Aldous Huxley 's Brave New World

As for intelligence there have been three capacities and virtues that should be targeted for moral enhancement, which are the sensitivity to the features of situations, thoughtfulness about doing what is moral, and the proper capacity for people to make proper judgments. The continued progress in the modification of learning, cognition, memory, the capabilities of decision-making will help assist the moral enhancement with these tasks. There have also been many neurochemicals that have been used to enhance cognitive abilities, which include increased attention span and cognition span. Drugs like OxyContin have also been used to help with empathy, and to make people feel happier. It may be believed that a drug like soma was only possible in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, but perhaps not. Utilitarian’s have been pushing for human enhancement that uses drugs, genetic engineering and nanotechnology to ensure the maximum amount of happiness possible while attempting to eliminate any pain. Proponents believe that this would reset the brain’s thinking patterns, and allow people to think more positively by keeping our minds engaged, rather than in a constant dull and depressing state. Many anti- depressant drugs are attempting to do just this. It is safe to say that moral enhancement is not just a potential innovation, but a technology that is already beginning.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, is a masterpiece of science fiction. His imagined, dystopian state creatively employs facts and theories of science, as well as his very own thinly-veiled commentary on the future of society. His family background and social status, in addition to molding Huxley himself and his perspective, no doubt made impact on his writing and contributed to the scientific accuracy of his presentation. However, Huxley certainly qualifies as a social commenter and his extensive works, while sometimes biased, were always perceptive comments on the future of mankind, predictions made based on current event in his world. In other words, current affairs had undeniable impact on Huxley’s novel, and his

Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That's why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe. They're smut." -Mustapha Mond (234). Instead of relying on fear to control the people and letting them choose from their own perspective, the government controls them through happiness; a fake happiness which is put into their heads as they grow up. In the novel, according to the World State, happiness is combined with stability. The basic goal of the brave new world is, supreme: the "happiness" of all, even if the consequences lead to the loss of freedom and free will. We can see how important it is for the state to improve happiness upon the people when Mustapha Mond says: "The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma." (220). The government's goal is to control people but it uses a very inhumane way. People aren't experiencing what life is really about because the state wants to keep people away form questioning. The essay Brave New World Society's Moral Decline found in www.123helpme.com, talks about Huxley's beliefs and predictions of the future when he was writing the novel. Some of these, he believed were

The color of the groups uniform determined how intelligent and skillful the people were mentally. A certain color(grey) determined if you were clever, an Alpha, and another color(green) determined if you were vapid, an Epsilon. More specifically, every individual was made to believe this in their sleep. As Huxley states, “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki… Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid”(Huxley 27/28). Huxley is stating that brain washing begins since one is born and occurs when an individual is not aware of what is going on in their surroundings.

A Brave New World published in 1932 by Aldous Huxley was about a utopian society in which people were placed in castes because of how their embryos were modified. Little did the author know less than a century later the idea of “designer babies” might be a reality. Designer babies are very similar to Huxley’s idea; a person could be genetically altered before they were born. Unlike Huxley’s book, in which embryos were genetically modified due to government industrial control, designer babies’ destinies are determined by parental control. Although, gene alteration can prevent genetic diseases, predetermining genetic outcomes should be illegal because of its negative effects on society; the effect genes have on each other, and the underwhelming success rate.

In his novel, “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley portrays a society in which the government has full control. At the time of the books writing America was striving for this status quo of complacent pleasantry, censorship was an issue, and things that were extreme or painful were being removed. As man has progressed through the years, societies have tried to arrive at a utopian society, where everyone is happy, disease is nonexistent, and strife, anger, or sadness are unheard of. Only happiness exists. But after reading Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World,” one comes to realize that this is not, in fact, what the human being really longs for. Huxley’s intended audience seems to be people that have the vision of a perfect society. He wrote the book as a dark satire. It's meant to mock (in a serious manner) the concept of a perfect society being possible. Huxley successfully made the point that there is more to life than stability and complacent happiness by utilizing a number of rhetorical strategies.

In the Sci-fi futuristic novel “Brave New World”, published in 1932, Aldous Huxley introduces the idea of the utopian society, achieved through technological advancement in biology and chemistry, such as cloning and the use of controlled substances. In his novel, the government succeeds in attaining stability using extreme forms of control, such as sleep teaching, known as conditioning, antidepressant drugs – soma and a strict social caste system. This paper will analyze the relevance of control of society versus individual freedom and happiness to our society through examining how Huxley uses character development and conflict. In the “Brave New World”, Control of society is used to enforce

Imagine that by taking one magic pill, you could be at the top of your world. With one pill, you could find complete happiness and unmatched physical fulfillment. In his novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley uses the drug Soma, to give the characters all of the benefits of fulfillment, both physically and spiritually, yet ironically, as the drug plays out its role, the “fulfillment” leaves its consumer empty.

Humans live their day-to-day life searching for something that makes them truly happy. What if someone were to tell you that what you thought was true happiness was all an illusion. In a Brave New World by Aldous Huxley people in the world state are conditioned and drugged up by soma to not experience true happiness.

The way that Huxley develops he's view of the new world and our is by showing how controlled the new world is compared to our. For example in page 18 "Community, Identity, Stability", which means that where they control the eggs, hatches the babies and educate them to do and what not to do. He's showing how this new environment has changed that we as human being cant have babies on our own, that now it's controlled by hatching them in a laboratory, which our work we don't do because that's something nature. Also, how they divide there people which is stated in page 23 " we decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilon...", which the Alphas and Epsilon are the upper class people, that are intelligent like knows how to read

A perfect society is always an ideal dream of the human mind. Peace, love, and education are intertwining parts of a perfect society or, a utopia. This idea is not always the case in an imperfect world and is usually only a hopeful dream. These types of worlds can greatly be described in detail through the world of science fiction. Aldous Huxley was an English writer who lived during a time when war and chaos were engulfing the world. His works reflect his view and thoughts on a dystopia, which is a false utopia, and describes what could occur in possible governments of the world. The ability to understand and dive into the thoughts of the author is what makes world literature such an important aspect in literature. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, depicts the horrors of a futuristic dystopia based on his society and significant aspects of his life, while leaving his mark on literature, as one of the most controversial and influential writers of the twentieth century.

In Brave New World, the community is given priority above the individual; and although this priority may seem like a sort of devotion, the way in which Huxley illustrates it strips a person of any form of individuality. William Matter sees that in Huxley’s Brave New World, “individuality must be repressed because it invites a malleable social structure” (Matter 95). This elimination of individuality causes no depth of feeling, no creativity and no intellectual excitement. What makes a person an individual is to have a sense of himself as being separate, distinct, and unique. This sense of self includes both the joys and sorrows of one’s life.

Happiness and truth are two fundamental principles which are crucial to humanity. These two concepts can refer to a variety of aspects: truth – such as human truths, emotion or love, whereas happiness may refer to one’s passions, experiences which overall bring authenticity to one’s life. Everyone has their own definition of these two aspects since everyone was raised differently and experienced different life situations. People raised in a totalitarian society may have a different definition in comparison to those raised in a democratic society. For the people of the World State from Huxley’s novel “Brave New World”, individuality was extremely looked down upon, therefore the aspect of truth was taken away and replaced with other principles which people believed in, by the cause of their intensely conditioned minds, and their reliance on consumption of soma. Throughout Huxley’s novel, the two principles of happiness and truth were frequently juxtaposed in order to see whether or not the two concepts may cease to coexist. The coexistence of happiness and truth is unachievable in society. Due to the factors of consumption, censorship and the overall dissatisfaction of life upon the discovery of truth, these two principles cannot coincide together.

The New World, a man-made Utopia, governed by its motto, Community, Identity, Stability (Huxley 3). A man-made world in every way. Human beings fertilized in bottles. Identity, gender, intelligence, position in society, all predestined. Human beings classified in the order of precedence: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Every one conditioned to be a certain way. Every one works for every one else (Huxley, 74). All man-made to ensure social stability. Is society in the New World truly better than in the 2000s? Are people in the New World truly happier than we are in the 2000s? Do we in the 2000s have any thing in common with the New World? Are there significant sociological differences between

Ideal happiness within a society varies greatly depending on the time period and trends that are found influential at the time. During the time the novel, Brave New World, was published many of the current trends include newly advanced scientific research that Aldous Huxley heavily used throughout the novel; “Huxley is a humanist horrified by the theories and accomplishments of extremists of his own time, but in the novel by using contrasting points of view, he makes no explicit statement of his own position”( Brad Congdon). By putting a vial twist on the current discoveries in his own time, Huxley displayed the utopian civilization by tugging at fears, people did not realize they had at the time; “Yet his suggestion that it be used to instill