|
In the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.) is giving a tour to new students. They begin in the Fertilizing Room on the ground floor, an enormous laboratory where workers dressed in wintry white overalls and "pale corpse-colored" rubber gloves bend over instruments in the frozen, dead light. Here, eggs are extracted from human ova kept in incubators and then fertilized to produce five groups of people: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. Using Bokanovsky's Process, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon eggs are forced to "bud"— divide into an average of seventy-two identical embryos. The process is one of arrested development, in which an egg's normal growth is checked with X-rays, cold, and alcohol. When the egg's growth is checked, it divides and then grows; then its growth is checked again, and so on, so that one egg results in anywhere from eight to ninety-six embryos. Bokanovsky's Process, the Director insists, is a major instrument of social stability, creating uniform men and women in standard batches. Furthermore, they can produce at least a hundred and fifty mature eggs within two years, resulting in nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters within two years of the same age. The Director calls over Mr. Foster, who eagerly explains that some of the tropical Centers have produced more, but he plans to beat them. The aim of this mass production is to stabilize the population immediately. It is the year A.F. 632, and the World State's motto is "Community, Identity, Stability." Predestinators collect figures from the Fertilizers, who provide them with embryos, thus compensating for unforeseen human wastages like those resulting from natural disasters. In the Social Predestination Room, numbers of individuals of various qualities are updated and coordinated, figures calculated, and then the embryos are sent down to the Embryo Store. The Embryo Store is in the basement of the building, where the light-sensitive embryos are protected. Here, dim figures with purple eyes, coral teeth, and symptoms of lupus test the embryos for sex, apply male hormones to some of the females to produce sterile freemartins, and finally, through a variety of environmental and mechanical techniques on the assembly line, condition the embryos for their future lives. For example, the embryos of future rocket-plane engineers have their containers continually rotated and their circulation slackened when they're right-side up, so they'll associate being upside-down with well being. Through an alternating application of heat and cold, those destined to emigrate to the tropics and become miners and steel workers are conditioned to thrive in the heat and be horrified by the cold. For that, explains the Director, "is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny." Lower-caste embryos, like the Epsilons, are deprived of oxygen to keep their intelligence low, since Epsilons do not need to be intelligent. The lower the caste, the lower the level of oxygen. The problem, explains the Director, is the years wasted in physical development; the Epsilon's mind is fully mature at ten, but the body is not actually fit to work until eighteen. They stop while Mr. Foster speaks to Lenina, one of the purple-eyed nurses. After reminding Lenina to meet him on the rooftop at ten to five, Mr. Foster offers to take the students to Meter 900, where the Alpha Plus intellectual embryos are conditioned. However, the Director says they have to go up to the Nurseries now, before the children have finished their naps. Brave New World is a dystopia—a speculative story in which a seemingly perfect society is revealed to have secret horrors. Authors often use dystopias to warn readers about the dangers inherent in contemporary society, including its values, goals and scientific advances. Dystopias reflect the author's idea of the potential negative outcome, if society proceeds on its present course. Written in 1931, Huxley's vision of a society based on mass production and consumption is set 600 years in the future and describes a World State whose motto is "Community, Identity, Stability." At the time the book was written, the Great Depression had caused soaring poverty and unemployment, the effects of which were felt worldwide. Coming on the heels of a world war that impacted an entire generation, the main goals of most people were peace and economic security. On the face, Huxley's world offers both—a perfect society, or utopia, based on advances in science and technology. However, as is typical in a dystopia, Huxley forces contemporary values and achievements to an extreme. The story opens with a student tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, a sterile, cold place that produces human beings on an assembly line. The explanation the Director gives the students is a device Huxley uses to familiarize readers with the world he has created. The opening imagery of dead light, corpse-like colors, and rows of scientific equipment creates an immediate impression of a world devoid of life and feeling. Here, human beings are engineered to fit neatly into the caste (or class) scheme the World State has created, one in which individuals are expendable, even dangerous. One of the central questions this book will ask is whether the individual is more important than the community. In Brave New World, individuality has been sacrificed for community and stability. Identity is conditioned, and the technology of the assembly line—something that was relatively new at the time Huxley wrote the book, but is immediately recognizable to readers today—is used to create batches of identical people who will serve the needs of the community. The idea of thousands of human beings mass produced on an assembly line is one that typically horrifies today's readers as much as it did readers in 1931. Huxley anticipated many of the dilemmas we currently face because of both industrialization and rapid advances in science. For instance, both have the potential to vastly improve our daily lives, but at what cost? Huxley asks this important question throughout the book. While early twentieth-century technology, and the assembly line in particular, promised to improve daily life by providing jobs and more leisure time, the reality was that it often replaced workers, or forced them to work long hours for little pay. In Brave New World, people have been reduced to the actual parts on the assembly line, and leisure time is spent not in the pursuit of art or knowledge but in consumption, which fuels the State. Readers might instinctively rebel against the society Huxley has created, but the students on the tour have been conditioned, like the rest of the fictional society, to not doubt the ethics or effectiveness of the way things are done. Later in the book, Huxley will question the source of the reader's rebellion. Conditioning is one of the cornerstones on which this fictional society is based, but is also undeniably a factor in our own lives, as studies have questioned which is the greater influence—Nature or Nurture? Nature represents our biological impulses, while Nurture is the influence of our environment. In Brave New World, both are tightly controlled. Intelligence of lower-caste members of society is restricted by depriving embryos of oxygen, while other forms of behavioral conditioning are used in children's moral and class education. Later, Huxley will apply the idea of conditioning to everything the reader holds dear, including religion. For now, he simply introduces the idea of conditioning, which the Director says is the key to a happy, stable society—liking what you have got to do.
|
