In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World it is suggested that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most sacred aphorisms of our culture: motherhood, home, family, freedom, and even love. He indicates that happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sport, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma. His Brave New World is essentially a benevolent oligarchy, under the direction of ten world controllers; their spokesman is Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western Europe. He governs a society where all aspects of an individual's life, from conception and conveyor-belt reproduction onwards, are determined by the state. The individuality of Brave New World's two billion inhabitants is suppressed. A government bureau, the Predestinators, decides a prospective citizen's role in the hierarchy. Children are raised and conditioned by the state bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families. Value has been stripped away from the person as an individual human being; respect belongs only to society as a whole. Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids. Society has no historical influence. It is interesting that in this utopia knowledge of the past is banned
to prevent envious comparisons. One would think that history lessons would be encouraged instead. That way the people could uncover for themselves the horror that once was. What is so frightening is that I think that this is where our society is heading, and even scarier is the fact that I don't think we can help it. Brave New World wasn't written intending to evoke just how wonderful our lives could be if the human genome were rewritten, in fact it was nearly the opposite. Huxley was presenting to us a world which, in his time, was on the frontiers of science. He was issuing a deeply pessimistic warning against all forms of genetic engineering and eugenics. His view is to play it safe because nature knows best. It is in today's world that this has become a reality. Genetic engineering has now gone beyond that of modified foods and has moved into animals. Perhaps one day our DNA will be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long happiness, awesome experiences, and outrageous designer-drugs. The inevitable question is that; will this be a bad thing? I think it has to be. Huxley implies that by abolishing nastiness and mental pain, the Brave New Worlders have got rid of the most profound experiences that life can
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