 Utopian refers to human efforts to create a hypothetically perfect society.  It refers to good but impossible proposals - or at least ones that are difficult to carry out.

 Dystopian is the opposite of utopian; it is often a utopia gone sour, an imaginary place or state where everything is as bad as it could possibly be.

 Dystopian novels usually include elements of contemporary society and are seen as a warning against some modern trend.  Writers use them as cautionary tales, in which humankind is put into a society that may look inviting on the surface but in reality, is a nightmare.

 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) At first, the world it describes sounds like a utopia: humanity is carefree, healthy, and technologically advanced. Warfare and poverty have been eliminated, and everyone is permanently happy. However, all of these things have been achieved by eliminating family, cultural diversity, art, literature, science, religion, and philosophy.

 The issues raised in the book were influenced by the issues of Huxley’s time. The Industrial Revolution had brought massive changes to the world. Mass production made cars, telephones, and radios cheap and widely available. The effects of World War I and totalitarian regimes were still being felt.  Huxley used his book to express the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future.

 One event that influenced Huxley was an early trip to America. Huxley was outraged by the commercial-led cheeriness and selfish nature of many of the people. There was a strong fear in Europe of worldwide Americanization.

 Therefore, in Brave New World, Huxley explores the fears of both Soviet communism and American capitalism.  Worse, he suggests that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of everything important in our culture: motherhood, home, family, community, and love.

 The dystopian literature of the period reflected the many concerns that resonated throughout the twentieth century.  The concept of a dystopia was introduced to help reveal the potential consequences of a utopia turning against itself.

 What do you think about forming a utopia?  Is it possible to create a perfect world in which to live?

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution." ~Huxley

A satirical piece of fiction, not scientific prophecy

 A piece of literature designed to ridicule the subject of the work.  While satire can be funny, its aim is not to amuse, but to arouse contempt.  Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and several other techniques are almost always present.

 As satire, the book’s purpose is to examine the failings of man’s behavior in order to encourage him to reform.  It may be painful to recognize today’s faults through the literature.  Pain and growth are part of the human condition, and prove that Huxley’s prophesies have not come true.

 However, many of the cultural concerns seen in the novel are still matters of great importance. In the years since Huxley first published this book, some of his prophesies seem far more plausible than they did in 1932.

 … of sexual promiscuity  … with a drug culture in the most literal sense of the word  … in which the traditional family has been rendered taboo  … in which religion has been reduced to rituals of physical expression  … in which art panders to the sensations of mass communications  … in which the positive values of western democracy have been converted into a rigid caste system

 Huxley exploits anxieties about Soviet Communism and American capitalism.  The price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of honored parts of our culture: “motherhood,” “home,” “family,” “freedom,” even “love.”

 Mustapha Mond, Resident Controller of Western Europe, governs a society where all aspects of an individual's life are determined by the state, beginning with conception and conveyor-belt reproduction.  A government bureau, the Predestinators, decides all roles in the hierarchy.  Children are raised and conditioned by the state bureaucracy, not brought up by natural families. There are only 10,000 last names Citizens must not fall in love, marry, or have their own kids.

 Brave New World, then, is centered around control and manipulation He instills the fear that a future world state may rob us of the right to be unhappy.

 time and place written: 1931, England  date of first publication: 1932  settings (place): England, Savage Reservation in New Mexico

 settings (time): 2540 AD; referred to in the novel as 632 years AF (“After Ford”), meaning 632 years after production of the first Model T car  narrator: Third-person omniscient  point of view: Narrated in the third person from the point of view of Bernard or John, but also from the point of view of Lenina, Helmholtz Watson, and Mustapha Mond

Happiness derives from consuming mass- produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, promiscuous sex, “the feelies,” and most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma.

 People resort to soma when they feel depressed, angry or have negative thoughts– it numbs feelings  They take it because their lives, like society itself, are empty of spirituality or higher meaning.  Soma keeps the population comfortable with their lot in life.

 Huxley foresees a culture in which widespread and addictive use of drugs offers another way of assuring a controlled society.  This is in addition to the pleasure of frequent and promiscuous sexual activity, used to distract the population and dissuade them from rebelling.

 The sole function of pleasure is to guarantee the happiness in the Brave New World, and assure a stable, controllable population  State-encouraged promiscuity assures that loyalty to a lover or family will not undermine one’s loyalty to the state

 Please keep that in mind as you read-- Huxley does not offer this world as an ideal

 Life is nice - but somehow a bit flat. In the words of the Resident Controller of Western Europe: "No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy - to preserve you, as far as that is possible, from having emotions at all."

Life-long emotional well-being is not genetically pre- programmed. It isn't even assured from birth by the soma. For example, babies are traumatized with electric shock conditioning.

 The Brave New World is a totalitarian welfare-state.  There is no war, poverty or crime.  Society is genetically predestined by caste. Alphas, the most intellectual, are the top-dogs. Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons toil away at the bottom. The lower orders are necessary because Alphas, even when they take soma, could never be happy doing menial jobs.

 BNW is set in the year 632 AF (After Ford). Its biotechnology is highly advanced. Yet the society itself has no historical dynamic: “History is bunk.” In this utopia, knowledge of the past is banned by the Controllers.

 The Brave New World is not an exciting place to live in.  It is geared to the consumption of mass- produced goods: “Ending is better than mending.”  Society is shaped by a single political ideology. The motto of the world state is “Community, Identity, Stability.”

Clones, the BNW inhabitants, are laboratory- grown and bottled from the hatchery. They are conditioned and brainwashed, even in their sleep. They are never educated to prize thinking for themselves.

 This novel is more applicable today than it was in This is a time of: propaganda, censorship, conformity, genetic engineering, social conditioning, and mindless entertainment. This was what Huxley saw in our future. His book is a warning.

 Is it better to be free or to be happy?  Is freedom compatible with happiness?  Is the collective more important than the individual?  Can children be taught effectively to think in only one certain way?  Can young people be taught so well that they never question their teachings later?  Is stability more important than freedom?  Can alterations made by advanced science to mankind be made permanent at the DNA-level?  Can mankind be conditioned by science?  Should the individual be limited/controlled for the greater good? If so, how much?

“Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.” Aldous Huxley

"The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation – a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka