Revisiting Brave New World

In my last blog, I talked about Huxley’s persuading that individual thought is like a cancer for the proverbial “social body” of Brave New World. In this post, I’d take that both forwards and backwards, and propose that Huxley persuades not that individual thought acts as this cancer, but individuality in a much broader sense. Additionally, the social body of the World State must do whatever is required to ensure the survival of the body.

The Director most adequately describes the danger to the World State which comes from individuality, stating, “’Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at society itself’” (137). Most slyly, Huxley places in the metaphor of the snake, in saying that unorthodoxy “strikes” society. This metaphor plays a key role in the understanding of how much this society relies upon uniformity. The proverbial snake of individuality can, at times, slither in unnoticed, and wreak havoc on the World State, first causing the body to panic, then, if the snake is allowed to “bite” the metaphorical body, causing widespread damage. Because of the immense danger individuality poses to the society as a whole.

Due to the danger associated with individuality, those in power within this society must act quickly and swiftly to remove anyone whose independence of thought and action may pose a threat to the stability of the society. Because of this, the Director quickly acts when he sees Bernard becoming too independent, and states that “’In Iceland he will have small opportunity to lead others astray by his unfordly example”’ (139). Bernard’s punishment is to be removed, so much like the cancer he could be to this social body, and placed somewhere else, in a sterile container full of others like him, where the cancer can’t spread to “civilized” society. That society removes Bernard as opposed to just killing him says a lot – the stability is so fragile, they have to make everything seem well and good for the lower castes, going to Iceland to them just seems like a change of location, not the punishment it’s intended to be. They must, at all costs, maintain the outward appearance of being completely stable in ideals and the human makeup of the upper division of humanity, lest the lower division become restless and follow those with ideas contrary to the hypnopædic teachings of the Conditioning Centre.

Truly, the rights of the individual fall under the pressure to keep society stable, which the Director most adequately describes when he says “’It is better one should suffer than that many should be corrupted’” (137). More than characterizing the mindset of the Director, this statement characterizes the society as a whole. Where, especially in our society, the “one” has a high value, especially for those close to the proverbial “one,” this society places stability of the many above the comfort and wellbeing of any one person, or even a small group of individuals, those with differing viewpoints are treated as well as any malignant cancer can be expected to be treated - - with hostility and the intent to remove the tumor as quickly and efficiently as possible. For Linda, the doctors let her drug herself to death on soma, for Helmholtz and Bernard, those in charge shipped them away, to a place where others like them lived, but couldn’t touch the social body.

Truly, more than anything else, this society focuses on smashing down individuality, and making the overall body of people as much like one continuous person as possible. From the very beginning, this is so. The lower castes are made up of so many identical people, hundreds upon hundreds genetically identical, and thousands upon thousands genetically related. Then, all people from each caste are engineered mentally, to have the same thought processes, the same intellectual identity. And, finally, they take away the intellectual free time of each individual in the society, balancing just enough work with just enough play, supplementing that play with soma, so no one has the time or forethought to really even think about why society acts the way it does, or who they are individually. Most certainly, Huxley aims to point out how each individual truly is just a cell in the body, and those with the mentality and thought to act as individuals are the better off for it. They are sent to places where other like them exist, where intellectuality and thought and creativity exist, and where they can be themselves, free of the rigorous hypnopædia and conditioning which takes away the beauty from the world, and replaces it with infantile gratification, instant happiness, and general stagnancy of being. (774 words) 

A Touch of Cancer

Thus far into A Brave New World, major themes are as yet still building, and for the most part the key to the novel has remained elusive. However, the novel seems to be highly interested in the negativity of individuality and personal identity. Social continuity and homogeneity maintain themselves as society’s stability, and individuality threatens the entity which is this World State.

The first instance which begins to explore the instrumentality of stripping society of individuality comes in the very beginning of the novel, when the students tour the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The new process for fertilizing eggs and then making embryos results in, for all castes other than Alphas and Betas, results in “Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress” (Huxley 17). Syntactically, these statements represent much of the philosophy of the society. It (the society) does not need to be made up of “complete” individuals, ones with independent mindsets, goals, and outlooks on life. Like these near-sentences, the people of the society can carry out their function without having a full consciousness. This encourages the retraction of individuality, and substitution with hive-minded people, for the sake of a more efficient system. Much like the way Huxley uses only fragments to describe the lack of genetic individuality within the World State, the geneticists and breeders strip the people down to only the necessary elements for their castes. Intelligence, psychological preferences and predispositions, and social mindset are precisely engineered to ensure the human contains only what is exactly necessary to give meaning to the situation, but not enough for any extraneous meanings or opinions to form from the information planted in that person.

Because the society actively puts down individuality, any appearance of difference is heavily ridiculed. Even the individual who appears or thinks differently than the rest of the society notices the difference, and extreme self-consciousness of the difference results. Bernard Marx, while intellectually equal to anyone else of the Alpha-Plus caste, is slightly shorter than the rest of his caste, and as such feels out of place. Because of this difference, “feeling an outsider he behaved like one,” directly characterizing Marx as someone in direct conflict with the goal of the World State society (69). In the case of the type of characterization Huxley employs to expose Marx, the use of direct as opposed to indirect characterization supersedes the importance of the explicit word choice of the statement. Though the others of his caste and his general society have an awareness of the difference between Marx and others conditionately equal to him, Marx has the greatest awareness of this difference. Marx internalizes his difference from others, and even works to make it larger. He consciously separates himself from the rigorous hypnopædia propaganda he was exposed to as a child. He wants to get to know the women he sees, as opposed to having lots of one night stands. His interests directly conflict with the society, and when people see this, they look down on him, more so than they do simply because of his physical “defect,” as it were. Any form of individuality maintains itself as alien to this society.

Furthermore, this individuality greatly threatens the society as a whole, whether Marx knows it or not. The society as a whole cannot function properly if a member becomes different enough to challenge the norms, although, as the Director states, “the social body persists although the component cells may change” (95). Marx’s mentality and challenging of the norms and hypnopædia represents something far more dangerous than simply a component cell dying and being exchanged in the metaphorical body of the World State. Newness of thought, innovation of opinion and tradition have the potential to spread like a cancer through this society, destroying it from the inside. Truly, the most dangerous occurrence for this society lies in the possibility that hypnopædia could be overcome, and the past freedom of thought come back. Especially dangerous, because the only people physically capable of this kind of thought are in the upper castes, and as a result, the differences in thought would manifest in the most important parts of the proverbial body, the reproductive system, the brain, the vital organs. A cancer of the support system of the body, the lower castes that keep the infrastructure going, a bone or skin cancer that is slow growing and not quick to metastasize, that can be cut out, cut off, and the body can keep going. But, when a cell in the brain, in the heart, in the major systems of the body becomes cancerous and begins to spread and grow, to overtake the mother organ and then move to others, it takes down the whole body, cannot be removed because as surely as the cancer will kill the body, so would the surgery necessary to remove it. This cancer is fatal. Huxley points out that even when highly conditioned, individuality, social cancerousness exists; to a society completely reliant on uniformity and the stripping of individual identity, the danger this cancer poses is real, and could spread to Stage IV before the body even realizes it’s there. (859 words)