The brave new world

3. A. Huxley 's novel "Brave New World".
As Huxley himself wrote, Brave New World was largely a polemical response to Wells's model of an ideal "scientific" society in Men Like Gods: "I am writing a novel about a future Brave New World, about the horror of Wells ' and about rebellion against her”. And later in "Brave New World Revisited," Huxley notes that the theme of the book is not the progress of science itself, but how this progress affects the personality of a person. In comparison with other works of dystopians , Huxley's novel is distinguished by the material well-being of the world, not false, falsified wealth, as in Orwell's "1984", where a person's mental suffering is closely related to his well-being, but really absolute abundance, which ultimately leads to the degradation of the individual. . Man as a person is the main object of Huxley's analysis. And Brave New World, more than other works of this genre, is relevant precisely because of Huxley's emphasis on the state of the human soul. In a world of dumb assembly line labor and equally dumb mechanical physiology, free, natural man is as exotic entertainment for a crowd of programmed savages as a “ stereo howling movie about a gorilla wedding” or a “sperm whale love life ”.
A. Huxley , when creating a model of the future "brave new world", synthesized the most dehumanizing features of "barracks socialism" and modern Huxley's society of mass consumption ­. However, Huxley considered the "truncation" of the individual to a size subject to cognition and programming, not just belonging to some particular social system, but the natural result of any attempt to scientifically determine the world. "Brave New World" is the only thing humanity can reach on the path of "scientific" reorganization of its own being. This is a world in which all human desires are predetermined: those that society can satisfy are satisfied, and those that cannot be fulfilled are “removed” even before birth thanks to the appropriate “genetic policy” in the test tubes from which the “population” is derived. “There is no civilization without stability. There is no social stability without individual ... Hence the main goal: all forms of individual life ... must be strictly regulated. Thoughts, actions and feelings of people must be identical, even the innermost desires of one must coincide with the desires of millions of others. Any violation of identity leads to a violation of ­stability, threatens the entire society" such is the ­truth of the "brave new world". This truth comes to life in the words of the Supreme Controller: “Everyone is happy. Everyone gets what they want, and no one ever wants what they can't get. They are provided, they are safe; they never get sick; they are not afraid of death; they are not annoyed by fathers and mothers; they do not have wives, children and lovers who can deliver strong feelings. We adapt them, and after that they cannot behave differently than the way they should”.⁵
One of the unshakable foundations of Huxley's anti-utopian "brave ­new world" is the complete subordination of Truth to the specific utilitarian needs of society. “Science, like art, is incompatible with happiness. Science is dangerous; she must be kept chained and muzzled , ” says the Supreme ­Controller, recalling the time when, according to his present ideas, they justly wanted to punish him for going too far in his research in the field of physics.
The world in the novel is one big state. All people are equal, but they are separated from each other by belonging to a caste. People who have not yet been born are immediately divided into higher and lower by chemical action on their embryos. "The ideal population distribution is an iceberg, 8/9 below the waterline, 1/9 above" (words of the Supreme Controller). The number of such categories ­in the "brave new world" is very large - "alpha", "beta", "gamma", "delta" and so on alphabetically - up to "epsilon". It is noteworthy here that if the proles from "1984" are just illiterate people who, apart from the simplest work, do not seem to be able to do anything, then the epsilons in the "brave new world" are specially created mentally handicapped for the most dirty and routine work. And consequently, the higher castes consciously refuse any contact with the lower ones. Although, that epsilons, that alpha pluses , all go through a kind of “adaptation” process through a 2040-meter conveyor belt. But the Supreme Controllers can no longer enter the category of “happy babies”, their understanding is accessible ­but everything that is available to an ordinary “maladapted” person, including the awareness of the very “white lie” on which the “brave new world” is built ". Even the forbidden Shakespeare is accessible to their understanding: “You see, this is forbidden.
Huxley speaks of a self-conscious future as something taken for ­granted—and in Brave New World we are presented with a society that emerged from the will of the majority. True, against the background of the majority, individuals arise who are trying to oppose their free choice to universal programmed ­happiness - these are, for example, two “alpha pluses” Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, who, moreover, cannot fully fit into the structure of the “brave new world” because of their physical handicaps; "what they both shared was the knowledge that they were individuals." And Bernard Marx, in his inner protest, comes to such a maxim: “I want to be myself ... A disgusting myself. But not by someone else, albeit a wonderful ­one. And by chance, the Savage, taken out of the reservation, who discovered “Time, and Death, and God,” even becomes an ­ideological opponent of the Supreme Controller: “I’d rather be unhappy than have that false, deceitful happiness that you have here ”. In short, Huxley's novel Brave ­New World presents the struggle between the forces that affirm a dystopian world and the forces that deny it. There is even an element of spontaneous rebellion - the Savage shouting "I came to give you freedom !" is trying to disrupt the distribution of the state drug - soma. However, this rebellion of the foundations of a dystopian society is not shocking - in order to eliminate its consequences, it was enough to spray the state ­drug soma in the air from a helicopter and put on the air the "Synthetic speech "Antiriot-2". The desire for self-consciousness and free moral choice in this world cannot become an "epidemic" - only the elect are capable of this, and these units are urgently isolated from "happy babies". In a word, Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson will be sent "to the islands" specially designed for enlightened intellectuals, and the freedom-loving speeches of the Savage became a universal laughingstock - realizing this, the Savage hanged himself. “Slowly, very slowly, like two slowly moving compass needles, the legs moved from left to right; north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west; then they stopped and after a few seconds slowly began to turn back, from right to left. South, southwest, south, southeast, east …”— this is how the novel ends. At the same time, this happens against the background of joyful exclamations of the inhabitants ­of the “brave new world”, thirsting for an unusual spectacle. Thus, it turns out that it is not those who control the dystopian world that are pushing the Savage to leave the life, but its ordinary inhabitants who are happy in this world, and therefore this world, once built, is doomed within the framework of the model created by Huxley to stability and prosperity.⁶
In most of the works cited ­, "dystopian" societies are shown in their heyday - and, nevertheless, further selection of human material in the name of higher goals in these societies continues . » . In the Orwellian dystopian world, social selection is carried out through "pulverization": "... Purges and pulverizations were a necessary part of the ­state mechanics. Even the arrest of a person did not always mean death. Sometimes he was released, and before his execution he walked free for a year or two. And it has also happened that a man who had long been considered dead appeared like a ghost in an open trial and testified against hundreds of people before disappearing - this time for good ­". Firefighters in R. Bradbury 's dystopian society burn books and, if necessary ­, people: "Fire solves everything !". The Supreme Controller from Brave New World is more humane. He sends “ ­to the troublemakers” “on the islands” - in a society like them - and, as a human being, envies them. But the Supreme Controller also admits in a conversation with a group of exiles: “It's good that there are so many islands in the world! I don't know what we would do without them? They would probably put all of you in a death cell” . “For 1931, this was a bold ­and terrible warning. Only a few years passed, and the islands were really missed”, and the “death chamber” became a reality on an all - ­European scale.
The presence of typological parallels that connect the most diverse ­dystopias in terms of their artistic structure is explained, first of all, by the presence of objective trends in the development of society, which could really stand out precisely in those dystopian forms that are discussed in this work. The future in the artistic world of a number of European and American " anti -utopians " - in particular, J. Orwell, R. Bradbury and especially A. Huxley - is to a ­lesser extent permeated with organized violence, although it does not completely abandon it. “All this happened without any intervention from above, from the government. It did not start with any prescriptions, not with orders or censorship restrictions. Not! Technology, mass consumption — that, praise the Lord, has led to the current situation” — this is what R. Bradbury sees as the origins of the coming anti-utopian universe ­. And “brave new world” Huxley generally ­appeals to fear in the last place - he appeals, first of all, to a person who consumes and strives to consume. Huxley's dystopian world began by drawing heavily on the givens of mass consumption ­and emerging "mass culture." In 1927, Huxley introduces into the artistic fabric of his novel These Barren Leaves the prophetic words uttered by the apparently "autobiographical" hero, Mr. Chalifer : ­not of a few thousand people, but of millions ... In a few generations, perhaps the whole planet will be occupied by one large American-speaking tribe, consisting of countless individuals who think and act in exactly the same way” . A few years later ­Huxley would model such a society in Brave New World. In this regard, one can agree with P. Firshaw that Huxley “most likely did not want to make his novel a satire for the future. For, after all, what is satire for the future good for? The only future ­that makes sense is the future that already exists in the present, and Huxley's dystopian Brave New World is ultimately "an attack on the concept of a future ­that exists in the present". But, it must be admitted that Huxley is still a satirist. And when comparing his novel with J. Orwell's dystopia "1984", the presence of irony is obvious . If the release of tension through synthetic gin in 1984 is no surprise, then in Huxley, precisely because of his sarcastic couplets, the acceptance of soma generates great interest, and singles out soma as an important regulator of mass self-consciousness:
Half a gram is better than swearing and drama ;
A person accepts soma - time stops running,
A person quickly forgets what was and what will be.
The attitude of the "new worlds" to history is indicative. In "1984" the past is constantly being replaced, there are entire centers for the elimination of objectionable historical facts. Huxley treats the past differently. History is presented as completely useless information, and indeed it is easier to discourage interest than to constantly eliminate everything. ““History is complete nonsense” ... He made a sweeping gesture, as if with an invisible whisk he brushed off a handful of dust, and that dust was Ur Chaldean and Harappa, swept away the ancient cobwebs, and that was Thebes, Babylon, Knossos , Mycenae. Shirk , shirk with a whisk, - and where are you, Odysseus, where is Job, Gautama, Jesus ? Shirk !..”.⁷
In 1959, in his essay ­Brave New World Revisited, Huxley, after tracing the evolution of Western civilization from the time of Brave New World to the time of this essay, came to the conclusion that there was a consistent and very rapid movement precisely in the direction where the final point is a world order, essentially akin to the anti-utopian world order of the “brave new world”. And if, while working on the novel Brave New World, as Huxley admits in the essay Brave New World Revisited, he still believed that the triumph of such a world order was possible, but in a very distant future, now, at the end of 1950 -x, such a world order will be revealed to him as a near ­future. At the same time, in his essay, Huxley scientifically analyzes the factors of real life that objectively contribute to the triumph of just such a world order: this is, first of all, overpopulation, which makes the concentration of power in one hand vital; further - these are the achievements of science, starting with the discoveries of I.P. Pavlov (it is noteworthy that in the anti-utopian "brave new world" Pavlov is canonized - along with Ford, Freud, Marx and Lenin - as the creator of the scientific justification for the system of manipulating people at an unconscious level) and ending with scientifically organized propaganda; finally, it is the creation of drugs related to the state drug soma in the “brave new world”.
Substantiating the reality of danger, Huxley in this essay enters into an argument with J. Orwell. If J. Orwell ­saw the main danger to civilization in the formation of scientifically organized systems of suppression, then Huxley believed that the achievements of science of the 20th century make possible a much less crude in its external forms, but no less effective mass “ deindividualization ”, based not on ­direct violence, but on the exploitation of human nature. Actually, even in his letter to J. Orwell dated October 21, 1949, Huxley, recognizing Orwell's novel "1984" as a serious cultural phenomenon, nevertheless, will enter into an argument with Orwell precisely on the problem of the real prospects of society. In this regard, Huxley writes: “In reality, the unlimited implementation of the “boot in the face” policy seems doubtful. I am convinced that the ruling oligarchy will find a less difficult and less costly way of governing and satisfying the lust for power, and that this will be reminiscent of what I described in Brave New World . Further in this letter, Huxley describes the achievements ­of science that make such a course of events possible (the discoveries of Freud, the introduction of hypnosis into psychotherapeutic practice, the discoveries of barbiturates, etc.) - as a result ­, according to Huxley, “... Already during the lifetime of the next generation, rulers of the world will realize that "adaptation in infancy" and hypnosis, coupled with the use of drugs, are more effective tools of management than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be satisfied by making people love their slavery as fully as and through scourging and "driving in" obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of 1984 is destined to turn into a nightmare of a world that has more points of contact with what I imagined in Brave New World . In his essay "Brave New World Revisited" (1959), Huxley continues his argument with Orwell by arguing that a potential " deindividualized " society would not, as ­Orwell modeled, be based on direct violence, that it would be a "non-violent totalitarianism” and that even ­all the external attributes of democracy are preserved – precisely because of the correspondence of this kind of world order to the basic laws of human nature. John Wayne, arguing with Huxley, the author of the novel Brave New World, says that the real threat to the civilized world lies not at all where Huxley sees it, not in the movement ­towards personality-erasing "harmony" and in the growth of mass consumption, but in the coming overpopulation, depletion of natural resources and the resulting tight control of consumption - “Huxley depicted the beautiful old world, the world experiencing a great material flowering ... In the world we are going to, the danger will be the worship of the devil and burning witches" ⁸. As for the danger of the embodiment of the dystopian world from Huxley's novel "Brave New World" - then Huxley ­, considering such an outcome to the very end of his life as quite possible and unacceptable in its pure form, nevertheless, includes elements of compromise in his later "positive programs" with this kind of world order. And if for Huxley during the creation of the novel "Brave New World" there was a two-way choice: either "harmony" in the version of "Brave New World" - or the chaos and suffering of the modern ­Huxley world as an inevitable price for freedom, the knowledge of Good and Evil, finally - for the preservation of the "I", then Huxley of the last years of his life will strive for the convergence of these models of the world order - in the name of preserving freedom, knowledge and Personality, but at the same time - and overcoming suffering as an integral part of human existence.
4. Socio-philosophical views of A. Huxley .
It is obvious that the dystopian line in Huxley's work is inextricably linked with his agnostic ­-pessimistic concept of the world, with his idea of the impossibility of knowing objective reality in general and the objective basis of any value in particular. The objective and subjective content of any value in Huxley's artistic world is separated by an insurmountable wall. Huxley rushes about in impotence in search of the Absolute. Values, which at that time reveal in Huxley's eyes their non- absoluteness , relative subjectivity ­, etc., henceforth lose their objective significance for him in general. Hence the absolute doubt about the objective, universal nature of any real value. In fact, Huxley faces two fundamentally separated sets of values. On the one hand, there may be objective, higher, “absolute” values that exist and – again, possibly – realized on Earth, namely, Truth, Goodness and Beauty. On the other hand, there are subjective, relative “values”, the main criterion of which is compliance with easily calculated utilitarian needs of a person. For Huxley, this is the only valuable reality accessible to the human mind, and this reality already determines both “applied” moral norms developed to streamline utilitarian needs, and “applied” entertainment art. The connection between the hypothetically existing absolute Good and these particular moral norms, as well as the connection between the no less hypothetical higher Beauty and the utilitarian "beauty", did not exist for Huxley ­. A person in the artistic world of Huxley finds himself in two completely unrelated dimensions. On the one hand, a person in the artistic world of Huxley is endowed with the ability to allow into his horizons the categories of the Absolute and the anti-Absolute, to think in the categories of Good and Evil, the Beautiful and the Ugly, to rise into the “abyss above us” and, accordingly, descend into the “abyss below us”. In this dimension, the human mind is doomed to absolute doubt. But, on the other hand, a person in the artistic world of Huxley has a number of materially expressed utilitarian needs and is able to adequately — at the empirical and logical levels — realize their origins, and therefore regulate their satisfaction within society. Such a "two-level" interpretation of a person determines Huxley's position as a social thinker, in particular, his assessment of a person's ability to rationally reorganize his being. That Absolute of the social order, to which, in the end, all reformers and revolutionaries aspire, is for Huxley a society of absolute freedom, in which there would be no contradictions between the will of an individual person and the will of other people, society as a whole. However, striving for such freedom, a person within the framework of Huxley's artistic conception is simultaneously afraid of it—not wanting to be known, calculated, programmed in all its manifestations: he is afraid of such freedom, turning into the highest unfreedom, and therefore constantly demonstrates his unknowability. That is why, according to Huxley, the “scientific” reorganization of the society of real people is impossible - this is opposed by all human passions that are not subject to reason, this is opposed by a person who admits categories unknowable in their absoluteness into his horizons - Good and Evil, Beautiful and Ugly - and admits into his soul of passion, not amenable to logical calculation.⁹
The problems inherent in the contradiction between the absolute content of basic human values and their limited ­, conditional interpretations within individual human ­communities worried Huxley throughout his life and were perceived by him in all their complexity and ambiguity. On the one hand, there is the loss of God and the loss of meaning that befell man in the first ­decades of the 20th century (when, according to G.-G. Watts , “it began to seem clear that human values do not have a primary origin in the consciousness and word of the deity (God’s will for man ) that they, instead ­, originate from the human will for oneself”; on the other hand, the need for at least a conditional “value code” limited by human imperfection (or a multitude of such “codes” within different civilizations) as means of organizing people's earthly life.(According to the characteristics of the same G.-G. Watts , this is “submission to a special code, which is a set of customs and taboos that regulate family relations and public morality. Such a code ... was worthy of preservation due to its social utility ­" . And already in his work "Thoughts ­about" (1927) Huxley touches on the problem of mandatory axioms, which, naturally, cannot reflect reality in its entirety - due to its unknowability - but the knowledge of which is necessary for the peaceful existence of society. Separately, in this work, Huxley considers the necessary assumptions that must be accepted as axioms in a democratic society: “As for the theory of democracy, the primordial assumptions are: that reason is the same and complete in all people and that all people are inherently equal. Added to these assumptions - several natural consequences - that people are by nature good and by nature reasonable, that they are a product of the environment and that they are unlimitedly teachable ” (later, already in 1959, in his essay “Revisited” brave new world" Huxley touches ­on the same problem of the contradiction between the impossibility of an absolute answer and the need to take relative answers for granted: "Omissions and simplifications help us gain understanding - but, in many cases, a false understanding; for our understanding in this case will be derivative from the concepts formulated ­by those who simplify, but not from the voluminous and ramified reality from which these concepts will be so arbitrarily separated.But life is short, and information is endless ... In practice, we are constantly forced to choose between an inadequately truncated interpretation - and lack of interpretation at all" Based on the foregoing, conditional, limited values - as an alternative to incomprehensible absolute ­ones - are inevitable - moreover, from Huxley's point of view, the basic values of his contemporary democratic society are even more conditional and limited than religious values (also based on necessary assumptions), since they are not turned to the Highest and Absolute at all, they are in the space of the achievable and realizable: “And when the ideal is achieved, the world for any person who stops for a moment to think will become a vanity of vanities. The alternatives are either not to think, but to keep talking and spinning around as if you are doing something extremely important, or else to recognize the vanity of the world and live cynically” . Huxley ­'s dystopian "brave new world" is the world of the societal ideal achieved, as that ideal is reduced to a comprehensible and achievable level. But the inhabitants of this world are deprived of the opportunity to choose the second of the alternatives presented by Huxley - they are deprived of the opportunity to "stop for a moment to think."¹⁰ As a result, Truth, Goodness and Beauty are being squeezed out of the horizons of the inhabitants of the "brave new world", being replaced by subjective "values" (corporate caste morality, entertainment art, etc.). In the center of everything is the utilitarian-value category of Happiness: “It was necessary to choose between happiness and what the ancients called high art. We have sacrificed art”. Beauty, the Supreme Controller bitterly admits ­.
Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with an undergraduate degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism and universalism addressing these subjects with works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945)—which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism—and The Doors of Perception (1954)—which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his vision of dystopia and utopia, respectively.
Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England, in 1894. He was the third son of the writer and schoolmaster Leonard Huxley, who edited The Cornhill Magazine, and his first wife, Julia Arnold, who founded Prior's Field School. Julia was the niece of poet and critic Matthew Arnold and the sister of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Julia named him Aldous after a character in one of her sister's novels. Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic, and controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother Julian Huxley and half-brother Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Aldous had another brother, Noel Trevenen Huxley (1889–1914), who took his own life after a period of clinical depression.
As a child, Huxley's nickname was "Ogie", short for "Ogre". He was described by his brother, Julian, as someone who frequently "[contemplated] the strangeness of things". According to his cousin and contemporary, Gervas Huxley, he had an early interest in drawing.
Huxley's education began in his father's well-equipped botanical laboratory, after which he enrolled at Hillside School near Godalming. He was taught there by his own mother for several years until she became terminally ill. After Hillside he went on to Eton College. His mother died in 1908, when he was 14 (his father later remarried). He contracted the eye disease Keratitis punctata in 1911; this "left [him] practically blind for two to three years". This "ended his early dreams of becoming a doctor". In October 1913, Huxley entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied English literature. He volunteered for the British Army in January 1916, for the Great War; however, he was rejected on health grounds, being half-blind in one eye. His eyesight later partly recovered. He edited Oxford Poetry in 1916, and in June of that year graduated BA with first class honours. His brother Julian wrote:
I believe his blindness was a blessing in disguise. For one thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medicine as a career ... His uniqueness lay in his universalism. He was able to take all knowledge for his province.
Following his years at Balliol, Huxley, being financially indebted to his father, decided to find employment. He taught French for a year at Eton College, where Eric Blair (who was to take the pen name George Orwell) and Steven Runciman were among his pupils. He was mainly remembered as being an incompetent schoolmaster unable to keep order in class. Nevertheless, Blair and others spoke highly of his excellent command of language.
Huxley also worked for a time during the 1920s at Brunner and Mond, an advanced chemical plant in Billingham in County Durham, northeast England. According to the introduction to the latest edition of his science fiction novel Brave New World (1932), the experience he had there of "an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was an important source for the novel.
Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of 17 and began writing seriously in his early twenties, establishing himself as a successful writer and social satirist. His first published novels were social satires, Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928). Brave New World (1932) was his fifth novel and first dystopian work. In the 1920s, he was also a contributor to Vanity Fair and British Vogue magazines.