Aldous Huxley said that a novel should be like a holdall bursting with opinion and arresting ideas. His book Brave New World contains many ideas that address fundamental questions about humans like what humans are, what causes happiness.

Man is also a product!

At the beginning of the book, we find that embryos are manufactured through advanced scientific methods in the factory in modern manufacturing assembly line style as though they were industrial products. But man is also a product formed as a consequence of several complex physio-chemical processes. Residents of the BNW are very well aware of this fact and this idea is well represented in the hypnopaedic sentence

All men are physio-chemically equal

What brings happiness

People are happy because they get what they want and they never want what they don’t get

In BNW, everyone is happy because they get exactly what makes them happy. The World state ensures universal happiness by destroying the uncomfortable and constantly feeding pleasure.

Sex: Sex is one of the natural instincts that gives happiness. If sex gives instant happiness then why restrict it? BNW doesn’t attempt to curb any of the natural sexual desires. Even children can be seen doing erotic play. One can fornicate with anyone he/she wishes. A hypnopaedic lesson that none of the readers will forget and wish if this were true:

Everyone belongs to everyone else

Concepts like family, responsibilities, relationship, commitments don’t exist in Brave New World, which reduces half the complexities and troubles of human life. Of course these are some of the beautiful things we experience, but things that even cause slight inconvenience are got rid of in BNW.

Work: Humans are not simple animals. Simple in the sense that just food, sleep and sex won’t suffice for human life. We want something in our life that fills our time when we don’t eat, sleep or have sex. That’s why we work! A large period of our life goes in training and finding the right kind of work. Even after such a long toil, many aren’t satisfied with their jobs. BNW eliminates such problems by caste system, assigning tasks from their birth itself. Different castes - Alphas, Betas, Deltas, Epsilons. In fact, people are manufactured for certain tasks. They control the conditions of embryos and also condition humans to like their task, so that they keep doing it all their lives.

All conditioning aims at making people like their unescapble social destiny.

Humans don’t have to struggle on deciding what to do and how to do things. There is one thing that you are asked to do, and you are hard-wired to do it! Where is the room for problem?

Chemical Pleasure: At the end of the day, it is the physio-chemical process that govern our mind. If anything goes wrong, there is always soma. Taking a gram of it teleports you to a different world making you forget all harsh truths of reality.

A gramme is better than a damn

Apart from the basic needs like food, clothing, shelter, the resident of BNW is satisfied with his sexual desires uncurbed, a work that gives a feeling of fulfilment at the end of the day. And if anything goes wrong, soma is the backup. But is that all what is needed to make a man happy? Huxley believes its not and this opinion is expressed in Mustafa Mond’s thoughts:

the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge

Bertrand Marx’s behaviour reflects this idea in simpler form. Marx doesn’t like sex as a recreation. He hates it when Henry talks about Lenina as though she were a piece of meat. Inspite of the uncomfortable feeling that he feels all the time, he refuses to take soma. As he states,

I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly

Another such unorthodox character is of Helmholtz’s. Helmholtz’s writing background helps him to think about meaning of things rather than indulge in immediate gratifications. Helmholtz is happy without taking soma for a long periods and doesn’t have sex as frequently as other conventional people. I guess that is what Huxley tried to convey via characters like Bertrand and Helmholtz that life has meaning beyond the play of senses and that immediate gratification will never be enough.

Everyone has their own definition of happiness. People pursuit their own madness in order to be happy. The inconvenient and exhausting quest for things that make you happy contribute to the happiness. BNW residents don’t get to experience that all.

What fun it would be if one didn’t have to think about happiness

Books shape thoughts and thought processes

When John is introduced to Shakespeare’s works, his perception and thoughts grow rich. His clarity on his own emotions is amplified though he couldn’t fully doesn’t understand the words.

What did the words exactly mean? He only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on rumbling in his head, and somehow it was as though he had never really hated Popé before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him. But now he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic. These words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken they gave him a reason for hating Popé; and they made his hatred more real; they even made Popé himself more real

This scene depicts the magical power of language and books. Reading books introduces you to new set of perceptions and ideas that are limited by one’s experience. As Faber tells in Fahrenheit 451, one of the unique feature of books is the quality of information present in them-telling detail about life. Good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her to flies.

The Ending

The book depicts two extreme ideas. On one hand, we have the world state’s idea of social stability and the other hand we have John’s idea of religious and orthodox life. The ending, in my opinion is meant to depict that both these extreme ideas are not suitable for man. Marx and Helmholtz are sent to a island, where with like minded intellectuals they can pursue their own interests. John, on the other hand ends up committing suicide. When a journalist asked Huxley whether his ultimate sympathies were with savage’s aspirations or with ideal of conditioned stability, he replied

With neither, but I believe some mean between two is both desirable and possible and must be our objective

Some damn good lines

One of the principal functions of friends is to suffer(in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but unable to inflict upon your enemies

When Savage betrays Bernard by not coming to the party, Bernard is insulted by everyone in the party. This line depicts the pain and frustration of Bernard had to undergo due to John’s friendship.

Christianity without tears, that’s what soma is

Suffering is an inevitable part of life. The aim of religion is to provide man the necessary moral training to withstand the suffering. But this is a long process that involves pain and effort. Instead, soma helps to face such harsh realities of life by avoiding them.

Men and women must have their adrenals simulated from time to time

John argues with Mustafa that there is something exciting about facing uncertainty in life and living dangerously. Mustafa agrees to it that such a feeling has to be present and mentions about Violent Passion Surrogate(V.P.S), a medical treatment where the body is flooded with Adrenaline providing the physiological equivalent of fear and rage. In BNW, all important human emotions like happiness, tolerance, fear, rage are caused artificially.

Happiness is a hard master if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestionably

You have to choose between happiness and what we call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead

Lines taken from the epic debate between Mustafa Mond and John.

Huxley was fascinated by the fact that ‘the same person is simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover etc.’

A line taken from the section introducing Aldous Huxley.

Post Scriptum

  • I feel Huxley is a unique author because his writing contains perfect mixture of elements from literature, philosophy and science. As a writer, Huxley’s aim was to ‘arrive technically at a perfect fusion of novel and essay’.
  • life has meaning beyond the play of senses and that immediate gratification will never be enough is phrase extracted from Margaret Atwood’s foreword to the book.