Brave New World
‘Brave New World’, written by Aldous Huxley was first published in 1932. Yet, when I read each chapter the modern context in which ‘Brave New World’ could be set forces me to remember that this is a book that was well ahead of it’s time, in even some ways ahead of our time.
I remember reading ’Nineteen Eighty Four’ and feeling the same grimace, the utterly painful correlation to the current world we live in. I constantly asked the question “Where are we headed?”.
‘Brave New World’ boldly steps on human procreation as feeble and faulty — Naive methods of building an unrestful society. It suggests we’re all inherently part of the class pyramid whether we like it or not, and that these “Conditioning Centres” serve to take the pain from class structure and make it a part of who we are, just like having eyes, ears and noses — humans are conditioned to have a class from when they’re born.
Population control has long been a controversial subject riddled with unjust morality because it’s human to care and, conversely, it’s human to be selfish. Taking control of human population is something that already exists, we can look to China to see how they control their population — 1 child per couple. And we can look to the UK and America to see how we control our population — career obsession, consumer selfishness.
I don’t know what the right answer is, I don’t think there is one. I just love the way that Huxley was brutally honest and imaginative in 1932 with ‘Brave New World’ and in 1949 with ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ George Orwell added to it. They were seeing the course of the modern world from the beginning of the last century while we see their fiction unravelling around us as reality; fertilisation clinics, cryogenics, population shifts, facebook “government tracking and tagging”, CCTV, oyster cards, ID cards, controlling natural resources, food supply etc.
With every year that passes Aldous Huxley seems more and more relevant and it scares me.
