femmenietzsche:

kontextmaschine:

I read Brave New World a long time ago, off the shelf of my mother’s books, and you know, I never ever got why it was supposed to be a “negative” utopia, there’s not a thing wrong with it.

People will say “Oh, but there’s no Art” (and oh boy, can you hear that capital A) and as someone who still considers himself a screenwriter, I’ve got to object - the hell do you call the feelie with the acrobatic triplets?

Now John the Savage sniffs that it’s not Shakespeare, because John the Savage is a pretentious twit (and Huxley a modernist snob), but that is after all mass market stuff, I’m sure there’s an Alpha Plus Plus somewhere making arthouse fare for the Alphas, with more complex plotting and avant-garde technique and still a good deal of sex. Probably in French, let’s be honest.

Plus, any culture that accords so much respect to pneumaticity and the athleticism of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy clearly has a cult of physical beauty strong enough to imply a figurative sculpture tradition.

Religion? Well, for one, Fordism. For two, I’d argue that the use of soma, especially as part of the death-transition, constitutes shamanic practice. I guess John the Savage did introduce the ecstasies of flagellant dervishism, good for him.

The one point I’ll yield is that the utopia lacks war and violence, the frisson of suffering. (Assuming there aren’t, say, snuff feelies.) But, as above, once exposed to the power of suffering they’re pretty quick to co-opt it into the orgy porgy as BDSM so things are set right by the end.

I guess the only thing that’s really missing is a tragic sense. Well Mustapha Mond is cynical, which is like a tragic sense minus the po-facedness. But anyway, to frame that as a complaint would be “this can’t be a utopia, things never go wrong”. Which is really just the dumbest modernist shitpiety, right there.

Wankers.

Stumbled across this old post while looking for something else and it reminded me of one of my central beefs with BNW. Huxley cheats and takes the easy way out to make his future feel like a dystopia without proving it. At one point, they mention that they tried to create a society of geniuses, but it fell apart since no one wanted to be the janitor, more or less. I guess that’s a possible outcome of such an experiment, but it’s hardly necessarily the case, and anyway automation could solve a lot of the issues, and further genetic engineering could iron out the rest. The point is, it doesn’t flow naturally from the rest of the worldbulding. It seems clear to me that Huxley only introduces that fact in order to make the brave new world seem base and stupid, and that lets him avoid a much deeper, harder question.

Imagine a world of Alphas who all live like Star Trek officers in their downtime, studying Shakespeare and playing instruments and whatnot. To what extent is that a meaningful life? How different is it from the world we see in the actual book? How much better are the higher pleasures than the lower ones, really? On the surface, it seems like a much less offensive world than what Huxley describes – or it certainly could, if described sympathetically. (As in Iain Banks’s Culture novels.) But while Shakespeare may be superior to feelies, is reading Shakespeare enough to create meaning? What if you face no challenges other than the self-imposed make-work of staging amateur plays, etc.?

That, I think, is the real concern which the logic of Brave New World ought to point to. So far, all human striving has been aimed at closing the gap between what we desire and what is. What if that loop gets completely closed, reduced to a single point of desires being instantly satisfied? Is that some sort of techno-Buddhist nirvana or what? Isn’t it the logical endpoint of Progress? By making the desires which are being satisfied seem so grubby, Huxley avoids the real problem presented by the technology of BNW, which is the full satisfaction of all desires, not just the full satisfaction of lame, low status desires. Limiting his world like that is loading the dice. It’s like taking an imaginary future and making all the people living in it really ugly just so that the audience knows to hate it.