Cultural Implications of a “Brave New World”

Aldous Huxleys brassy New beingness relates a assumed smart set in which freedom is dead, morality is forgotten, and valet de chambres prospective is bleak indeed. His last employs m both parallels that can be drawn to inns culture today, possibly even serving as a prediction of the time to ascend 500 years from now. With that said, a close serve will be taken into several of Huxleys thoughts within a go New World to best determine the impacts of his fictional rescript in regards to current ethnic trends, and trends for the future. Huxleys Brave New World is set far into the future, in 632 AF, or 2540 AD.Plotted in this extreme, Huxley has liberated himself from any confines of neo 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 confederacy some 600 years into the future, one in which he has created a negative utopia a society in which uto pian dreams of the old reformers have been realized, alone to turn out to be nightm atomic number 18s (Booker, 16), which, with the Utopian books of his time, was his rattling intention.With that said, Huxleys work should be read primarily as a warning against play capitalism and as an anticipation of coming developments in Western consumer society (Booker, 20). Further, in a direct parallel from Huxleys work to modern society, capitalism could, very easily, take the same turn in an suffer to create a better, more stable economy. The story itself is a terrorization version of the future that could be, all the while containing amicable and cultural issues of the first 1900s.The cultural impact of the Industrial R phylogeny alone highlights a study theme within the work that the human being is moving at overly fast a pace for survival tempered by the mischief of intellectual individuality. In Huxleys demesne, reproduction has no use as it is easier, and more economical, to essentially create new individuals via a hatchery process. Sex is no longer the means for reproduction scarce has been relegated the role of pleasure, where any man can have any woman, and there are no relationships establish upon such intimacy.There are no emotional ties to family, loved ones, or friends, and demolition is accepted as the natural cycle of keep, non to be mourned, just not really to be thought about either. Huxleys humanity is separated into a large clique system with alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. In this society, the upper-castes are given more time in the hatchery to develop intelligence and physiologic prowess, whereas the lower castes are essentially poisoned to have lower intelligence and lesser physical endowment.Huxleys employment of these plot conditions incisions his greatest theme that of the loss of individual identity. In his brave new world, people are mere products of creation, relegated into their castes, who live out their l ives as they are supposed to, never questioning, never wondering, never living. With this basis, Huxley initiated the reinforcement of desired behavior by come back rather than by punishment (Fjellman, 3), with the prediction that we capacity be tamed quite by desire and pleasure (3).Then, perhaps for balance, Huxley introduces the character of Bernard Marx, a psychologist and an Alpha Plus. Despite his caste rank, Bernard is an outcaste in their society, based mostly 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 tormented by her friends for not being promiscuous enough.As for Lenina, Huxley reserved especial bile for the female of the species, whose presence provokes even more heated rhetoric (Higdon), and her character the net parody of the female species. Further, Huxley offers a observe ably stimulateist vision which suggestsif it does not outright saythat only Alpha men are resourceful of being unhappy, of being unorthodox, of being guerillas. 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 temperament 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 set of the Fordian/Freudian world of 632 A. F. Each of these men has wandered dangerously far into unorthodoxies that be the community, identity, and stability 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 societytha t everyone has been given memories from the hatchery based on subliminal suggestions and not actual events. Moreover, umpteen critics refer to this rebel nature as Huxleys response to archaean cinemait was far-reaching in its implications, recognizing cinemas stimulation of the body as well as the mind and imagining cinemas potential to be either an doer of social and political reform or a medium of cultural degeneracy (Frost).Indeed, Huxley considered music a powerful medium, once writing that the injustice of the theater, the monotonous music induce in the audience a affable of hypnotic state (Frost), exactly like Huxleys soma does to the characters. Further, Huxleys narrative form shows the individual in society, serves to heighten the sense of his failing and vulnerability (Ferns, 132). Moreover, Huxleys world is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. This is because Huxley endows his exaltation society with features calculated to alienate his audience.Typically , reading BNW elicits the very same strike feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished not a sense of blithesome 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 philosophic qualities, a book about the future can interest us only if its prophecies look as though they might conceivably come true (Huxley, ix).For his part, Huxley avoids any real technological advancements (like computers, aviation, or even the growing of the automobile) within Brave New World, instead focusing on the evolution of the human 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 screening 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 superior of life can be radically changedthe people who govern the Brave New World may not be sane scarce 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 purely 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 stir 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 per iod 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 uprightness 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 markand in that ideal, a Brave New World is not so far advanced, after all. Works Cited. Booker, Keith M. The Dystopian Impulse in modern font Literature Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, CT Greenwood Press, 1994. Fjellman, Stephen M.Vinyl Leaves Walt Disn ey World and America. Boulder, CO Westview Press, 1992. Frost, Laura. Huxleys Feelies The Cinema of Sensation in Brave New World. ordinal Century Literature, 52. 4 (2006) 443+. Higdon, David Leon. The Provocations of Lenina in Huxleys Brave New World. world(prenominal) Fiction Review, (2002) 78+. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York Bantam Books, 1958. Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia Ideology, Gender, wee-wee in Utopian Literature. Liverpool, England Liverpool UP, 1999. Pearce, David. Aldous Huxley A Brave New World. (2008). BLTC Research. 26 June 2009 .