brave new world Essay Examples

Brave New World Essay Example

The Misuse of Science In Brave New World

Brave New World as one of the world's most iconic dystopian novels about economic uncertainty, unemployment and a radical scientific world that creates its citizens in Laboratories using technology based on eugenics, doing away with procreation completely. In this new and bleak world, there is no need for people to have sex and everything is controlled in an authoritarian style. As part of a human control, the novel features the predominant use of a drug called Soma, which manufactured and administered to all citizens to regulate moods and keep everybody happy without exerting any long-term side effects. Within Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, there is a perfectly created social system which is solely based on consumerist ideology, reducing human activity to the mere consumption of material goods. In this novel, society becomes fully satisfied with citizens utilizing their desired goods. Science, that is considered one of the fundamental processes in the novel, controls society, reaches new heights of progress at the time the story is set. One of the key scientific discoveries in this novel is mostly been carried out in order to completely control every aspect of citizen's lives. The theme of science in Huxley’s novel is one of the most important. Huxley wanted to create a society where everyone was unequal, yet everybody was completely satisfied with their life. The introduction of the idea of ectogenesis, i.e. allowing people to create children through synthesis, and the ideas of postnatal development being under control by the state are two key ideas that feature throughout the novel. It is a bizarre dystopian state where science is the leader of everything or, at least, purports to be. It is as though people are such slaves to the state that the state’s own thoughts are rather implanted into ordinary citizens minds in their seemingly cruel and completely unnatural manner. The price you pay to be part of society within Brave New World is that you will never have a mother or father. People in the world state are created in hatcheries, scientists carefully creating humans that are put into a societal caste system. In large jars will you be cultivated, put into a group of either gamers or doubters, yet the beta group will be created with the desire to engage in harsh manual labor and be completely submissive. Science as a concept of social engineering is one of the most important aspects of this novel, taking the Bokanovsky process (a scientific cloning process) and completely twisting it upside down. Within Brave New World, science has a significant impact on religion, completely tearing apart any past ideas of religion and throwing them away, replacing with an atheist community which is ruled by the state. Any spiritual beliefs that were once harbored by people have been replaced with ideas of material possessions and consumerism within Huxley’s novel. Any belief in God has been replaced by faith in technological science, all other religious beliefs becoming distorted, and converting everything into a dulled state using continuous consumption of the drug Soma. This drug creates a state, which is completely euphoric with people, and it is one of the most basic needs of the generation within this world state. Science enters into the totalitarian regime and Huxley makes this very apparent. The people that control the world control it using violence and propaganda as well as scientific technology. Huxley portrays the use of technology in a rather horrible and cruel way. For instance, when infants that have been created are put into rigorous developmental schemes - infants are given electric shock therapy and are tortured with loud noises which conditions them to instinctively hate books and flowers, which are prohibited by the totalitarian regime for being unstable towards society. Another form of violence is used practicing sleep teaching, showing another cruel side of the scientific method in a totalitarian and authoritarian rule. In a way, Huxley is trying to get the reader to think about the ways that science can do harm on society if powerful technology and scientific discovery is completely misused by powerful people that wish to gain control or harm others. Huxley has essentially created a novel whereby science is used to provide instant gratification. Within Brave New World, science only serves the purpose of making citizens become instantly gratified with things such as material possessions. Citizens are like little children throughout their lives, constantly pampered and never thinking twice about anything that they have been trained to do since birth. The New World states is essentially an industrialized complex, the worker caste systems serving to keep the machine going whereas the beaters and the alphas control other parts. In a rather ironic way, Brave New World shows us that science is a tool that eradicates the human qualities that we like and, instead controls humans in order to almost rid them of their individual qualities. Within the world states in the novel, citizens enjoy slight freedom but it comes at an enormous price, people having to deprive themselves of their morals and their actions in order to live a slightly free life that is completely in control by the state. An illusion of happiness is constantly generated through either soma or other violent means and this creates a society whereby the motto, “community, identity, stability” runs deep.