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wingedbeastI... can't view Brave New World as a key dystopian fiction, anymore. It's a straw-man fiction, much like if anti-feminists were to write a fictional world of the feminist ideal. It's less a chilling view of the future and more of a chilling view of how people view you when they're unwilling to actually see you.
I'm going to tackle two chapters at once, because they're basically the same thing, a drawn-out discussion on why Fordly society is as it is and why it is inferior, though happier, to previous ways of life and society (which is to say, ways that Huxley approves of). And, again, I'm put amind of the recent Kevin Sorbo movie "Let There Be Light".
In that movie, Kevin Sorbo plays the world's top atheist who presents atheism as being about sex, drugs, and music with rocks in. His home-life is one of bitter, alcoholic loneliness. The notion, much like at the heart of this book, is that it's impossible to be different, to not have these particular values, without having different, quite important values to replace them.
I'll go over the beats.
According to the book, Fordly society is without high art, such as Shakespear's dramas, because nobody feels anything deeply or passionately. By systematically removing that which enables anybody to be aware of injustices, they've done away with the need for such injustices that would allow for the "high art" that is "Hamlet".
I use "Hamlet" as the example because I know the story better than "Othello", which John uses. Also, because Hamlet is a revenge play, a story about killing with moral justification. It is very much a feely of it's day.
At the same time, I sincerely doubt that a society could do such a thing as eliminate passion. If for no other reason, passions are useful things.
According to the book, you can't do away with the underclasses, because the smart people would be constantly trying to gain higher status and... the thought of crafting a world where more menial tasks aren't rewarded less or given less status than other tasks just never occurs. That's why there must be the casts rather than all deltas.
I don't buy that, either. If the conditioning were truly so powerful as the book claims, you can condition smart people to enjoy jobs that let them do a task for a while and, in their off hours, recreationally indulge their intelect.
One thing that bugged me from way back in the beginning is how, while the Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons have the induced brain-damage, the Deltas are given jobs like engineering and repair... jobs you want people at full thinking for.
It doesn't make sense to make them deliberately less intelligent, not unless you have a devotion to class distinctions that just isn't easy to justify otherwise.
And, of course, God. Mustafa is sure that there must be a God and willing to agree wth John that God doesn't change. I'm left to wonder how Mustafa Mond comes to agree with that. Sure, the claim is made in the Bible, but for nearly every claim made in the Bible, the Bible is there to disagree.
If Mr. Mond has given the topic the amount of study his interest would suggest, he'd learn that God has, indeed, changed over time. Once upon a time, YHVH was a god of war, one god among many. Later, he was a monotheistic only-god that favored the Chosen People above all. Later, he loved everybody and may just have used the Chosen People as a lineage for Jesus.
And, the notion that you need to get rid of religion in order to have a society wherein people are conditioned to do their part in a stable society? That's just plain laughable.
There is one point of debate. According to John, with God there is a reason for self-denial, a reason for chastity. As though those are unconditional virtues, not virtues conditional on what leads to a better outcome.
Still, I will argue that Mustfa Mond remains a straw-man in that he doesn't disagree. He just points to a world where that is unnecessary.
I'll disagree with that. You're not going to have a world where someone denying their immediate desires isn't going to be in line with some longer-term desire.
Somewhere, beneathe all of this, I feel like the story I've read is the retelling of a biased source, one who can't see the different values of a different culture, but only the lack of their own values.
That, in the end, is how John dies, at least in my head.
Lenina isn't the sex-mandating purity culture creation, but a woman with sex-positive values who also didn't want John "winning" or "deserving" her through tasks. She tried to explain, but her values were rejected.
The feelies are new art forms for a different culture. But John only saw the salacious elements and never the deeper terror of a fiction about being forced to fit into someone else's relationship model when it isn't your own.
It's not a perfect society, but in the media blitz around him, people tried to help him, people tried to offer him good things and tried to help him have his voice heard. But, he only saw a swarm of news reporters using him.
In the end, he never did see the values that had to be there, much like the value the society placed in Linda to afford her a world of happiness in her final days, so he took the last way out. Rather than see the potential values, he self-destructed.
In so doing, he proved that this book does have value, still.
It's not a chilling horror about a world to come. It's a chilling horror about people who will choose what they see rather than values that might just make things better.
And, that, I suppose, makes for a good lead in to The Handmaid's Tale
I'm going to tackle two chapters at once, because they're basically the same thing, a drawn-out discussion on why Fordly society is as it is and why it is inferior, though happier, to previous ways of life and society (which is to say, ways that Huxley approves of). And, again, I'm put amind of the recent Kevin Sorbo movie "Let There Be Light".
In that movie, Kevin Sorbo plays the world's top atheist who presents atheism as being about sex, drugs, and music with rocks in. His home-life is one of bitter, alcoholic loneliness. The notion, much like at the heart of this book, is that it's impossible to be different, to not have these particular values, without having different, quite important values to replace them.
I'll go over the beats.
According to the book, Fordly society is without high art, such as Shakespear's dramas, because nobody feels anything deeply or passionately. By systematically removing that which enables anybody to be aware of injustices, they've done away with the need for such injustices that would allow for the "high art" that is "Hamlet".
I use "Hamlet" as the example because I know the story better than "Othello", which John uses. Also, because Hamlet is a revenge play, a story about killing with moral justification. It is very much a feely of it's day.
At the same time, I sincerely doubt that a society could do such a thing as eliminate passion. If for no other reason, passions are useful things.
According to the book, you can't do away with the underclasses, because the smart people would be constantly trying to gain higher status and... the thought of crafting a world where more menial tasks aren't rewarded less or given less status than other tasks just never occurs. That's why there must be the casts rather than all deltas.
I don't buy that, either. If the conditioning were truly so powerful as the book claims, you can condition smart people to enjoy jobs that let them do a task for a while and, in their off hours, recreationally indulge their intelect.
One thing that bugged me from way back in the beginning is how, while the Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons have the induced brain-damage, the Deltas are given jobs like engineering and repair... jobs you want people at full thinking for.
It doesn't make sense to make them deliberately less intelligent, not unless you have a devotion to class distinctions that just isn't easy to justify otherwise.
And, of course, God. Mustafa is sure that there must be a God and willing to agree wth John that God doesn't change. I'm left to wonder how Mustafa Mond comes to agree with that. Sure, the claim is made in the Bible, but for nearly every claim made in the Bible, the Bible is there to disagree.
If Mr. Mond has given the topic the amount of study his interest would suggest, he'd learn that God has, indeed, changed over time. Once upon a time, YHVH was a god of war, one god among many. Later, he was a monotheistic only-god that favored the Chosen People above all. Later, he loved everybody and may just have used the Chosen People as a lineage for Jesus.
And, the notion that you need to get rid of religion in order to have a society wherein people are conditioned to do their part in a stable society? That's just plain laughable.
There is one point of debate. According to John, with God there is a reason for self-denial, a reason for chastity. As though those are unconditional virtues, not virtues conditional on what leads to a better outcome.
Still, I will argue that Mustfa Mond remains a straw-man in that he doesn't disagree. He just points to a world where that is unnecessary.
I'll disagree with that. You're not going to have a world where someone denying their immediate desires isn't going to be in line with some longer-term desire.
Somewhere, beneathe all of this, I feel like the story I've read is the retelling of a biased source, one who can't see the different values of a different culture, but only the lack of their own values.
That, in the end, is how John dies, at least in my head.
Lenina isn't the sex-mandating purity culture creation, but a woman with sex-positive values who also didn't want John "winning" or "deserving" her through tasks. She tried to explain, but her values were rejected.
The feelies are new art forms for a different culture. But John only saw the salacious elements and never the deeper terror of a fiction about being forced to fit into someone else's relationship model when it isn't your own.
It's not a perfect society, but in the media blitz around him, people tried to help him, people tried to offer him good things and tried to help him have his voice heard. But, he only saw a swarm of news reporters using him.
In the end, he never did see the values that had to be there, much like the value the society placed in Linda to afford her a world of happiness in her final days, so he took the last way out. Rather than see the potential values, he self-destructed.
In so doing, he proved that this book does have value, still.
It's not a chilling horror about a world to come. It's a chilling horror about people who will choose what they see rather than values that might just make things better.
And, that, I suppose, makes for a good lead in to The Handmaid's Tale
