Brave New World: A Dystopian Vision of Society and Technology, Study notes of Voice

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BRAVE NEW WORLD

by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Chapter One

A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main en-

trance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDEN- TITY, STABILITY. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose- flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porce- lain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse- coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables. "And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room." Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the

fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduc- tion–"the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months' salary"; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consid- eration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liq- uor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa–at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents re-examined; how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas re- mained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bo- kanovsky's Process. "Bokanovsky's Process," repeated the Director, and the students un- derlined the words in their little notebooks. One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress. "Essentially," the D.H.C. concluded, "bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding." Responds by budding. The pencils were busy. He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box, another, rack-full was emerging. Machinery faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he

told them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few died; of the rest, the least susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to the incubators, where the buds began to develop; then, after two days, were suddenly chilled, chilled and checked. Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol; consequently burgeoned again and having budded–bud out of bud out of bud–were thereafter–further arrest being generally fatal–left to develop in peace. By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos– a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins–but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time. "Scores," the Director repeated and flung out his arms, as though he were distributing largesse. "Scores." But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay. "My good boy!" The Director wheeled sharply round on him. "Can't you see? Can't you see?" He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. "Bokanovsky's Process is one of the major instruments of social stabil- ity!" Major instruments of social stability. Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg. "Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!" The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. "You really know where you are. For the first time in history." He quoted the planetary motto. "Community, Identity, Stability." Grand words. "If we could bo- kanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved." Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Mil- lions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.

months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, ei- ther decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We'll beat them yet." "That's the spirit I like!" cried the Director, and clapped Mr. Foster on the shoulder. "Come along with us, and give these boys the benefit of your expert knowledge." Mr. Foster smiled modestly. "With pleasure." They went. In the Bottling Room all was harmonious bustle and ordered activity. Flaps of fresh sow's peritoneum ready cut to the proper size came shooting up in little lifts from the Organ Store in the sub-basement. Whizz and then, click! the lift-hatches hew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take the flap, insert, smooth-down, and be- fore the lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the end- less band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum had shot up from the depths, ready to be slipped into yet another bottle, the next of that slow interminable procession on the band. Next to the Liners stood the Matriculators. The procession advanced; one by one the eggs were transferred from their test-tubes to the larger containers; deftly the peritoneal lining was slit, the morula dropped into place, the saline solution poured in … and already the bottle had passed, and it was the turn of the labellers. Heredity, date of fertilization, membership of Bokanovsky Group–details were trans- ferred from test-tube to bottle. No longer anonymous, but named, identified, the procession marched slowly on; on through an opening in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room. "Eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index," said Mr. Foster with relish, as they entered. "Containing all the relevant information," added the Director. "Brought up to date every morning." "And co-ordinated every afternoon." "On the basis of which they make their calculations." "So many individuals, of such and such quality," said Mr. Foster. "Distributed in such and such quantities." "The optimum Decanting Rate at any given moment." "Unforeseen wastages promptly made good." "Promptly," repeated Mr. Foster. "If you knew the amount of overtime I had to put in after the last Japanese earthquake!" He laughed good- humouredly and shook his head. "The Predestinators send in their figures to the Fertilizers." "Who give them the embryos they ask for."

"And the bottles come in here to be predestined in detail." "After which they are sent down to the Embryo Store." "Where we now proceed ourselves." And opening a door Mr. Foster led the way down a staircase into the basement. The temperature was still tropical. They descended into a thickening twilight. Two doors and a passage with a double turn insured the cellar against any possible infiltration of the day. "Embryos are like photograph film," said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. "They can only stand red light." And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer's afternoon. The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus. The hum and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air. "Give them a few figures, Mr. Foster," said the Director, who was tired of talking. Mr. Foster was only too happy to give them a few figures. Two hundred and twenty metres long, two hundred wide, ten high. He pointed upwards. Like chickens drinking, the students lifted their eyes towards the distant ceiling. Three tiers of racks: ground floor level, first gallery, second gallery. The spidery steel-work of gallery above gallery faded away in all direc- tions into the dark. Near them three red ghosts were busily unloading demijohns from a moving staircase. The escalator from the Social Predestination Room. Each bottle could be placed on one of fifteen racks, each rack, though you couldn't see it, was a conveyor traveling at the rate of thirty-three and a third centimetres an hour. Two hundred and sixty-seven days at eight metres a day. Two thousand one hundred and thirty-six metres in all. One circuit of the cellar at ground level, one on the first gallery, half on the second, and on the two hundred and sixty-seventh morn- ing, daylight in the Decanting Room. Independent existence–so called. "But in the interval," Mr. Foster concluded, "we've managed to do a lot to them. Oh, a very great deal." His laugh was knowing and trium- phant. "That's the spirit I like," said the Director once more. "Let's walk around. You tell them everything, Mr. Foster."

ture …" He was going to say "future World controllers," but correcting himself, said "future Directors of Hatcheries," instead. The D.H.C. acknowledged the compliment with a smile. They were passing Metre 320 on Rack 11. A young Beta-Minus me- chanic was busy with screw-driver and spanner on the blood-surrogate pump of a passing bottle. The hum of the electric motor deepened by fractions of a tone as he turned the nuts. Down, down … A final twist, a glance at the revolution counter, and he was done. He moved two paces down the line and began the same process on the next pump. "Reducing the number of revolutions per minute," Mr. Foster explained. "The surrogate goes round slower; therefore passes through the lung at longer intervals; therefore gives the embryo less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par." Again he rubbed his hands. "But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?" asked an in- genuous student. "Ass!" said the Director, breaking a long silence. "Hasn't it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?" It evidently hadn't occurred to him. He was covered with confusion. "The lower the caste," said Mr. Foster, "the shorter the oxygen." The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eye- less monsters. "Who are no use at all," concluded Mr. Foster. Whereas (his voice became confidential and eager), if they could dis- cover a technique for shortening the period of maturation what a tri- umph, what a benefaction to Society! "Consider the horse." They considered it. Mature at six; the elephant at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually mature; and is only full-grown at twenty. Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed development, the human intelligence. "But in Epsilons," said Mr. Foster very justly, "we don't need human in- telligence." Didn't need and didn't get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow's, what an enormous saving to the Community!

"Enormous!" murmured the students. Mr. Foster's enthusiasm was in- fectious. He became rather technical; spoke of the abnormal endocrine co- ordination which made men grow so slowly; postulated a germinal mu- tation to account for it. Could the effects of this germinal mutation be undone? Could the individual Epsilon embryo be made a revert, by a suitable technique, to the normality of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it was all but solved. Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; ei- ther you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head. Their wanderings through the crimson twilight had brought them to the neighborhood of Metre 170 on Rack 9. From this point onwards Rack 9 was enclosed and the bottle performed the remainder of their journey in a kind of tunnel, interrupted here and there by openings two or three metres wide. "Heat conditioning," said Mr. Foster. Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to dis- comfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miner and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. "We condition them to thrive on heat," concluded Mr. Foster. "Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it." "And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of hap- piness and virtue–liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny." In a gap between two tunnels, a nurse was delicately probing with a long fine syringe into the gelatinous contents of a passing bottle. The students and their guides stood watching her for a few moments in si- lence. "Well, Lenina," said Mr. Foster, when at last she withdrew the syringe and straightened herself up. The girl turned with a start. One could see that, for all the lupus and the purple eyes, she was uncommonly pretty.

Chapter Two

MR. FOSTER was left in the Decanting Room. The D.H.C. and his stu-

dents stepped into the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor. INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS, an- nounced the notice board. The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny; for the whole of the southern wall was a single win- dow. Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Big bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble. The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. came in. "Set out the books," he said curtly.

In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out–a row of nursery quartos opened invit- ingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird. "Now bring in the children." They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in khaki. "Put them down on the floor." The infants were unloaded. "Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books." Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of a momen- tary eclipse behind a cloud. The roses flamed up as though with a sud- den passion from within; a new and profound significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books. From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure. The Director rubbed his hands. "Excellent!" he said. "It might almost have been done on purpose." The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The Director waited until all were happily busy. Then, "Watch carefully," he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal. The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever. There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.

One of the students held up his hand; and though he could see quite well why you couldn't have lower-cast people wasting the Community's time over books, and that there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes, yet … well, he couldn't understand about the flowers. Why go to the trouble of making it psychologically impossible for Deltas to like flow- ers? Patiently the D.H.C. explained. If the children were made to scream at the sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic policy. Not so very long ago (a century or thereabouts), Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers–flowers in particular and wild nature in general. The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every available opportunity, and so compel them to consume transport. "And didn't they consume transport?" asked the student. "Quite a lot," the D.H.C. replied. "But nothing else." Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to find an eco- nomically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affec- tion for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found. "We condition the masses to hate the country," concluded the Director. "But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport. Hence those electric shocks." "I see," said the student, and was silent, lost in admiration. There was a silence; then, clearing his throat, "Once upon a time," the Director began, "while our Ford was still on earth, there was a little boy called Reuben Rabinovitch. Reuben was the child of Polish- speaking parents."

The Director interrupted himself. "You know what Polish is, I suppose?" "A dead language." "Like French and German," added another student, officiously showing off his learning. "And 'parent'?" questioned the D.H.C. There was an uneasy silence. Several of the boys blushed. They had not yet learned to draw the significant but often very fine distinction between smut and pure science. One, at last, had the courage to raise a hand. "Human beings used to be …" he hesitated; the blood rushed to his cheeks. "Well, they used to be viviparous." "Quite right." The Director nodded approvingly. "And when the babies were decanted …" "'Born,'" came the correction. "Well, then they were the parents–I mean, not the babies, of course; the other ones." The poor boy was overwhelmed with confusion. "In brief," the Director summed up, "the parents were the father and the mother." The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys' eye-avoiding silence. "Mother," he repeated loudly rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, "These," he said gravely, "are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleas- ant." He returned to Little Reuben–to Little Reuben, in whose room, one evening, by an oversight, his father and mother (crash, crash!) hap- pened to leave the radio turned on. ("For you must remember that in those days of gross viviparous re- production, children were always brought up by their parents and not in State Conditioning Centres.")

At breakfast the next morning, "Tommy," some one says, "do you know which is the longest river in Africa?" A shaking of the head. "But don't you remember something that begins: The Nile is the …" "The - Nile - is - the - longest - river - in - Africa - and - the - second - in - length - of - all - the - rivers - of - the - globe …" The words come rushing out. "Although - falling - short - of …" "Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?" The eyes are blank. "I don't know." "But the Nile, Tommy." "The - Nile - is - the - longest - river - in - Africa - and - second …" "Then which river is the longest, Tommy?" Tommy burst into tears. "I don't know," he howls.) That howl, the Director made it plain, discouraged the earliest investi- gators. The experiments were abandoned. No further attempt was made to teach children the length of the Nile in their sleep. Quite rightly. You can't learn a science unless you know what it's all about. "Whereas, if they'd only started on moral education," said the Director, leading the way towards the door. The students followed him, desper- ately scribbling as they walked and all the way up in the lift. "Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational." "Silence, silence," whispered a loud speaker as they stepped out at the fourteenth floor, and "Silence, silence," the trumpet mouths indefati- gably repeated at intervals down every corridor. The students and even the Director himself rose automatically to the tips of their toes. They were Alphas, of course, but even Alphas have been well condi- tioned. "Silence, silence." All the air of the fourteenth floor was sibilant with the categorical imperative. Fifty yards of tiptoeing brought them to a door which the Director cau- tiously opened. They stepped over the threshold into the twilight of a shuttered dormitory. Eighty cots stood in a row against the wall. There

was a sound of light regular breathing and a continuous murmur, as of very faint voices remotely whispering. A nurse rose as they entered and came to attention before the Direc- tor. "What's the lesson this afternoon?" he asked. "We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes," she answered. "But now it's switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness." The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and re- laxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively. "Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let's have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet." At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Di- rector walked up to it and pressed a switch. "… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta." There was a pause; then the voice began again. "Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, be- cause they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta chil- dren. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …" The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows. "They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty