Brave New World: Discussion VI

Chapters 16-18: Beauty, truth, and tragedy

Initial thoughts

Like many millennials, the Harry Potter books were what first spurred my love of reading. Some of my favorite parts were the endings when Harry, fresh off his clash with Voldemort and his minions, would sit down with Dumbledore, who would go on to explain everything that Harry and myself had been dying to know. I loved those final scenes because they clarified everything, but looking back now they do strike me as a bit clumsy, a bit too expositional. Admittedly these final chapters with Mond reminded me of those conversations, and though it’s not my preferred type of conclusion, the content, as always, is worth unpacking.

Chapter 16

• “So you don’t much like civilization, Mr. Savage.” Language is twisted to serve the World State’s aims, disguising a world of twins popping soma with a word that invokes innovation, progress, and human flourishing

• It’s striking that John was intent on lying to the Controller, but is inspired to tell the truth by the “good-humoured intelligence of the Controller’s face.” Mond isn’t exactly a caricature of evil. In fact, his words suggest that he isn’t surprised at all by John’s rebellion, and maybe even respects it

• Bernard is “horrified.” “To be labeled as a friend of a man who said that he didn’t like civilization—said it openly and, of all people, to the Controller—it was terrible.” Didn’t he just claim to be John’s friend two pages ago? Now he’s shrinking in front of the Controller. Charmin Soft. (218)

• The Savage admits, “There are some very nice things. All that music in the air, for instance…” That John singles out music as the most redeeming quality of the World State is yet another testament to its power, which we’ve seen across all three reads so far, and witnessed earlier in the novel when Lenina “liked the drums” of the Malpais ritual. The resonance of a sick beat is something that cannot be fully suppressed (218)

• Mond responds quoting The Tempest: “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and sometimes voices.” Love the fact that Mond knows and quote Shakespeare off the cuff. Honestly wouldn’t hate having him on the bar trivia team (218)

• “But as I make the laws here, I can also break them. With impunity, Mr. Marx. Which I’m afraid you can’t do.” Rules for thee, not for me. (219)

• Shakespeare is prohibited because it’s old: “We haven’t any use for old things here.” Banning books is a familiar game, and we know why it’s done. But why the disregard for old things altogether? Is it because “old things” are inconvenient, that they remind us of a world that no longer exists, because they provide an account of the past that clashes with the vision of the future, perhaps a past rooted in compassion and connection instead of consumption?

• “…we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.” Obstacle Golf, the feelies, the scent organ—these new things have replaced the artistic expression of the past, and with it the peoples’ ability to find meaning in history

  • Let’s dive a little deeper, only because this antihistorical posture is being adopted by our own government this very moment, and it’s important to question why

  • An Executive Order from March 27 titled, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” takes aim at the Smithsonian Institution—the quintessential steward of the “old”—for “an exhibit representing that ‘[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.’” This critique of the Smithsonian is one aspect of the EO’s larger mission which purports to stop the “revisionist” movement in the United States in which “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Slavery, anyone? Segregation? Women’s suffrage? We learn this shit in high school.

  • I know the parallel between Shakespeare and the Smithsonian isn’t perfect here, but the outcome is the same. The Smithsonian is the curator of the “old”, and history is the path to truth. When truth disrupts narrative and comfort—in this case, the claim that the United States has only ever advanced liberty—the old is cast as dangerous

• John invokes Othello—to which Mond responds “they couldn’t understand it”, just as Helmholtz couldn’t understand Romeo and Juliet. “You can’t make tragedies without social instability.” It’s not so much that art is banned, but that certain forms of art have become obsolete, as the conditions that give rise to them no longer exist (219)

• “But that’s the price we pay for stability. You have to choose between happiness and high art.” This is the central idea behind The Great American Book Club, which was inspired by Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman argued that the introduction of the television fundamentally changed how human beings processed information and that literacy was its main casualty. The internet has been an even more dramatic extension of that. It’s not just about the dopamine hits. The content is dictated by the form, and the shift from television to internet has made it so content is no longer about entertaining but instead maintaining attention. The sports highlights, manosphere mantras, and shaking asses are served to us on a silver platter, bludgeoning our attention spans with whatever makes us feel good, so that when we do finally pick up Brave New World, we can’t even get past the first few pages. The algorithm is the soma, and it distorts our brains at the cost of real thought and feeling

• Mond touts the feelies and the scent organ to John, and their “agreeable sensations to the audience.” John replies, “But they’re…they’re told by an idiot.” It’s a callback to the Macbeth line we quoted in full in Discussion III, and we only need look at that quote again to identify the meaning behind John’s claim: “told by an idiot…signifying nothing.”

• “And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortunate, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt.” Nothing to really add here, speaks for itself (221)

• John brings it back to the Twins. Mond states “‘…they’re the foundation…the gyroscope that stabilizes the rocket plane of state on its unswerving course’…the gesticulating hand implied space and the onrush of the irresistible machine.” The erasure of identity and individuality in the name of stability, stability for the sake of production and profit (222)

  • In The Grapes of Wrath the Joads were sacrificed to the tractor, in Slaughterhouse-Five, innocents were sacrificed to the war, and here in the Brave New World, the individual is sacrificed to the production line. The machine dehumanizes man in the name of progress—progress never seems to mean progress for everybody

• “A society of Alphas couldn’t fail to be unstable and miserable.” A sentiment prevalent throughout our society—not everybody can be Bezos, some have to be the drivers, the baristas, the janitors. But should the driver have to work two jobs while Bezos sails on his yacht? At what point does this Alpha mentality become an excuse for disenfranchisement? It’s worth stating that even in a dystopia, food and housing for the lowest-caste is a guarantee

• “Only an epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices…for him they’re not sacrifices; they’re the line of least resistance.” In the World State these occupations are determined by genetics—in ours, they’re largely determined by class. And there are many in our society who are perfectly content with “low-grade” work. But what about the person who isn’t? Is it moral to engineer Epsilons so they don’t mind making “Epsilon sacrifices?” Is it moral to credit a person’s shitty job to their character, if they never had access to education or opportunity that would give them more?

• The World State has recognized the instability inherent in new inventions—which is why the prefer to keep “a third of the population on the land.” This brings to mind job displacement due to AI, and we already saw this same dynamic play out a hundred years ago in The Grapes of Wrath, when the tractor replaced the farmers. Our society, though, has no apparent plans to “keep the population on the land,” so what happens then? We’ve got Waymos and chatbot customer service agents and one person working the self-checkout line while seven registers sit empty. New jobs aren’t going to magically appear. The mom who did decently working the register at Walmart a decade ago is now out of a job, and the Walton family now pockets her paycheck. What happens to her?

  • Mond claims that “Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.” Yet this is a fact lost on our society. Technology never requires justification. When this technology disrupts everyone’s jobs from the Walmart cashier to the once-indispensable software engineer, I can’t imagine anything more subversive than that

• “The words galvanized Bernard into violent and unseemly activity. Send me to an island…you can’t send me. I haven’t done anything. It was the others. I swear it was the others.” Yeah fuck this guy. People like him are exactly how the Nazis amassed power, not even kidding. Alcohol in his blood-surrogate-having-ass

• The island as a place with “interesting” people—people “too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life…Every one, in a word, who’s any one.” The islands are a place where individualism flourishes…even Mond says the punishment is actually a reward. Kind of a happy ending for Helmholtz at least, considering rebellion such as his in our own earthly regimes would likely end in imprisonment or execution

• “Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness…mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.” We have to keep in mind through all of this that the World State’s idea of stability is not stability for the sake of peace and safety, but profit. Those interested in truth and beauty naturally won’t be satisfied with working the production line, and that’s why comfort and happiness have been adopted as the defining values

• “What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?..People were ready to have even their appetites controlled even then. Anything for a quiet life.” Human agency is depicted a casualty of war, not just the individual but the collective. It speaks to the human impulse to avoid suffering, often at the cost of humanity—at first that of others, but ultimately our own (228)

• “Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr Watson—paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.” Truth and beauty are incompatible with happiness because they inspire us to question, and questioning leads to discontent and even rebellion.

• “That’s how I paid. By choosing to serve happiness. Other people’s—not mine.” Mond’s own backstory draws him as another example of “sacrifice”—one whose agency and individualism is reduced by the machine for the good of the community, just like the man in Malpais sacrificed for the rain. He’s the oppressor, but also something of a tragic figure—his complicated depiction shows that even the men at the top can be victims of the same structural forces, swept up into systems by perverse economic incentives they’re powerless to change

• Helmholtz accepts his exile, even going so far as to choose a poor climate in the interest in writing. Mond respects it and I get the reasoning but I probably would have chosen Bermuda. Reminds me of a quote from another Huxley book I’ve never read, Antic Hay, but once quoted in my AIM status when my crush started dating someone else:

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Chapter 17

• Art and science are described in the previous chapter as the price of happiness, but there’s another cost: religion.

• The Savage’s idea of God is linked to “solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death…” It’s an idea of God far removed from any concepts of sin or guilt or religion—a more natural idea informed by his contemplation of isolation and darkness and being

• Not going to lie, I had to read the wall of text across pages 232-233 like three different times. Cardinal Newman argues that it is not fear of death that makes men turn to religion as they age, but because the “passions grow calm”. Less distracted, Man sees God clearly. Mond argues that since the World State has engineered it so that engaging in these passions is possible right up to the very end, God and religious sentiment have become “superflous”

• “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.” God, like tragedy, is rendered obsolete—because what He offers—comfort, stimulation, salvation, community—is no longer relevant to the human experience

• The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us…the Savage reverts to Shakespeare to invoke divine judgment, but is shot down by Mond. The Edmund from King Lear was punished by the gods, but “where would Edmund be nowadays? Sitting in a pneumatic chair, with his arm around a girl’s waist…”

  • Is he being punished? John argues that he is in fact “degraded by pleasant vices”, and this is the question of our time. We, too, sit in the pneumatic chair, pleasant vices a tap or a scroll away. Is this a reward? Is this degrading? Is it all just a little too easy?

• “Providence takes its cue from men.” This line tracks with the language of the World State in which Ford has replaced God. It elevates man above God, positioning man as the driver of history and peoples. A Providence taking its cue from an industrial fails to be Providence at all—as true Providence extends its promise to all

• Soma— “Christianity without tears” —just like it’s alcohol without the hangover. Yet these things—drugs, religion, alcohol—are not vices because of their physical effects but because of how they can warp our perception, detach us from the world around us (238)

• John quotes Othello: “If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow til they have wakened death.” The storm, the “inclemency”, gives way to new clarity, new contentment, a peace and appreciation not possible in a world with no storms

• I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin (240)

  “Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.

  “I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.

• The Savage lays claim to the human condition, and finally rejects the dehumanization of the World State. That’s the whole ballgame right there.

Chapter 18

• “I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, I ate my own wickedness.” Dramatic line from John, here. I thought it was Shakespeare at first, but it’s his own. Is this a commentary on John himself as a failed consumer? He went to the feelies, he wanted to consummate his relationship with Lenina, yet ultimately could not assimilate into the society; its composition was toxic to him (241)

• “There was a silence. In spite of their sadness—because of it, even; for their sadness was the symptom of their love for one another—the three young men were happy.” — Sadness is no longer expressed as symptom of illness but as a symptom of love. Moreover, this might be the only time in the whole text the word “happy” denotes something real and not manufactured (242)

• That the Controller refuses the Savage the island exile because he “wanted to go on with the experiment” is cold—the scientific dogma of the World State is apparently insurmountable, despite Mond’s evident humanity

• “So long as I can be alone,” John says, a final rejection of Community (243)

• Savage chooses the air-lighthouse that was utilized before the “upline” was moved, which left the skies above it “silent and deserted.” The air-lighthouse mirrors our own: once a symbol of illumination, now abandonment. It’s worth noting that, like John, our own society still values these structures because of their beauty and isolation—their value transcends their contribution to industry

• “Flowers and a landscape were the only attractions here. And so, as there was no good reason for coming, nobody came.” Just as the people can’t contemplate literature or God, nor can they appreciate the beauty of nature. This is by design, indicated in the early pages, but this passage serves as a bleak reminder of what is lost in utopia. It’s like living a half hour from Yellowstone, but going to Dave and Buster’s every August afternoon instead. Not the existence I would choose

  • I don’t think it’s explicitly mentioned but these people must not care about the beach, either, right? I mean the sun and the sand probably still feel good, but the crashing waves, the blue sky, the boats on the horizon—they must not care at all. Not to mention the stimulation of the sun and sand is probably produced a million-fold in some feelie. What a sad, sad world—where even the beach has lost its luster

• “From time to time he stretched out his arms as though he were on the Cross…” John did this in chapter 8, and it caught our attention. John is a Christ figure who bears the sins of man, a sacrifice for the greater good

• From his lighthouse, John can see the skyscrapers of Guildford, the “modest little village” of Puttenham, and, beyond, stretches and stretches of beautiful woods. This lighthouse’s location symbolizes John’s position as a man separated from all worlds. There’s he towering city to which he was brought, the untouched stunning nature for which he longs, and the “modest village”—which I read as a sort of middle-ground, a symbol of normalcy, not quite Malpais, not quite London, but a slice of the old world, a place that reaps the benefits of industry without succumbing to it entirely (245)

• John making the bow is a callback to him working the clay back on page 134, again driving home the significance of craft, a pointed contrast to the impersonality of industry (247)

• “…when he realized with a start that he was singing—singing!” Singing is not just an act of solidarity or protest but an act of hope. John feels guilty about singing, about forgetting the twins and Linda for a moment, but shows this also shows healing and a humanity that both the twins and Linda were denied

• The Savage kicking the reporter is not depicted as an act of struggle but as a “sensation”, resulting in even more newspapers flocking to the island. It’s the same dynamic at play that had Helmholtz laughing at Romeo and Juliet

• “Poor Linda whom he had sworn to remember. But it was Lenina who still haunted him.” Why is John haunted by Lenina more than his mother? Is it because Linda was doomed the moment she popped her first gramme of soma, but Lenina, despite living under such repressive conditions, had indicated a desire for something deeper? Linda always remained a slave to her conditioning despite her time away from London. Yet Lenina had shown flashes of hope, humanity, a desire for true connection. Maybe John understands he fumbled that one but just can’t articulate it (252)

• Bonaparte is a big-game photographer who films the Savage, resulting in a feelie—The Savage of Surrey—and an influx of tourists to John’s lighthouse. Suffering is commodified, John’s inner conflict turned into content

  • One real-world parallel this calls to mind is American influencer Logan Paul’s 2018 visit to Aokigahara, a forest in Japan known for its suicides, where he filmed himself coming across a dead body. In the intro, Paul stated, “This is not clickbait. This is the most real vlog I’ve ever posted to this channel…Now with that said: Buckle the fuck up, because you’re never gonna see a video like this again.” Could easily see a Tik Toker saying the same thing, before he turns the camera onto the Savage flogging himself and screams

• “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.” Here’s that Macbeth soliloquy again, and here it seems to speak to John’s own mindset, about his mother. While above it was used to reject the meaningless words of the World State’s emphasis on sensation, here it seems to speak to John’s nihilism (254)

• “In a few minutes there were dozens of them…laughing, clicking their cameras, throwing (as to an ape) peanuts…” Reminds me an awful lot of Billy Pilgrim in the zoo on Tralfamadore. Both John and Billy are alienated and dehumanized by their respective plights—reduced to spectacle instead of treated with empathy (We know that Tralfamadore is metaphorical, and illustrates Billy’s alienation as someone suffering from PTSD in post-war America—a society that fails to even comprehend his struggle)

• “We—want—the—whip!” The crowd yells at the Savage. I’m certain this has a double-meaning. One, it speaks to the crowds’ desire for entertainment, spectacle—they want to witness the freakish commodity advertised to them on screen in person. But it also speaks to their own psychology—the argument made throughout the novel that people want and even need suffering and pain in order to be fully human. In clamoring for John’s entertaining stunt, they’re also clamoring for their own liberation, for the capacity to feel—though they don’t know it

• Lenina shows up with the crowd. She tries to say something to John—maybe it was “I love you”—but is drowned out by the crowd. It’s another example of her inability to communicate with John, the insurmountable barrier between them as products of two different worlds, this time symbolized quite literally by being lost in the clamor of her own chanting countrymen

• “Her blue eyes seemed to grow larger, brighter; and suddenly two tears rolled won her cheeks.” Lenina displays true sadness, true emotion, true longing. She finally separates herself from the masses, she seeks to connect, her arc is complete—yet she is misunderstood and met with the whip. What a tragedy.

• John’s whipping of Lenina sends the crowd into a “orgy of atonement”—in which they strike each other and sing and dance, spurred by John’s whipping of Lenina. John succumbs to this “long-drawn frenzy of sensuality.” He’s finally consumed by the Community, the very system he’s tried so hard to reject; he falls victim to the same human impulses the World State manipulates so menacingly. That this whole orgy was triggered by his rejection of Lenina—who represented hope and change and choice—is all the more twisted

• That John hangs himself is no surprise. It’s his final assertion of agency against a system that he could not fully overcome, a refusal to succumb entirely to the hollow existence and society from which he cannot fully escape. John’s suicide, though devastating, is the natural tragic conclusion to his arc. It’s an act of nihilism but an also an act of resistance. It’s a sad, sad ending, and warning about a world that replaces truth and beauty with happiness and comfort

And that concludes our discussion of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Although written nearly a hundred years ago, it’s perhaps our most relevant read yet. The smartphone is the soma of our time, and its emphasis on comfort, sensation, and spectacle has profoundly altered ourselves, our communities, and our relationships with others. I won’t rehash the relevant themes that Huxley at times beat us over the head with, but will instead end on this note: we must continue to pursue truth and beauty, because when we lose sight of those two things, we lose sight our our humanity.

I want to thank everyone who stuck with it throughout this long read of Brave New World. I thought Slaughterhouse-Five was difficult to write about because of the chronology, but something about Huxley’s on-the-nose style made some of this even more difficult to write about without falling into paraphrase. Still, though, its relevance is stunning, and everybody should read it.

Our next two read have already been announced, Huckleberry Finn and James, back-to-back, which should be a lot of fun. Our first discussion post for that is slated for this coming Sunday, so I hope I’ll see you there.

Thanks for reading.

Steve