Science versus human relations : in portrait of artist as a young man
1. Science versus human relations :
Aldous Huxley was born in 1894 ,son of Leonard Huxley, grandson of T.H Huxley who
was an eminent biologist and his brother was also a biologist.
Brave new world has achieved prosperity, community and stability. In this world art and
science, family and religion have no value .The most important thing here is bodily health
and immediate gratification. They don’t read, write, think and show love for others. This
society dehumanized man in such a way that he has no conscious that he is an individual
(has destroyed their individuality).
The society in Brave New World can only survive because it has destroyed any remnants
of human relationships and bonds. The relationships of father and mother no longer exist
because all human beings are born in a scientific lab. They feel shame in being call
mother and father. e.g. when John calls Linda “Mother”, she says don't call me mother,
call me Linda. Director becomes more mortified when John walks in and falls to his
knees and calls him “Father”, a word that fills him with embarrassment and all the
workers begin to laugh until the Director leaves the room. He calls John not use such
“dirty language” and decides to leave his post because the shame of being a father is too
great. The relationship between husband and wife is no longer necessary because society
shuns monogamy, and all men and women learn to share each other equally.
The mass production of humans is accomplished with the Bokanovsky process. In this
process, human beings are genetically engineered in laboratories:”A bokanovskified egg
will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will
grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full sized adult”. One of
the threats of this genetic breeding is that no family structures exist on the reservation.
Instead, humans are raised in conditioning centers. Another threat that the Bokanovsky
process poses to society is that life is not highly valued:”Murder kills only the individual
and, after all what is an individual? With a sweeping gesture he(Mr. Foster) indicated the
rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the incubators. We can make a new one with the
greatest ease-as many as we like”. Human life holds no value because it can be easily
replaced through the Bokanovsky process. Furthermore, Bokanovsky's method of mass
2. production prevents individuality, as on the reservation, all people are cloned.In Brave
New World, one's intelligence depends on the amount of alcohol injected into their
embryo. For example, one of the lower classes in society, Epsilons, have quite a high
amount of alcohol injected in the decanting process. Mental faculty, therefore, is
predestined from the moment of cloning. By creating a world where humans are mass
produced, Brave New World demonstrates that advances in biology can be dangerous if
used without regard for the well being of the human race.
The cost of such actions is that human beings cannot truly experience the emotions of
love. Both John and Lenina begin to feel these strong emotions over the course of the
novel, but they cannot act on these emotions in a constructive way because neither can
comprehend how to have such a relationship in their society. This society has no human
values, production and conditioning of embryos through various machine and techniques.
Scientists grow embryos in bottles means human beings are born in plastic bottles. They
call John, The Savage. Women have no respect .This so-called scientific and civilized
society have no moral values. In the World State, sex is casual, regular , and
explicit.“Every one belongs to every one else” which means when a man wants to sleep
with a woman, he publicly says, “Hey, you, let’s have sex tonight,” and she says, “OK”.
Even little kids play games with each other like hunt-the-zipper and a boy who refuses to
play with a girl must go to a psychologist. Also, orgies are a required bi-weekly event.
They have destroyed the marriage system.
Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.
World Government uses sex as a unifying force. Modern married couples use sex to
unite them in marriage much in the same way the World Government uses orgies to unite
multiple individuals in Brave new world. This absence of committed relationship creates
a world without deep feelings of human affection.
They see home, family life and the love of a mother with hatred look,
3. “And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a
midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What
suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the
members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her
children) … brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat
that could say, "My baby, my baby," over and over again. "My baby, and oh, oh, at my
breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last
my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth.
My little baby sleeps …"
"Yes," said Mustapha Mond, nodding his head, "you may well shudder."
All the people in their society are not equal. The society contains five-tiered caste system
that ranks Alpha (Huxley uses this scientific word because alphas are the names of
radioactive particles who are heavy massed and ionizes things more strongly) and Betas
(they are comparatively less stronger than Alphas)on the top. The others are Gammas
(particles have no mass at all) Deltas and Epsilons. Alphas represent the intellectually
superior group, followed by the Betas and containing down to the Epsilons who have
little to no intelligence.
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so
frightfully clever. I'm 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. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And
Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear
black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."(chap no 2)
For these lower-caste men and women, individuality is literally impossible. As a result,
built on a large foundation of identical, easily manipulated people, the society thrives.
Stability lives, but individuality — the desire and or ability to be different — is dead.
In Huxley's dystopia (the society in which everything is bad), the drug soma also serves
to keep individuals from experiencing the stressful negative effects of conflicts that the
society cannot prevent. Pain and stress , grief, humiliation, disappointment , representing
4. uniquely individual reactions to conflict still occur sometimes in the brave new world.
For example when Lenina finds that John is not attending the party, she feels a new
emotion:”A sense of dreadful emptiness, a breathless apprehension, a nausea”. The taking
of soma loss the senses of the individual and they do not understand the sorrows, feelings
and emotions of others. This so-called scientific society, encourages everyone to
take soma as a means of social control by eliminating the affects of conflict. John's plea
to the Deltas to throw away their soma, then, constitutes a cry for rebellion that goes
unheeded (ignored). Somatized people do not know their own degradation. They are not
even fully conscious that they are individuals. John who knows human values cries at the
death of his mother while Children are conditioned at hospitals for the dying and given
sweets to eat when they hear of death occurring.
By the end of the novel, all the efforts to free the individual from the grip of the World
State have failed, destroyed by the power of convention induced by hypnopaedia and
mob psychology. Only Helmholtz and Bernard, represent the possibility of a slight hope ,
a limited freedom within the confines of a restrictive society. John is a son of conditioned
woman and grown up in unconditioned society due to this he unable to identify himself,
because he wants to have a monogamous relation with his mother and Lenina, the so-
called civilized society does not accept him and savage Reservation does not accept him
as the child of a civilized woman. So due to the loss of identity and other reasons he
committed suicide.
To conclude that, Thomas D. Clareson points out that, ”The Brave New World is
mindless... it's citizens are 'nice tame animals”...(Huxley, DISC). The society depicted in
Brave New World is to many, a frightening one have no value of human emotions,
feelings and thoughts, have not moral values at all. Though, it may be more of a reality
than is presently thought. Society must ensure that science is changing to suit human
needs, rather than changing the human race to suit science. With the increasing progress
in biology, technology and psychology, this may be an impossible feat to overcome. The
world may one day be without individuality, emotions or free thought. In Brave New
World, the scientific advances show to be a threat to society, where “One could of course,
exist. . .” though, “... One could not-in the fullest sense of the word-live in it”.