A Brave New World

Utopia means the idyllic state as first used by sir Thomas Moore as the title of his book in 1516 (Brave New World’s Barron’s Notes by Anthony Astrachan).

The Utopia achieved by the world-state in Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World had a terribly High price. A price which, I think is not worth it. Their citizens live in as oblivious and ignorant kind of bliss in world that is free of war, fear, violence, disease and all the other draw-backs of living in the real world (Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 1974, cited in Brave New World’s Barron’s Notes by Anthony Astrachan).

The characters from Utopia in the novel do not even know freedom. They are happy and contented in their respective occupations and are satiated by spending their free time wallowing in pleasure even though they are all alike in each class and behave in much the same way as each other save for a few idiosyncrasies Uniformity is stressed and individuality becomes like a sickness and all characters who had even a minor difference from other citizens in the same class were cruelly crushed into either conformity or the final escape of death in John’s case.
However, if the price of such comforts would be the ignorance of the existence of freedom, an idea that many countless people have died fighting for in the real world, I think Utopia is not worth it.
A. Huxley did very well in highlighting this point. John’s suicide after seeing that his beloved joined the mob to watch him suffer is a great point at rejecting the idea of Utopia in the book.
Even when John found a place where he could live with all the things that he thought were necessary, including pain, he was followed by a huge crowd which had come to watch him suffer. Seeing Lenina come to watch him whip himself causes him to kill himself.
In the novel, Huxley plays with the idea of how technological advances would affect society. In Utopia, humans are grown in bottles. No one has a mother. Multiple copies of a single person can be made in one go. This is a very extreme way to highlight the author’s point, completely removing the “humanity” from humanity to the point that even the genuine personal bond of parent and child is removed.
The achievement of stability is attained by keeping everybody in an artificial state of perpetual happiness and contentment.  Pain and grief is removed from the realm of human emotion thereby removing all the deep feelings we associate with the feeling of being genuinely “alive”.
Citizens in Utopia are encouraged to be promiscuous. Anybody can have sex with anybody they want and vice versa. Family life and the formation of intense personal relationship are obliterated so that these cannot interfere with the stability of society. Love is non-existent. Anybody who’d date or have sex with a single person for an extended period is looked on as weird.
I think that the author was successful at highlighting his point. His characters were only secondary to the ideas that he proposed especially considering the time and context when he propounded them. He makes me feel as if the novel’s version of Utopia is not far from becoming a truth. Today’s culture promotes the culture of almost mindless consumption, too much indulgence in pleasure and diminishing of the family.
Technology is a result of human endeavor. It allows us to live in a better world with all of our modern necessities and comforts. In this book however, a different view is illustrated. While it acknowledges the former to be true, it declares resoundingly that the opposite is possible also. Technology also has the potential to wipe out the essence of humanity. It can wipe out genuine happiness, individuality, close personal relationships, deep emotions and family.
References
BLTC, Brave New World? A Defence of Paradise-Engineering, Retrieved on April 13, 2008, from http://www.huxley.net/index.html
BLTC, Brave New World’s Barron’s Notes by Anthony Astrachan, Retrieved on April 13, 2008, from http://www.huxley.net/studyaid/bnwbarron.html
BLTC, Brave’s New World’s Monarch Notes, Retrieved on April 13, 2008 from http://www.huxley.net/studyaid/index.html