Aldous Huxley-Novel of Ideas

Brave New World has been called a "novel of ideas," because Huxley takes as his primary
focus for the fiction the contrast and clash of different assumptions and theories rather than
merely the conflict of personalities. The first three chapters present most of the important ideas
or themes of the novel. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explains that this Utopia
breeds people to order, artificially fertilizing a mother's eggs to create babies that grow in bottles.
They are not born but decanted. Everyone belongs to one of five classes, from the Alphas, the
most intelligent, to the Epsilons, morons bred to do the dirty jobs that nobody else wants to do.
The lower classes are multiplied by a budding process that can create up to 96 identical clones
and produce over 15,000 brothers and sisters from a single ovary. Besides these ideas there are
also another important ideas illustrated in the novel.

All the babies are conditioned, physically and chemically in the bottle, and psychologically after
birth, to make them happy citizens of the society with both a liking and an aptitude for the work
they will do. One psychological conditioning technique is hypnopaedia, or teaching people while
they sleep- not teaching facts or analysis, but planting suggestions that will make people behave
in certain ways. The Director also makes plain that sex is a source of happiness, a game people
play with anyone who pleases them.

Political system

 The novel is settled in 632 A.F. (After Ford), after the Nine Years War when the
previous civilization was destroyed;

 At the time of the novel, the entire planet is united as the World State, governed by ten
World Controllers, headquartered in various key cities.

A few isolated areas have been left as "savage reservations", including parts of New
Mexico, Samoa, and a small group of islands off the coast of New Guinea. Toward the end of the
novel, a conversation between John and Western Europe's World Controller, Mustapha Mond,
reveals further details of the World State's political geography. Mond explains that certain areas
which have very few resources or languish in unpleasant climates are not "civilised" by the
government, as it would be uneconomical.
Small islands across the planet, such as the Falkland Islands, Iceland, and the Marquesas
Islands, are reserved for citizens of the World State who do not wish to live in, or do not fit into
the normal society.

Huxely’s view of materialism was shaped by the two dominant forms of materialist
civilisation at the time of Brave New World’s publication in 1932, Soviet communism and
American capitalism. Soviet communism came to power on the wave of the Russian Revolution
in 1917. The soviets adapted Marxist philosophy to social reconstruction, gradually abolished
private property, organised production into state collectives and, under Stalin, implemented
strong, centralised planning of the economy and society. In Huxley’s “Utopian” future, the state
exercises control over every aspect of human life, yet goes further than Stalin could ever have
hoped to. Not only the economy and politics, but even the birth, lifespan and the very thoughts of
the individual are manipulated and controlled; this is socio-biological totalitarianism.
If Stalin could not scientifically manipulate the thoughts of the masses to the same effective
extent as the Fordist state of Brave New World, he could, at least, regulate it by persecuting those
whose thoughts or activities conflicted with the narrow state ideology. Intellectuals, free
thinkers, dissidents who refused to tow the party line were punished, exiled or executed. Thought
became a potential crime, information was regulated, subversive works, past and present,
banned. Again, the Fordist state reflects a similar paranoia towards free-thought and intellectuals
as subversive to the order and stability of society. As Mustafa Mond, the world controller for
Western Europe, states, free speech, free scientific inquiry, independent minds and “the truth”
are dangerous to the stability of the social machine; they threatened it with change. The Fordist
state reflects 20th century totalitarianism’s obsession with enforcing intellectual and social
conformity.
The second major materialist civilisation that shapes Huxley’s Fordist statehapes Huxley’s
Fordist state is that of American capitalism. In the 1920s American modernism surged onto the
world stage. It’s extreme individualism, its pleasure seeking culture and its belief that progress
rested in the acquisition of material goods were major factors in its growing influence. The name
of the Fordist state is taken from Henry Ford the American industrialist who inaugurated mass-
production and a new era of the mass-consumer, an era that brought cheap, hightech goods such
as cars, radios, and record players into the homes of millions. In the Fordist state mass-
production and consumption are the heart of the economic system; indeed they are religious
tenets with Henry Ford as its deity.

The feelies (movies you can feel), scent and colour organs, super-sonic orchestras, promiscuous
sex and state sanctioned recreational drug use are all designed to obliterate thinking, conscious
life. Sensation supersedes the intellect; the passive, pleasuring body supersedes the individual
will. Such passive, satiated individuals are subsequently easily controlled and manipulated by the
state, an intentional comment by Huxley on the political and social purpose of contemporary
American mass entertainment.

Through this, Huxley suggests, the two systems, totalitarian communism and hedonistic
capitalism, reveal their final purpose; the annihilation of the mind, the former to communal
unity, the latter given up to sensual pleasure.

In Brave New world, the settings in which the action took place are contrasted. On the
one hand, there is London, a hyper-civilised World state projected some 600 years in the future
in 632 A.F. (After Ford) Human life has been almost entirely industrialized — controlled by a
few people at the top of a World State and the previous types of human civilization was
destroyed. The prototype of the perfectly well-conditioned is Lenina Crowne. On the other hand,
there is The Pueblo Reservation in North America, an isolated place where old religious belief
are preserved, where time passes naturally, people are getting old, they experience different
forms of pain, the women get pregnant, they breastfeed their children and finally people die. As
a representative of this wild society it is presented John The Savage.

The contrast provided by the two settings is paralleled by the opposition between John
and the inhabitants of London. This conflict becomes extremely dramatic and serious in Chapter
16 and 17 in which John and Mustafa Mond start arguing. The conversation between Mond
and John is the intellectual heart of Brave New World. It is here that the issues implied by the rest
of the novel are made explicit, and discussed in an abstract form.
1. Shakespeare is forbidden because beautiful things, such as great literature, tend to last.
People continue to like them even when they become quite old. A society based on
consumerism, such as the World State, needs citizens who want new things.

2. In the second place, the citizens of the World State would not be able to understand
Shakespeare, because the stories he writes are based on experiences and passions that do
not exist in the World State. Grand struggles and overpowering emotions have been
sacrificed in favor of social stability.

3. Technology is controlled. Although the World State is a technotopia, meaning that it is

made possible by technologies vastly more advanced than our own, Mond explains that
even technology has to be kept under rigorous controls for the happy and stable society to
be possible

4. Religion which have also been expunged from World State society. Mond argues that in a
prosperous, youthful society, there are no losses and therefore no need for religion. He
quotes a French philosopher who claims that the religious sentiment is essentially a
response to the threat of loss, old age, and death. Mond says that no one in the World
State is degraded; they just live by a different set of values than John does. World State
civilization does not require anyone to bear unpleasant things. If, by accident something
negative occurs, soma is there to take away the sting. Soma, he says, is “Christianity
without tears.”

"We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom,
I want goodness. I want sin."
"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis
and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in
constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the
right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said

John
The Savage, also known as John, is the son of the Director and Linda. He was born on the
reservation in a city called Malpais. He grew up as a hybrid of three cultures: the culture
of the London, the new world which was depicted in his mother`s stories, the Indian
culture in which he lived, but they always rejected him (they don`t allow him to
participate in their rituals) and Shakespeare`s plays. Shakespeare embodies all of the
human and humanitarian values that have been abandoned in the World State and in this
point there is a contradiction between John` s way of thinking and the conditioned way of
seeing the world. Actually, he is the only character who is able to see the real face of this
new world, how monstrous it is and how mechanically people behave. His beliefs
contradicts the rules of the new world and as a example we can take the scenes in which
he struggles to remain pure, instead of having sex with Lenina or when he is revolted
about that children who do not respect the fact that his mother is dead, but also the
conversation with Mustafa Mond. He becomes aware that this Brave new world does not
suits to him and prefers to be isolated. He even mortifies himself by self-flagellation
because of his disgust for the new world values. When Lenina and others inhabitants of
the London come to watch how he tortures himself he has a breakdown and committees
suicide.
John’s naïve optimism about the World State, expressed in the words from The
Tempest that constitute the novel’s title, is crushed when he comes into direct contact
with the State. The phrase “brave new world” takes on an increasingly bitter, ironic, and
pessimistic tone as he becomes more knowledgeable about the State.

Helmholtz Watson

He is different from the cast in which he has been raised- an Alpha-plus

intellectual. He seems to be incompatible with the world that he should serve: he is more
intelligent than his job requires, he is successful in sport and women. He accepts without
problems to be exilated to the Falkand Island.
 Helmholtz is also a foil for John, but in a different way. Helmholtz and John are
very similar in spirit; both love poetry, and both are intelligent and critical of the World
State. But there is an enormous cultural gap between them. Even when Helmholtz sees
the genius in Shakespeare’s poetry, he cannot help but laugh at the mention of mothers,
fathers, and marriage—concepts that are vulgar and ridiculous in the World State. The
conversations between Helmholtz and John illustrate that even the most reflective and
intelligent World State member is defined by the culture in which he has been raised.