Cultural Implications of a “Brave New World”

Aldous Huxleys Brave new orbit relates a put on society in which freedom is dead, morality is forgotten, and mans prospective is bleak indeed. His pop off employs mevery parallels that jackpot be worn to societys culture today, possibly hitherto serving as a prediction of the rising 500 years from now. With that said, a loaded look will be taken into several of Huxleys themes at heart a Brave new-fangled existence to best determine the impacts of his fictional society in regards to latest pagan trends, and trends for the future tense. Huxleys Brave saucy World is set remote into the future, in 632 AF, or 2540 AD.Plotted in this extreme, Huxley has emancipated himself from any confines of modern literature and opened up the doors for a future entirely of his making, with his own rules, and own utopian predictions. For, written in 1931, Huxley was essentially inventing a society some 600 years into the future, one in which he has created a negative utopia a society in which utopian dreams of the old reformers hold back been realized, only to turn out to be nightm argons (Booker, 16), which, with the Utopian books of his time, was his very intention.With that said, Huxleys sprain should be read primarily as a word of advice against runaway capitalism and as an anticipation of coming developments in westbound consumer society (Booker, 20). Further, in a direct parallel from Huxleys work to modern society, capitalism could, very easily, take the very(prenominal) turn in an attempt to create a better, more electrostatic economy. The story itself is a frightening version of the future that could be, all the while containing social and cultural issues of the early 1900s.The cultural impact of the Industrial Revolution alone highlights a major theme within the work that the world is moving at too fast a pace for survival tempered by the loss of intellectual individuality. In Huxleys world, reproduction has no lend oneself as it is easier, and mor e economical, to essentially create new individuals via a hatchery process. conjure up is no longer the means for reproduction exclusively has been relegated the role of pleasure, where any man can have any woman, and there are no relationships based upon such intimacy.There are no emotional ties to family, loved ones, or friends, and death is accepted as the natural cycle of bearing, non to be mourned, but not really to be thought about either. Huxleys world is separated into a large caste system with Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. In this society, the upper-castes are given more time in the hatchery to develop password and physical prowess, whereas the humiliate castes are essentially poisoned to have lower discussion and lesser physical endowment.Huxleys employment of these plot conditions marks his superior theme that of the loss of individual identity. In his brave new world, good deal are mere products of creation, relegated into their castes, who live out their lives as they are supposed to, never questioning, never wondering, never living. With this basis, Huxley initiated the reinforcement of desired behavior by reward rather than by penalisation (Fjellman, 3), with the prediction that we might be meek instead by desire and pleasure (3).Then, perhaps for balance, Huxley introduces the font of Bernard Marx, a psychologist and an Alpha Plus. Despite his caste rank, Bernard is an outcaste in their society, based in general on his physical condition, which socially marks him as a lower caste because of his smaller size. Bernard, of course, falls for a Beta Plus, Lenina, who is so far in the societal doe that she cannot even question her own actions and is hurt by her friends for not being promiscuous enough.As for Lenina, Huxley reserved especial crust for the female of the species, whose presence provokes even more heated rhetoric (Higdon), and her parting the ultimate parody of the female species. Further, Huxley offers a remarkably sexist hallucination which suggestsif it does not outright saythat only Alpha men are capable of being unhappy, of being unorthodox, of being jumps. Only once, in a remark by Mustapha Mond, does the work suggest that women can become as troublesome to the State as men and suffer exile for their unorthodoxy (Hidgon).This rebel nature and ability to see the world for the reality of what is can be seen through the actions and thoughts of its four male rebels Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, John the Savage, and Mustapha Mondeach of whom has been driven in one way or another to question and to rebel against the not-to-be-questioned values of the Fordian/Freudian world of 632 A. F. Each of these men has wandered dangerously far into unorthodoxies that threaten the community, identity, and constancy of the World State (Higdon).From this basis, Bernard is the first male character to begin his rebellion when he realizes that there is something very wrong within their society that everyone has been given memories from the hatchery based on subliminal suggestions and not tangible events. Moreover, many critics refer to this rebel nature as Huxleys retort to early cinemait was far-reaching in its implications, recognizing cinemas stimulation of the proboscis as well as the mind and imagining cinemas potential to be either an instrument of social and political reform or a culture medium of cultural degeneracy (Frost).Indeed, Huxley considered music a powerful medium, once make-up that the darkness of the theater, the monotonous music induce in the audience a kind of hypnotic state (Frost), exactly like Huxleys word form does to the characters. Further, Huxleys narrative form shows the individual in society, serves to heighten the sensory faculty of his helplessness and vulnerability (Ferns, 132). Moreover, Huxleys world is an unsettling, loveless and even menacing place. This is because Huxley endows his ideal society with features calculated to ali enate his audience.Typically, reading BNW elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished not a mind of joyful anticipation. Huxley himself describes BNW as a nightmare (Pearce). Indeed, Huxley writes in his Forward that his work is a book about the future and, whatever its artistic or philosophical qualities, a book about the future can engagement us only if its prophecies look as though they might conceivably come true (Huxley, ix).For his part, Huxley avoids any real expert advancements (like computers, aviation, or even the evolution of the automobile) within Brave New World, instead focusing on the evolution of the gentlemans gentleman being and the social cultural advancements that 600 years into the future might bring. More, Huxley writes that the only scientific advances to be specifically described are those involving the application to human beings of the results of future research in biology, physiology, and psychology (ix-x). Indeed, in choosing this form, Huxley has created a society that could exist in the very near futureand not one 600 years distant.Further, it is only by means of the sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changedthe people who grade the Brave New World may not be sanebut they are not madmen, and their aim is not anarchy but social stability. It is in order to achieve stability that they carry out, by scientific means, the ultimate, personal, really revolutionary revolution (x). With this epiphany, Huxley made, for the first time, a stringently utopian society in which it is not the technological advances that relegate the future of mankind, but it is mankind themselves who make it for themselves, for the good or for the bad.And it is this ideal that makes a frightening assumption for the future of mankind. 500 years into the future, surely Huxleys world could come into fruition, but, in an even more frightening realization, Huxleys world could come into society slowly, and within a period of decades, the current society, in an attempt to create a more safe and stable life for its inhabitants, could instead transform into the dystopian world predicted in a Brave New World. Overall, Aldous Huxley, in a Brave New World demonstrates a dystopian future in which mankind is subjugated by the very essence of being human.Where pleasure is a form of reinforcing punishment and sex is nothing more than an activity of the popular. The future that Huxley predicts is, in reality, a truth that every society may yet face. For, in removing the technological advances that mark many utopian works, Huxley has given the story over to human nature itself. And, in every future, there lies a culture where stability is the goaland in that ideal, a Brave New World is not so far advanced, after all. Works Cited. Booker, Keith M. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, CT Greenwood Press, 1994. Fjellm an, Stephen M.Vinyl Leaves Walt Disney World and America. Boulder, CO Westview Press, 1992. Frost, Laura. Huxleys Feelies The Cinema of Sensation in Brave New World. Twentieth Century Literature, 52. 4 (2006) 443+. Higdon, David Leon. The Provocations of Lenina in Huxleys Brave New World. International Fiction Review, (2002) 78+. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York trivial Books, 1958. Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature. Liverpool, England Liverpool UP, 1999. Pearce, David. Aldous Huxley A Brave New World. (2008). BLTC Research. 26 June 2009 <http//www. huxley. net/>.