that will never
play us false – a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth.
Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is
of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that
experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other
losses.’
Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned
back in his chair.“One of the numerous things
in heaven and earth that these philosophers
didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his
hand),“us, the modern world.‘You can only be
independent of God while you’ve got youth and
prosperity; independence won’t take you
safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth
and prosperity right up to the end. What
follows? Evidently, that we can be independent
of God.‘The religious sentiment will
compensate us for all our losses.’ But there
aren’t any losses for us to compensate;
religious sentiment is superfluous. And why
should we go hunting for a substitute for
youthful desires, when youthful desires never
fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go
on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very
last? What need have we of repose when our
minds and bodies continue to delight in
activity? Of consolation, when we have soma?
Of something immovable, when there is the
social order?”
“Then you think there is no God?”
“No, I think there quite probably is one.”
“Then why?...”
Mustapha Mond checked him.“But he
manifests himself in different ways to
different men. In premodern times he
manifested himself as the being that’s
described in these books. Now…”
“How does he manifest himself now?”
asked the Savage.
“Well, he manifests himself as an
absence; as though he weren’t there at all.”
“That’s your fault.”
“Call it the fault of civilization. God isn’t
compatible with machinery and scientific
medicine and universal happiness.You must
make your choice. Our civilization has
chosen machinery and medicine and
happiness. That’s why I have to keep these
books locked up in the safe. They’re smut.”
From here, John and Mond go back
and forth, with John growing
increasingly agitated.
You’ll notice that Mond doesn’t need
to interrupt John, and that he routinely –
almost unfailingly – speaks in
paragraphs.
John is restricted to sharp rejoinders,
probing questions, and various oneliners.
He’s not Mond’s intellectual equal,
which would matter more if the stakes
were higher.
It’s amazingly easy to forget, while
reading this chapter, that there are no
stakes: the Controller’s already made
his decision, and it’s not as though
John’s trying to talk him out of it.
As the Savage and the Controller spar over
virtually everything – the worthiness of instinct and
the worthlessness of conditioning, the virtue of
solitude and the necessity of its prevention – the
conversation slides inevitably to Shakespeare.
I’m fascinated by the Bard’s influence on the
text, and impressed by the sheer number of ways
Huxley finds to work him in.
Readers of Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and
Romeo and Juliet will recognize the familiar
touchstones of those earlier works, from the
“foolish lover who cannot understand his own
emotions” to the Lear figure raging and screaming
against the injustices inflicted by a perverse
universe.
Yet it is The Tempest that provides Brave New
World with its name – a very different play from
those blood-soaked tragedies that preceded it.
The Tempest was mystical, wondrous, bitterly
funny and poignant; it was probably Shakespeare’s
last solo venture as a playwright, and critics have
long argued that he consciously wrote it as a swan
song.
Brave New World is also bitterly funny and
poignant, but its mysticism and wonder are
intentionally curdled.
John, like the main characters in The Tempest,
is a shipwreck survivor in two directions, stranded
outside of the State that unintentionally but
irrevocably produced him and the Reservation that
housed him.
He walks not so much between both worlds as
apart from them, stranded in a mindset that only
fits a time that faded long ago.
Where he sees degradation, Mond sees
entertainment; where he sees God, Mond sees a
vacuum.
And where he sees virtue in self-denial, Mond
sees the unnatural and unstable forces that tore
apart his society’s predecessors, the mad passions
and twisted urges that unleashed war for a good
decade on a global scale.
The only way to be safe, Mond argues, is to
pursue “self-indulgence up to the very limits
imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the
wheels stop turning.”
And as for God?
“But God’s the reason for everything noble and fine and
heroic. If you had a God…”
“My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond,“civilization
has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are
symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized
society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble
or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable
before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where
there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to
be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended – there,
obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there
aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to
prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such
thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you
can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to
do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses
are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations
to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything
unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always
soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always
soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to
make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could
only accomplish these things by making a great effort and
after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or
three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be
virtuous now.You can carry at least half your morality about in
a bottle. Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.”
“But the tears are necessary. Don’t you
remember what Othello said? ‘If after every
tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till
they have wakened death.’ There’s a story one of
the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of
Mátaski. The young men who wanted to marry her
had to do a morning’s hoeing in her garden. It
seemed easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes,
magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn’t
stand the biting and stinging. But the one that
could – he got the girl.”
“Charming! But in civilized countries,” said the
Controller,“you can have girls without hoeing for
them, and there aren’t any flies or mosquitoes to
sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago.”
The Savage nodded, frowning.“You got rid of
them.Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of
everything unpleasant instead of learning to put
up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to
take arms against a sea of troubles and by
opposing end them…but you don’t do either.
Neither suffer nor oppose.You just abolish the
slings and arrows. It’s too easy.”
He was suddenly silent, thinking of his mother. In
her room on the thirty-seventh floor, Linda had
floated in a sea of singing lights and perfumed
caresses – floated away, out of space, out of time, out
of the prison of her memories, her habits, her aged
and bloated body. And Tomakin, ex-Director of
Hatcheries and Conditioning, Tomakin was still on
holiday – on holiday from humiliation and pain, in a
world where he could not hear those words, that
derisive laughter, could not see that hideous face, feel
those moist and flabby arms round his neck, in a
beautiful world…
“What you need,” the Savage went on,“is
something with tears for a change. Nothing costs
enough here.”
(“Twelve and a half million dollars,” Henry Foster
had protested when the Savage told him that.“Twelve
and a half million–that’s what the new Conditioning
Centre cost. Not a cent less.”)
“Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that
fortune, death and danger dare, even for an eggshell.
Isn’t there something in that?” he asked, looking up
at Mustapha Mond.“Quite apart from God – though of
course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there
something in living dangerously?”
“There’s a great deal in it,” the Controller
replied.“Men and women must have their
adrenals stimulated from time to time.”
“What?” questioned the Savage,
uncomprehending.
“It’s one of the conditions of perfect
health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S.
treatments compulsory.”
“V.P.S.?”
“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly
once a month. We flood the whole system
with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological
equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic
effects of murdering Desdemona and being
murdered by Othello, without any of the
inconveniences.”
“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller.“We prefer
to do things comfortably.”
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I
want poetry, I want real danger, I want
freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond,“you’re
claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly,
“I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and
ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis
and cancer; the right to have too little to eat;
the right to be lousy; the right to live in
constant apprehension of what may happen
to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right
to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every
kind.”There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
That question John asks –“Isn’t there something
in living dangerously?” – is, of course, the question
that we’ve grappled with all semester – all year,
really, if you read The Inferno (Dante descends),
Gilgamesh (losing a friend), King Lear (losing one’s
power and mind), and Arthur C. Clarke (leaving the
planet at Childhood’s End) with me.
It’s also not an easy question to answer.
Living dangerously (literally speaking) appeals
more to people with no responsibilities, for obvious
reasons: the childless 22-year-old can kill himself
bungee-jumping with minimal consequences to
the rest of the world (I promise that sounds harsher
than I intend), but the father of four has no
business leaving his children fatherless just so he
can get an adrenal kick and the feeling of falling,
falling, falling…
And from a figurative standpoint, you might
remember clutching a coin you’d been perfectly
happy to flip ten minutes earlier as you watched
me write that extra set of numbers next to your
own, the 7 and 3 representing your hypothetical
children’s hypothetical fates, and putting it away.
While that’s an understandable impulse,
it’s also one that we must – and here I pause to
re-emphasize – must control if we are to move
forward.
Our lives as adults come to be defined by
the tension between what we want, what we
fear, and what we believe.
We do not always navigate that tension well:
look at Cady Heron’s naked scheming costing
her every human connection she valued in
Mean Girls, 1984’s Oceania’s waking
nightmare crushing its people into powder –
even at Tommy’s desperate choices, and what
they cost him, in The Fountain.
And just as our individual decisions stem
from that tension, as well as our increasing
mastery of it – it gets easier to make decisions
when we come to want less with age – our
society mirrors our actions, wishes, and wants.
Progress depends on risk because any
move forward is risky: we don’t know when
we’ll die, just that we’re alive in the present
and dead in the future.
With every passing second, we get closer
to making that “future” a present; we don’t
get safer with any passing second because
all of them take us closer to death.
Yet rather than sit paralyzed by the fear of
what may come, we find it necessary to go
out and live our lives – because every
moment that doesn’t contain our death is
one that should be spent on life.
Some moments should be spent on study,
on work, on play, on love, on searching, on
longing…and on planning, in the hopes that
future moments can be spent just as well.
Society’s planners must take risks, or society
stagnates: God goes in the safe, science becomes
the enemy, and the “individual” disappears along
with the things that once defined him.
Caution can minimize tragedy, but we’ll never
be safe enough to be invulnerable: no one can stop
the clock, and no one can control all the myriad
factors that influence our existences.
So while it’s important to be cautious, it’s
equally important to be curious; the person who
can balance both is the person who can be
courageous, because he knows what to risk and
what to protect.
He’s the person who knows to leave the lab and
take the walk in the snow.
He’s the person who knows to fall in love, even if
the price is eventual heartbreak.
And he’s the person who, having come face to
face with the World Controller, does not fall,
groveling, to the floor, begging helplessly to
change what can’t be changed: he stands, toe to toe
with power and intellect personified, and speaks
his mind, because that’s the decision that the
moment calls for.
No one, try as we might, knows exactly
how another person can learn to navigate
that balance; experience is a firm teacher,
and philosophy a stern tutor.
It’s difficult to avoid the assumption that
you’ve learned everything you’ll need to
learn; it’s equally difficult to avoid choking
yourself off from possibilities just because
you’re satisfied with what you’ve obtained or
achieved.
After all, you have to be satisfied at some
point if you want a stable marriage, if you
want to hold a job for any length of time, if
you want to own a home, or if you want to be
a consistent, responsible presence in the
lives of your friends, family members, and
community at large.
For those of you who’ve read Siddhartha, I
can say: you have to break the samsara cycle
somehow.
More than anything else, Brave New
World warns against reaching that
point of satisfaction too soon, of ending
all exploration because you assume
you’ve solved everything you needed to
solve.
The oddly Buddhist-nightmare-vision
of the World State sees people leading
meaningless lives defined only by the
temporary and ephemeral, by pleasure
instead of profundity.
A world without growth isn’t just a
false safety: it’s fundamentally at odds
with everything we choose to perceive
about human nature.
If we are to grow, if we are to make
progress, if we are to build a better
world, we won’t do so simply by doing
what we’ve always done, or by doing
what we used to do.
That’s no better than writing the
same stories we’ve always written.
During the first semester, I spoke
about the angst my freshmen-with-anasterisk Creative Writing students felt
when I told them about the Seven
Stories, about how purposeless they felt
when it seemed like “everything had
been written already.”
But that’s not true.
The point of the archetype is not to allow
the author to be lazy; it’s to allow him to tap
into something larger, into a foundation from
which he can reach ever greater heights.
Our stories stand on the shoulders of
Gilgamesh, on Dante, and, yes, on Brave New
World and 1984; you cannot conceive of how
differently your generation would seek
entertainment had the Dystopians never
published their works.
Yet the authors whose works can’t help but
be influenced by Huxley and Orwell don’t do
either gentleman a disservice.
When echoes of Brave New World and 1984
ring out in the V for Vendettas of the world, the
old stories are revived, rejuvenated, given new
purpose; one can’t help but think of the tale
Izzi tells in The Fountain about Moses
Morales’s father.
Our stories rest on the foundations
our forefathers laid down – working
“into the wood, into the bloom” – only
to become the foundation for those
who follow them.
When Huxley writes Brave New
World, Shakespeare flies with the
birds.
And that, tragically, is the price the
World State pays: not just art, religion,
and science, but definition,
foundation, and meaning.
That is the cost John rejects, and
with good reason.
So claim the right to be unhappy
because, in doing so, you claim the right
to be happy, the right to seek truths for
yourself, the right to live life organically
and truthfully, the right to earn what
you receive, the right to produce
something piercing, the right to tap into
whatever’s larger than yourself, the
right to be more than a body composed
of chemicals that the World State would
recycle after your death.
We must embrace the life we’ve
chosen, not the life we’ve been
conditioned to choose…and do the best
we can in the time we’re allotted, never
knowing when we’ll run out of time to
open our arms and eyes.
Like I said earlier, if Brave New World
ends there, at the close of the final
battle, I think the novel concludes
perfectly.
There’s just enough closure to let the
reader feel like he witnessed a complete
story, and just enough ambiguity to let
that same reader ponder what he’s just
absorbed for a few days.
Perhaps I wouldn’t feel this way if I
hadn’t disliked Chapter 18 so
profoundly the first time I read it.
I understand why Huxley ends the
book the way he does, but I had a
visceral negative response to John’s
ultimate downfall.
Honestly, I don’t know what you do
with the Savage after that conversation
with Mond that’s any better than what
Huxley came up with.
But I don’t think you need to do
anything with him.
Some stories don’t demand closure;
in other cases, the imagined
consequence proves superior to the
explicit one.
In Brave New World’s case, I think
Huxley’s run up against both: he crafted
a story that doesn’t demand an ending
(it’s not like there’s much of a plot or
sense of suspense!) and grafted an
unsatisfying one on anyway.
To be fair, Huxley’s ending does have thematic
resonance.
Huxley ultimately decides to force John to
confront the knowledge that a) he’ll never be left
alone while he’s in the World State, b) that he’s not
strong enough to keep all of his desires in check,
and c) that he’s unable to deal with violating his
principles in order to satisfy his desires.
John’s defining characteristic is inner turmoil,
and it makes sense that his defeat would lie in his
own inability to grapple with something (which
recalls the “broken coping skills” motif).
But I didn’t want John’s story to end that way –
not because I like the character (I never grew as
fond of him as I did of Winston; John’s too unstable
and prone to violence for me to identify with him),
but because it’s the opposite of 1984’s ending.
It’s interesting – I don’t feel like Winston’s
defeat betrays the character because I feel
everything in that story crescendos towards a
single conclusion, and the fact that we don’t want
to accept that conclusion as inevitable just adds to
Orwell’s themes.
With Brave New World, I felt like you could
go anywhere after Chapter 17 – like John
doesn’t have to die, or even be defeated.
That’s why I don’t feel like the ending is
necessary – it’s perfunctory, and I can’t
convince myself that Huxley picked the best,
most profound, or even most interesting
possibility.
Even Huxley later admitted that he messed
up his conclusion.
As a young man, he says, he was blind to the
third option in front of John – that he could find
a middle ground in a society where science
can be reined in until it serves man once more
instead of the other way around.
This was one of the reasons he came full
circle, ideologically speaking, over the course
of his career, and why Island was so different
from Brave New World.
Ending issues aside, though, there’s a lot to
like in Brave New World.
It’s a huge literary touchstone, inspiring
scores of tributes and knock-offs.
As far as our curriculum is concerned, it’s a
perfect counterpart to 1984 – not simply
because its author had such a profound effect
on Orwell’s career, but because it allows us to
continue looking at that book’s ideas and even
reassess its conclusions.
As we move into the last quarter of the year,
our next book (Never Let Me Go) will finish our
study of these themes, and will (hopefully!)
help you enter the next phase of your lives with
a richer and more comprehensive framework
of beliefs, ideas, and philosophies.
And we’ll try our own hand at making a
brave new world – because it’s your
generation’s turn to try!