New World happiness is merely a system of social control: something that can only be ‘served’, rather than truly felt. ‘Serving happiness’ does not make oneself happy. He is sure to clarify: ‘other peoples’ happiness, not my own.’ Mond’s phrasing illustrates something important about the happiness of the New World. Mond reveals that he chose to stay in the New World and ‘serve happiness’. The only character in the book who has ‘chosen’ anything about their happiness is the Controller, Mustapha Mond – a member of the New World elite, who reveals that he was offered the opportunity to travel to place himself in exile. Eichmann’s evil, his moral failure, was in his failure to think. Instead he blindly followed the legal order of the Nazi regime. He did not think and make judgments about what he was doing. Arendt controversially claimed that Eichmann was not evil because he chose evil, but because he did not choose at all.
BRAVE NEW WORLD QUOTES ABOUT FAMILY TRIAL
This was more than three decades before Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher, would attend the trial of Adolph Eichmann and describe the ‘banality’ of his evil.
But it was arguably prescient in a different and more powerful way. Huxley’s book is often described as prescient for its remarks on reproductive technology. And risks are not acceptable in a world as tightly controlled as Huxley’s. Love and death both require us to make choices and take risks with our emotions. The elderly in the New World are executed at 60 years of age, when they have allegedly exhausted their social value. When Linda, John’s mother, is portrayed dying on a ward, drugged and oblivious, her carers politely question why John would feel any loss. He quotes Juliet’s speech in which she implores her mother to allow her to die, and be buried alongside her cousin Tybalt, rather than marry someone she does not love.īut the strength of Juliet’s feeling is incomprehensible to the citizens of the New World, as is her sadness at death. When John returns to the New Word, he brings with him his knowledge of Shakespeare. Bernard Marx meets John, a ‘savage’ from ‘the reservation’, a small area of the world that has not been subject to social controls. It is not the only aspect of social life which has been rendered meaningless. Promiscuity is the only way to satiate one’s own urges, without the emotional risk of commitment. It is this intimacy that has been done away with in the New World, along with the terms that once described intimate relationships. When our protagonist Bernard Marx sees a ‘savage’ breastfeeding a child, he is ‘surprised by the intimacy’ of the relationship. Words which once described familial bonds – ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘birth’ – are all remembered as expletives, spoken by previous generations of humans. The language of Brave New World reflects this loss of meaning. This is why even children in Brave New World have to engage in ‘erotic play’.
Sex has been reduced to the temporary satiation of physical impulses.
But the promiscuity of the New World citizens is empty. Huxley was a member of the Bloomsbury set, a group for writers who delighted in attacking and inverting Victorian things like traditional marriage. Sexual promiscuity is seen as a social duty. In this world, ‘Everyone belongs to everyone else’. It depicts a world in which reproduction is tightly controlled by growing babies in mass hatcheries. Huxley’s Brave New World, written 10 years before the essay quoted above, is a novel in which love and relationships have ceased to mean anything.
Young people in the 1940s, he said, no longer ‘love with a large L’. If Huxley was sceptical of the nuclear family, he did not see much potential in unrelenting promiscuity either. He wrote that a ‘sordid and ignoble realism offers no resistance to the sexual impulse, which now spends itself purposelessly, without producing love, or even, in the long-run, amusement’. But he also expressed concern that something important could be lost with this new sexual revolution. In his later life he expressed what was close to revulsion with the Victorian nuclear family.
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