Is the alternate future presented in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World necessarily a bad thing?

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I'm reading it again and many aspects of it sound fucking great to me as a 24-year-old, even though they terrified the 15-year-old me to tears.

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Friday, 23 January 2004 20:51 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah, I read it in high school and thought it sounded pretty fucking ace.

― Jordan (Jordan), Friday, 23 January 2004 20:53 (twenty-two years ago)

'Malthusian belts'

― Jordan (Jordan), Friday, 23 January 2004 20:54 (twenty-two years ago)

Lots of stressless sex, always happy with your place in life, loads of cool games to play, helicopter flights to Exmoor from london for a picnic; sounds pretty fucking ace, yeah?

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Friday, 23 January 2004 21:00 (twenty-two years ago)

Taking sides; what I just typed vs. lots of pathetic indie whinging and insecurity?

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Friday, 23 January 2004 21:00 (twenty-two years ago)

predictable but nonetheless true answer: it's here already, just not to that degree of completion

in many ways the book makes points about human nature, rather than politics or civillization, this may be how we ultimately prefer to live it suggests - is that lamentable, is it in fact unavoidable?
that invites us to consider how we are constructed, which might make us more aware of ourselves asnd our actions, free will etc.
Huxley always aimed to do this, whether in his novels, essays, spiritual tracts or polemics.

have you read 'island' nick? if not you should read it straight after.

― pete s, Friday, 23 January 2004 21:04 (twenty-two years ago)

I think it'd be great so long as you had no memory or knowledge of what life was like in the Cowardly Old World.

― oops (Oops), Friday, 23 January 2004 21:04 (twenty-two years ago)

I haven't, Pete; I'll seek it out.

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Friday, 23 January 2004 21:04 (twenty-two years ago)

It's a dystopia... and dystopia's are bogus. I like the Zardoz world better. Not the land in the bubble, but Zardoz's world: guns, grain horses and floating God heads.

― andy, Friday, 23 January 2004 21:06 (twenty-two years ago)

In my English 110 or something I got in, not quite trouble, but ah increased my rep as a lit-scoundrel for arguing (this was a long time ago, so details are sketchy) that the way the one guy kept quoting Shakespeare was no different from the Somatose people always reciting their mantras. That everybody's just programmed anyhow, so we should eat donuts and get fat.

This was the class where I also suggested that Lady Macbeth had recently had a miscarriage or lost an infant since there is a reference to her lactating in one of her solils. This evoked a wonderful "ewwww" from the rest of the class, and I didn't sleep with any of them.

― The Luge (Horace Mann), Friday, 23 January 2004 21:06 (twenty-two years ago)

Best sorta non-sequitur ending for a post ever?

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 23 January 2004 21:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Damn fucking right. I'm proud to have started this thread just for that.

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Friday, 23 January 2004 21:09 (twenty-two years ago)

http://othyrworld.com/zardoz/promo/images/brutalhead.jpg

― andy, Friday, 23 January 2004 21:10 (twenty-two years ago)

I really want to buy Huck a pint.

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Friday, 23 January 2004 21:11 (twenty-two years ago)

('island' is huxley's honest attempt to concieve of a utopia: it's his idealistic older self challenging the cynical young egghead who was so good at fault-finding with human beings)

― pete s, Friday, 23 January 2004 21:11 (twenty-two years ago)

This was the class where I also suggested that Lady Macbeth had recently had a miscarriage or lost an infant since there is a reference to her lactating in one of her solils.

My English teacher pointed that out to us, when I was studying Macbeth for my GCSE.

Brave New World (another thing I did for my GCSE, as it happens) would be classic if you were Alpha or Beta. And if you were Epsilon (or did it go down to Gamma?) you wouldn't realise what you were missing anyway.

― caitlin (caitlin), Saturday, 24 January 2004 10:57 (twenty-two years ago)

actually I was just going to say, would it be better if you were an alpha and on top (but felt disgust and maybe pity for the eps and gamms) or if you were a Gamma and shat upon put happy with your place?

Also, no body hair!

― teeny (teeny), Saturday, 24 January 2004 13:18 (twenty-two years ago)

also no being pregnant!

― teeny (teeny), Saturday, 24 January 2004 13:18 (twenty-two years ago)

I think it would be pretty rubbish. there is a lack of real human intimacy in Brave New World, and for all the mollycoddling of the regime, it is essentially a dictatorship where anyone who kicks up is packed off to the gulag.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Saturday, 24 January 2004 13:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Rising divorce rates, increasing instances of clinical depression, cybernetic devices allowing us to do more and more without leaving our own homes, erosion of the traditional nuclear family, growing state-of-the-world paranoia, government funded abstinance programs in the US; I'd say there's a lack of real human intimacy in our world.

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Saturday, 24 January 2004 13:40 (twenty-two years ago)

In a Brave New World there would be no ILX. Therefore we wouldn't even have the thread to discuss this, so I say dud.

If people are saying "Hey, the life in the book wasn't so bad, I mean, we're halfway there already without the good stuff!" well, I think that's missing the point a bit.

― the river fleet, Saturday, 24 January 2004 13:45 (twenty-two years ago)

I'd say there's a lack of real human intimacy in our world.

there isn't in mine.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Saturday, 24 January 2004 13:54 (twenty-two years ago)

Well, there could be a serious lack of human intimacy in my world. But I find there isn't if I make an effort, and try to connect with people, and "love is a verb, not a noun, blah blah blah" and all that.

The future of BNW *has* to be somewhat slightly appealing and/or realistic, or we wouldn't buy the idea that people would have chosen to live in it. Many Dystopian stories (Logan's Run, f'rinstance) I just can't picture how it could have happened. BNW, I could. But it wouldn't be my choice.

― the river fleet, Saturday, 24 January 2004 13:57 (twenty-two years ago)

People who disparage the Soma-world are ignorant of how shitty life is for a lot of people. Free will would be great if everything else was free too

― dave q, Saturday, 24 January 2004 14:13 (twenty-two years ago)

Life is inherantly unfair. People are created inherantly not equal. (They should be treated equally, meaning fairly, but people ARE different.) Putting *everyone* into a soma-world because some people have shitty lives destroys what is beautiful and good in the lives of those who are willing to struggle to find what is beautiful and good.

If you want to live in a soma-world, go take prozac. But I reserve the right *not* to, knowing that the unhappiness and struggle and occasional shittiness of human existence is more than made up for by the inverse - the joy, the love, the intimacy that I sometimes find.

― the river fleet, Saturday, 24 January 2004 14:24 (twenty-two years ago)

'those who are willing to struggle to find what is beautiful and good'

The Alphas?

― dave q, Saturday, 24 January 2004 14:30 (twenty-two years ago)

Betas. Alphas don't have any struggle at all.

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Saturday, 24 January 2004 14:38 (twenty-two years ago)

The fact that you can ask the question "is this world such a bad thing" is what makes the book so much better than the regular Orwellian crap.

― Maxwell von Bismarck (maxwell von bismarck), Saturday, 24 January 2004 17:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Indeed. There's no argument whatsoever that 1984 is a bad place. Huxley doesn't fetishise the savages in the reservation, it's Bernard doing that, and Bernard is a less than sympathetic protagonist to start with, whereas Winston is hyper-sympathetic, almost (aspirational too in terms of how [I've forgotten her name] comes on to him vs Bernard's Stan from South Park-like nerves).

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Saturday, 24 January 2004 17:14 (twenty-two years ago)

i read an entire book based on the premise that the world had become bravenewworld and not 1984 as everyone had been afraid of:Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves To Death". He really lays into the telegraph in that book. dirty, stinking telegraph.

― scott seward (scott seward), Saturday, 24 January 2004 17:34 (twenty-two years ago)

Yeah, I've often sorta wondered about life a hundred years back when I could (theoretically) have as many books as I do in a private library, maybe, but no DVDs, videotapes, TV, CDs, Internet etc. to occupy/waste/focus my time. But my reaction is often, "Gosh, what DID people do?" Which is both faux-naive and a good point (and I think indirectly feeds into my precise desire to often get away from all that and just relax and think).

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 24 January 2004 18:06 (twenty-two years ago)

150 years ago prime-time entertainment in the united states was going down to the town hall after a back-breaking day of labor to listen to a 6 hour political debate. It was the WWF of its day.

― scott seward (scott seward), Saturday, 24 January 2004 18:51 (twenty-two years ago)

Woo!

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 24 January 2004 18:53 (twenty-two years ago)

the real darkness of BNW comes for me from the fact that it is the triumph of our supposed weaknesses--our need for comfort, diversion, and physical pleasure. it's the ultimate nihilistic civilization--and the realization that what we truly want is to be drugged out of existence.

― ryan (ryan), Saturday, 24 January 2004 21:50 (twenty-two years ago)

Why is that necessarily dark? Have we not just been conditioned by, well; moralism, religion, decency, call it what you want - into thinking that these 'sins of the flesh' are bad?

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Saturday, 24 January 2004 21:51 (twenty-two years ago)

I appreciate that I'm totally playing devil's advocate a lot here.

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Saturday, 24 January 2004 21:52 (twenty-two years ago)

i mean to say that the point of the novel to me is that existence is fundamentally unbearable no matter what--the existence of the brave new worlders is completely centered on nullifying that existence. (Huxley said the choice was between the insane and the absurd, or something like that)

― ryan (ryan), Saturday, 24 January 2004 21:54 (twenty-two years ago)

and note that Island is him trying to solve that problem, and i think he fails miserably.

― ryan (ryan), Saturday, 24 January 2004 21:56 (twenty-two years ago)

"sins of the flesh" have always been considered bad i think as a recognition of mortality. moralism, religion, any sort of system of deathless ideals is in part an attempt to find meaning outside of our mortal bodies. BNW abandons this approach but can only make existence bearable through destroying individualism, real relationships, pain, etc. it reduces the human experience to it's most fundamental level, not unlike an amoeba. i dont think this is necessarily bad, esp if you are as pessimistic as i am, but it is sad.

(hope that clarifies what i mean)

― ryan (ryan), Saturday, 24 January 2004 22:02 (twenty-two years ago)

i think it's standard practice in utopias to eliminate the very things we think of as representing us at our best (art, philosophy, etc.) because those things are a result of (and often mistaken as the cause of) our painful existence--what makes utopia necessarily a dystopia for many people is that it doesn't really idealize the human so much as diminish him. in BNW real science, the pursuit of knowledge for it's own sake, is abandonded for the sake of the status quo.

i think nietzsche wrote "to live is to desire that things be different"

― ryan (ryan), Saturday, 24 January 2004 22:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Is BNW an existentialist's utopia?

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Saturday, 24 January 2004 22:22 (twenty-two years ago)

We'll have to ask our own bnw what he feels like, poor guy.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 24 January 2004 22:35 (twenty-two years ago)

How many black-clad Frenchmen are currently smoking Caré Cremés in your belly? More than fifteen and you = existentialist utopia!"

― Llahtuos Kcin (Nick Southall), Saturday, 24 January 2004 22:36 (twenty-two years ago)

do people still read walden 2 by skinner? i used to love books like that.

― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 25 January 2004 00:07 (twenty-two years ago)

I can't read this thread without substituting '"bnw" for "BNW".

― tokyo rosemary (rosemary), Sunday, 25 January 2004 04:24 (twenty-two years ago)

Downsides to Brave New World

1) "I don't care if he's an Alpha++, Carl is still an incompetent fool and doesn't deserve to be Director of Brotheltronics."
2) You can't purchase cheesy souveniers and naughty postcards if your holidays are all Soma Holidays.
3) Nothing on the radio but "Up With Peopleoids"

― Lord Custos Omicron (Lord Custos Omicron), Sunday, 25 January 2004 21:12 (twenty-two years ago)

one year passes...

has anyone read 'after many summers dies the swan'?

― terry lennox. (gareth), Thursday, 8 September 2005 14:21 (twenty years ago)

Hooray! I've been saying this about Brave New World for years! Gimme Soma!!!

― I Ain't No Addict, Whoever Heard of a Junkie as Old as Me? (noodle vague), Thursday, 8 September 2005 14:27 (twenty years ago)

Is that the one with the reclusive millionaire in the castle who is searching for the elixir of everlasting life, made from giant carp or something like that?

If that's the one, it was fantastic. The ending was grotesque and cruel but wonderful.

― Luminiferous Aether (kate), Thursday, 8 September 2005 14:34 (twenty years ago)

seven years pass...

The Devils of Loudon is really extraordinary. Flawed perhaps by Huxley's short digressions into faddish considerations of ESP and the like, but even that's not a problem for me because it marks the book as of its time/author. But it's remarkable to what extent it also considers more deeply and confidently the themes of totalitarianism/barbarism/mysticism that are present in so much of Huxley's more well known work, specifically what Huxley seems to consider as the disastrous diassociation between our animalistic natures and desires and the "humanistic" ideal we hold of ourselves. the repeated phrase "not I, but Christ" becomes somewhat chilling in that context.

― ryan, Monday, 8 July 2013 15:06 (twelve years ago)

I just saw the BBC movie, which is on youtube as a VHS rip, and haven't read the book yet. Yeah, it almost seems to me that the utopian society was a good thing going and John Savage's POETRY! EMOTION! FEEEELINGS! revolution was kind of a wet blanket. Anyways it was a pretty entertaining film and had Dave Bowman from 2001 and Harold from Harold and Maude.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Monday, 15 July 2013 00:43 (twelve years ago)

They have reached a point where death is not feared in ANY way and this guy wants to come in and mess it all up cos he thinks he's a Shakespearean actor.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Monday, 15 July 2013 00:44 (twelve years ago)

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