Dystopias in Contemporary Literature
Dystopian literature has been characterized as fiction that presents a negative view of the
future of society and humankind. Utopian works typically sketch a future in which
technology improves the everyday life of human beings and advances civilization, while
dystopian works offer an opposite view. Some common themes found in dystopian fiction
include mastery of nature—to the point that it becomes barren, or turns against humankind;
technological advances that enslave humans or regiment their lives; the mandatory division of
people in society into castes or groups with specialized functions; and a collective loss of
memory and history making mankind easier to manipulate psychologically and ultimately
leading to dehumanization. Critics have argued that several of the extreme historical
circumstances that took place during the twentieth century have been conducive to the
flourishing of dystopian fiction. Such critics have noted that some of the finest dystopian
works were produced during the Nazi era in Germany, during the Stalin era in Russia, in
response to various wars over the decades, and as a commentary upon various totalitarian
regimes. Discussions regarding personal freedom, the role of free will, the value of individual
resistance to dictatorships, and the power of technology to transform people's lives are also
typical characteristics of dystopian fiction.
Scholars consider Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, H. G. Wells, and Yevgeny Zamyatin as
four of the most important classic authors in the dystopian genre. Huxley's Brave New World
(1932), Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1904), and
Zamyatin's We (1924) are regarded as some of the major canon works of twentieth-century
dystopian literature. Critics have repeatedly noted the influence of these works on the writing
of modern dystopian authors, including Margaret Atwood, Chinua Achebe, Anthony Burgess,
Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ray Bradbury, among numerous
others. Dystopian fiction has remained critically and commercially successful throughout the
twentieth century, inspiring new generations of contemporary writers such as Suzette Haden
Elgin, Zoë Fairbairns, and Vlady Kocinacich to continue and expand on the tradition. Many
reviewers, including John Harrington and Theodore Dalrymple, have demonstrated an
interest in comparing utopian with dystopian fiction, using the polar opposites to identify the
major tenets of each genre. For example, Gorman Beauchamp, Donald Watt, and Donald Y.
Hughes have analyzed the recurring theme of technology gone awry in dystopian works,
asserting that a dependence on computers and electronics often leads to a surrender of
individual freedoms. Additionally, Renata Galtseva and Irina Rodnyanskaya have examined
the role of an individual's free will in dystopian futures. On a slightly more theoretical plane,
such critics as Calin Andrei Mihailescu and James W. Bittner have written about the
techniques various dystopian writers use to create a sense of reality in their works, balancing
recognizable, everyday detail with elements of science fiction. In contemporary times, there
has also been growth in the scholarship on extensions of the dystopian genre—for example,
studies of adaptations made by authors writing in postcolonial societies or of the particular
role of women in dystopias. Perhaps the strongest modern trend in dystopian criticism has
been to explore dystopias from a feminist perspective, which has been discussed by a number
of critics including Karen F. Stein, Jocelyn Harris, Kathryn M. Grossman, Peter Fitting, and
Elizabeth Mahoney.
Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism, ©2003 Gale Cengage. All Rights
Common traits of dystopian fiction
The following is a list of common traits of dystopias, although it is not definitive. Most
dystopian films or literature includes at least a few of the following:
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a hierarchical society where divisions between the upper, middle and lower class are
definitive and unbending.
a nation-state ruled by an upper class with few democratic ideals
state propaganda programs and educational systems that coerce most citizens into
worshipping the state and its government, in an attempt to convince them into thinking that
life under the regime is good and just
strict conformity among citizens and the general assumption that dissent and individuality
are bad
a fictional state figurehead that people worship fanatically through a vast personality cult,
such as 1984’s Big Brother or We‘s The Benefactor
a fear of the world outside the state
a common view of traditional life, particularly organized religion, as primitive and
nonsensical
a penal system that lacks due process laws and often employs psychological or physical
torture
constant surveillance by state police agencies
the banishment of the natural world from daily life
a back story of a natural disaster, war, revolution, uprising, spike in overpopulation or some
other climactic event which resulted in dramatic changes to society
a standard of living among the lower and middle class that is generally poorer than in
contemporary society
a protagonist who questions the society, often feeling intrinsically that something is terribly
wrong
because dystopian literature takes place in the future, it often features technology more
advanced than that of contemporary society
To have an effect on the reader, dystopian fiction typically has one other trait:
familiarity. It is not enough to show people living in a society that seems unpleasant.
The society must have echoes of today, of the reader's own experience. If the reader
can identify the patterns or trends that would lead to the dystopia, it becomes a more
involving and effective experience. Authors can use a dystopia effectively to highlight
their own concerns about societal trends. George Orwell apparently wanted to title
1984 1948, because he saw this world emerging in austere postwar Europe.
Some examples of dystopian literature
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‘1984’ by George Orwell
‘A Clockwork Orange’ by Anthony Burgess
‘Anthem’ by Ayn Rand
‘Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley (This could perhaps be considered a utopia, as the
people in that society are certainly happy, but it is more generally regarded by critics as a
dystopian satire, as the population is actually drugged into happiness.)
‘Fahrenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury (see also the 2004 US politcal movie echo ‘Fahrenheit 911’)
‘The Handmaid's Tale’ by Margaret Atwood
‘Lord of the Flies’ by William Golding (an example of a dystopia that takes place in the
present)
‘The Machine Stops’ by E.M. Forster
‘Welcome to the Monkey House’ by Kurt Vonnegut
Some examples of dystopian films
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A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrik
Blade Runner, adapted from Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Logan's Run
Metropolis by Fritz Lang
Soylent Green
The Terminator and its sequels
12 Monkeys
Some examples of dystopias in music
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Crime of the Century (1974) by the British band Supertramp depicted and evoked the
personal, social and institutional causes and effects of alienation and mental illness in
contemporary society.
Time (1981) by ELO features tracks that may be considered dystopian or utopian depending
on your point of view.
OK Computer (1997) by the British band Radiohead.
British band Pink Floyd and its film adaptation are considered by many to be the epitome of
dystopian music. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and many of their other
recordings also explore dystopian themes.
The Pleasure Principle (1979) by Gary Numan, ex-leader of the Tubeway Army, continued his
narratives of a robotic world in songs like Metal.
Commonly used dystopias
These could be used as introductory exercises for students to identify traits in settings of well known
dystopic films, to raise awareness prior to reading.
Totalitarian dystopias
As the name suggests, totalitarian societies utilises total control over and demands total
commitment from the citizens, usually hiding behind a political ideology. Totalitarian states are, in
most cases, ruled by party bureaucracies backed up by cadres of secret police and armed forces. The
citizens are often closely monitored and rebellion is always punished mercilessly. Stories taking place
in totalitarian dystopias usually depict the hopeless struggle of isolated dissidents. Totalitarian
dystopias have, in general, dark psychological depths and strong political qualities. Hitler's Third
Reich and Stalin's Soviet Union were real examples of such societies.
Examples: Nineteen Eighty-Four (novel; TV play; motion picture), We (novel), Fatherland (novel; TV
movie).
Nineteen
Eighty-Four
Bureaucratic dystopias
Bureaucratic dystopias, or technocratic dystopias, are strictly regulated and hierarchial societies,
thus related to totalitarian dystopias. Where totalitarian regimes strive to achieve complete control,
bureaucratic regimes only strive to achieve absolute power to enforce laws. When totalitarian
regimes tend to found their own laws, bureaucratic regimes tend to defend old laws. The law always
seem to stand in conflict with rational thinking and human behaviour. To change status quo, even
everyday procedures, is a long and difficult process for the citizens. It goes without saying such
dystopias have strong satirical qualities and to some extent surreal qualities as well.
Examples: Brazil (motion picture), The Trial (novel; several TV plays; TV movie).
Cyberpunk dystopias
A cyberpunk society is essentially a drastically exaggerated version of our own. Cyberpunk is a
heterogeneous genre, but most dystopias have the following settings: the technological evolution
has accelerated, environmental collapse is imminent, the boards of multi-national corporations are
the real governments, urbanisation has reached new levels and crime is beyond control. Important,
but not necessary essential, concepts in cyberpunk are cybernetics, artificial enhancements of body
and mind, and cyberspace, the global computer network and ultimate digital illusion. Cyberpunk
stories are often street-wise and violent. It is debatedly the most influential dystopian genre ever.
Examples: Neuromancer (novel; comic), Blade Runner (novel: Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?; motion picture; comic; computer game), Matrix (motion picture), Strange Days (motion
picture).
Crime dystopias
Crime dystopias may have different settings. These societies have been infested with grave
criminality and the authorities are about to lose control or have already lost it. This criminality may
span from street crime to organised crime, more seldom governmental crime such as corruption and
abuse of power. The authorities often use drastic and inhumane measures to fight the moral decay,
perhaps out of desperation, perhaps out of necessity. The society is often in imminent danger of
becoming totalitarian. Crime dystopias are not seldom political statements, usually of a radical and
controversial nature.
Examples: A Clockwork Orange (novel; motion picture), The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse (novel; motion
picture), The Escape from New York (motion picture: part of series).
Overpopulation dystopias
The population of the world has grown dramatically and the limited resources of our planet are
exhausted. Mankind is living in dispair and society is in imminent danger of becoming or has already
become social-darwinistic. There is an enormous wealth gap between the rich and the poor, and
military and police are used to control the starving masses. There are many parallells between
overpopulation dystopias and cyberpunk dystopias, especially when speaking of environment and
urbanisation. This kind of dystopia is rather rare, which is surprising: it may become an imminent
problem in the near future.
Examples: Make Room! Make Room! (novel; motion picture: Soylent Green), Stand on Zanzibar
(novel).
Leisure dystopias
Leisure dystopias are probably best described as utopias gone wretched or failed paradiseengineering projects. In these societies, all problems have been solved, at least officially, and all
citizens are living in wealth and happiness. Unfortunately, this is often achieved by suppressing
individuality, art, religion, intellectualism and so on and so forth. Conditioning, consumption,
designer-drugs, light entertainment and similar methods are widely used in order to combat
existential misery. Conformity is encouraged as it makes it easier to control the population. The
government's means of control are always of a very subtle nature and open repression is basically
non-exist. Leisure dystopias are not very common nowadays, probably as Utopia is almost extinct as
concept.
Examples: Brave New World (novel; TV movie), Demolition Man (motion picture), The Joy Makers
(novel), Things to Come (motion picture).
Feminist dystopia
As the name suggests, feminist dystopias deal with oppression of women. The feminist dystopia is
built on patriarchal structures and the role of woman has been diminished, e.g. to house-keeping
and breeding. The society is often totalitarian or at least crypto-totalitarian, sometimes with more or
less obvious parallells to fascism as represented in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. To one
degree or another, all dystopias are patriarchal, but in feminist dystopias it is explicit. This genre is
debatedly one of the most innovative dystopian genres nowadays, but have received a remarkably
small amount of attention.
Examples: The Handmaid's Tale (novel; motion picture), Walk to the End of the World (novel),
Woman at the Edge of Time (novel), Bulldozer Rising (novel).
Critical background for teaching about
dystopias
Characteristics of dystopias
Dystopias usually express original and innovative ideas, thus forming a heterogeneous genre. Still,
there are some common characteristics.
Settings
Dystopian depictions are always imaginary. Although Hitler's Third Reich and Stalin's Soviet Union
certainly qualify as horror societies, they are still not dystopias. The very purpose of a dystopia is to
discuss, not depict contemporary society or at least contemporary mankind in general. Stories like
Taxi Driver and Enemy of the State may have dystopian qualities, but they still depict reality,
however twisted the prerequisites of those stories might be. Dystopian depictions may borrow
features from reality, but the purpose is to debate, critisise or explore possibilities and probabilities.
Dystopia is not really about tomorrow, but rather about today or sometimes yesterday.
Nevertheless, dystopian stories take place in the future in most cases. The year 1984 may have past,
but George Orwell's horror story described a plausible future scenario when it was published for the
first time in 1949 and it may still come true in a not too distant future. Interesting exceptions from
this rule are uchronias, so called What-if? stories, like Fatherland.
Dystopias have always been a powerful rethorical tool. They have been used and abused by
politicians, thus making dystopian stories controversial. The anti-totalitarianism in Nineteen EightyFour is explicit, but the anti-Reaganism in Neuromancer is implicit. The war-ridden world in the Mad
Max triology is obviously a Dystopia, but it would be ridiculous to call it a political statement,
although one can claim it is a warning regarding the dangers of anarchy and Social-Darwinism.
Themes
The leitmotif of dystopias has always been oppression and rebellion. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the
pseudo-communistic party Ingsoc's oppression of the people is obvious, but the multi-national
mega-corporations' oppression of the people in Neuromancer is more subtle. The oppressors are
usually more or less faceless, as in THX-1138, but may sometimes be personified, as in Blade Runner.
The oppressors are almost always much more powerful than the rebels. Consequently, dystopian
tales often become studies in survival. In Neuromancer it is simply a question of staying alive, in
Brave New World it is a question of staying human. In Nineteen Eighty-Four it is even a matter of
remaining an individual with own thoughts. The hero, because it is usually not a heroine, often faces
utter defeat or sometimes Pyrrhic victory, a significant feature of dystopian tales.
As the citizens of dystopian societies often live in fear, they become paranoid and egoistical, almost
like hunted animals. Dystopian citizens experience a profound feeling of being monitored,
shadowed, chased, betrayed or manipulated. The factors which trigger this paranoia may be very
evident and explicit like in Brazil or more diffuse and implicit like in Blade Runner. The most extreme
example of paranoia is probably the Thought Police and the thoughtcrime concept in Nineteen
Eighty-four. As a result of this fearful atmosphere, dystopian heroes are not seldom monsters in
many respects.
The dehumanisation of society may also be connected to the benefits and hazards of technological
progress. Cyberspace cowboys refer to their bodies as "meat" and blade runners hunt artificial, but
completely sentient beings like animals. In Dystopia, the borderline of humanity is often blurred and
the very concept of humanity distorted.
Finally, dystopian stories tend to explore the concept of reality. Rick Deckard in Blade Runner is not
sure if he is a human being or a bio-mechanical replica. Case in Neuromancer sometimes cannot
distinguish cyberspace from reality. Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is forced to learn that
two plus two make five. In many dystopian tales the people in general and the heroes in particular
get manipulated beyond reality.
Aesthetics
Dystopian stories frequently take place in landscapes which diminish people, like large cities with
mastodontic architecture or vast wastelands devastated by war and pollution. Dystopian societies
are usually, but far from always, battered and worn-out. They may be colorless like Nineteen EightyFour or kaleidoscopic like Blade Runner, but always visually obtrusive.
For uncertain reasons, dystopian movies often use film noir features like dim rooms, rain wet
asphalt, disturbing contrasts, symbolic shadows etc. Unproportionaly much of the action takes place
during night in many dystopian stories. Possibly, this reflects the thematic relationship between
dystopian fiction and film noir.
Generally speaking, the environment plays an active role in dystopian depictions. The environment is
not only a fancy background, but emphasises the message. A prominent example is Blade Runner:
there can be no doubt in the viewer that USA has become completely commercialised and that the
world is in a state of terminal decay.
Depth of the Feminine Character:
An Analysis of Julia and Offred The novels 1984 by George Orwell and The Handmaid’s Tale by
Margaret Atwood both reveal the perils and depression in a dystopian society of the future. Orwell
writes of a society and ³its repellent ethos of power for power’s sake´, while Atwood takes it one step
further and explains the reason for such power-- procreation (Caldwell 339). In her essay explaining
the inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood gives credit to Orwell’s 1984, but ³particularly the
epilogue´ (516). She goes on to explain that she wanted to steer away from dystopias told from a male
perspective, and write a ³world according to Julia´ (516). Her efforts brought forth the character of
Offred, who embodies the emotions and beliefs of a woman in a dystopian society. Orwell wrote
1984 from a male perspective, and thus wrote a flat female character who possesses characteristics not
congruent with her sex. By writing her novel with a feminine approach, Atwood created a much more
believable female character who reacts to government control and sexuality in a more credible
manner. The use of fear to control the masses played a particularly strong role in the societies of both
Oceania and Gilead. The ³Two Minutes Hate´ activity was such a strong element in Oceania’s day-today life that every citizen ³could not help sharing in the general delirium´ (17).They watched the
screen as Goldstein’s face changed from ³that of a sheep« into that of a Eurasian soldier´ (15). The
never-ending war facing Oceania undoubtedly drove the masses to easily submit to the will of the
regime.
One final measure used to force fear on the Outer Party is the threat of being banished forever.
Citizens disappeared completely with no hint of where they went. The true test of Julia’s character
came when she and Winston were captured and separated. The fear of the unknown and continued
torture in The Ministry of Love building caused her to crack under pressure. She explains to Winston,
after the ordeal, that she ³[didn’t] give a damn what [he] suffer[ed]´ because ³all [she] cared about
[was herself]´ (292). In an effort to preserve her life, she used whatever means necessary. Her actions
speak volumes about the lack of her emotional connection to anyone, even Winston. Fear of her own
mortality far outweighed any feelings of attachment she shared with Winston. That being said, Orwell
wrote a female character that could not be trusted when push came to shove. Her own selfish
aspirations dominated her concern for Winston’s well-being. This simple act of betrayal demonstrates
a stereotypical weakness in the female sex. Julia’s actions portray those of a flat character who only
feeds into the beliefs of Orwell’s typical audience: white men. While one can argue that Winston
betrayed Julia in a similar manner, the reader must look deeper into stereotypical gender roles.
Winston’s character did not demonstrate Orwell’s idea of a man of honor. In her feminist analysis of
Orwell, Ivett Csaszar asserts that his ³stance against feminism´ and his ³repulsionfrom«soft men´
should be ³two sides of the same coin´ (39). She further explains that he used his novels to secure his
³niche in society´ by writing about the importance of ³courage,heroism«[and] self-sacrifice´ (40). All
of these attributes coincide with Orwell’s thoughts of what it is to be an ideal protean man. In The
Handmaid’s Tale, the society of Gilead also uses the fear of never-ending war to control its citizens.
In Offred’s first conversation with Ofglen, the two women discuss the military ³defeat[ing] more
[Baptist] rebels´ in the ³Blue Hills´ (20). Neither one elaborates on the war at large, which forces the
reader to question whether the war is taking place. Taking the concept of control through fear one step
further, Atwood adds the element of female safety from rape. Females were taught that the new way
of life was to protect the safety of all women and to ensure proper procreation of the Caucasian race.
Offred and other women at the Red Center were shown ³old porno film[s]´ that portrayed ³women
being raped, beaten up [and] killed´ (118),solidifying the theory that there was only protection under
the order of the new regime. All of the Angels and Guardians were said to be there for their
protection. However, they were just an added measure to ensure the women did not revolt.Similar to
punishment for rebellion in 1984, women in The Handmaid’s Tale were either banished to The Colonies
to clean up ³toxic dumps and radiation spills´ or destined to live out the rest of their lives as a
prostitute at Jezebel’s (248). When it comes time for Offred to face the reality of life or death, she
contemplates screaming and ³relinquish[ing] dignity´ by bringing the Commander and his wife down
with her for their indiscretions. After only a fleeting moment, she decides that strength is her only
ally. During all of the chaos, she looks at the Commander and ponders how she ³still [has] it in [her]
to feel sorry for him´ (294). Her decision to face potential death alone illustrates a more complex look
into the female spirit. Perhaps because Atwood was not writing her novel to further the white male
agenda, her task of writing a realistic female protagonist became much easier to execute. Amin Malak
argues in his analysis that Atwood’s use of ³well-punctuated revelations´ at the end of the story
connect with the ³novel’s central meaning´ that ³misogynous dogmas are bound, when allowed access
to power, to reveal their ruthlessly tyrannical nature´ (14). Free from the need to impress white male
readers, Atwood focused on creating a society told through the eyes of a strong woman. Part of being
human includes the ability to enjoy time alone or in the company of like-minded people. If a regime
takes this right away from their citizens, it also annihilates any possibility of plotting a government
takedown. The control of leisure in 1984 gives new meaning to the control of a citizen’s personal
time. One of Winston’s journal entries included the idea that ³thoughtcrime does not entail death:
thoughtcrime IS death´ (28). In Oceania, just the thought of over-throwing the government would lead
to certain death. Party members maintain a regimented day under constant surveillance by the
³Thought Police´ and the ³telescreens´(Orwell 2). Citizens are forbidden to speak with each other in
private and need to schedule very intricate rendezvous plans in order to throw off the scent of ³Big
Brother´ (2). The only chance for the leisure of independent thought that Julia receives takes place
when Winston acquires³The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism´ from O’Brien. As
Winston read her the book written by the ³traitor´ Goldstein, Julia laid down with her ³cheek pillowed
in her hand´ and conveniently fell asleep (217). Her lack of concern demonstrates Orwell¶s known
belief that women should possess an aura of ³feminine passivity´, which means they should not
question their role or assert themselves through use of knowledge (Csaszar 40). In their critical
analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret J. Daniels and Heather E. Bowen assert that Gilead
authority to control the Handmaids’ ³access to leisure reinforces [their] enslavement´ (427). The
women are not allowed to speak to one another, or even look past their blinders. Restricted to only
wander certain roads, the handmaids have no way to amuse themselves. Instead of being treated as
humans, they are demoralized to nothing more than baby factories. Furthermore, Offred and her
fellow women have lost all right to reading and writing. The Bible becomes a vessel from which only
the men of the community may read. Due to her past, she recalls certain scriptures and notices when
the Gilead government changes The Beatitudes to include ³blessed are the silent´ (89). Unlike Julia,
Offred possesses an inquisitive nature. She refuses to forget her past, and constantly questions why
things have changed so drastically. Her drive to understand everything around her becomes evident
again in the story when she boldly asks the Commander to translate the term ³nolite te bastardes
carborundorum´ (185). Her strength and thirst for knowledge far outweigh her fear of persecution.
Amin Malak contends that Offred’s ³maturing comprehension´ morphed her from a ³victim´ into a
³full-roundedcharacter´ and ³determined conniver´ (14). Her perseverance ultimately led her to escape;
thus making her a much more believable, calculating and indeed rounded character. Sexuality, or lack
thereof, dominates much of the storyline in both dystopian societies. Pleasure and love have been
stripped from the act of sex, only to be replaced by a sense of duty. It has become something
awkward, uncomfortable and only necessary to create new life. Winston recalls to Julia how sex with
his wife was a ³frigid little ceremony´ in which her body³stiffen[ed] as soon as he touched [it]´ (132).
To this dispassionate memory, Julia simply recites what women have been taught at school by stating
it is ³[their] duty to the Party´ (132).Women were instructed to hate sex and to only endure it as part of
their duties as a citizen. By taking love out of relationships, it makes people feel isolated and bars
against the formation of unions. By restricting ³sexual privation´, the Party can take that sexual energy
and transfer it to³war fever and leader worship´ (133). Julia becomes an anomaly to all other women
surrounding her. Instead of hating sex, she loves it enough to use it to her advantage. In her mind,
³everything[comes] back to her sexuality´ (132). Julia’s behaviors do not fall in line with a typical
woman’s because she does not form any attachments to the men with whom she is intimate. She
merely uses sex as her own personal rebellion; however, this rebellion is ³only«from the waist
down´(156). In her feminist critique of Orwell, Daphne Patai asserts that his downfall was
³polariz[ing] human beings according to sex roles and gender identity´ in order to ³legitimize male
displays of dominance and aggression´ (17). By conditioning women to ignore the pleasure felt in the
act of sex, Orwell is dehumanizing them. Julia displays other male aggressive characteristics
throughout the novel as well, such as when she initiated contact through her ³I love you´ note (114).
She goes against typical female roles even further when, with ³military precision´, she details out
exactly how she and Winston would meet (115). Taking a cue from 1984, Atwood calls the sexual act
between Commanders and Handmaids ³The Ceremony´, which has ³nothing to do with passion or love
or romance´ because these things are only ³superfluous distractions for the light-minded´ (94).
Women in Gilead do not have sex for pleasure; in fact, the only people who experience any sexual
pleasure are the Commanders when they are with the Jezebels. While men have no pre-requisites cast
upon them to enjoy sex, the very women they have for pleasure are forced into sterilization with a
shortened lifespan before they will die as a result of a lifestyle forced upon them. Despite the
exploitation of women and the lack of emotional connection during sex, Offred still perseveres to feel
true intimacy with someone. Throughout the story, she reflects on her love with Luke and how much
she longs for the touch of another human. She remembers how beautiful sex was before the new
regime took over and became a duty to society. Even in this new world, she still follows her typical
gender role by not being the pursuer in her relationship with Nick. If Serena Joy had not pushed the
union so much, she may have never instigated sleeping with him. He would have had to pursue her
himself to make that happen. Her recollections of their first night together give one a feeling of
disorientation because she gives two different stories and then ends her thought by saying, ³I made
that up´ (261). Nevertheless, she experiences feelings of ³betrayal´ during this particular sexual act
with Nick because she feels emotion; and with that emotion, comes a sense of cheating on Luke (263).
This whirlwind of emotion brings her to a level of near-obsession with Nick. Shirley Neuman
suggests that at this point, Offred ³falls under the spell of rendezvous with Nick´ and in turn
³ceases«to pay attention´ to what is going on around her (860). Her hunger for intimacy could have
been her kryptonite, but it ultimately became what defined her as a complex female character. The
constant theme of control is ever-present in both Orwell and Atwood’s dystopian societies. The
women in both novels make a conscious decision as to how they want to handlelife under totalitarian
control. Julia’s decision to live life in silent sexual rebellion with noconcern for her future or anyone
around her is very unrealistic and has no deep reasoning. Orwell’s anti-feminist beliefs clouded his
abilities to write a round female character, which in turn made Julia very unbelievable. Atwood, on
the other hand, wrote from a female perspective and was able to create a complex, round character
when she created Offred.
The Handmaid’s Tale: Critical responses:
INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL
In an interview for The Progressive, Margaret Atwood explains how she came to write The Handmaid’s Tale,
which is often labeled speculative fiction because it appears to predict or warn of a triumph of totalitarianism or what
one reviewer calls a “Western Hemisphere Iran.” Having absorbed the New England Puritan tradition during her studies at
Harvard, she observed the rise of the U.S. political right in the 1980s and compared the Moral Majority’s grass-roots
menace to the phenomenon of Hitler. According to Atwood, the Nazi leader told the world what he intended to do; then he
set about accomplishing his heinous aims. The ranting diatribes of late twentieth-century American right-wingers—who
steadfastly push women back into the traditional roles common in the 1950s, delight in the AIDS epidemic among
homosexuals, and threaten death to members of the gay culture—parallel Hitler’s fascist candor. Atwood claims to have
acted on a what-if scenario: suppose ultraconservatives did achieve a coup d’état and turned rhetoric into a stringent
authoritarianism, replete with suspension of constitutional rights, racial cleansing, torture, perpetual sectarian wars, public
execution of homosexuals and dissidents, a repressive police and spy operation, and assignment of roles to women based
on their childbearing capabilities? So trenchant and compelling is Atwood’s fictional premise that critics were bound to
clash in their individual responses and interpretations. During the months following publication of the novel and a parallel
period after the release of the film version, a variety of voices filled columns and reviews with their responses:
Barbara Holliday, writing for the Detroit Free Press, Granted the novel the adulation due a “brilliant and
Machiavellian” thriller, but noted plot shortcuts, particularly the President’s Day massacre of the U.S. president and the
Congress, who are machine-gunned in one neat guerrilla attack. Holliday labels this unlikely scenario “a coup in a Banana
Republic.”
Doris Grumbach, reviewing for the Chicago Tribune,strikes to the heart of Atwood’s purpose—shocking the audience
with her dystopian view, which is “gripping in its horrendous details, striking in the extensions Atwood makes from what
is true now of our society to what might The Handmaid’s Tale possibly be true in time to come.”
•
From a strictly literary perspective, John S. Nelson, writing for the Wichita, Kansas,
Eagle-Beacon, pegs The Handmaid’s Tale as a “cross between 1984 and The Scarlet Letter, “an oft-repeated
duo of comparatives that draw on themes of religious authoritarianism, repression, indoctrination, treachery, and
victimization of women.”
•
A pointed complaint of Robert I. Davis’ review for the Greenburg, Pennsylvania, Tribune is the limited development of
characters, both male and female. Other critics lament that the Commander and Nick receive so little fleshing out,
particularly during the evening at Jezebel’s and on the evening of Offred’s arrest.
•
Elliot Krieger, book editor for the Providence, Rhode Island, Journal, brings Atwood up short for misinterpreting
American devotion to free thought and speech. In what Krieger refers to as Atwood’s ludicrous overestimation of ultraright clout, Americans appear to roll over and play dead, demonstrating an unreal tendency to be “sheepish, malleable,
easily duped.” Krieger concludes that Atwood intends not so much to warn as to ponder the ramifications of the “so-called
return to traditional values.”
•
Alix Madrigal, a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, who interviewed Atwood during her visit to the
newspaper’s office, claims that the fictional regime in Gilead lacks cohesion because its Christians and its revolutionaries
express too little fervor, too little devotion to God or leaders. He concludes: “With no unifying vision, the center doesn’t
hold.”
•
Paul Skenazy, a literature teacher reviewing for the San Jose, California, Mercury News, lauds Atwood, but
criticizes the novel’s ending—the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies set at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on
June 25, 2195—as “inept.” He says, “It is Atwood at her cutest and most unappealing, a jarring piece of narrative silliness
that adds little one could not already guess.”
•
More laudatory is Cathy Warren, an author reviewing for the Charlotte, North Carolina,Observer,
who depicts The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood’s work as “the cry of a female Jeremiah. . .. The Handmaid’s Tale
is not a feminist novel; it is a political one in the Orwell tradition. It is a savage and gripping book, the kind you wish you
could put aside but can’t. “Atwood herself feared that readers would label her paranoid, but out of alarm at the growing
power of anti-abortion terrorism and repressive, anti-female religio-political groups, she continued collecting ominous
news clippings from the United States, Romania, Russia, Iran, and South Africa to use during the writing of
The Handmaid’s Tale.She noted: “I sometimes wake up in the night with disturbing thoughts. . . . What if this book is
not a warning, but a forecast?” North American parallels to her thoughts were revealing: Canadian readers worried that
such a reactionary cabal might form; U.S. readers shuddered in dread that a right-wing dictatorship was not a matter of
if but when.
THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL
As Atwood reveals through her essays and interviews, The Handmaid’s Tale is an outgrowth of the twentieth-century
dystopian point of view. Unlike pre-twentieth-century dreamers, altruists, and sectarians—such as Bronson Alcott,
Robert Owens, Henry David Thoreau, Mother Ann Lee, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, Mary Baker Eddy, and
Charles Fourier, who created perfect worlds on paper and launched experimental utopias (for example, Brooke Farm,
Pennsylvania Dutch enclaves, Christian Scientists’ Massachusetts Metaphysical College and Pleasant View Home, the
pioneer beginnings of Salt Lake City, Utah, and the New Harmony and Oneida communes)—dystopian writers countered
unbridled idealism with a worst-case perspective.
George Orwell, master of the genre, wrote 1984 (1949), a nightmare novel set in London under a totalitarian regime
where manipulative rewriters of history change facts to suit political exigency, manipulate language to serve the truth of the
moment, and suborn party menials with threats, coercion, and subtle terrors. Orwell’s brief beast fable, Animal Farm
(1945), presents a similar controlled misery in miniature as the disgruntled animals on an English farm revolt and evolve a
fascist pig-run police state, which is far worse than their former servitude to the human farmer. Other anti-utopian classics
from the twentieth century exhibit the doubts, fears, and discontent of notable dystopists: Ayn Rand (Anthem), Aldous
Huxley (Brave New World),Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), Karel Capek (R.U.R.), and Ray
Bradbury (“There Will Come Soft Rains” and Fahrenheit 451).In most instances, creators of these hell-on-earth
visions draw on the perversion of science and technology as a major determinant of society’s function and control. For
example, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is set in a California dystopia that features a fire department whose sole purpose is
book burning. Likewise, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World contains a baby factory capable of manufacturing the
prescribed number of people in each of five intellectual levels and indoctrination centers that train the resultant infants to
embrace their lot in life. In contrast to the technical wizardry of Capek, Burgess, Bradbury, and Orwell, Rand, in Anthem,
evolves a society in which innovation is suppressed and people are forced to live in primitive squalor.
Atwood, whose Handmaid’s Tale demonstrates elements inherent in the dystopian genre, echoes numerous motifs
and literary devices. Like Huxley’s creation of a drug-calmed society, her characters awaiting execution appear
tranquilized by shots or pills. Like Huxley’s engineered reproduction, Atwood’s fictional Gilead depends on the allotment
of enslaved babymakers as a means of assuring the birth of white children to repopulate a declining Caucasian nation. A
factor that Atwood’s novel shares with Rand’s Anthem and Orwell’s Animal Farm is the subversion of aphorism as
a means of indoctrination. Further enforced by overseers, these simplistic precepts are subject to change or reinterpretation,
depending on the exigencies of the artificial society that they are meant to bolster.
Critical Insights: The Handmaid's Tale
Feminism and The Handmaid's Tale
By Jennifer E. Dunn
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale would seem, on the surface, a straightforward feminist
text. The narrative is set in a speculative future, exploring gender inequalities in an absolute
patriarchy in which women are breeders, housekeepers, mistresses, or housewives—or otherwise
exiled to the Colonies. In Atwood's fictional Gilead, all of the work of twentieth-century feminism
has been utterly undone, and the text explores the effects of this from a first-person point of view
that elicits the reader's sympathy. Offred's tale functions as a critique of women's oppression, as we
can see from one of her earlier statements problematizing biological determinism: "I avoid looking
down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it.
I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely" (72-73). Yet Offred's story is
neither wholly triumphant nor wholly straightforward. Offred's narrative is potentially undermined,
and certainly deconstructed, by the future historians featured in the text's epilogue. At the same
time, Offred herself is an unreliable and elusive narrator. Can we believe her story? And does her
unreliable status enhance or detract from the text's feminist messages? In raising these questions,
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale engages with the debates of feminist politics, dramatizing a
complicated and ongoing ideological history. This is a complex novel, one that is open to more than
one interpretation, but there are certain affinities with some of the major developments in feminist
thought in the twentieth century, from Virginia Woolf's arguments about women's roles and
women's writing to later discourses on the male gaze, the binary division of male and female, and
the radical potential of language.
In A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf posits that "a woman must have money and a room
of her own if she is to write fiction" (3). Although Woolf suggests an income of "five hundred a year"
would be sufficient for a woman writer, the amount of money is less important than the economic
independence it represents. Likewise, the "room of one's own" is both literal and figurative,
signifying an actual space for retreat as well as a woman's right to privacy, independent thought, and
personal expression. In the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, income and a room of one's
own—and, most important, the freedoms they represent—are systematically denied to women. In
Offred's flashbacks to the time before Gilead, we learn how the new Gilead regime moved quickly to
take away women's financial independence. In the space of a single day, Offred is fired from her job
at the library and denied access to her bank account. The new legislation banning women from
employment and taking away their financial assets immediately demotes Offred and all other
women to the status of second-class citizens, making them dependent on the men who now control
all household income. Even the dynamic in Offred's own marriage changes:
Something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken, so that when [Luke] put his
arms around me, gathering me up, I was small as a doll. I felt love going forward
without me.
He doesn't mind this, I thought. He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We
are not each other's, anymore. Instead, I am his. (191)
This is a major change from the earlier stages of their relationship, when both Offred and her
husband had taken equality between the genders for granted. Offred's mother, a feminist activist,
had even taken exception to their complacency on this matter:
You young people don't appreciate things, she'd say. You don't know what we had
to go through, just to get where you are. Look at [Luke], slicing up the carrots. Don't
you know how many women's lives, how many women's bodies, the tanks had to
roll over just to get that far? (131)
Under the Gilead regime, Offred enjoys certain privileges denied other women, including her own
room in the Commander's household. Soon after her arrival, she makes an effort to claim the space
as her own, examining its contents slowly and in detail: "There has to be some space, finally, that I
can claim as mine, even in this time" (60). Yet this is not truly a room of her own, just as the
Handmaids' very names—all patronymics—are not their own. Offred is not the first Handmaid to
sleep in the room, and during her stay she is not allowed to keep personal belongings. The bedroom
door cannot be locked, allowing the Commander to peer into the room at will. (It is unusual and
meaningful that Cora, one of the Marthas, shows respect by knocking before entering.) Constant
surveillance fosters an atmosphere of paranoia, so that Offred must hide the stolen butter she uses
to moisturize her face, just as she must monitor her words and actions in public. For the women of
Gilead, there is no such thing as private space or ownership, and certainly no room for free personal
expression.
The latter is further reinforced by the Handmaids' appearance. Like all of the other women in Gilead,
the Handmaids are marked by their uniform. Paradoxically, the uniforms of the Wives, Marthas,
Handmaids, and Econowives are meant to be marks of distinction, yet the effect of this mandatory
dress is to make all of the women in a given group indistinguishable from one other. This is
particularly true of the Handmaids' uniform, which takes the design of a nun's habit but is made with
red cloth instead of the conventional black and white. The long gown conceals the Handmaid's body
and is accompanied by long gloves and a wimple with large wings that conceal the face: "They are to
keep us from seeing, but also from being seen" (18). The habit, particularly the wimple, restricts its
wearer's movements, much like Victorian corsetry. Intriguingly, Offred's description of her uniform is
followed by a description of the Commander's house as "late Victorian" (18). Like women's clothing,
decor has a symbolic function in this novel. Here, the decor links the Handmaids to the Victorian cult
of domesticity, the notion of "separate spheres" that relegated women to the home and reserved
professional and public spaces for men alone. Dressed as a Handmaid, Offred is a perverse version of
the Victorian Angel in the House, the idealized, self-sacrificing wife and mother with whom Woolf
does battle in order to express herself as a writer ("Professions for Women"). In Gilead, Offred
suffers where Woolf has gained, as the main effect of the Handmaid's uniform is to repress her
individuality. One Handmaid looks much like any other, a fact reinforced by the text's recurring
image of Handmaids walking two by two around the town or of Offred reflected and thus doubled in
mirrors. Indeed, the Commander's interest in Offred has little, or perhaps nothing, to do with who
she is as an individual; for him, as for other men in Gilead, she is simply a replacement for the
Handmaid that preceded her. Offred's own sense of selfhood is greatly diminished by the rules
governing Handmaids' appearance and behavior. She has trouble remembering what she looked like
before she became a Handmaid, and during her time in Gilead she is dissociated from her own body
and reflection. She does not look down at her body when she takes a bath, and in the mirror she
sees only the confusing signifiers of her uniform: "a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some
fairytale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as
danger. A Sister, dipped in blood" (18).
The Handmaid's uniform is telling in other ways as well, since it operates as a signifier of the
Handmaid's contradictory sexual status. The nunlike habit works to desexualize the Handmaid,
recalling chaste servants of God and concealing the woman's face and body from men who might
find her sexually attractive. Yet the uniform simultaneously marks out its wearer as someone whose
sole function in Gilead is sexual. The red material is meant to represent the blood of the womb and
the sacred rite of reproduction, yet this symbolically resonant color retains historical connotations of
both sexual allure and sexual shame (e.g., Hester Prynne's "scarlet letter" in Nathaniel Hawthorne's
novel). The Handmaids are officially protected and untouchable, but they remain powerful objects of
taboo desire; indeed, their inaccessibility and sham aura of chastity might make them even more
desirable. Early on in the narrative, Offred describes the lingering look of two young Guardians: "As
we walk away I know they're watching, these two men who aren't yet permitted to touch women.
They touch with their eyes instead" (32). The moment conforms to feminist theories of the male
gaze, which reduces women to objects (often sexualized ones) rather than active, individual subjects.
Laura Mulvey argues: "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split
between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects it fantasy onto the
female figure, which is styled accordingly" (442). The gaze makes the woman the "bearer, not maker,
of meaning" (Mulvey 439). Offred becomes a passive object, a blank screen onto which the gazer
might project any meaning at all—including, but not limited to, objectifying sexual fantasies. In The
Handmaid's Tale, even Aunt Lydia recognizes the power of the beholder:
Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to
be—her voice trembled—penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable. (39)
The Handmaids' habits do little to prevent the penetrating gaze of others. Although only men of
higher rank are allowed sexual access to women, the Guardians' leering goes unpunished as long as
the young men do not act on their desires. Yet their gaze speaks to the power that accompanies
looking in Gilead, especially when it comes to looking at women. Gilead is a society that has
outlawed pornography and sexual images of women, yet one of its basic organizing principles is the
sexual objectification of the Handmaids.
This objectification occurs via hypocritical but official routes in public, in the way the Handmaids are
classified and dressed, and it occurs through unofficial, more familiar means in private. The
Commander, for instance, has access to illicit materials such as fashion magazines and pornography,
and numerous high-ranking officers secretly frequent the Jezebel's club. Here, male officers consort
with women wearing forbidden lingerie and cosmetics. When the Commander takes Offred to the
club, he first provides her with a new "uniform" of sequined, feathered lingerie. Moving through the
crowd at Jezebel's, Offred is uncomfortable with the unusual sight of exposed female flesh and
realizes that she, too, is on display:
[The Commander] is showing me off, to them, and they understand that, they are
decorous enough, they keep their hands to themselves, but they review my breasts,
my legs, as if there's no reason why they shouldn't. But also he is showing off to me.
He is demonstrating, to me, his mastery of the world. He is breaking the rules, under
their noses, thumbing his nose at them, getting away with it. (248)
The Commander, who "retains hold of [Offred's] arm" as he displays her to the crowd, is also
showing off his mastery of her. Being the object of the gaze means being in someone's power,
especially in a society so highly controlled by surveillance. The mysterious surveillance force known
only as the Eyes is perhaps the most powerful authority in all of Gilead; even upper-level members
of the regime, including the Commander, fear their transgressions being "seen" by higher
authorities—authorities that remain, significantly, unseen themselves. It is telling that Offred
occasionally gains some power by manipulating the dynamics of the gaze. When she senses the
young Guardians watching her, she realizes she has them in her thrall to some extent:
I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It's like thumbing
your nose from behind a fence or teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach. . . .
I'm ashamed of myself for doing it. . . .
Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power: power of a dog bone, passive but there. (32)
The language used here is similar to Offred's description of the Commander "thumbing his nose" at
the crowd at Jezebel's. Offred describes the Commander's behavior as a "juvenile display" of power,
but a display she understands (248). Likewise, Offred's teasing of the Guardians is "passive," but it is
a form of resistance and subversion nonetheless. Later, in her relationship with the Commander,
Offred gains more power through witnessing the Commander's transgressions. Her shopping
companion Ofglen recognizes this knowledge as real power and asks Offred to pass on any
incriminating information to Mayday, the secret rebel organization.
Gilead's separation of men and women into mutually exclusive roles points to a system of binary
divisions coded by gender. Feminist critics and theorists have explored how such binaries form the
foundation of patriarchal societies, especially as they tend to promote a hierarchy in which one
term, usually that coded as female, is subordinate to the other, usually that coded as male. Hélène
Cixous demonstrates how oppositions such as father/mother, head/heart, and activity/passivity are
gendered and assigned different status: "Logocentrism subjects thought—all concepts, codes and
values—to a binary system, related to `the' couple, man/woman" (91). Woolf gestures toward this
organizational hierarchy in A Room of One's Own, when she realizes that "women have served all
these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure
of man at twice its natural size" (32).
In her illegal relationship with the Commander, Offred's subordinate position serves to flatter the
man and reinforce his power, as made evident in the scene at Jezebel's. The Commander's grip on
her arm symbolizes his personal control and ownership of her, even as her body is put on public
display. As both a "Jezebel" and a Handmaid, Offred is an accessory and object of patriarchal
authority rather than a subject in her own right. Similarly, the women who work at Jezebel's find
themselves in a subordinate position to the men who visit them. Like the Handmaids who hide
butter or quietly tease the staring Guardians, their own subversions operate within a small range.
These women are not confined by the blue gowns of the Wives or the red habits of the Handmaids,
or by Econowives' and Marthas' lives of drudgery. The Jezebels can be sexually expressive to a point,
and even have the opportunity to experience true affection and intimacy in relationships with each
other. But, as Moira explains, the women—some former prostitutes, other former professionals and
intellectuals—have little choice in being there: "Nobody gets out of here except in a black van"
(255). To Offred, Moira's acceptance of this fate suggests an upsetting "lack of volition" (261). Offred
wants to think of Moira as retaining her former agency and assertiveness: "I want gallantry from her,
swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat" (255). But Moira has had to accept the passive role
on the other side of this binary opposition: "Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes
down to" (261).
If men and women are separated by different levels of freedom and power, Gilead's social
classifications work to separate women from each other, as well. The division between Handmaid
and Jezebel re-creates the classic dichotomy of angel and whore, opposing the sexually pure woman
with the sexually promiscuous ("fallen," "ruined") one. The two terms are made absolute and
mutually exclusive, denying the Handmaid sexual identity and the Jezebel moral principle. Some
women are complicit in this system founded on absolute, gendered difference; even Aunt Lydia, we
are told, is "in love with either/or" (18). The Aunts are represented ironically, of course. They are not
nurturing maternal or sisterly figures, but rather operate as agents of Gilead's oppressive patriarchal
regime, a "crack female control agency" (320).
The Wives, too, are enemies rather than companions. Their blue gowns, an allusion to the Virgin
Mary, belie their position as rivals: to the infertile Wife, the Handmaid would seem a competitor for
her husband's affection and sexual desire, and, ultimately, for the highly prized role of mother. The
Commander's Wife, Serena Joy, is particularly malevolent. Offred tells us: "She doesn't speak to me,
unless she can't avoid it. I am a reproach to her; and a necessity" (23). In a society that prizes
children so highly, the Handmaid's role as surrogate mother breeds rivalry and tension. When
Serena Joy finally discovers that the Commander has been taking Offred to Jezebel's, she accuses
Offred of being "vulgar" and a "slut" (299). She must realize that Offred had little choice in the
matter, and she unwittingly reveals the real cause of her resentment, telling Offred, "You could have
left me something" (299).
Women of lower social rank are also enemies. Econowives resent the Handmaids' privileges and high
social status, while Rita, one of the Marthas in the Commander's household, quietly judges the
Handmaids. Rita's statement that "she wouldn't debase herself like that" (20) points to the unspoken
fact that the sexually "pure" Handmaid is not that different from a mistress or prostitute. The
Marthas, like the Wives, can share or withhold valuable information. Offred listens to kitchen gossip
when she can, but Rita is tight-lipped about certain matters, including the fate of Offred's
predecessor (we later learn she committed suicide). Similarly, Serena Joy uses information about
Offred's birth daughter as a means of control. Even other Handmaids cannot fully be trusted. When
completing errands in town, Offred and Ofglen test each other, unsure of the other's affiliations and
beliefs. When a new Ofglen appears near the end of the novel, Offred soon senses she cannot trust
her new companion. This "new, treacherous Ofglen" recognizes Offred's code word, "Mayday," but
discourages further discussion, giving one of many sanctioned responses: "Under His Eye" (297). Like
Offred, Ofglen's replacement might be too worried about spies to respond to Offred truthfully.
Thus, even women in the same position are divided from one another. Isolation fosters the culture
of fear and reinforces the assimilation process initiated at the Red Center. Most important, it
prevents solidarity among women. There is little opportunity in Gilead for collective political action;
the feminist "sisterhood" of the past, in which Offred's mother played a significant role, is no more.
Even when women are allowed to gather in groups—during Birthing, Salvaging, or Particicution
ceremonies, for instance—these gatherings are highly ritualized and regulated. They are licensed
outlets for emotional expression, what Professor Pieixoto calls "a steam valve for the female
elements in Gilead" (320). During the Particicution ceremony near the end of Offred's story, we see
how the presiding Aunt Lydia encourages the Handmaids to bond in anger and violence, and work
together to attack an accused rapist. As Ofglen reveals, the man in question is not a rapist but a
subversive agent working to liberate Gilead's female slaves. Here, the spontaneously formed
women's collective becomes a mob controlled by the authorities, upholding the status quo and
destroying their would-be savior rather than providing an opportunity for real expression or political
action.
Those who oppose Gilead's patriarchal regime must find other ways to rebel against and undermine
it. As discussed above, rebellion often works on an individual scale and through small gestures: in
Offred's minor thefts of butter or sugar packets, for instance, or the furtive exchanges of information
between Handmaids. Any large-scale movement must work secretly, beyond the vision of the Eyes
and Commanders. We see this in the hidden "Underground Femaleroad" and in Mayday's careful
placement of spies within the regime. But we might also interpret Offred's very narrative as an act of
rebellion and protest. By recording her story, Offred reveals suppressed truths, passing on crucial
information not only for other refugees of Gilead and the international community of the story but
also for posterity, for the future readers and historians represented in the text's concluding
"Historical Notes." As an important historical document, and as a tale that articulates forbidden
truths and emotions, Offred's narrative gives a voice to the silenced, marginalized, and subjugated
women of Gilead. The Handmaid's Tale tells their side of the story, becoming what feminist critics
might call "herstory." In "Women and Fiction" (1929), Woolf observes that "very little is known of
women. The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female" (141). Information
about women's writing and female experience, Woolf suggests, "lies at present locked in old diaries,
stuffed away in old drawers . . . in those almost unlit corridors of history where the figures of
generations of women are so dimly, so fitfully perceived" (141). Offred's narrative is a modernized
version of the old diaries Woolf describes; hers is a disguised story, recorded between songs on
cassette tapes and locked away in an old Army surplus box, only to be found and analyzed almost
two centuries later. Feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s (significantly, the years that precede
the Gilead regime in Atwood's novel) sought to uncover hidden stories not unlike Offred's and to
establish the women's history Woolf outlines in "Women and Fiction." Studies such as Ellen Moers's
Literary Women (1976) and Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) examined and
celebrated marginalized women writers, establishing a female literary tradition. In 2195 in The
Handmaid's Tale, the work of Professor Pieixoto and other academics conducts a similar
reconstruction of women's experiences and stories, and Offred's tale plays a key role in this.
This Handmaid's tale is what Adrienne Rich calls re-vision: "the act of looking back, of seeing with
fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (18). The Handmaid's Tale is a
rewriting in many ways, drawing on the tropes of the gothic genre, satire, and the slave narrative to
tell a new story about women's experience. As signified by the text's first epigraph, it is also a
rewriting of Genesis. If the Gilead regime interprets the Bible to suit its own purposes, Offred's story
enacts yet another reinterpretation and retelling, giving a voice to Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid in
Genesis. The text has also been compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); both
novels imagine a dystopian world controlled by surveillance, although The Handmaid's Tale
recenters Orwell's story on a woman's experience in such a world rather than a man's. For Rich, the
re-vision of familiar stories is "an act of survival" for women writers and women readers (18). This
speaks to Offred's experience, which is very much an effort to survive. Telling her story is part of that
effort. Indeed, Offred sometimes offers more than one version of events, and she calls attention to
the constructed nature of her tale as it goes on. Like daydreaming of liberty or love, and like
remembering her daughter and husband, telling stories is a coping strategy. It allows her to preserve
a sense of hope but also to distance herself from the horrors of her reality:
I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it.
Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. (49)
The "story" in question is re-visionary in other ways, as well. It offers alternatives to Gilead's
problematic definitions of women. In this sense, Offred's tale is what Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls a
"displacement," a representation of "the other side of the story" that offers positive images of
women (108). Offred's friend Moira, for instance, is often cast as a hero and rebel. Offred's mother,
a feminist activist, is also seen in a heroic light as the narrative unfolds and Offred better
understands her struggle for women's rights. Scenes of feminists marching in the streets and of
Moira's daring escape attempt are beacons of hope, counternarratives to the grainy television image
of Offred's mother enslaved in the Colonies, and to the final image of Moira as a resigned Jezebel.
The narrative potentially positions Offred herself as a heroine, in that the discovery of her cassette
tapes in Bangor, Maine, suggests she has escaped and survived to tell the tale.
As shown in the text's "Historical Notes" section, Offred's account ultimately functions as an
alternative to the official history of Gilead. Conventional historical accounts strive for objectivity and
factual truth, and typically focus on the macro scale; Offred's story is clearly a subjective, even
autobiographical, account, and one that focuses on everyday, domestic reality. She is not the
hidden, omniscient narrator of history textbooks, but rather a deeply unreliable storyteller. She
admits to a limited knowledge of events, displays a problematic memory, and sometimes changes
her story:
If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an
ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
It isn't a story I'm telling.
It's also a story I'm telling, in my head, as I go along. (49)>
The text is thus a rewriting of history, a way of "telling it slant," to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. If the
text challenges and revises familiar tales and images of women, it also confronts historiography,
offering "herstory" instead. As Coral Ann Howells notes, "Offred's tale claims a space, a large
autobiographical space, within the novel and so relegates the grand narratives [of the Bible, of
history] to the margins as mere framework" (93). Just as Offred's own story offers multiple versions
of events and multiple kinds of truth, the text as a whole presents "history" and "herstory" as
competing but also equal discourses. This is another kind of re-vision, one DuPlessis calls
"delegitimation." Unlike displacement, which gives the reader access to "other side of the story,"
delegitimation is an "active rupture of a narrative order" that highlights how "stories are ideologies
that shape our sense of reality—indeed, that stories themselves can colonize" (112). In other words,
delegitimation acknowledges the power that language has over us. In The Handmaid's Tale, language
is shown to be a source of power, one as effective as the gaze. The Commander's illicit games of
Scrabble are a metaphor for control over language and an acknowledgment of its potential. At first,
the game seems to offer merely the thrill of the forbidden:
This was once the game of old women, old men. . . . Now of course it's something
different. Now it's forbidden, for us. Now it's dangerous. Now it's indecent. Now it's
something he can't do with his Wife. (148-149)
Offred even compares the game to a fetish: Playing with words has become a replacement
for the sexual taboos of the past. Yet, in Gilead, playing with words is much more than a
game. Like telling one's story, it is a means of subversion and survival. The text is full of puns,
codes, and gossip, all of which serve to pass on—or to hide—vital information. Offred's own
narrative both passes on and disguises the truth. As Professor Pieixoto discusses, Offred has
probably used pseudonyms, and she even disrupts the order of her own story by not labeling
the cassette tapes. Nathalie Cooke argues that Offred is ultimately not in control of her own
story, since Pieixoto's team creates the final, authoritative version: "In the war of words,
Offred has lost" (131). Yet we might see the very elusiveness of Offred's tale as a final
gesture of subversion. Her text resists closure and fixed meanings, defying the logical
paradigms of historiography and the penetrating gaze of the reader, even some two
centuries later. After all, as many critics have noted, even Atwood's post-Gilead society
displays sexist tendencies, as seen most clearly in Professor Pieixoto's lewd pun on the
Handmaid's "tail." The self-reflexive qualities of Offred's tale, and the way it draws attention
to the plurality of meaning and the unreliability of any narrative, forces the reader to
consider the effects of language in any context and to think about who is telling and retelling
stories.
The Handmaid's Tale is exceptionally open-ended, lending itself to more than one feminist
reading. In its explicit critique of gender inequalities and positive images of women, the text
answers to the demands of academic feminist criticism. In its elusiveness and playfulness
with meanings, it reflects a preoccupation with the instability of language and radical
potential of rewriting and retelling, thus conforming to many feminist approaches. Yet the
text is sometimes a satire of feminist politics, too, just as it is a satire of patriarchal ideology
and authority. As Fiona Tolan observes, the terrifying Aunts "ironically echo the slogans of
early utopian feminism": Aunt Lydia's society of "freedom from," though repressive and
dystopian, is in some ways a solution to earlier problems of "freedom to" (Tolan 152-53).
Atwood's images of women are not all positive, and the text does not always offer happy
endings, as we see in the case of Moira. This does not detract from the novel's feminist
import. On the contrary, The Handmaid's Tale illustrates that both positive and negative
endings—like straightforward and elusive narratives—can highlight social injustice, criticize
repressive ideologies, and prompt the reader to think about the effects and applications of
language, especially as they relate to gender inequality
UTOPIAS AND ANTI-UTOPIAS
The tradition of utopian fiction in our Western culture goes back to the Ancient Greeks with
Plato's Republic, written about 35011C. Writers have always invented imaginary good
societies (utopias) and imaginary bad societies (anti-utopias or dystopias) in order to
comment on distinctive features and trends of their own societies. Utopias and anti-utopias
are not merely fantasy worlds, but, as Krishan Kumar describes them in his book Utopianism
(1991), they are imaginary places 'and accordingly futile to seek out, that nevertheless exist
tantalisingly (or frighteningly) on the edge of possibility, somewhere just beyond the
boundary of the real' (p. 1). These fictions always have a kind of mirror relation to the writer's
own world. They may offer models for the future, or more frequently they may make satiric
attacks on present society and deliver strong warnings against the consequences of particular
kinds of political and social behaviour.
Margaret Atwood said in a review of Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976),
'Utopias are products of the moral rather than the literary sense', and as political or social
commentary they have a strongly didactic element. They need to be read with some
knowledge of the context of their own time to enable the reader to see the particularities of
the society in which they were produced. Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is concerned with
the possibilities for a better society that were being opened up by the discovery of the New
World of America, whereas nearly 500 years later The Handmaids Tale is warning against
threats of environmental pollution, religious fundamentalism and state surveillance in that
same New World which has become the United States of America.
Margaret Atwood's negative vision of tyranny, women's enslavement and ecological disaster
belongs to a long line of anti-utopian fictions which goes back to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels.(1726) and includes some remarkable twentieth-century novels such as Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Women have also written utopian and anti-utopian fictions, or, more frequently, fictions that
mix the two. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed
(1974), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Joanna Russ's The Female Man
(1975) all combine negative social criticism with visions of a better future.
The Handmaid's Tale is an exposure of power politics at their most basic - 'Who can do what
to whom', as Offred says. Indeed, it is women who are worst off, for in Gilead women and
nature are relentlessly exploited as 'national resources'. Atwood's Gilead is her strong
warning against the policies and assumptions of late twentieth-century Western technological
society. As she also makes plain in the 'Historical Notes', Gilead turns out to have been an
unworkable social experiment. She told an interviewer in 1987, 'I'm an optimist. I like to
show that the Third Reich, the Fourth Reich, the Fifth Reich did not last forever'
(Conversations, p. 223), and she compares her 'Historical Notes' with Orwell's note on
Newspeak at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Many of the themes of The Handmaids Tale are to be found in Nineteen Eighty-four. It offers
a similar warning against threats of totalitarianism in the not too distant future, and delineates
the ways in which any totalitarian state tries to control not only the lives but also the thoughts
of its subjects. There are similar efforts to silence opposition at any price, and both novels
warn against the dangers of propaganda and censorship. Atwood pays particular attention to
the abuses of language in Gilead where the meanings of words are changed to their opposites,
as in Orwell's Newspeak, in an effort to restructure the way people are allowed to think about
their world. For example, the Gileadean rhetoric of 'Aunts', 'Angels', 'Salvagings' takes words
with reassuring emotional connotations and distorts them into euphemisms for the
instruments of oppression. There is, however, one major difference between The Handmaids
Tale and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Atwood's novel is told from the point of view of an 'ignorant
peripherally involved woman'. (Incidentally, this is the same point of view that she adopted in
her previous novel, Bodily Harm.) Offred is not Orwell's Winston Smith and she does not
come to love Big Brother (or in her case, the Commander) in the end. Instead she escapes and
tells her story as a narrative of resistance.
The novel is set in the United States, because, as Atwood has said, 'The States are more
extreme in everything ... Everyone watches the States to see what the country is doing and
might be doing ten or fifteen years from now' (Conversations, p. 217). This is a futuristic
scenario but close enough to our time, for the protagonist herself has grown up in the
permissive society of the 1970s and 1980s and is at the time of telling her story only thirtythree years old. Some of the features of Gilead could apply to any late twentieth-century state
with advanced technology and pollution problems. It is, however, specifically an American
location, as we learn not only from the 'Historical Notes', but also from details within Offred's
narrative, as, for example, from the Gileadean take-over 'when they shot the President and
machine-gunned the Congress' (Chapter 28), Moira's escape along Mass Avenue (Chapter
38), and 4 July, the former Independence Day (Chapter 31). Atwood signals the particular
historical, social and political context in her 'What if statement (see Introduction). There is
also a strong sense of American Puritan history here, establishing connections between
seventeenth-century New England's witch hunts and late twentieth-century Gilead, with its
New Right ideology and its religious fanaticism.
Not only is it a 'Back to the Future' scenario but it is also a period of crisis, for the novel deals
with the new anti-utopian society at its moment of transition. Offred herself is facing both
ways, but so is Gilead, with all its citizens and its leaders remembering the capitalist era and
its culture. Gilead is a bizarre mixture of fundamentalist principles, late twentiethcentury
technology and a Hollywood-style propaganda machine. It also has the whole of human
history upon which to draw, for 'there was little that was truly original with or indigenous to
Gilead: its genius was synthesis' ('Historical Notes'). The novel ends as a strong warning to
learn from history in order to avoid a nightmare like Gilead for our own future.
February 9, 1986
New York Times: Book Review
By MARY McCARTHY
Surely the essential element of a cautionary tale is recognition. Surprised recognition, even,
enough to administer a shock. We are warned, by seeing our present selves in a distorting
mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue. That was the
effect of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four,'' with its scary dating, not 40 years ahead, maybe also of
''Brave New World'' and, to some extent, of ''A Clockwork Orange.''
It is an effect, for me, almost strikingly missing from Margaret Atwood's very readable book
''The Handmaid's Tale,'' offered by the publisher as a ''forecast'' of what we may have in store
for us in the quite near future. A standoff will have been achieved vis-a-vis the Russians, and
our own country will be ruled by right-wingers and religious fundamentalists, with males
restored to the traditional role of warriors and us females to our ''place'' - which, however,
will have undergone subdivision into separate sectors, of wives, breeders, servants and so
forth, each clothed in the appropriate uniform. A fresh postfeminist approach to future shock,
you might say. Yet the book just does not tell me what there is in our present mores that I
ought to watch out for unless I want the United States of America to become a slave state
something like the Republic of Gilead whose outlines are here sketched out.
Another reader, less peculiar than myself, might confess to a touch of apathy regarding credit
cards (instruments of social control), but I have always been firmly against them and will go
to almost any length to avoid using one. Yet I can admit to a general failure to extrapolate
sufficiently from the 1986 scene. Still, even when I try, in the light of these palely lurid
pages, to take the Moral Majority seriously, no shiver of recognition ensues. I just can't see
the intolerance of the far right, presently directed not only at abortion clinics and
homosexuals but also at high school libraries and small-town schoolteachers, as leading to a
super-biblical puritanism by which procreation will be insisted on and reading of any kind
banned. Nor, on the other hand, do I fear our ''excesses'' of tolerance as pointing in the same
direction. Liberality toward pornography in the courts, the media, on the newstands may
make an anxious parent feel disgusted with liberalism, but can it really move a nation to
install a theocracy strictly based on the Book of Genesis? Where are the signs of it? A
backlash is only a backlash, that is, a reaction. Fear of a backlash, in politics, ought not to
deter anybody from adhering to principle; that would be only another form of cowardice.
The same for ''excessive'' feminism, which here seems to bear some responsibility for Gilead,
to be one of its causes. The kind of doctrinaire feminism likely to produce a backlash is
exemplified in the narrator's absurd mother, whom we first hear of at a book-burning in the
old, pre-Gilead time - the ''right'' kind of book-burning, naturally, merely a pyre of
pornographic magazines: ''Mother,'' thinks the narrator in what has become the present, ''You
wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one.'' The wrong kind, of course.
The new world of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' is a woman's world, even though governed,
seemingly, and policed by men. Its ethos is entirely domestic, its female population is divided
into classes based on household functions, each class clad in a separate color that instantly
identifies the wearer - dull green for the Marthas (houseworkers); blue for the Wives; red,
blue and green stripes for the Econowives (working class); red for the Handmaids (whose
function is to bear children to the head of the household, like Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid in
Genesis, but who also, in their long red gowns and white wimple-like headgear, have
something of the aura of a temple harlot); brown for the Aunts (a thought-control force, partgoverness, part-reform-school matron). The head of the household - whose first name the
handmaid takes, adding the word ''of'' to show possession -''Offred,'' ''Ofwarren'' - is known as
the Commander. It is his duty to inseminate his assigned partner, who lies on the spread
thighs of his wife. THE Commanders, presumably, are the high bureaucracy of the regime,
yet they are oddly powerless in the household, having no part in the administration of
discipline and ceremonially subject to their aging wives. We are not told how and in what
sense they govern. The oversight perhaps accounts for the thin credibility of the parable. That
they lack freedom, are locked into their own rigid system, is only to be expected. It is no
surprise that our narrator's commander, Fred, like a typical bourgeois husband of former
times, does a bit of cheating, getting Offred to play Scrabble with him secretly at night
(where books are forbidden, word games become wicked), look at his hoard of old fashion
magazines (forbidden), kiss him, even go dressed in glitter and feathers to an underground
bunny-type nightclub staffed by fallen women, mostly lesbian. Nor is it a surprise that his
wife catches him/ them. Plusca change, plus c'est la meme chose. But that cannot be the
motto for a cautionary tale, whose job is to warn of change.
Infertility is the big problem of the new world and the reason for many of its institutions. A
dramatically lowered birth rate, which brought on the fall of the old order, had a plurality of
causes, we are told. ''The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water
swarmed with toxic molecules.'' During an earthquake, atomic power plants exploded
(''nobody's fault''). A mutant strain of syphilis appeared, and of course AIDS. Then there were
women who refused to breed, as an antinuclear protest, and had their tubes tied up. Anyway,
infertility, despite the radical measures of the new regime, has not yet been overcome. Not
only are there barren women (mostly shipped to the colonies) but a worrying sterility in men,
especially among the powerful who ought to be reproducing themselves. The amusing
suggestion is made, late in the book at a symposium (June 25, 2195) of Gileadean historical
studies, that sterility among the Commanders may have been the result of an earlier genesplicing experiment with mumps that produced a virus intended for insertion into the supply
of caviar used by top officials in Moscow.
''The Handmaid's Tale'' contains several such touches of deft sardonic humor - for example,
the television news program showing clouds of smoke over what was formerly the city of
Detroit: we hear the anchorman explain that resettlement of the children of Ham in National
Homeland One (the wilds of North Dakota) is continuing on schedule - 3,000 have arrived
that week. And yet what is lacking, I think - what constitutes a fundamental disappointment
after a promising start - is the destructive force of satire. ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' had it, ''A
Clockwork Orange'' had it, even ''Brave New World'' had it, though Huxley was rather short
on savagery. If ''The Handmaid's Tale'' doesn't scare one, doesn't wake one up, it must be
because it has no satiric bite.
The author has carefully drawn her projections from current trends. As she has said
elsewhere, there is nothing here that has not been anticipated in the United States of America
that we already know. Perhaps that is the trouble: the projections are too neatly penciled in.
The details, including a Wall (as in Berlin, but also, as in the Middle Ages, a place where
executed malefactors are displayed), all raise their hands announcing themselves present. At
the same time, the Republic of Gilead itself, whatever in it that is not a projection, is
insufficiently imagined. The Aunts are a good invention, though I cannot picture them as
belonging to any future; unlike Big Brother, they are more part of the past - our
schoolteachers.
But the most conspicuous lack, in comparison with the classics of the fearsome-future genre,
is the inability to imagine a language to match the changed face of common life. No
newspeak. And nothing like the linguistic tour de force of ''A Clockwork Orange'' - the brutal
melting-down of current English and Slavic words that in itself tells the story of the dread
new breed. The writing of ''The Handmaid's Tale'' is undistinguished in a double sense,
ordinary if not glaringly so, but also indistinguishable from what one supposes would be
Margaret Atwood's normal way of expressing herself in the circumstances. This is a serious
defect, unpardonable maybe for the genre: a future that has no language invented for it lacks
a personality. That must be why, collectively, it is powerless to scare. ONE could argue that
the very tameness of the narrator-heroine's style is intended as characterization. It is true that
a leading trait of Offred (we are never told her own, real name in so many words, but my
textual detective work says it is June) has always been an unwillingness to stick her neck out,
and perhaps we are meant to conclude that such unwillingness, multiplied, may be fatal to a
free society. After the takeover, she tells us, there were some protests and demonstrations. ''I
didn't go on any of the marches. Luke [ her husband ] said it would be futile, and I had to
think about them, my family, him and her [ their little girl ] .'' Famous last words. But, though
this may characterize an attitude - fairly widespread - it does not constitute a particular kind
of speech. And there are many poetical passages, for example (chosen at random): ''All things
white and circular. I wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round
face of the implacable clock.'' Which is surely oldspeak, wouldn't you say?
Characterization in general is weak in ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' which maybe makes it a poet's
novel. I cannot tell Luke, the husband, from Nick, the chauffeur-lover who may be an Eye
(government spy) and/ or belong to the ''Mayday'' underground. Nor is the Commander
strongly drawn. Again, the Aunts are best. How sad for postfeminists that one does not feel
for Offred-June half as much as one did for Winston Smith, no hero either but at any rate
imaginable. It seems harsh to say again of a poet's novel - so hard to put down, in part so
striking - that it lacks imagination, but that, I fear, is the problem.
Mary McCarthy, whose latest book is ''Occasional Prose,'' will assume the new Stevenson
Chair of Literature at Bard College beginning this fall.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the
Dystopian Tradition
Paul Brians
February 21, 2006
Revised October 31, 2007
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is one of the most famous and popular novels ever written belonging
to the literary genre known as “dystopias.” This term is derived from “Utopia,” the word that
Thomas More used for the title of his sixteenth-century novel depicting an ideal society; but the
earliest work of its type is generally considered to be the 4th-century BC Plato’s Republic, which has
in common with the government of Bradbury’s novel a deep suspicion of literature as disturbing and
subversive. Plato suggests that if the great epic poet Homer were to arrive in his ideal city, he should
crown him with laurels, congratulate him on his achievements, and send him on his way—much less
harsh than burning him to death, but depicting a similar determination to control the thoughts of
citizens and ban the free play of the imagination.
Thus we see that one person’s idea of an ideal existence is another’s nightmare. Utopias proliferated
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it is not surprising that dystopias began to appear then
as well, including the earliest well-known example, Evgeny Zamiatin’s We, published in 1927 as a
scathing attack on the increasingly repressive Soviet state.
The same year the German silent film Metropolis appeared, depicting a mechanized, rigid society
with a mindless, self-indulgent upper class benefiting from the brutal exploitation of the workingclass masses. This is one of the great films of all times, though it was subsequently edited almost to
incomprehensibility. A relatively complete beautifully restored version was released in 2001.
Ironically, the screenwriter of this hymn to equality and love, Thea von Harbou, went on to work
with the Nazis as they implemented their own real-life dystopia, while her Jewish husband, director
Fritz Lang, fled to the West.
The first dystopian novel commonly encountered by American readers today is Aldous Huxley’s 1932
Brave New World. It depicts a society in which human beings are treated like different model cars
trundling off the Ford assembly line, bred in bottles for designated roles in society comparable to
those depicted in Metropolis, as drudges or as self-indulgent but loveless upper-class mindless twits
hooked on orgies and drugs. (It is often noted, however, that Huxley himself was ultimately to
embrace psychedelic drugs and took LSD while he was dying.) Societal control is enforced by among
other means by the suppression of literary classics. In this society Shakespeare’s plays are a
revolutionary force. In its opposition to modern technology and science, Brave New World is a
deeply conservative reaction against the innovations of the first two decades of the 20th century.
By far the best-known dystopia is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, written in 1948 and
published in June of 1949, in the early days of the Cold War. Although revisionist literary critics have
tried for decades to portray the book as being as much a critique of the West as of the East, it is
difficult to ignore the many obvious images reflecting aspects of Stalinist Russian society, including
censorship involving the rewriting of history, the near-deification of the dictator, and the
encouragement of children to spy on and betray their parents. Whereas Huxley’s citizens were
amused into mindlessness, Orwell’s are treated much more brutally, with torture and murder of
dissidents being commonplace. In this novel, unlike Huxley’s, loveless sex is a means of protest; and
endless, inescapable television propaganda broadcasts have replaced reading. Although television
had been developed in a crude form as early as the mid-1920’s, its commercial spread was delayed
by World War II, and it had really erupted into public consciousness only in 1948, the year in which
Orwell was writing his novel.
In his culture television is a two-way tool which watches the citizens even more intently than the
citizens watch it. Orwell never really explains how everyone can be spied on so intently without at
least one half of the population watching the other half. The improbability of this arrangement is
typical of dystopias, which seldom strive to create plausible portraits of a degraded future culture,
but instead exaggerate certain tendencies in order to isolate and highlight them.
In science fiction, the dystopia became immensely popular during the 1950’s as writers protested
against what they saw as the overwhelming tide of conformity and cultural emptiness typified by
mass-market television and other powerful forces in the postwar world. Many of them could be
called stories on the theme “If This Goes On—” which was the title of a 1940 story by Robert A.
Heinlein—not in itself a dystopian tale, but the phrase sums up the technique used by numerous
authors: take a social tendency, extrapolate it to an extreme degree, and describe the
consequences. Clifford D. Simak extrapolated the post-war flight of people from the cities to the
suburbs in his moving but wildly improbable series of stories assembled into City (1952). Individuals
not only isolate themselves on remote country estates in a rapidly depopulating world, but
eventually abandon their human forms and leave Earth altogether.
In the next decade, authors would more plausibly imagine an overpopulated future in such works as
Make Room, Make Room by Harry Harrison—later drastically reworked as a film titled Soylent
Green—and Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Even with increased attention paid to believability,
such works tend to strike contemporary readers as exaggerated because they ignore natural brakes
on population which have led in our own time to a leveling off in the birth rate in most regions of the
world.
Such catastrophic futures have since been commonplace in popular culture, especially in films like
Mad Max and Escape from New York. This sort of dystopia is often no longer an anti-utopia—but
simply a failed society in full collapse. It often ceases to function as what is called an “awful warning”
(the formal literary term is “cautionary tale”) because the reader is encouraged to identify with the
violent adventurers who enjoy the anarchy created by the fall of civilization. Macho thrillers set in
post-holocaust radioactive wastelands became very popular in the 1980s, and decayed urban
dystopias are common in contemporary video games.
In contrast to these macho fantasies, women authors began increasingly to write feminist dystopias
in the 1970’s. Especially notable is the sharply satirical and hard-hitting The Female Man by Joanna
Russ, and the fiercely misogynist culture depicted in Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee
Charnas. But most interesting of all is Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which like
Bradbury’s deals with the repression of literacy. Fundamentalist pro-life militants have taken over
society and severely repressed women, using a peculiar interpretation of the Bible to justify their
actions. Women are forbidden to read, presumably to prevent their developing their own
interpretations and ideas. In the novel the desperate but witty narrator makes a major breakthrough
into literacy, introduced at first as an illicit thrill by her master, who like Beatty in Fahrenheit 451,
enjoys tasting forbidden fruit while still upholding the values of the repressive dominant order.
In 1955, Frederik Pohl wrote a seminal story titled “Tunnel Under the World,” which depicted a
nightmare experiment where a miniaturized city lived through the same day over and over again to
test the effectiveness of various advertising campaigns. It was turned into a radio drama broadcast
the next year. The same sort of artificial reality was depicted in the 1960 Philip K. Dick novel Time
Out of Joint, and the even more closely related 1963 novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye
(though the theme was only briefly alluded to in the 1999 film version, The Thirteenth Floor). This
sort of fiction in which the audience of mass media winds up inhabiting it is of course best known
from The Matrix and its sequels. Although the modern versions employ computer technology rather
than video, the tradition has its roots over anxiety about the mesmerizing power of television to
manipulate and transform its audience.
1950 was the year that television became a truly mass-culture phenomenon in the United States.
People would visit friends simply to sit—or stand, if there weren’t enough chairs to go around—and
stare mesmerized at the glowing little box for hours. To some people it seemed to portend the death
of civilized discourse, literacy, and individualism. Among these was Ray Bradbury.
Bradbury had begun his career writing mostly stories in the “weird tales” tradition, spooky horror
stories of supernatural and uncanny events, often with shocking endings. The best of these are
collected in The October Country, and many were adapted for television in The Twilight Zone and
other venues. But gradually he became more and more a science fiction writer, finally becoming
famous for his best-selling 1950 story collection, The Martian Chronicles. Many of the stories
included had been published in the 1940’s, and one can see in this work a complex and sometimes
contradictory mixture of horror, science-fictional wonder, and sentimental nostalgia which was to
become characteristic of his mature writing.
1950 also marked the beginning of the “Red Scare” period most memorably exemplified by Senator
Joseph McCarthy’s vicious, irresponsible crusade against supposed communists and communist
sympathizers which included attempts to remove suspect books from public libraries. This was also
the period of the Hollywood blacklist, with many actors, directors, and screenwriters being banned
from working on Hollywood films or television. Although Bradbury has said that the book-burnings in
Fahrenheit 451 were inspired by the 1933 Nazi book-burnings, he was much more likely inspired by
the censorship that accompanied the Red Scare of his own era.
He experimented with the theme of censorship in the story “Usher II,” which appeared somewhat
awkwardly in The Martian Chronicles, where it seemed arbitrarily put into a Martian context.
Fantastic fiction has been banned, and is burned wherever it may be discovered. A fanatical admirer
of the works of Edgar Allan Poe invites the censors to his monstrous castle, to be murdered one after
the other in imitation of grisly deaths depicted in Poe’s writings. The hero argues eloquently for the
importance of the imagination, revealing among other things that Bradbury was an ardent fan of L.
Frank Baum’s Oz books; but his bloody-minded behavior would seem to lend credibility to the
censors’ fears of fantastic fiction rather than plausibly advancing the cause of the freedom to read.
But “Usher II” is also dark comedy, and one of his most memorable stories on that account.
Dystopias have often been most successful as literature when they have incorporated humor. One of
the most effective modern works of dystopian satire is Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which incorporates
themes and images from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but is all the more frightening for its fierce comic
touches. Today it seems much less dated than Orwell’s novel or either of the movies based on it.
At the end of The Martian Chronicles the kindly father-hero of “The Million-Year Picnic” protects the
next generation from repeating the mistakes of a violent Earth civilization by ceremoniously burning
books from the past. This marks only one of the many inconsistencies that run through this loosely
linked collection of stories. However, it is notable that the works destroyed in this story are
nonfiction volumes relating to politics and that the works eulogized in “Usher II” are fantasy and
gothic horror.
Bradbury seems to have had second thoughts about the wisdom of erasing past knowledge by fire
when in 1950 he wrote “The Fireman,” the story which became the kernel of Fahrenheit 451. In this
story and the ensuing novel he imagined a nightmare society in which reading has become all but
banned: pornography, comic books, and television scripts seem to be the only print material
allowed. A secondary target was the popular Reader’s Digest condensed books, which boiled down
bestsellers for impatient readers, and which Bradbury portrays as a transitional stage to the
annihilation of books altogether.
Caches of books, when discovered, are burned by “firemen” whose job is eradicating print.
Socialization has been reduced to group television viewings, and creativity narrowed into brief
moments in shows when the audience is prompted to respond to the virtual events they are
witnessing, and which absorb them far more than the real world around them.
The novel was an immediate success, and has been widely read ever since, being made into a
memorable film in 1966 by the famed French New Wave director François Truffaut.
It is a peculiar work in Bradbury’s oeuvre. He is best known as a short story writer, and his most
characteristic books, such as The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine, are really compilations of
stories. Fahrenheit 451 is his only fully successful novel. In addition, much of his popularity can be
attributed to the perfumed sensuousness of his imagery, the often extravagant sights, sounds, and
smells he deploys to engage the reader. Fahrenheit 451 lacks the evocative descriptions that
characterize his other works, being set in a sterile, artificial world. Even when Clarisse speaks of her
enjoyment of nature at night the language is abstract and general.
Once again the books most treasured by the literate characters are fiction, though religious and
philosophical works appear as well. Works of science are entirely unmentioned. Bradbury is
famously a science-fiction writer not particularly fond of science. One wonders how the technocrats
who create the wallscreens and originate the broadcasts gain the knowledge they need to do their
jobs if they too are illiterate. Orwell had depicted a civilization in decline, unable to innovate
anything but new tortures; but Bradbury seems to imagine that technological advances can be
carried out in the absence of knowledge gained from print.
It is easy to see why the book was warmly received when it was published in 1953. The prosperity of
post-war America created a mass culture of vast complacency which valued conformity and
blandness. The edginess which Bradbury’s beloved science fiction, horror, and fantasy featured was
suspect. There were plenty of voices raised in protest, celebrating nonconformity, individualism, and
creativity; and a large number of these voices belonged to science fiction writers.
The book probably continued to appeal to readers for the same reason that a great deal of science
fiction has always appealed to certain readers. It portrays as heroes those who disdain sports, who
like to read— in short, unathletic nerds like Bradbury—like me and my friends—who were
swallowing science fiction in huge gulps in the 1950s. The masses are stupid, brutish, uncaring.
Anybody who loves books is likely to be cheered by a tale in which depicts writers not only as the
“unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Shelley had called them, but as the keepers of the
flame of civilization itself. Most people enjoy a story in which the underdog comes out on top.
Imagine: Napoleon Dynamite saves the world!
One of the most striking characteristics of the novel to be frequently overlooked is its setting in an
era of recurrent atomic war. In 1950, when Bradbury was writing, the Russians had just the previous
year exploded their first atomic bomb, making real the nuclear arms race that had only been
fantasized before. The first thermonuclear weapon was not to be tested for another year, though
Bradbury depicts a society which has already weathered two atomic wars. As in Orwell’s novel, there
are suggestions that this state of war is designed to preserve the supremacy of the tyrannical regime
which governs this dystopia. A final apocalyptic nuclear exchange at the end of the novel marks its
fall, but it is so briefly and distantly described that most readers entirely forget about it, as they
forget about the much more vividly depicted annihilation of Earth by nuclear war in The Martian
Chronicles.
Both of these are instances of what I like to call “muscular disarmament,” in which one final
cataclysmic war is depicted as preparing the way for an era of peace and enlightenment. One of the
earliest examples was H. G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free in which—as the title suggests—
atomic weapons clear the ground for the emergence of a utopia. Bradbury doesn’t go that far, but
clearly the holocaust at the end of the novel is meant to be more cheering than horrifying. We are
also expected to sympathize with Montag’s murder of Beatty with the flamethrower, just as we had
been encouraged to be amused by the grisly deaths of the censors in “Usher II.” Stories like these
are the intellectual’s equivalent of gory computer games in which players can take out their
frustrations on imaginary foes by blasting them to bits. When we think about the essential image of
Bradbury we remember the scenes he evokes of sitting on the porch sipping lemonade and listening
to the hum of cicadas and forget the fictional mayhem he sometimes inflicts on the people he
disdains.
It is also easy to see why Fahrenheit 451 would seem especially timely today. Thanks to the Patriot
Act, government agents secretly track the reading habits of citizens based on the books they borrow
from libraries. Web technology makes it possible to go even further, and determine what sites
people are browsing. It is not uncommon to hear of the electronic trails left by Web browsers being
introduced as evidence in trials.
We have robot dogs and execution by lethal injection, though we have not yet combined the two.
But we identify criminals by their unique DNA signatures much as the Hound of the novel identifies
them by their unique smell.
Reading, particularly of fiction, has continued to decline in popularity. In Bradbury’s day there were
dozens of popular general-audience magazines read by a broad public, and most of them published
fiction. Bradbury himself published stories in Collier’s, The Nation, Maclean’s, Good Housekeeping,
McCall’s, and The Saturday Evening Post. Now fiction is rare in mass magazines, and there is little of
it.
Despite the vast success of isolated titles like the The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter books,
Americans read very few books once they leave college, and those are largely confined to
sensational memoirs, diet books, and books about business and religion. The “reality” shows which
draw a mass audience today are the equivalent of the mesmerizing serials in the novel.
Of course the notion that before the age of television people sat around chatting and enjoying each
other’s company is a fantasy. I grew up in the waning days of radio’s “golden age,” when families sat
in their living rooms transfixed by the same sorts of tales of horror and crime and family situation
comedies that would later be televised. And before that most of what people read was junk. The
culling process that operates over time glamorizes the writing of the past, isolating the few authors
we can still enjoy.
Modern anti-depressants are often more effective than the tranquilizers taken by Montag’s wife, but
her zombie-like state is all too familiar. Depression is so common and widely discussed today that
she no longer seems as bizarre as Bradbury probably intended her to be.
American popular culture has always been profoundly anti-elitist and anti-intellectual, and that has
not changed. A president who tells us students must be held to higher standards himself makes no
effort to exemplify intellectual curiosity or profundity. Rather a folksy, unthreatening populism is
celebrated by almost all modern politicians. John Kennedy could never be elected today—he’d be
viewed as an intellectual snob. The slogan is “no child left behind”—not “encourage exceptional
brilliance.”
All these are reasons that Bradbury’s novel resonates with contemporary readers. However, it is
worth noting the ways in which our world differs from that of Fahrenheit 451.
We have our big-screen TVs, some of them approaching wall size; but increasingly we refuse to be
passive recipients of what the networks want to hand out. We Tivo our favorite shows and skip past
the commercials, infuriating the sponsors. DVD technology lets us view the films we want when we
want. The mass quality of mass communications is eroding, and the television network executives
and advertisers are growing frantic as they see the impending end of an era. Television viewing,
though still consuming a huge amount of our leisure time, is actually declining as people spend more
time playing video games or using the Web. The Internet is notoriously the greatest innovation that
science fiction failed to anticipate, and it is far more anarchic, individualized, and unregulated than
the mass media which preceded it and which shaped the nightmares of earlier dystopian writers.
The Internet has also helped to reverse in some measure the decline in reading. The classics
Bradbury cites as endangered in his novel are all available for reading or downloading via the Web—
though the foreign ones are usually available only in dated public-domain translations. On the Web
the classics are more accessible than contemporary fiction and poetry, which remain locked in
limited-circulation books and magazines.
The “seashells” that people insert in their ears today are earbuds through which people listen to
highly individualized playlists of songs on their iPods, and they can even listen to an audio study
guide for The Martian Chronicles, though the novel itself doesn’t seem to be available yet for
downloading from the iTunes Store.
We now see a generation of young people who have grown up text-messaging, blogging, and
creating Web sites online for whom reading and writing are constant, natural activities. Much of the
prose they generate and read is appalling by traditional standards, but it is not just the passive
consumption of images that Bradbury envisioned. Increasingly I encounter students entering college
who think of themselves as both readers and writers, and who are interested in using these skills in
the workplace. The number of English majors at Washington State University has climbed in the last
three years from 200 to 230 to 282, with no signs of the rate of increase diminishing.
E-books have been slow to catch on. The paper and hardbound book is not yet in danger of
extinction. Ironically, fat “airport novels” and huge science fiction and fantasy trilogies are more
popular than the comic books Bradbury deplored, which in 1950 filled racks in stores all over town
and now have to be sought out in specialty shops. Magazines have narrowed in focus, but they have
proliferated wildly.
Attempts to censor fiction, like the fundamentalist attacks on the Harry Potter books, are largely
doomed to failure—are greeted with contempt or indifference. And the much-criticized Federal
government has granted a large sum to Seattle to support the study of a book that criticizes
government opposition to the freedom to read. It reminds one of the Athenians paying Aristophanes
for creating plays which fiercely attacked their foreign policy.
The problem with dystopias and other cautionary forms is that their exaggeration can cause us to
become complacent because things just aren’t as bad as the novels predicted. But so long as we
read them thoughtfully, understanding that they are meant to point us toward problems rather than
accurately foretelling the future, they can still inspire us to work for a world which, if not utopian, is
a lot better than our worst nightmares.
The following entry presents criticism on Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953). See also
Ray Bradbury Short Story Criticism, Ray Bradbury Criticism (Volume 1), and Volumes 3,
10, 15.
INTRODUCTION
Among Bradbury's most influential and widely read works, Fahrenheit 451 (1953) describes
the impact of censorship and forced conformity on a group of people living in a future society
where books are forbidden and burned. (The title refers to the temperature at which book
paper catches fire.) The novel was written during the era of McCarthyism, a time when many
Americans were maliciously—and often falsely—accused of attempting to subvert the United
States government. This was also the period of the Cold War and the moment when television
emerged as the dominant medium of mass communication. Within this context, Fahrenheit
451 addresses the leveling effect of consumerism and reductionism, focusing on how
creativity and human individuality are crushed by the advertising industry and by political
ideals. Traditionally classified as a work of science fiction, Fahrenheit 451 showcases
Bradbury's distinctive poetic style and preoccupation with human subjects over visionary
technology and alien worlds, thereby challenging the boundaries of the science fiction genre
itself. The social commentary of Fahrenheit 451, alternately anti-utopian, satirical, and
optimistic, transcends simple universal statements about government or world destiny to
underscore the value of human imagination and cultural heritage.
Plot and Major Characters
Fahrenheit 451, a revision and expansion of Bradbury's 56-page novella "The Fireman,"
consists of a series of events and dialogue divided into three parts. Together the story traces
the emotional and spiritual development of Guy Montag, a twenty-fourth century "fireman"
who, unlike his distant predecessors, is employed to start fires rather than extinguish them.
Under government mandate to seek out and eradicate all books—in Montag's world, book
ownership is a crime punishable by death—Montag and his colleagues answer emergency
calls to burn the homes of people found to be in possession of books. The first and longest
part of the novel, "The Hearth and the Salamander," opens with Montag happily fueling a
blaze of burning books. This event is followed by a period of gradual disillusionment for
Montag and then by Montag's abrupt renunciation of his profession. Montag's surprising
reversal is induced by several events, including his chance meeting and interludes with
Clarisse McClellan, a teenage girl whose childlike wonderment initiates his own selfawareness; the bizarre attempted suicide of his wife Mildred and Montag's reflections upon
their sterile relationship; and Montag's participation in the shocking immolation of a woman
who refuses to part with her books. During this last episode, Montag instinctively rescues a
book from the flames and takes it home, adding it to his secret accumulation of other pilfered
volumes. The strain of his awakening conscience, exacerbated by Mildred's ambivalence and
by news of Clarisse's violent death, drives Montag into a state of despair. When he fails to
report to work, Captain Beatty, the fire chief, becomes suspicious and unexpectedly visits
Montag at home to offer circumspect empathy and an impassioned defense of the book
burners' mission. Beatty's monologue establishes that the firemen were founded in 1790 by
Benjamin Franklin to destroy Anglophilic texts. Beatty also claims that book censorship
reflects public demand and the naturally occurring obsolescence of the printed word, which
has been supplanted by the superior entertainment of multimedia technology. The scene
closes with Beatty's exit and Montag among his books, professing his intent to become a
reader. The second and shortest part of the novel, "The Sieve and the Sand," continues
Montag's progressive rebelliousness and ends in his inevitable discovery. After an afternoon
of reading with Mildred, who quickly becomes agitated and returns to the diversion of her
television "family," Montag contacts Faber, a retired English professor he once encountered
in a public park. At Faber's apartment Montag produces a stolen Bible. Faber then equips
Montag with an electronic ear transmitter to maintain secret communication between them.
Invigorated by Faber's complicity, Montag returns home and rashly attempts to reform
Mildred and her two friends, Mrs. Phelps and Mrs. Bowles, as they sit mesmerized by images
in the television parlor. His patronizing effort at conversation, along with his recitation of
Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," drive the women out of the house and leave Montag in
open defiance of the state. Montag retreats to the firehouse, where he is greeted coolly and
goaded by Beatty with literary quotations alluding to Montag's futile interest in books and
learning. The scene ends with a minor climax when Beatty, Montag, and the firemen respond
to an alarm that leads directly to Montag's own house. The third and final part of the work,
"Burning Bright," completes Montag's break from society and begins his existence as a
fugitive, enlightened book lover. When the fire squad arrives at his home, Montag obediently
incinerates the house and then turns his flamethrower on Beatty to protect Faber, whose
identity is jeopardized when Beatty knocks the transmitter from Montag's ear and confiscates
it. As he prepares to flee, Montag also destroys the Mechanical Hound, a robotic book
detector and assassin whose persistence and infallibility represent the terrifying fusion of
bloodhound and computer. Following a dramatic chase witnessed by a live television
audience, Montag evades a second Mechanical Hound and floats down a nearby river, safely
away from the city. He emerges from the water in an arcadian forest, where he encounters a
small band of renegade literati who, having watched Montag's escape on a portable
television, welcome him among their ranks. Through conversation with Granger, the apparent
spokesperson for the book people, Montag learns of their heroic endeavor to memorize select
works of literature for an uncertain posterity. Safe in their wilderness refuge, Montag and the
book people then observe the outbreak of war and the subsequent obliteration of the city. The
novel concludes with Granger's sanguine meditation on the mythological Phoenix and a
quotation from Book of Ecclesiastes.
Major Themes
Fahrenheit 451 reflects Bradbury's lifelong love of books and his defense of the imagination
against the menace of technology and government manipulation. Fire is the omnipresent
image through which Bradbury frames the dominant themes of degradation, metamorphosis,
and rebirth. As a destructive agent, fire is employed by the state to annihilate the written
word. Fire is also used as a tool of murder when turned on the book woman and on Beatty,
and fire imagery is inherent in the flash of exploding bombs that level civilization in the final
holocaust. The healing and regenerative qualities of fire are expressed in the warming fire of
the book people, a startling realization for Montag when he approaches their camp, and in
Granger's reference to the Phoenix, whose resurrection signifies the cyclical nature of human
life and civilization. Through Beatty, Bradbury also posits the unique cleansing property of
the flames—"fire is bright and fire is clean"—a paradoxical statement that suggests the
simultaneous beauty and horror of fire as an instrument of purification. Montag's irresistible
urge to read and his reaction to the desecration of the physical text establish the book as the
central symbol of human achievement and perseverance. Thus literature, rather than Montag,
can be said to represent the true hero of the novel. However, Bradbury contrasts the sanctity
of the printed word with the equal vitality of oral tradition, particularly as cultivated by the
book people but also as anticipated by Faber's earlier intent to read to Montag via the ear
transmitter. Throughout Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury expresses a pronounced distrust for
technology. The various machines in the novel are depicted as chilling, impersonal gadgets of
mechanized anti-culture or state control—namely the ubiquitous thimble radios and television
walls, the invasive stomach pumper that revives Mildred, roaring warplanes, and the
Mechanical Hound. Considered in its historical context, the novel is both a reflection of
mainstream American fears in the 1950s—mainly of the Cold War and the threat of
communist world domination—and Bradbury's satire of this same society. Taking aim at the
negative power of McCarthy-era anti-intellectualism, a superficial consumer culture, and the
perceived erosion of democratic ideals, Bradbury assumes cloaked objectivity in the novel to
project the fragile future of the American Dream. Written less than a decade after the end of
the Second World War, the specter of book burning and thought control also recall the recent
reality of Adolf Hitler's fascist regime. At its most dystopian, Fahrenheit 451 evokes an
intense atmosphere of entrapment, evidenced in Montag's alienation, Mildred's dependency
on drugs and television, Faber's reclusion and impotency, and Clarisse's inability to survive.
Bradbury's prophetic vision, however, ultimately evinces confidence in the redemptive
capacity of mankind, displayed by the survival of the book people and the miraculous inner
transformation of Montag.
Critical Reception
While Fahrenheit 451 is considered one of Bradbury's most effective prose works, the novel
has been faulted for its sentimental evocation of culture and "highbrow" literary aspirations.
Bradbury's justification of intellectual pursuit as a virtuous and humane ideal, with reading
portrayed as a heroic act in itself, has been labelled romantic and elitist. Since Bradbury does
not refute Captain Beatty's version of the firemen's history or his convoluted rationale for
censorship, critics have claimed that the novel has the effect of positioning intellectuals
against the masses, rather than the individual against the state. The totalitarian state is thereby
implicitly exonerated by blaming the masses for the book's decline, while intellectuals in the
form of the book people are entrusted with saving and repopulating the world. Thus it has
been suggested that Bradbury's defense of humanity expresses little faith in the masses. In
addition, many of the novel's high-culture allusions are considered too esoteric for the general
reader, as with a reference to "Master Ridley," an obscure sixteenth-century martyr, or overly
simplistic, as exemplified by Granger's involved exposition of the Phoenix myth. The shifting
dystopian-utopian structure of Fahrenheit 451, drawing frequent comparison to Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),
remains the subject of critical attention as the source of both inconsistency and subtlety in the
novel. Praised for its engaging narrative, concise presentation, and pounding intensity,
Fahrenheit 451 embodies Bradbury's effective blending of popular science fiction and serious
literature.
Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism, ©1997 Gale Cengage. All Rights
Brave New World and the Threat of
Technological Growth
Derek D Miller Student Pulse: Online academic journal 2011, Vol. 3 No. 04
The world in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has one goal: technological progress. The morals and
aspirations of the society are not those of our society today - such as family, love, and success - but
instead are focused around industry, economy, and technologic growth and improvement. The
citizens are not concerned with themselves as individuals; they have been conditioned to see the
world as a collective and technologically oriented. This society is one which Neil Postman, the author
of Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, would consider a ‘Technopoly.’ But Postman
also perceives cultures in the world today to be nearing this socio-technologic status. What can be
seen about Brave New World and its comments on technological advancements as well as their
effects in society, when we examine it from the perspective of Postman’s Technopoly? The medical
advancements in Huxley’s novel and its concepts of educational standardization carry drastic
similarities to society today as well. Sir Ken Robinson’s discussions on education elucidate these
congruencies. Through these scholastic perspectives it can be seen that the novel is a dangerously
accurate prophesy of technology’s capacity to dominate society, and how this domination is silently
changing the goals, moralities, and values of our culture.
The most prevalent themes in Brave New World are centered around the industrial and economic
systems in novel, and how technology has brought the advancements of these themes to fruition.
The mentality of the society is that progress, through invention, is the key goal of mankind.
Consumerism and productivism are the purpose of life in Huxley’s industrial utopia. The consumerist
ideals of the society can be captured by one of the hypnopaedic proverbs demonstrated in this
quote from the novel: “‘But old clothes are beastly,’ continued the untiring whisper. ‘We always
throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is
better than mending.’” (Huxley 54). All the citizens of The World State in the novel are conditioned
since birth to maintain that buying new is proper and repairing is immoral. They are taught to
conform to the consumer-oriented mentality of the culture. Postman provides an example for the
means of how this transition in society is taking place today and suggests how Huxley may have
imagined it happening: “Along with [the idea that if something could be done, it should be done]
there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity,
efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that
the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as
children of God or even as citizens but as consumers” (Postman 42). This perspective describes with
pinpoint accuracy how Huxley’s society functions. The people are no longer oriented to believe in
god, but instead only believe in the principles of consumption.
In the novel all religion has faded away and been forgotten by the citizens of the World State. The
only deity-like or religious principles that people follow are that of Henry Ford, inventor of the Model
T. Society’s closest acknowledgement of a “god” is Ford. As Postman states, “the great narrative of
inductive science takes precedence over the great narrative of Genesis, and those who do not agree
must remain in intellectual backwater” (Postman 50). In fact, the dating system used in the novel is
based upon A.F. and B.F. which is the abbreviated form for After Ford and Before Ford, which Huxley
clearly used to parody our current dating system of B.C. (before Christ) and A.D. (anno domini). God
is not merely second to technology - as is the paradigm of society today, which Postman calls the
ideals of a ‘Technocracy” - but God has completely been stamped out and forgotten, replaced by
paradigms of God being progress, which is the ideal of a Technopoly.
Postman describes the cause of this to be that “the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was
the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent
things receded in importance” (Postman 42). By constantly inventing, replacing, and consuming, a
society loses its ties with the spiritual and gains new ones to technology; personal transcendence is
replaced with technological transcendence. Progress, technology, and invention become their God.
This transition -as Postman puts it the transition of a Technocracy to a Technopoly- is the transition
that has taken place in Brave New World. Technocracy did not entirely destroy the traditions of the
social and symbolic worlds. Technocracy subordinated these worlds - yes even humiliated them - but
it did not render them totally ineffectual” (Postman 45). However, a Technopoly, utterly destroys the
existence of these worlds, and this is the state of Huxley’s utopia. “Technopoly eliminates
alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlines in Brave New World. It does not
make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes
them invincible and therefore irrelevant (Postman 48).
Therefore, from the perspective of Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,
Huxley’s society in Brave New World is a stunningly perfect example of a Technopoly. In this
Technopoly, technology and the advancements of it contain all the principles one needs to live their
lives by. A Technopoly is a more radical concept than a technocracy. “The citizens of a technocracy
knew that science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live” (Postman 47) unlike
the Technopoly in Brave New World. This is precisely why Huxley’s society is a Technopoly and not a
Technocracy; in the novel the citizens know just the opposite, that science and technology does
provide philosophies by which to live and moreover is the very pinnacle of their lives and their
existence.
The lower castes of Huxley’s society are simple workers; multitudes of drones and one-task thinkers.
The mass production of human life is key to the economic structure of this society, but there is
another factor that goes along with the workers. Not only are the workers created for the purpose of
a simple life of servitude, they are also conditioned to enjoy such a meager life. They are content
with this lifestyle in every sense, and therefore, they are stable. Like biological machinery, constantly
working, working, working; satisfied with every minute of their day. This resembles our world today
as Sir Ken Robinson elucidates in his RSA Animate on education. Robinson speaks about the
“culture” of education and how children are conditioned to think that there are ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’
individuals and that this paradigm limits children. This black-and-white standardization is similar to
Huxley’s caste system. A strict organization like these contains the similarities of making society
believe that society is best if it operates on the modern principle that there is a cultural split in
education: the split of high and low intelligence. These two examples also share the similarity that
they neglect how certain individuals may be better or worse at different tasks or subjects and that in
reality this kind of standardization actually limits society. This is a postmodern idea, currently
growing in popularity.
In society today there is the idea of ADHD being an epidemic in America. Sir Ken Robinson points out
that there is not really an epidemic and that children are being medicated carelessly. they are given
Ritalin and Adderall so they can be focused in school. A non-medical problem is being cared for with
medication (RSA). This strongly resembles the Soma in Brave New World. If someone isn’t happy,
they simple take Soma, and suddenly they’re content again. This reliance on drugs is a parallel
between Huxley’s novel and Sir Robinson's video. As Huxley’s proverb goes, “a gramme is better
than a damn” (Huxley 156).
The similarities between how our education system puts children in groups by age and has them
taught to think that there is only one answer. Robinson points out how students are taught linearly
instead of divergently (RSA). This standardization of education reflects the caste system in Brave
New World and how each caste is conditioned to be only able to do the job their caste demands.
Each caste is conditioned through hypnopaedia to only think one way, this resembles the culture of
our education system and how students are taught to think only in terms of if one score high on
tests, one is intelligent and will have a good job and if one scores low, the person is unintelligent and
must have a laborious job.
Another significant parallel which can be seen through the ‘lens’ of Robinson’s video is the
similarities between the "production line mentality" of America's education system, and the
biologically mass-produced citizens of the World State in Brave New World. The students in America
go through this process of classes organized by age, yet as Robinson elucidates, age does not
necessarily dictate a student’s aptitude or discipline with a certain subject (RSA). This resembles the
caste system in the novel and how everyone is conditioned from pre-birth to maturity to only be
intelligent enough for their caste's jobs.
The democracy of individual growth and personal spirituality is eliminated in Huxley’s Technopoly.
By analyzing the novel from the perspectives of Postman and Robinson, it becomes clear that
Huxley’s work is a prediction for the future that hits all-too close to the bone. The transition from
the Technocracies of today, to the Technopoly in Brave New World is one that seems to be growing
nearer, dauntingly. When do our advances in technology begin to do more harm than help? No one
can predict when good-natured intentions can bring about unfortunate ends, yet Huxley provides a
profound guess. How long before the ever-sharpening claws of technology latch around our own
society, and grip us away from the morals we hold to be valuable? Should we fear this threat? Or
embrace its benefits? “Progress is lovely, isn’t it?” (Huxley 98).
Dystopian Elements in Brave New World
Brave New World (1932) is one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever
written.
An exaggeration?
Tragically, no. Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any regime of
universal happiness.
For sure, Huxley was writing a satirical piece of fiction, not scientific prophecy. Hence to
treat his masterpiece as ill-conceived futurology rather than a work of great literature might
seem to miss the point. Yet the knee-jerk response of "It's Brave New World!" to any
blueprint for chemically-driven happiness has delayed research into paradise-engineering
for all sentient life.
So how does Huxley turn a future where we're all notionally happy into the archetypal
dystopia? If it's technically feasible, what's wrong with using biotechnology to get rid of
mental pain altogether?
Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. This is because Huxley
endows his "ideal" society with features calculated to alienate his audience. Typically,
reading BNW elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it
depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation. In Brave New World
Revisited (1958) Huxley describes BNW as a "nightmare".
Thus BNW doesn't, and isn't intended by its author to, evoke just how wonderful our lives
could be if the human genome were intelligently rewritten. In the era of post-genomic
medicine, our DNA is likely to be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long bliss,
awesome peak experiences, and a spectrum of outrageously good designer-drugs. Nor does
Huxley's comparatively sympathetic account of the life of the Savage on the Reservation
convey just how nasty the old regime of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. If you think it
does, then you enjoy an enviably sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. For it's all
sugar-coated pseudo-realism.
In Brave New World, Huxley contrives to exploit the anxieties of his bourgeois audience
about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism. He taps into, and then
feeds, our revulsion at Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning and eugenics. Worse, it is
suggested that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most hallowed
shibboleths of our culture: "motherhood", "home", "family", "freedom", even "love". The
exchange yields an insipid happiness that's unworthy of the name. Its evocation arouses our
unease and distaste.
In BNW, 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.
As perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma underwhelms. It's not really a utopian wonderdrug at
all. It does make you high. Yet it's more akin to a hangoverless tranquilliser or an opiate - or
a psychic anaesthetising SSRI like Prozac - than a truly life-transforming elixir. Third-
millennium neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a vastly richer product-range of
designer-drugs to order.
For a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It gives rise to only a shallow,
unempathetic and intellectually uninteresting well-being. Apparently, taking soma doesn't
give Bernard Marx, the disaffected sleep-learning specialist, more than a cheap thrill. Nor
does it make him happy with his station in life. John the Savage commits suicide soon after
taking soma [guilt and despair born of serotonin depletion!?]. The drug is said to be better
than (promiscuous) sex - the only sex brave new worlders practise. But a regimen of soma
doesn't deliver anything sublime or life-enriching. It doesn't catalyse any mystical
epiphanies, intellectual breakthroughs or life-defining insights. It doesn't in any way
promote personal growth. Instead, soma provides a mindless, inauthentic "imbecile
happiness" - a vacuous escapism which makes people comfortable with their lack of
freedom. The drug heightens suggestibility, leaving its users vulnerable to government
propaganda. Soma is a narcotic that raises "a quite impenetrable wall between the actual
universe and their minds."
If Huxley had wished to tantalise, rather than repel, emotional primitives like us with the
biological nirvana soon in prospect, then he could have envisaged utopian wonderdrugs
which reinforced or enriched our most cherished ideals. In our imaginations, perhaps we
might have been allowed - via chemically-enriched brave new worlders - to turn ourselves
into idealised versions of the sort of people we'd most like to be. In this scenario,
behavioural conditioning, too, could have been used by the utopians to sustain, rather than
undermine, a more sympathetic ethos of civilised society and a life well led. Likewise,
biotechnology could have been exploited in BNW to encode life-long fulfilment and superintellects for everyone - instead of manufacturing a rigid hierarchy of geneticallypreordained castes.
Huxley, however, has an altogether different agenda in mind. He is seeking to warn us
against scientific utopianism. He succeeds all too well. Although we tend to see other
people, not least the notional brave new worlders, as the hapless victims of propaganda and
disinformation, we may find it is we ourselves who have been the manipulated dupes.
For Huxley does an effective hatchet-job on the very sort of "unnatural" hedonic
engineering that most of us so urgently need. One practical consequence has been to
heighten our already exaggerated fears of state-sanctioned mood-drugs. Hence millions of
screwed-up minds, improvable even today by clinically-tested mood-boosters and antianxiety agents, just suffer in silence instead. In part this is because people worry they might
become zombified addicts; and in part because they are unwilling to cast themselves as
humble supplicants of the medical profession by taking state-rationed "antidepressants".
Either way, the human cost in fruitless ill-being is immense.
Fortunately, the Net is opening up a vast trans-national free-market in psychotropics. It will
eventually sweep away the restrictive practices of old medical drug cartels and their allies in
the pharmaceutical industry. The liberatory potential of the Net as a global drug-delivery
and information network has only just begun.
Of course, Huxley can't personally be blamed for prolonging the pain of the old Darwinian
order of natural selection. Citing the ill-effects of Brave New World is not the same as
impugning its author's motives. Aldous Huxley was a deeply humane person as well as a
brilliant polymath. He himself suffered terribly after the death of his adored mother. But
death and suffering will be cured only by the application of bioscience. They won't be
abolished by spirituality, prophetic sci-fi, or literary intellectualism.
So what form might this cure take?
In the future, it will be feasible technically - at the very least - for pharmacotherapy and
genetic medicine to re-engineer us so that we can become - to take one example among
billions - a cross between Jesus and Einstein. Potentially, transhumans will be endowed with
a greater capacity for love, empathy and emotional depth than anything neurochemically
accessible today. Our selfish-gene-driven ancestors - in common with the cartoonish brave
new worlders - will strike posterity as functional psychopaths by comparison; and posterity
will be right.
In contrast to Brave New World, however, the death of ageing won't be followed by our
swift demise after a sixty-odd year life-span. We'll have to reconcile ourselves to the
prospect of living happily ever after. Scare-mongering prophets of doom notwithstanding, a
life of unremitting bliss isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.
The good news gets better. Drugs - not least the magical trinity of empathogens,
entactogens and entheogens - and eventually genetic engineering will open up
revolutionary new state spaces of thought and emotion. Such modes of consciousness are
simply unimaginable to the drug-innocent psyche. Today, their metabolic pathways lie
across forbidden gaps in the evolutionary fitness landscape. They have previously been
hidden by the pressure of natural selection: for Nature has no power of anticipation. Open
such spaces up, however, and new modes of selfhood and introspection become accessible.
The Dark Age of primordial Darwinian life is about to pass into history.
In later life, Huxley himself modified his antipathy to drug-assisted paradise. Island (1962),
Huxley's conception of a real utopia, was modelled on his experiences of mescaline and LSD.
But until we get the biological underpinnings of our emotional well-being securely encoded
genetically, then psychedelia is mostly off-limits for the purposes of paradise-engineering.
Certainly, its intellectual significance cannot be exaggerated; but unfortunately, neither can
its ineffable weirdness and the unpredictability of its agents. Thus mescaline, and certainly
LSD and its congeners, are not fail-safe euphoriants. The possibility of nightmarish bad trips
and total emotional Armageddon is latent in the way our brains are constructed under a
regime of selfish-DNA. Uncontrolled eruptions within the psyche must be replaced by the
precision-engineering of emotional tone, if nothing else. If rational design is good enough
for inorganic robots, then it's good enough for us.
In Brave New World, of course, there are no freak-outs on soma. One suspects that this is
partly because BNW's emotionally stunted inhabitants don't have the imagination to have a
bad trip. But mainly it's because the effects of soma are no more intellectually illuminating
than getting a bit drunk. In BNW, our already limited repertoire of hunter-gatherer
emotions has been constricted still further. Creative and destructive impulses alike have
been purged. The capacity for spirituality has been extinguished. The utopians' "set-point"
on the pleasure-pain axis has indeed been shifted. But it's flattened at both ends.
To cap it all, in Brave New World life-long emotional well-being is not genetically preprogrammed as part of everyday mental health. It isn't even assured from birth by
euphoriant drugs. For example, juvenile brave new worlders are traumatised with electric
shocks as part of the behaviorist-inspired conditioning process in childhood. Toddlers from
the lower orders are terrorised with loud noises. This sort of aversion-therapy serves to
condition them against liking books. We are told the inhabitants of Brave New World are
happy. Yet they periodically experience unpleasant thoughts, feelings and emotions. They
just banish them with soma: "One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments".
Even then, none of the utopians of any caste come across as very happy. This seems all too
credible: more-or-less chronic happiness sounds so uninteresting that it's easy to believe it
must feel uninteresting too. For sure, the utopians are mostly docile and contented. Yet
their emotions have been deliberately blunted and repressed. 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."
A more ambitious target would be to make the world's last unpleasant experience a
precisely dateable event; and from this minimum hedonic baseline, start aiming higher.
"Every day, and in every way, I am getting better and better". Coué's mantra of therapeutic
self-deception needn't depend on the cultivation of beautiful thoughts. If harnessed to the
synthesis of smarter mood-enrichers and genetically-enhanced brains, it might even come
true.
Of course, it's easy today to write (mood-congruent) tomes on how everything could go
wrong. This review essay is an exploration of what it might be like if they go right. So it's
worth contrasting the attributes of Brave New World with the sorts of biological paradise
that may be enjoyed by our ecstatic descendants.
Stasis
Brave New World is a benevolent dictatorship: a static, efficient, totalitarian welfare-state.
There is no war, poverty or crime. Society is stratified by genetically-predestined caste.
Intellectually superior Alphas are the top-dogs. Servile, purposely brain-damaged Gammas,
Deltas and Epsilons toil away at the bottom. The lower orders are necessary in BNW
because Alphas - even soma-fuelled Alphas - could allegedly never be happy doing menial
jobs. It is not explained why doing menial work is inconsistent - if you're an Alpha - with a
life pharmacological hedonism - nor, for that matter, with genetically-precoded wetware of
invincible bliss. In any case, our descendants are likely to automate menial drudgery out of
existence; that's what robots are for.
Notionally, 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". It is curious to find a utopia
where knowledge of the past is banned by the Controllers to prevent invidious comparisons.
One might imagine history lessons would be encouraged instead. They would uncover a
blood-stained horror-story.
Perhaps the Controllers fear historical awareness would stir dissatisfaction with the
"utopian" present. Yet this is itself revealing. For Brave New World is not an exciting place to
live in. It is a sterile, productivist utopia geared to the consumption of mass-produced
goods: "Ending is better than mending". Society is shaped by a single all-embracing political
ideology. The motto of the world state is "Community, Identity, Stability."
In Brave New World, there is no depth of feeling, no ferment of ideas, and no artistic
creativity. Individuality is suppressed. Intellectual excitement and discovery have been
abolished. Its inhabitants are laboratory-grown clones, bottled and standardised from the
hatchery. They are conditioned and indoctrinated, and even brainwashed in their sleep. The
utopians are never educated to prize thinking for themselves. In Brave New World, the twin
goals of happiness and stability - both social and personal - are not just prized but effectively
equated.
This surprisingly common notion is ill-conceived. The impregnable well-being of our
transhuman descendants is more likely to promote greater diversity, both personal and
societal, not stagnation. This is because greater happiness, and in particular enhanced
dopamine function, doesn't merely extend the depth of one's motivation to act: the hyperdopaminergic sense of things to be done. It also broadens the range of stimuli an organism
finds rewarding. By expanding the range of potential activities we enjoy, enhanced
dopamine function will ensure we will be less likely to get stuck in a depressive rut. This rut
leads to the kind of learned helplessness that says nothing will do any good, Nature will take
its revenge, and utopias will always go wrong.
In Brave New World, things do occasionally go wrong. But more to the point, we are led to
feel the whole social enterprise that BNW represents is horribly misconceived from the
outset. In BNW, nothing much really changes. It is an alien world, but scarcely a rich or
inexhaustibly diverse one. Tellingly, the monotony of its pleasures mirrors the poverty of
our own imaginations in conceiving of radically different ways to be happy. Today, we've
barely even begun to conceptualise the range of things it's possible to be happy about. For
our brains aren't blessed with the neurochemical substrates to do so. Time spent counting
one's blessings is rarely good for one's genes.
BNW is often taken as a pessimistic warning of the dangers of runaway science and
technology. Scientific progress, however, was apparently frozen with the advent of a world
state. Thus ironically it's not perverse to interpret BNW as a warning of what happens when
scientific inquiry is suppressed. One of the reasons why many relatively robust optimists including some dopamine-driven transhumanists - dislike Brave New World, and accordingly
distrust the prospect of universal happiness it symbolises, is that their primary source of
everyday aversive experience is boredom. BNW comes across as a stagnant civilisation. It's
got immovably stuck in a severely sub-optimal state. Its inhabitants are too contented living
in their rut to extricate themselves and progress to higher things. Superficially, yes, Brave
New World is a technocratic society. Yet the free flow of ideas and criticism central to
science is absent. Moreover the humanities have withered too. Subversive works of
literature are banned. Subtly but inexorably, BNW enforces conformity in innumerable
different ways. Its conformism feeds the popular misconception that a life-time of
happiness will [somehow] be boring - even when the biochemical substrates of boredom
have vanished.
Controller Mustapha Mond himself obliquely acknowledges the dystopian sterility of BNW
when he reflects on Bernard's tearful plea not to be exiled to Iceland: "One would think he
was going to have his throat cut. Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand
that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being
sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found
anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too selfconsciously individual to fit into community life. All the people who aren't satisfied with
orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own. Everyone, in a word, who's
anyone..."
Admittedly, Huxley's BNW enforces a much more benign conformism than Orwell's
terrifying 1984. There's no Room 101, no torture, and no war. Early child-rearing practices
aside, it's not a study of physically violent totalitarianism. Its riot-police use somavaporisers, not tear-gas and truncheons. Yet its society is as dominated by caste as any
historical Eastern despotism. BNW recapitulates all Heaven's hierarchies (recall all those
angels, archangels, seraphim, etc.) and few of its promised pleasures. Its satirical
grotesqueries and fundamental joylessness are far more memorably captured than its
delights - with one pregnant exception, soma.
Unlike the residents of Heaven, BNW's inhabitants don't worship God. Instead, they are
brainwashed into revering a scarcely less abstract and remote community. Formally, the
community is presided over by the spirit of the apostle of mass-production, Henry Ford. He
is worshipped as a god: Alphas and Betas attend soma-consecrated "solidarity services"
which culminate in an orgy. But history has been abolished, salvation has already occurred,
and the utopians aren't going anywhere.
By contrast, one factor of life spent with even mildly euphoric hypomanic people is pretty
constant. The tempo of life, the flow of ideas, and the drama of events speeds up. In a PostDarwinian Era of universal life-long bliss, the possibility of stasis is remote; in fact one can't
rule out an ethos of permanent revolution. But however great the intellectual ferment of
ecstatic existence, the nastiness of Darwinian life will have passed into oblivion with the
molecular machinery that sustained it.
Imbecility
Some drugs dull, stupefy and sedate. Others sharpen, animate and intensify.
After taking soma, one can apparently drift pleasantly off to sleep. Bernard Marx, for
instance, takes four tablets of soma to pass away a long plane journey to the Reservation in
New Mexico. When they arrive at the Reservation, Bernard's companion, Lenina, swallows
half a gramme of soma when she begins to tire of the Warden's lecture, "with the result
that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all". Such a response
suggests the user's sensibilities are numbed rather than heightened. In BNW, people resort
to soma when they feel depressed, angry or have intrusive negative thoughts. They take it
because their lives, like society itself, are empty of spirituality or higher meaning. Soma
keeps the population comfortable with their lot.
Soma also shows physiological tolerance. Linda, the Savage's mother, takes too much: up to
twenty grammes a day. Taken in excess, soma acts as a respiratory depressant. Linda
eventually dies of an overdose. This again suggests that Huxley models soma more on
opiates than the sort of clinically valuable mood-brightener which subverts the hedonic
treadmill of negative feedback mechanisms in the CNS. The parallel to be drawn with
opiates is admittedly far from exact. Unlike soma, good old-fashioned heroin is bad news for
your sex life. But like soma, it won't sharpen your wits.
Even today, the idea that chemically-driven happiness must dull and pacify is demonstrably
false. Mood-boosting psychostimulants are likely to heighten awareness. They increase selfassertiveness. On some indices, and in low doses, stimulants can improve intellectual
performance. Combat-troops on both sides in World War Two, for instance, were regularly
given amphetamines. This didn't make them nicer or gentler or dumber. Dopaminergic
power-drugs tend to increase willpower, wakefulness and action. "Serenics", by contrast,
have been researched by the military and the pharmaceutical industry. They may indeed
exert a quiescent effect - ideally on the enemy. But variants could also be used on, or by,
one's own troops to induce fearlessness.
A second and less warlike corrective to the dumb-and-docile stereotype is provided by socalled manic-depressives. One reason that many victims of bipolar disorder, notably those
who experience the euphoric sub-type of (hypo-)mania, skip out on their lithium is that
when "euthymic" they can still partially recall just how wonderfully intense and euphoric life
can be in its manic phase. Life on lithium is flatter. For it's the havoc wrought on the lives of
others which makes the uncontrolled exuberance of frank euphoric mania so disastrous.
Depressed or nominally euthymic people are easier for the authorities to control than
exuberant life-lovers.
Thus one of the tasks facing a mature fusion of biological psychiatry and psychogenetic
medicine will be to deliver enriched well-being and lucid intelligence to anyone who wants it
without running the risk of triggering ungovernable mania. MDMA(Ecstasy) briefly offers a
glimpse of what full-blooded mental health might be like. Like soma, it induces both
happiness and serenity. Unlike soma, it is neurotoxic. But used sparingly, it can also be
profound, empathetic and soulfully intense.
Drugs which commonly induce dysphoria, on the other hand, are truly sinister instruments
of social control. They are far more likely to induce the "infantile decorum" demanded of
BNW utopians than euphoriants. The major tranquillisers, including the archetypal
"chemical cosh" chlorpromazine (Largactil), subdue their victims by acting as dopamine
antagonists. At high dosages, willpower is blunted, affect is flattened, and mood is typically
depressed. The subject becomes sedated. Intellectual acuity is dulled. They are a widelyused tool in some penal systems.
Amorality
Soma doesn't merely stupefy. At face value, the happiness it offers is amoral; it's
"hedonistic" in the baser sense. Soma-fuelled highs aren't a function of the well-being of
others. A synthetic high doesn't force you to be happy for a reason: unlike people, a good
drug will never let you down. True, soma-consumption doesn't actively promote anti-social
behaviour. Yet the drug is all about instant gratification.
Drug-naïve John the Savage, by contrast, has a firm code of conduct. His happiness - and
sorrows - don't derive from taking a soul-corrupting chemical. His emotional responses are
apparently based on reasons - though these reasons themselves presumably have a
neurochemical basis. Justified or unjustified, his happiness, like our own today, will always
be vulnerable to disappointment. Huxley clearly feels that if a loved one dies, for instance,
then one will not merely grieve: it is appropriate that one grieves, and there is good reason
to do so. It would be wrong not to go into mourning. A friend who said he might be sad if
you died, but he wouldn't let it spoil his whole day - for instance - might strike us as quite
unfeeling, if rather droll: not much of a friend at all.
By our lights, the utopians show equally poor taste. They don't ever grieve or treat each
others' existence as special. They are conditioned to treat death as natural and even
pleasant. As children, they are given sweets to eat when they go to watch the process of
dying in hospital. Their greatest kick comes from taking a drug. Life on soma, together with
early behavioural conditioning, leaves them oblivious to the true welfare of others. The
utopians are blind to the tragedy of death; and to its pathos.
Surely this is a powerful indictment of all synthetic pleasures? Shouldn't we echo the
Savage's denunciation of soma to the Deltas: "Don't take that horrible stuff. It's poison, it's
poison...Poison to the soul as well as the body...Throw it all away, that horrible poison".
Don't all chemical euphoriants rob us of our humanity?
Not really; or only on the most malaise-sodden conception of what it means to be human.
Media stereotypes of today's crude psychopharmacy are not a reliable guide to the next few
million years. It is sometimes supposed that all psychoactive drug-taking must inherently be
egotistical. This egotism is exemplified in the contemporary world by the effects of powerdrugs such as cocaine and the amphetamines, or by the warm cocoon of emotional selfsufficiency afforded by opium and its more potent analogues and derivatives. Yet drugs - not
least the empathogens such as Ecstasy - and genetic engineering can in principle be
customised to let us be nicer; to reinforce our idealised codes of conduct. The complex role
of the "civilising neurotransmitter" serotonin, and its multiple receptor sub-types, is hugely
instructive - if still poorly understood. If we genetically re-regulate its receptors, we can
make ourselves kinder as well as happier.
The crucial point is that, potentially, long-acting designer-drugs needn't supplant our moral
codes, but chemically predispose us to act them out in the very way we would wish.
Biotechnology allows us to conquer what classical antiquity called akrasia [literally, "bad
mixture"]. This was a Greek term for the character flaw of weakness of the will where an
agent is unable to perform an action that s/he knows to be right. Tomorrow's "personality
pills" permit us to become the kind of people we'd most like to be - to fulfil our secondorder desires. Such self-reinvention is an option that our genetic constitution today
frequently precludes. Altruism and self-sacrifice for the benefit of anonymous strangers including starving Third World orphans whom we acknowledge need resources desperately
more than we do - is extraordinarily hard to practise consistently. Sometimes it's impossible,
even for the most benevolent-minded of the affluent planetary elite. Self-referential
altruism is easier; but it's also different - narrow and small-scale. Unfortunately, the true
altruists among our (non-)ancestors got eaten or outbred. Their genes perished with them.
More specifically; in chemical terms, very crudely, dopaminergics fortify one's will-power,
mu-opioids enhance one's happiness, while certain serotonergics can deepen one's
empathy and social conscience. Safe, long-lasting site-specific hybrids will do both. Richer
designer cocktails spiced with added ingredients will be far better still. It is tempting to
conceptualise such cocktails in terms of our current knowledge of, say, oxytocin,
phenylethylamine, substance P antagonists, selective mu-opioid agonists and
enkephalinase-inhibitors etc. But this is probably naïve. Post-synaptic receptor antagonists
block their psychoactive effects, suggesting it's the post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades they
trigger which form the heartlands of the soul. Our inner depths haven't yet been properly
explored, let alone genetically re-regulated.
But our ignorance and inertia are receding fast. Molecular neuroscience and behavioural
genetics are proceeding at dizzying pace. Better Living Through Chemistry doesn't have to
be just a snappy slogan. Take it seriously, and we can bootstrap our way into becoming
smart and happy while biologically deepening our social conscience too. Hopefully, the need
for manifestos and ideological propaganda will pass. They must be replaced by an
international biomedical research program of paradise-engineering. The fun hasn't even
begun. The moral urgency is immense.
It's true that morality in the contemporary sense may no longer be needed when suffering
has been cured. The distinction between value and happiness has distinctively moral
significance only in the Darwinian Era where the fissure originated. Here, in the short-run,
good feelings and good conduct may conflict. Gratifying one's immediate impulses
sometimes leads to heartache in the longer term, both to oneself and others. When
suffering has been eliminated, however, specifically moral codes of conduct become
redundant. On any utilitarian analysis, at least, acts of immorality become impossible. The
values of our descendants will be predicated on immense emotional well-being, but they
won't necessarily be focused on it; happiness may have become part of the innate texture of
sentient existence.
In Brave New World, by contrast, unpleasantness hasn't been eradicated. That's one reason
its citizens' behaviour is so shocking, and one reason they take soma. BNW's outright
immorality is all too conceivable by the reader.
Typically, we are indignant when we see the callous way in which John the Savage is treated,
or when we witness the revulsion provoked in the Director by the sight of John's ageing
mother - the companion he had himself long ago abandoned for dead after an ill-fated trip
to the Reservation. Above and beyond this, all sorts of sour undercurrents are endemic to
the society as a whole. Bernard is chronically discontented, even "melancholy". The Alpha
misfits in Iceland are condemned to a bleak exile. Feely-author Helmholtz Watson is
frustrated by a sense that he is capable of greater things than authoring repetitive
propaganda. The Director of Hatcheries is utterly humiliated by the understandably
aggrieved Bernard. Boastful Bernard is himself reduced to tears of despair when the Savage
refuses to be paraded in front of assorted dignitaries and the Arch-Community-Songster of
Canterbury. Lesser problems and unpleasantnesses are commonplace. And appallingly, the
utopians come to gawp at John in his hermit's exile and watch his suffering for fun.
Brave New World is a patently sub-standard utopia in need of some true moral imagination
- and indignation - to sort it out.
FalseHappiness
Huxley implies that by abolishing nastiness and mental pain, the brave new worlders have
got rid of the most profound and sublime experiences that life can offer as well. Most
notably, they have sacrificed a mysterious deeper happiness which is implied, but not
stated, to be pharmacologically inaccessible to the utopians. The metaphysical basis of this
presumption is obscure.
There are hints, too, that some of the utopians may feel an ill-defined sense of
dissatisfaction, an intermittent sense that their lives are meaningless. It is implied, further,
that if we are to find true fulfilment and meaning in our own lives, then we must be able to
contrast the good parts of life with the bad parts, to feel both joy and despair. As
rationalisations go, it's a good one.
But it's still wrong-headed. If pressed, we must concede that the victims of chronic
depression or pain today don't need interludes of happiness or anaesthesia to know they
are suffering horribly. Moreover, if the mere relativity of pain and pleasure were true, then
one might imagine that pseudo-memories in the form of neurochemical artefacts imbued
with the texture of "pastness" would do the job of contrast just as well as raw nastiness. The
neurochemical signatures of deja vu and jamais vu provide us with clues on how the reengineering could be done. But this sort of stratagem isn't on Huxley's agenda. The clear
implication of Brave New World is that any kind of drug-delivered happiness is "false" or
inauthentic. In similar fashion, all forms of human genetic engineering and overt
behavioural conditioning are to be tarred with the same brush. Conversely, the natural
happiness of the handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed Savage on the Reservation is portrayed
as more real and authentic, albeit transient and sometimes interspersed with sorrow.
The contrast between true and false happiness, however, is itself problematic. Even if the
notion is both intelligible and potentially referential, it's not clear that "natural", selfishDNA-sculpted minds offer a more authentic consciousness than precision-engineered
euphoria. Highly selective and site-specific designer drugs [and, ultimately, genetic
engineering] won't make things seem weird or alien. On the contrary, they can deliver a
greater sense of realism, verisimilitude and emotional depth to raw states of biochemical
bliss than today's parochial conception of Real Life. Future generations will "re-encephalise"
emotion to serve us, sentient genetic vehicles, rather than selfish DNA. Our well-being will
feel utterly natural; and in common with most things in the natural world, it will be so.
If desired, too, designer drugs can be used to trigger paroxysms of spiritual enlightenment or at least the phenomenology thereof - transcending the ecstasies of the holiest mystic or
the hyper-religiosity of a temporal-lobe epileptic. So future psychoactives needn't yield only
the ersatz happiness of a brave new worlder, nor will euphoriant abuse be followed by the
proverbial Dark Night Of The Soul. Just so long as neurotransmitter activation of the right
sub-receptors triggers the right post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades regulated by the right
alleles of the right genes in the right way indefinitely - and this is a technical problem with a
technical solution - then we have paradise everlasting, at worst. If we want it, we can enjoy
a liquid intensity of awareness far more compelling than our mundane existence as
contemporary sleepwalking Homo sapiens. It will be vastly more enjoyable to boot.
If sustained, such modes of consciousness can furnish a far more potent definition of reality
than the psychiatric slumlands of the past. Subtly or otherwise, today's unenriched textures
of consciousness express feelings of depersonalisation and derealisation. Such feelings are
frequently nameless - though still all too real - because they are without proper contrast:
anonymous angst-ridden modes of selfhood that, in time, will best be forgotten. "True"
happiness, on the other hand, will feel totally "real". Authenticity should be a designspecification of conscious mind, not the fleeting and incidental by-product of the workings
of selfish DNA.
Tomorrow's neuropharmacology, then, offers incalculably greater riches than souped-up
soma. True, drugs can also deliver neurochemical wastelands of silliness and shallowness. A
lot of the state-spaces currently beyond our mental horizons may be nasty or uninteresting
or both. Statistically, most are probably just psychotic. But a lot aren't. Entactogens, say,
[literally, to "touch within"] may eventually be as big an industry as diet pills; and what they
offer by way of a capacity for self-love will be far more use in boosting personal self-esteem.
"Entactogens", "empathogens", "entheogens" - these are fancy words. Until one is granted
first-person experience of the states they open up, the phraseology invoked to get some
kind of intellectual handle on Altered States may seem gobbledygook. What on earth does it
all mean? But resort to such coinages isn't a retreat into obscurantism or mysterymongering. It's a bid to bring some kind of order to unmapped exotica way beyond the
drug-naïve imagination.
One can try to hint at the properties of even seriously altered states by syntactically
shuffling around the lexical husks of the old order. But the kind of consciousness disclosed
by these extraordinary agents provides the basis for new primitive terms in the language of
a conceptual apparatus that hasn't yet been invented. Such forms of what-it's-likeness can't
properly be defined or evoked within the state-specific resources of the old order.
Ordinarily, they're not neurochemically accessible to us at all. Genetically, we're actionoriented hunter-gatherers, not introspective psychonauts.
So how well do we understand the sort of happiness Huxley indicts?
Even though we find the nature of BNW-issue "soma" as elusive as its Vedic ancestor, we
think we can imagine, more-or-less, what taking "soma" might be like; and judge
accordingly. Within limits, plain "uppers" and "downers" are intelligible to us in their effects,
though even here our semantic competence is debatable - right now, it's hard to imagine
what terms like "torture" and "ecstasy" really denote. When talking about drugs with (in
one sense) more far-reaching effects, however, it's easy to lapse into gibbering nonsense. If
one has never taken a particular drug, then one's conception of its distinctive nature derives
from analogy with familiar agents, or from its behavioural effects on other people, not on
the particular effects its use typically exerts on the texture of consciousness. One may be
confident that other people are using the term in the same way only in virtue of their
physiological similarity to oneself, not through any set of operationally defined criteria. Thus
until one has tried a drug, it's hard to understand what one is praising or condemning.
This doesn't normally restrain us. But are we rationally entitled to pass a judgement on any
drug-based civilisation based on one fictional model?
No, surely not. Underground chemists and pharmaceutical companies alike are likely to
synthesise all sorts of "soma" in future. Licitly or otherwise, we're going to explore what it's
like; and we'll like it a lot. But to suppose that the happiness of our transhuman descendants
will thereby be "false" or shallow is naïve. Post-humans are not going to get drunk and
stoned. Their well-being will infuse ideas, modes of introspection, varieties of selfhood,
structures of mentalese, and whole new sense modalities that haven't even been dreamt of
today.
Brave New World-based soma-scenarios, by contrast, are highly conceivable. This is one
reason why they are so unrealistic.
Totalitarian
BNW is a benevolent dictatorship - or at least a benevolent oligarchy, for at its pinnacle
there are ten world controllers. We get to meet its spokesman, the donnish Mustapha
Mond, Resident Controller of Western Europe. Mond 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 BNW's two billion hatchlings is systematically
stifled. 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. There are only ten thousand surnames. 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. This would seduce their
allegiance away from the community as a whole by providing a rival focus of affection. The
individual's loyalty is owed to the state alone. By getting rid of potential sources of tension
and anxiety - and dispelling residual discontents with soma - the World State controls its
populace no less than Big Brother.
Brave New World, then, is centred around control and manipulation. As ever, the fate of an
individual depends on the interplay of Nature and Nurture, heredity and environment: but
the utopian state apparatus controls both. Naturally, we find this control disquieting. One of
our deepest fears about the prospect of tampering with our natural (i.e. selfish DNA-driven)
biological endowment is that we will ourselves be controlled and manipulated by others.
Huxley plays on these anxieties to devastating effect. He sows the fear that a future world
state may rob us of the right to be unhappy.
It must be noted that this right is not immediately in jeopardy. Huxley, however, evidently
feels that the threat of compulsory well-being is real. This is reflected in his choice of a
quotation from Nicolas Berdiaeff as BNW's epigraph. "Utopias appear to be much easier to
realize than one formerly believed. We currently face a question that would otherwise fill us
with anguish: How to avoid their becoming definitively real?" Perhaps not all of the multiple
ironies here are intended by BNW's author.
Huxley deftly coaxes us into siding with John the Savage as he defends the right to suffer
illness, pain, and fear against the arguments of the indulgent Controller. The Savage claims
the right to be unhappy. We sympathise. Intuitively but obscurely, he shouldn't have to
suffer enforced bliss. We may claim, like the Savage, "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". Yet the
argument against chemical enslavement cuts both ways. The point today - and at any other
time, surely - is that we should have the right not to be unhappy. And above all, when
suffering becomes truly optional, we shouldn't force our toxic legacy wetware on others.
But what will be the price of all this happiness?
It's not what we might intuitively expect. Perhaps surprisingly, freedom and individuality can
potentially be enhanced by chemically boosting personal well-being. Vulnerable and
unhappy people are probably more susceptible to brainwashing - and the subtler sorts of
mind-control - than active citizens who are happy and psychologically robust. Happiness is
empowering. In real life, it is notable that mood- and resilience-enhancing drugs, such as the
selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, tend to reduce submissiveness and subordinate
behaviour. Rats and monkeys on SSRIs climb the pecking order, or transcend it altogether.
They don't seem to try and dominate their fellows - loosely speaking, they just stop letting
themselves be messed around. If pharmacologically and genetically enriched, we may all
aspire to act likewise.
Admittedly, this argument isn't decisive. It's a huge topic. Humans, a philosopher once
observed, are not rats. Properly-controlled studies of altered serotonin function in humans
are lacking. The intra-cellular consequences of fifteen-plus serotonin receptor sub-types
defy facile explanation. But we do know that a dysfunctional serotonin system is correlated
with low social-status. Enhancing serotonin function - other things being equal - is likely to
leave an individual less likely to submit to authority, not docile and emasculated. Brave New
World is exquisite satire, but the utopia it imagines is sociologically and biologically
implausible. Its happy conformists are shallow cartoons.
Of course, any analysis of the state's role in future millennia is hugely speculative. Both
minimalist "night-watchman" states and extreme totalitarian scenarios are conceivable. In
some respects, any future world government may indeed be far more intrusive than the
typical nation-state today. If the ageing process and the inevitability of death is superseded,
for instance, then decisions about reproduction - on Earth at least - simply cannot be left to
the discretion of individual couples alone. This is because we'd soon be left with standing
room only. The imminence of widespread human cloning, too, makes increased regulation
and accountability inevitable - quite disturbingly so. But challenges like population-control
shouldn't overshadow the fact that members of a happy, confident, psychologically robust
citizenry are far less likely to be the malleable pawns of a ruling elite than contented
fatalists. A chemically-enslaved underclass of happy helots remains unlikely.
Anthropocentric
Brave New World is a utopia conceived on the basis of species-self-interest masquerading as
a universal paradise. Most of the inhabitants of our planet don't get a look-in, any more
than they do today.
Strong words? Not really. Statistically, most of the suffering in the contemporary world isn't
undergone by human beings. It is sometimes supposed that intensity and degree of
consciousness - between if not within species - is inseparably bound up with intelligence.
Accordingly, humans are prone to credit themselves with a "higher" consciousness than
members of other taxa, as well as - sometimes more justifiably - sharper intellects. Nonhuman animals aren't treated as morally and functionally akin to human infants and
toddlers i.e. in need of looking after. Instead, they are wantonly abused, exploited, and
killed.
Yet it is a striking fact that our most primitive experiences - both phylogenetically and
ontogenetically - are also the most vivid. For physical suffering probably has more to do with
the number and synaptic density of pain cells than a hypertrophied neocortex. The
extremes of pain and thirst, for example, are excruciatingly intense. By contrast, the kinds of
experience most associated with the acme of human intellectual endeavour, namely
thought-episodes in the pre-frontal region of the brain, are phenomenologically so anaemic
that it is hard to introspect their properties at all.
Hardcore paradise-engineering - and not the brittle parody of paradise served up in BNW will eradicate such nastiness from the living world altogether. None of Huxley's implicit
criticism of the utopians can conceivably apply to the rest of the animal kingdom. For by no
stretch of the imagination could the most ardent misery-monger claim animal suffering is
essential for the production of great art and literature - a common rationale for its
preservation and alleged redeeming value in humans. Nor would its loss lead to great
spiritual emptiness. Animal suffering is just savage, empty and pointless. So we'll probably
scrap it when it becomes easy enough to do so.
Whether pain takes the form of the eternal Treblinka of our Fordist factory farms and
conveyor-belt killing factories, or whether it's manifested as the cruelties of a living world
still governed by natural selection, the sheer viciousness of the Darwinian Era is likely to
horrify our morally saner near-descendants. A few centuries hence - the chronological
details are sketchy - hordes of self-replicating nanorobots armed with retroviral vectors and
the power of on-board quantum supercomputers may hunt out the biomolecular signature
of aversive experience all the way down the phylogenetic tree; and genetically eliminate it.
Meanwhile, depot-contraception, not merciless predation, will control population in our
wildlife parks. Carnivorous killing-machines - and that includes dear misunderstood kitty, a
beautiful sociopath - will be reprogrammed or phased out if the abolitionist project is to be
complete. Down on the farm, tasty, genetically-engineered ambrosia will replace abused
sentience. For paradise-engineering entails global veganism. Utopia cannot be built on top
of an ecosystem of pain and fear. Unfortunately, this is an issue on which Brave New World
is silent.
How is it possible to make such predictions with any confidence?
Properly speaking, one can't, or at least not without a heap of caveats. But as science
progressively gives us the power to remould matter and energy to suit our desires - or
whims - it would take an extraordinary degree of malice for us to sustain the painfulness of
Darwinian life indefinitely. For as our power increases, so does our complicity in its
persistence.
Even unregenerate humans don't tend to be sustainably ill-natured. So when geneticallyengineered vat-food tastes as good as dead meat, we may muster enough moral courage to
bring the animal holocaust to an end.
Caste-bound
In BNW, genetic engineering isn't used straightforwardly to pre-code happiness. Instead, it
underwrites the subordination and inferiority of the lower orders. In essence, Brave New
World is a global caste society. Social stratification is institutionalised in a five-way genetic
split. There is no social mobility. Alphas invariably rule, Epsilons invariably toil. Genetic
differences are reinforced by systematic conditioning.
Historically, dominance and winning have been associated with good, even manically
euphoric, mood; losing and submission are associated with subdued spirits and depression.
Rank theory suggests that the far greater incidence of the internalised correlate of the
yielding sub-routine, depression, reflects how low spirits were frequently more adaptive
among group-living organisms than manic self-assertion. But in Brave New World, the
correlation vanishes or is even inverted. The lower orders are at least as happy as the
Alphas thanks to soma, childhood conditioning and their brain-damaged incapacity for
original thought. Thus in sleep-lessons on class consciousness, for instance, juvenile Betas
learn to love being Betas. They learn to respect Alphas who "work much harder than we do,
because they're so frightfully clever." But they also learn to take pleasure in not being
Gammas, Deltas, or the even more witless Epsilons. "Oh no," the hypnopedia tapes suggest,
"I don't want to play with Delta children."
One might imagine that progress in automation technology would eliminate the menial,
repetitive tasks so unsuitable for big-brained Alphas. But apparently this would leave the
lower castes disaffected and without a role: allegedly a good reason for freezing scientific
progress where it is. It might be imagined, too, that one solution here would be to stop
producing oxygen-starved morons altogether. Why not stick to churning out Alphas? The
Controller Mustapha Mond informs us that an all-Alpha society was once tried on an island.
The result of the experiment was civil war. 19 000 of the 22 000 Alphas perished. Thus the
lower castes are needed indefinitely. The happiness that they derive from their routinebound lives guarantees stability for society as a whole. "The optimum population", the
Controller observes, "is modelled on the iceberg - eight-ninths below the waterline, oneninth above".
There are evidently (strong!) counter-arguments and rebuttals that could be delivered
against any specific variant of this scenario. But Huxley isn't interested in details. BNW is a
deeply pessimistic blanket-warning against all forms of genetic engineering and eugenics.
Shouldn't we keep the status quo and ban them altogether? Let's play safe. In the last
analysis, Nature Knows Best.
As it stands, this argument is horribly facile. The ways in which the life sciences can be
abused are certainly manifold. Bioethics deserves to become a mainstream academic
discipline. But the idea that a living world organised on principles of blind genetic selfishness
- the bedrock of the Darwinian Era - is inherently better than anything based on rational
design is surely specious. Selfishness, whether in the technical or overlapping popular sense,
is a spectacularly awful principle on which to base any civilisation. Sooner or later, simple
means-ends-analysis, if nothing else, will dictate the use of genetic engineering to
manufacture constitutionally happy mind/brains. Reams of philosophical sophistry and
complication aside, that's what we're all after, obliquely and under another description or
otherwise; and biotechnology is the only effective way to get it.
For despite how frequently irrational we may be in satisfying our desires, we're all slaves to
the pleasure principle. No one ever leaves a well-functioning pleasure-machine because
they get bored: unlike the derivative joys of food, drink and sex, the delightfulness of intra-
cranial self-stimulation of the pleasure-centres shows no tolerance. Natural selection has
"encephalised" emotion to disguise our dependence on the opioidergic and mesolimbic
dopamine circuitry of reward. Since raw, unfocused emotion is blind and impotent, its
axonal and dendritic processes have been recruited into innervating the neocortex. All our
layers of cortical complexity conspire to help self-replicating DNA leave more copies of itself.
Thus we fetishise all sorts of irrelevant cerebral bric-a-brac ["intentional objects": loosely,
what we're happy or upset "about"] that has come to be associated with adaptively nice and
nasty experiences in our past. But the attributes of power, status and money, for instance,
however obviously nice they seem today, aren't inherently pleasurable. They yield only a
derivative kick that can be chemically edited out of existence. Their cortical representations
have to be innervated by limbically-generated emotions in the right way - or the wrong way
- for them to seem nice at all.
Rationally, then, if we want to modulate our happiness so that it's safe and socially
sustainable, we must genetically code pre-programmed well-being in a way that shuts down
the old dominance-and-submission circuits too. Such a shut-down is crudely feasible today
on serotonergics, both recreational and clinical. But the shut-down can be comprehensive
and permanent. Germ-line gene therapy is better than a lifetime on drugs.
Is this sort of major genetic re-write likely?
Yes, probably. A revolution in reproductive technologies is imminent. Universal preimplantation diagnosis may eventually become the norm. But in the meantime, any
unreconstructed power-trippers can get a far bigger kick in immersive VR than they can
playing primate party-politics. If one wants to be Master Of The Universe, then so be it: a
chacun son gout. The narrative software which supports such virtual worlds can even be
pharmacologically enhanced in the user so that virtual world mastery is always better than
The Real Thing - relegated one day, perhaps, to a fading antiquarian relic. The fusion of
drugs and computer-generated worlds will yield greater verisimilitude than anything
possible in recalcitrant old organic VR - the dynamic simulations which perceptual naïve
realists call the world. For we live in a messy and frustrating regime which passes itself off as
The Real World, but is actually a species-specific construct coded by DNA.
OK. But can power-games really be confined exclusively to VR? Won't tomorrow's Alphas
want to dominate both?
This question needs a book, not the obiter dicta of a literary essay. But if one can enjoy
champagne, why drink meths, or even be tempted to try it in the first place? In common
with non-human animals, we respond most powerfully to hot-button supernormal stimuli.
Getting turned-on by the heightened verisimilitude of drugs-plus-VR from a very young age
is likely to eclipse anything else on offer.
This isn't to deny that in any transitional era to a mature post-Darwinian paradise, there will
have to be huge safeguards - no less elaborate than the multiple failsafe procedures
surrounding the launch codes for today's nuclear weaponry. In the near future, for instance,
prospective candidates for political leadership in The Real World will probably have their
DNA profiles scrutinised no less exhaustively than their sexual peccadillos. For it will be
imprudent to elect unenriched primitives endowed with potentially dangerous genotypes. If
one is going to put oneself and one's children into, say, ecstasy-like states of loving empathy
and trust, then one is potentially more vulnerable to genetic cavemen. But this is all the
more reason to design beautifully enhanced analogues of ecstasy and coke which fuse the
best features of both.
Even if a power-tripper's fantasy wish-fulfilment is confined to private universes, we are still
likely to view it as an unnerving prospect. One of the reasons we find the very thought of
being dominated and controlled and manipulated à la BNW so aversive is that we associate
such images with frustration, nastiness and depression. For sure, the Brave New Worlders
are typically happy rather than depressed. Yet they are all, bar perhaps the Controllers,
manipulated dupes. The worry that we ourselves might ever suffer a similar fate is
unsettling and depressing. Brave New World gives happiness a bad name.
But it's misery that deserves to be stigmatised and stamped out. Brave New World dignifies
unpleasantness in the guise of noble savagery just when it's poised to become biologically
optional. And on occasion unpleasantness really can be horrific - too bad to describe in
words. Some forms of extreme pain, for instance, are so terrible to experience that one
would sacrifice the whole world to get rid of the agony. Pain just this bad is happening in the
living world right now. It's misguided to ask whether such pain is really as bad as it seems to
be - because the reality is the very appearance one is trying vainly to describe. The extremes
of so-called "mental" pain can be no less dreadful. They may embody suicidal despair far
beyond everyday ill-spirits. They are happening right now in the living world as well. Their
existence reflects the way our mind/brains are built. Unless the vertebrate central nervous
system is genetically recoded, there will be traumas and malaise in utopia - any utopia - too.
No behavioural account of even moderately severe depression, for instance, can do justice
to its subjective awfulness. But a spectrum of depressive signs and symptoms will persist
within even a latter-day Garden of Eden - in the absence of good drugs and better genes.
We can understand why depressive states evolved among social animals in terms of the
selective advantage of depressive behaviour in reinforcing adaptive patterns of dominance
and subordination, avoiding damaging physical fights with superior rivals, or of inducing
hypercholinergic frenzy of reflective thought when life goes badly wrong - for one's genes.
Likewise, intense and unpleasant social anxiety was sometimes adaptive too. So was an
involuntary capacity for the torments of sexual jealousy, fear, terror, hunger, thirst and
disgust. Our notions of dominance and subordination are embedded within this stew of
emotions. They are clearly quite fundamental to our social relationships. They pervade our
whole conceptual scheme. When we try to imagine the distant future, we may of course
imagine hi-tech gee-whizzery. Yet emotionally, we also think in primitive terms of
dominance and submission, of hierarchy and power structures, superiority and inferiority.
Even when we imagine future computers and robots, we are liable to have simple-minded
fantasies about being used, dominated, and overthrown. Bug-eyed extra-terrestrials from
the Planet Zog, too, and their legion of hydra-headed sci-fi cousins, are implicitly assumed to
have the motivational structure of our vertebrate ancestors. Superficially they may be alien
- all those tentacles - but really they're just like us. Surely they'll want to dominate us,
control us, invade Earth etc? Huxley's vision of control and manipulation is (somewhat)
subtler; but it belongs to the same atavistic tradition.
For the foreseeable future, these concerns aren't idle. We may rightly worry that if some of
us - perhaps most of us - are destined to get drugged-up, genetically-rewritten and plugged
into designer worlds, then might not invisible puppet-masters be controlling us for their
own ends, whatever their motives? Who'll be in charge of the basement infrastructure
which sustains all the multiple layers of VR - and thus ultimately running the show? Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes? as we say here in Brighton.
Admittedly, sophisticated and intellectually enriched post-humans are unlikely to be naïve
realists about "perception"; so they'll recognise that what their ancestors called "real life"
was no more privileged than what we might call, say, "the medieval world" - the virtual
worlds instantiated by our medieval forebears. But any unenriched primitives still living in
organic VR could still be potentially dangerous, because they could bring everything else
tumbling down. In certain limited respects, their virtual worlds, like our own, would causally
co-vary with the mind-independent world in ways that blissed-up total-VR dwellers would
typically lack. So can it ever be safe to be totally nice and totally happy?
These topics deserve a book - many books - too. The fixations they express are doubtless
still of extreme interest to contemporary humans. Sado-masochistic images of dominationand-submission loom large in a lot of our fantasies too. The categories of experience they
reflect were of potent significance on the African savannah, where they bore on the ability
to get the "best" mates and leave most copies of one's genes. But they won't persist for
ever. A tendency to such dominance-and-control syndromes is going to be written out of
the genome - as soon we gain mastery of rewriting the script. For on the whole, we want
our kids to be nice.
More generally, the whole "evolutionary environment of adaptation" is poised for a
revolution. This is important. When any particular suite of alleles ceases to be the result of
random mutation and blind natural selection, and is instead pre-selected by intelligent
agents in conscious anticipation of their likely effects, then the criteria of genetic fitness will
change too. The sociobiological and popular senses of "selfish" will progressively diverge
rather than typically overlap. Allegedly "immutable" human nature will change as well when
the genetic-rewrite gathers momentum and the Reproductive Revolution matures. The
classical Darwinian Era is drawing to a close.
Unfortunately, its death agonies may be prolonged. Knee-jerk pessimism and outright
cynicism abound among humanistic pundits in the press. They are common in literary
academia. And of course any competent doom-monger can glibly extrapolate the trends of
the past into the future. Yet anti-utopianism ignores even the foreseeable discontinuities
that lie ahead of us as we mature into post-humans. Most notably, it ignores the major
evolutionary transition now imminent in the future of life. This is the era when we rewrite
the genome in our own interest to make ourselves happy in the richest sense of the term. In
the meantime, we just act out variations on dramas scripted by selfish DNA.
Philistine
Brave New World is a stupid society. For the most part, even the Alphas don't do anything
more exalted than play Obstacle Golf. A handful of the Alphas are well-delineated: Bernard,
Helmholtz, and Mustapha Mond. They are truly clever. Huxley is far too brilliant to write a
novel with convincingly dim-witted lead characters. The Savage, in particular, is an
implausibly articulate vehicle for Huxley's own sympathies. But in the main, brave new
worlders are empty-headed mental invalids in the grip of terminal mind-rot - happy pigs
rather than types of unhappy Socrates.
Since the utopians are (largely) contented with their lives, they don't produce Great Art.
Happiness and Great Art are allegedly incompatible. Great Art and Great Literature are very
dear to Huxley's heart. But is artistic genius really stifled without inner torment? Is paradise
strictly for low-brows?
There is a great deal of ideological baggage that needs to be picked apart here; or preferably
slashed like a Gordian knot. The existence of great art, unlike (controversially) great science,
is not a state-neutral fact about the world. Not least, "great art" depends on the resonances
it strikes in its audience. Today we're stuck with legacy wetware and genetically-driven
malaise. It's frequently nasty and sometimes terrible. So we can currently appreciate only
too well "great" novels and plays about murder, violence, treachery, child abuse, suicidal
despair etc. Such themes, especially when "well"-handled in classy prose, strike us as more
"authentic" than happy pap. Thus a (decaying) Oxbridge literary intelligentsia can celebrate,
say, the wonderful cathartic experience offered by Greek tragedies - with their everyday
tales of bestiality, cannibalism, rape and murder among the Greek gods. It's good to have
one's baser appetites dressed up so intelligently.
Yet after the ecstatic phase-change ahead in our affective states - the most important
evolutionary transition in the future of life itself - the classical literary canon may fall into
obscurity. Enriched minds with different emotions encephalised in different ways are
unlikely to be edified by the cultural artefacts of a bygone era. Conversely, we might
ourselves take a jaundiced view if we could inspect the artistic products of a civilisation of
native-born ecstatics. This is because any future art which explores lives predicated on
gradations of delight will seem pretty vapid from here. We find it hard enough to imagine
even one flavour of sublimity, let alone a multitude.
The nagging question may persist: will posterity's Art and Literature [or art-forms expressing
modes of experience we haven't even accessed yet] really be Great? To its creators, sure,
their handiwork may seem brilliant and beautiful, moving and profound. But might not its
blissed-out authors be simply conning themselves? Could they have lost true critical insight,
even if they retain its shadowy functional analogues?
Such questions demand a treatise on the nature and objectivity of value judgements. Yet
perhaps asking whether we would appreciate ecstatic art of 500 or 5000 years hence is
futile in the first place. We simply can't know what we're talking about. For we are unhappy
pigs, and our own arts are mood-congruent perversions. The real philistinism to worry about
lies in the emotional illiteracy of the present. Our genetically-enriched posterity will have no
need of our condescension.
ThingsGoWrong
Even by its own criteria, BNW is not a society where everyone is happy. There are asylums in
Iceland and the Falklands for Alpha-male misfits. Bernard Marx is disaffected and
emotionally insecure; a mistake in the bottling-plant left him stunted. Lenina has lupus. If
you run out of soma, a fate which befalls Lenina when visiting the Reservation, you feel sick:
well-being is not truly genetically pre-programmed. Almost every page of the novel is
steeped in negative vocabulary. Its idiom belongs to the era it has notionally superseded. On
a global scale, the whole society of the world state is an abomination - science gone mad - in
most people's eyes, at any rate. In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley clearly expects us to
share his repugnance.
Surely any utopia can go terribly wrong? One thinks of Christianity; the Soviet experiment;
The French Revolution; and Pol Pot. All ideas and ideals get horribly perverted by power and
its pursuit. So what horrors might we be letting ourselves in for in a global species-project to
abolish the biological substrates of malaise?
There is an important distinction to be drawn here. In a future civilisation where aversive
experience is genetically impossible - forbidden not by social diktat but because its
biochemical substrates are absent - then the notion of what it means for anything to go
wrong will be different from today. If this innovative usage is to be adopted, then we're
dealing with a separate and currently ill-defined - if not mystical - concept; and we run a risk
of conflating the two senses. For if we are incapable of aversive experience, then the notion
of things going wrong with our lives - or anyone else's - doesn't apply in any but a
Pickwickian sense. "Going wrong" and "being terrible" as we understand such concepts
today are inseparable from the textures of nastiness in which they had their origin. Their
simple transposition to the Post-Darwinian Era doesn't work.
Perhaps functional analogues of things going wrong will indeed apply - even in a secular
biological heaven where the phenomenology of nastiness has been wiped out. So the idea
isn't entirely fanciful. For the foreseeable future, functional analogues of phenomenal pain
will be needed in early transhumans no less than in silicon robots to alert their bodies to
noxious tissue damage etc. Also, functional analogues of "things going wrong", at least in
one sense, are needed to produce great science and technology, so that acuity of critical
judgement is maintained; uncontrolled euphoric mania is not a recipe for scientific genius in
even the most high-octane supermind. Yet directly or indirectly, the very notion of "going
wrong" in the contemporary sense seems bound up with a distinctive and unpleasant
phenomenology of consciousness: a deficiency of well-being, not a surfeit.
This doesn't stop us today from dreaming up scenarios of blissed-out utopias which strike us
as distasteful - or even nightmarish - when contemplated through the lens of our own
darkened minds. This is because chemically-unenriched consciousness is a medium which
corrupts anything that it seeks to express. The medium is not the message; but it leaves its
signature indelibly upon it. We may imagine future worlds in which there is no great art, no
real spirituality, no true humanity, no personal growth through life-enriching traumas and
tragedies, etc. We may conjure up notional future worlds, too, whose belief-systems rest on
a false metaphysic: e.g. an ideal theocracy - is it a real utopia if it transpires there's no God?
But it's hard to escape the conclusion that "ill-effects" from which no one ever suffers are
ontological flights of fancy. The spectre of happy dystopias may trouble some of us today
rather than strike us as a contradiction on terms. But like Huxley's Brave New World, they
are fantasies born of the very pathology that they to seek warn us against.
This is not to deny that the transition to the new Post-Darwinian Era will be stressful and
conflict-ridden. We learn from the Controller that the same was true of Brave New World civilisation as we know it today was destroyed in the Nine Years' War. One hopes, on rather
limited evidence, that the birth-pangs of the new genetic order will be less traumatic. But
the supposition that a society predicated on universal bliss engineered by science is
inherently wrong - as Huxley wants us to believe - rests on obscure metaphysics as well as
questionable ethics. Sin is a concept best left to medieval theologians.
Consumerist
Brave New World is a "Fordist" utopia based on production and consumption. It would
seem, nonetheless, that there is no mandatory work-place drug-testing for soma; if there
were, its detection would presumably be encouraged. In our own society, taking drugs may
compromise a person's work-role. Procuring illicit drugs may divert the user from an
orthodox consumer life-style. This is because the immediate rewards to be gained from
even trashy recreational euphoriants are more intense than the buzz derived from acquiring
more consumer fripperies. In BNW, however, the production and consumption of
manufactured goods is (somehow) harmoniously integrated with a life-style of drugs-andsex. Its inhabitants are given no time for spiritual contemplation. Solitude is discouraged.
The utopians are purposely kept occupied and focused on working for yet more
consumption: "No leisure from pleasure".
Is this our destiny too?
Almost certainly not. Productivist visions of paradise are unrealistic if they don't incorporate
an all-important genomic revolution in hedonic engineering. Beyond a bare subsistence
minimum, there is no inherent positive long-term correlation between wealth and
happiness. Windfalls and spending-sprees do typically bring short-term highs. Yet they don't
subvert the hedonic treadmill of inhibitory feedback mechanisms in the brain. Each of us
tends to have a hedonic set-point about which our "well"-being fluctuates. That set-point is
hard to recalibrate over a lifetime without pharmacological or genetic intervention.
Interlocking neurotransmitter systems in the CNS have been selected to embody both shortand long-term negative feedback loops. They are usually efficient. Unless they are
chemically subverted, such mechanisms stop most of us from being contented - or clinically
depressed - for very long. The endless cycle of ups and downs - our own private reenactment of the myth of Sisyphus - is an "adaptation" that helps selfish genes to leave
more copies of themselves; in Nature, alas, the restless malcontents genetically outcompete happy lotus-eaters. It's an adaptation that won't go away just by messing around
with our external environment.
This is in no way to deny the distinct possibility that our descendants will be
temperamentally ecstatic. They may well consume lots of material goods too - if they don't
spend their whole lives in fantasy VR. Yet their well-being cannot derive from an unbridled
orgy of personal consumption. Authentic mental health depends on dismantling the hedonic
treadmill itself; or more strictly, recalibrating its axis to endow its bearers with a
motivational system based on gradients of immense well-being.
So what sort of scenario can we expect? If we opt for gradations of genetically preprogrammed bliss, just what, if anything, is our marvellous well-being likely to focus on?
First, in a mature IT society, the harnessing of psychopharmacology and biotechnology to
ubiquitous virtual reality software gives scope for unlimited good experiences for everyone.
Any sensory experience one wants, any experiential manifold one can imagine, any
narrative structure one desires, can be far better realised in VR than in outmoded
conceptions of Real Life.
At present, society is based on the assumption that goods and services - and the good
experiences they can generate - are a finite scarce resource. But ubiquitous VR can generate
(in effect) infinite abundance. An IT society supersedes the old zero-sum paradigm and
Fordist mass-manufacture. It rewrites the orthodox laws of market economics. The ability of
immersive multi-modal VR to make one - depending on the software title one opts for - Lord
Of Creation, Casanova The Insatiable etc puts an entire universe at one's disposal. This can
involve owning "trillions of dollars", heaps of "status-goods", and unlimited wealth and
resources - in today's archaic terminology. In fact one will be able to have all the material
goods one wants, and any virtual world one wants - and it can all seem as "unvirtual" as one
desires. A few centuries hence, we may rapidly take [im]material opulence for granted. And
this virtual cornucopia won't be the prerogative of a tiny elite. Information isn't like that.
Nor will it depend on masses of toiling workers. Information isn't like that either. If we want
it, nanotechnology promises old-fashioned abundance all round, both inside and outside
synthetic VR.
Nanotechnology is not magic. The self-replicating molecular robots it will spawn are
probably more distant than their enthusiasts suppose, perhaps by several decades. We may
have to wait a century or more before nanorobots can get to work remoulding the cosmos to make it a home worth living in and call our own. Details of how they'll be programmed,
how they'll navigate, how they'll be powered, how they'll locate all the atoms they
reconfigure, etc, are notoriously sketchy. But the fact remains: back in the boring old mindindependent world, applied nanoscience will deliver material superabundance beyond
measure.
For the most part, admittedly, vast material opulence may not be needed thanks to VR. This
is because we can all have the option of living in immersive designer-paradises of our own
choosing. At first, our customised virtual worlds may merely ape and augment organic VR.
But the classical prototype of an egocentric virtual world is parochial and horribly restrictive;
the body-image it gives us to work with, for instance, is pretty shoddy and flawed by built-in
obsolescence. Unprogrammed organic VR can be hatefully cruel as well - Nature's genetic
algorithms are nastily written and very badly coded indeed. Ultimately, artificial VR may
effectively supersede its organic ancestor no less (in)completely than classical macroscopic
worlds emerged from their quantum substrate. The transition is conceivable. Whether it will
happen, and to what extent, we simply don't know.
Heady stuff. But is it sociologically plausible? Doesn't such prophecy just assume a naïve
technological determinism? For it might be countered that synthetic drugs-and-VR
experiences - whether interactive or solipsistic, deeply soulful or fantasy wish-fulfilment will always be second-rate shadows of their organically-grown predecessors. Why will we
want them? After a while, won't we get bored? For surely Real Life is better.
On the contrary, drugs-plus-VR can potentially yield a heightened sense of verisimilitude;
and exhilarating excitement. Virtual worlds can potentially seem more real, more lifelike,
more intense, and more compelling than the lame definitions of reality on offer today. The
experience of this-is-real - like all our waking- or dreaming consciousness - comprises a
series of neurochemical events in the CNS like any other. It can be amped-up or toneddown. Reality does not admit of degrees; but our sense of it certainly does. Tone, channel
and volume controls will be at our disposal. But once we've chosen what we like, then the
authentic taste of paradise is indeed addictive.
Thus in an important sense Brave New World is wrong. Our descendants may "consume"
software, genetic enhancements and designer drugs. But the future lies in bits and bytes,
not as workers engaged in factory mass-production or cast as victims of a consumer society.
In some ways, BNW is prescient science fiction - uncannily prophetic of advances in genetic
engineering and cloning. But in other ways, its depiction of life in centuries to come is
backward-looking and quaint. Our attempts to envision distant eras always are. The future
will be unrecognisably better.
Loveless
BNW is an essentially loveless society. Both romantic love and love of family are taboo. The
family itself has been abolished throughout the civilised world. We learn, however, that the
priggish Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning was guilty of an indiscretion with a Betaminus when visiting the Reservation twenty years ago. When John the Savage falls on his
knees and greets him as "my father", the director puts his hands over his ears. In vain, he
tries to shut out the obscene word. He is embarrassed. Publicly humiliated, he then flees the
room. Pantomime scenes like this - amusing but fanciful - contribute to our sense that a
regime of universal well-being would entail our losing something precious. Utopian
happiness, we are led to believe, is built on sacrifice: the loss of love, science, art and
religion. Authentic paradise-engineering, by contrast, can enhance them all; not a bad
payoff.
In BNW, romantic love is strongly discouraged as well. Brave new worlders are conditioned
to be sexually promiscuous: "Everyone belongs to everyone else." Rather than touting the
joys of sexual liberation, Huxley seeks to show how sexual promiscuity cheapens love; it
doesn't express it. The Savage fancies lovely Lenina no less than she fancies him. But he
loves her too. He feels having sex would dishonour her. So when the poor woman expresses
her desire to have sex with him, she gets treated as though she were a prostitute.
Thus Huxley doesn't offer a sympathetic exploration of the possibility that prudery and
sexual guilt has soured more lives than sex. In a true utopia, the counterparts of John and
Lenina will enjoy fantastic love-making, undying mutual admiration, and live together
happily ever after.
Fantastical? The misappliance of science? No. It's just one technically feasible biological
option. In the light of what we do to those we love today, it would be a kinder option too. At
any rate, we should be free to choose.
The utopians have no such choice. And they aren't merely personally unloved. They aren't
individually respected either. Ageing has been abolished; but when the utopians die quickly, not through a long process of senescence - their bodies are recycled as useful
sources of phosphorus. Thus Brave New World is a grotesque parody of a utilitarian society
in both a practical as well as a philosophical sense.
This is all good knockabout stuff. The problem is that some of it has been taken seriously.
Science is usually portrayed as dehumanising. Brave New World epitomises this fear. "The
more we understand the world, the more it seems completely pointless" (Steven Weinberg).
Certainly science can seem chilling when conceived in the abstract as a metaphysical worldpicture. We may seem to find ourselves living in a universe with all the human meaning
stripped out: participants in a soulless dance of molecules, or harmonics of pointlessly
waggling superstrings and their braneworld cousins. Nature seems loveless and indifferent
to our lives. What right have we to be happy?
Yet what right have we to sneeze? If suffering has been medically eradicated, does
happiness have to be justified any more than the colour green or the taste of peppermint?
Is there some deep metaphysical sense in which we ought to be weighed down by the
momentous gravity of the human predicament?
Only if it will do anyone any good. The evidence is lacking. Paradise-engineering, by
contrast, can deliver an enchanted pleasure-garden of otherworldly delights for everyone.
Providentially, the appliance of biotechnology offers us the unprecedented prospect of
enhancing our humanity - and the biological capacity for spiritual experience. When
genetically-enriched, our pursuit of such delights won't be an escape from some inner sense
of futility, a gnawing existential angst which disfigures so many lives at present. Quite the
opposite: life will feel self-intimatingly wonderful. Wholesale genetic-rewrites tweaked by
rational drug-design give us the chance to enhance willpower and motivation. We'll be able
to enjoy a hugely greater sense of purpose in our lives than our characteristically
malfunctioning dopamine systems allow today. Moreover this transformation of the living
world, and eventually of the whole cosmos, into a heavenly meaning-steeped nirvana will in
no way be "unnatural". It is simply a disguised consequence of the laws of physics playing
themselves out.
And, conceivably, it will be a loving world. Until now, selection pressure has ensured we're
cursed with a genome that leaves us mostly as callous brutes, albeit brutes with
intermittently honourable intentions. We are selfish in the popular as well as the technical
genetic sense. Love and affection are often strained even among friends and relatives. The
quasi-psychopathic indifference we feel toward most other creatures on the planet is a byproduct of selfish DNA. Sociobiology allied to evolutionary psychology shows how genetic
dispositions to conflict are latent in every relationship that isn't between genetically
identical clones. Such potential conflicts frequently erupt in overt form. The cost is immense
suffering and sometimes suicidal anguish.
This isn't to deny that love is real. But its contemporary wellsprings have been poisoned
from the outset. Only the sort of love that helps selfish DNA to leave more copies of itself which enable it to "maximise its inclusive fitness" - can presently flourish. It is fleeting,
inconstant, and shaped by cruelly arbitrary criteria of physical appearance which serve as
badges of reproductive potential. If we value it, love should be rescued from the genes that
have recruited and perverted the states which mediate its expression in blind pursuit of
reproductive success. Contra Brave New World, love is not biologically inconsistent with
lasting happiness.
This is because good genes and good drugs allow us, potentially, to love everyone more
deeply, more empathetically and more sustainably than has ever been possible before.
Indeed, there is no fundamental biological reason why the human genome can't be
rewritten to allow everyone to be "in" love with everyone else - if we should so choose. But
simply loving each other will be miraculous enough; and will probably suffice. An empty
religious piety can be transformed into a biological reality.
Love is versatile; so we needn't turn ourselves into celibate angels either. True love does not
entail that we become disembodied souls communing with each other all day.
"Promiscuous" sex doesn't have to be loveless. Bonobos ("pygmy chimps") are a case in
point; they would appreciate a "Solidarity Service" rather better than we do. When sexual
guilt and jealousy - a pervasive disorder of serotonin function - are cured, then bed-hopping
will no longer be as morally reckless as it is today. Better still, designer love-philtres and
smarter sex-drugs can transform our concept of intimacy. Today's ill-educated fumblings will
seem inept by comparison. Sensualists may opt for whole-body orgasms of a frequency,
duration and variety that transcends the limp foreplay of their natural ancestors. Whether
the sexual adventures of our descendants will be mainly auto-erotic, interpersonal, or take
guises we can't currently imagine is a topic for another night.
Profound love of many forms - both of oneself and all others - is at least as feasible as the
impersonal emotional wasteland occupied by Huxley's utopians.
Gene-Splicers Versus Glue-Sniffers
The molecular biology of paradise
The prospect of a lifetime of genetically-engineered sublimity strikes some contemporary
Savages as no less appalling than getting high with drugs. The traditional conception of living
happily-ever-after in Heaven probably hasn't thrilled them unduly either; but the unusual
eminence of its Author has discouraged overt criticism. In any event, the consensus seems
to be that God's PR representatives did a poor job in selling The Other Place to his acolytes.
Today, many people find the idea of winning the national lottery far more appealing; and in
fairness, it probably offers better odds. Possibly His representatives on earth should have
tried harder to make Heaven sound more appealing. One worries that an eternity spent
worshipping Him might begin to pall.
But the Death Of God, or at least his discreet departure to a backstage role, shouldn't mean
we're doomed to abandon any notion of heaven, and certainly not on earth. Suffering,
whether it's merely irksome or too terrible for words, doesn't have to be part of life at all.
Unfortunately, the proposal that aversive experience should be eliminated in toto via
biotechnology tends to find itself assimilated to two stereotypes:
The image of an intra-cranially self-stimulating rat. Its degraded frenzy of lever-pressing is
eventually followed by death from inanition and self-neglect.
Soma and visions of Brave New World.
And just as during much of the Twentieth Century, any plea for greater social justice could
be successfully damned as Communist, likewise today, any strategy to eradicate suffering is
likely to be condemned in similar reactionary terms: either wirehead hedonism or revamped
Brave New World. This response is not just facile and simplistic. If it gains currency, the
result is morally catastrophic.
Of course, the abolitionist issue rarely arises. Typically, universal bliss is still more-or-less
unthinkingly dismissed as technically impossible. Insofar as the prospect is even
contemplated - grudgingly - it is usually assumed that the new regime would be
underwritten day-by-day with drugs or, more crudely, electrodes in the pleasure-centres.
These techniques have their uses. Yet in the medium-to-long-term, stopgaps won't be
enough. All use of psychoactive drugs may be conceived as an attempt to correct something
pathological with one's state of consciousness. There's something deeply wrong with our
brains. If what we had now was OK, we wouldn't try to change it. But it isn't, so we do.
Mature biological psychiatry will recognise inadequate innate bliss as a pandemic form of
mental ill-health: good for selfish DNA in the ancestral environment where the adaptation
arose, but bad for its throwaway vehicles, notably us. The whole gamut of behavioural
conditioning, socio-economic reform, talk-therapies - and even euphoriant superdrugs - are
just palliatives, not cures, for a festering global illness. Its existence demands a global
eradication program, not idle philosophical manifestos and scientific belles lettres.
But one does one's best. The ideological obstacles to genetically pre-programmed mental
super-health are actually more daunting than the technical challenges. To be cured, hypohedonia must be recognised as a primarily genetic deficiency-disorder. Designer moodbrighteners and anti-anxiety agents to alleviate it are sometimes branded "lifestyle-drugs";
but this is to trivialise a serious medical condition which must be corrected at source.
Happily, our hereditary neuropsychiatric disorder is likely to become extinct within a few
generations as the Reproductive Revolution unfolds. Aversive experience, and the
poisonous metabolic pathways that mediate its textures, will become physiologically
impossible once the genes coding its neural substrates have been eliminated. We won't miss
its corrupting effect when it's gone.
In the medium-term, the functional equivalent of aversive experience can help animate us
instead. Late in the Third Millennium and beyond, its functional successors may be
expressed as gradients of majestic well-being. On this scenario, our descendants will enjoy a
civilisation based on information-bearing pleasure-gradients: whether steep or shallow, we
simply don't know. Such a global species-project does not have the desperate moral urgency
of eliminating the phenomenon of Darwinian pain - both "mental" and "physical", human
and non-human alike. Abolishing raw nastiness - sometimes vile beyond belief - remains the
over-riding ethical priority. One doesn't have to be an outright negative utilitarian to
acknowledge that getting rid of agony takes moral precedence over maximising pleasure.
But both genetic fundamentalists and gung-ho advocates of Better Living Through Chemistry
today agree on one crucial issue. There is no sense in sustaining a legacy of mood-darkening
metabolic pathways out of superstitious deference to our savage past.
***
When Bernard Marx tells the Savage he will try to secure permission for him and his mother
to visit the Other Place, John is initially pleased and excited. Echoing Miranda in The
Tempest, he exclaims: "O brave new world that has such people in it." Heavy irony. Like
innocent Miranda, he is eager to embrace a way of life he neither knows nor understands.
And of course he comes unstuck. Yet if we swallow such fancy literary conceits, then
ultimately the joke is on us. It is only funny in the sense there are "jokes" about Auschwitz.
For it is Huxley who neither knows nor understands the glory of what lies ahead. A utopian
society in which we are sublimely happy will be far better than we can presently imagine,
not worse. And it is we, trapped in the emotional squalor of late-Darwinian antiquity, who
neither know nor understand the lives of the god-like super-beings we are destined to
become.
tilitarianism is a school of thought identified with the writings of Jeremy Bentham and
James Mill. It advocated the principle and goal of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". Though
admirable, its approach to achieving happiness was rather like a stimulus or response approach, focusing
on the influence of pleasure and pain and the negative and positive associations created through praise and
punishment. Its approach in education was to form positive associations with actions for social good and
negative associations with things socially hurtful.
John Stuart Mill argues that moral theories are divided between two distinct approaches: the intuitive
and inductive schools. Although both schools agree on the existence of a single and highest normative
principle (being that actions are right if they tend to promote happiness and wrong if they tend to
produce the reverse of happiness), they disagree about whether we have knowledge of that principle
intuitively, or inductively. Mill criticises categorical imperative, stating that it is essentially the same as
utilitarianism, since it involves calculating the good or bad consequences of an action to determine the
morality of that action.
Mill defines "happiness" to be both intellectual and sensual pleasure. He argues that we have a
sense of dignity that makes us prefer intellectual pleasures to sensual ones. He adds that the principle of
utility involves assessing an action's consequences, and not the motives or character traits of the agent.
Mill argues that the principle of utility should be seen as a tool for generating secondary moral principles,
which promote general happiness. Thus most of our actions will be judged according to these secondary
principles. He feels that we should appeal directly to the principle of utility itself only when faced with a
moral dilemma between two secondary principles. For example, a moral principle of charity dictates that
one should feed a starving neighbour, and the moral principle of self-preservation dictates that one
should feed oneself. If one does not have enough food to do both, then one should determine whether
general happiness would be better served by feeding my neighbour, or feeding oneself.
Mill discusses our motivations to abide by the utilitarian standard of morality. Man is not
commonly motivated to specific acts such as to kill or steal, instead, we are motivated to promote
general happiness. Mill argues that there are two classes of motivations for promoting general happiness.
First, there are external motivations arising from our hope of pleasing and fear of displeasing God and
other humans. More importantly, there is a motivation internal to the agent, which is the feeling of duty.
For Mill, an this feeling of duty consists of an amalgamation of different feelings developed over time,
such as sympathy, religious feelings, childhood recollections, and self-worth. The binding force of our
sense of duty is the experience of pain or remorse when one acts against these feelings by not promoting
general happiness. Mill argues that duty is subjective and develops with experience. However, man has
an instinctive feeling of unity, which guides the development of duty toward general happiness.
Mill's proof for the principle of utility notes that no fundamental principle is capable of a direct
proof. Instead, the only way to prove that general happiness is desirable is to show man's desire for it. His
proof is as follows: If X is the only thing desired, then X is the only thing that ought to be desired. Thus if
general happiness is the only thing desired, therefore general happiness is the only thing that ought to be
desired. Mill recognises the controversiality of this and therefore anticipates criticisms. A critic might
argue that besides happiness, there are other things, such as virtue, which we desire. Responding to this,
Mill says that everything we desire becomes part of happiness. Thus, happiness becomes a complex
phenomenon composed of many parts, such as virtue, love of money, power, and fame.
Critics of utilitarianism argue that unlike the suppositions of the utilitarians, morality is not based
on consequences of actions. Instead, it is based on the fundamental concept of justice. Mill sees the
concept of justice as a case for utilitarianism. Thus, he uses the concept of justice, explained in terms of
utility, to address the main argument against utilitarianism. Mill offers two counter arguments. First, he
argues that social utility governs all moral elements in the notion of justice. The two essential elements in
the notion of justice are: punishment, and the violation of another's rights. Punishment results from a
combination of revenge and collective social sympathy. As a single entity, revenge has no moral
component, and collective social sympathy is equal to social utility. Violation of rights is also derived from
utility, as rights are claims that one has on society to protect us. Thus, social utility is the only reason
society should protect us. Consequently, both elements of justice are based on utility. Mill's second
argument is that if justice were foundational, then justice would not be ambiguous. According to Mill,
there are disputes in the notion of justice when examining theories of punishment, fair distribution of
wealth, and fair taxation. Only by appealing to utility can these disputes be resolved. Mill concludes that
justice is a genuine concept, but it must be seen as based on utility.