Still hailed as a particularly timely word for our time, discovering that Aldous Huxley’s famous novel Admirable New World turns 85 this year [1] is something that may surprise. As a work of futuristic fiction, he has sparked many dialogues about the values and ideologies explored in his imaginary world.
This year’s anniversary gives us a good excuse to revisit huxley’s classic and reflect on its relevance in the contemporary world.
New world order
A happy world finds its narrative premise and the object of its critique in Huxley’s growing fordist ideology, projected towards a disturbing dystopian future. In the state of the world of Huxley, Henry Ford is revered as an almost mythical mesianic figure. based on its dating system (the events of the book take place in 632 AD. after Ford), and his name, the founder of the new world, is now used where God’s name once was. consumption of disposable products (“Better to finish than repair” [2]), as well as predictability and uniformity values, are fundamental principles of the world order.
Human beings the very being has become the object of global state hyperfordism; in a vast eugenic project, people are masses produced through reproductive technologies and conditioned to be docile participants and useful to society, fully involved in the production and consumption that constitute its core. five different castes or models of humanity, each carefully planned and conditioned to serve a particular social purpose. Is individuality and exclusivity of the family or monogamous love repelled as an obstacle to homogeneity and social conformity?”They’re all everyone’s. “
While children are modeled through uniform online production processes, sexual reproduction, monogamy and the notion of mother and father, all of this has been seen with disgust. Citizens are encouraged to engage in sterile promiscuous sexual intercourse, to make them complacent with submission and to prevent the appearance of particular affections. As Huxley points out in his introduction, “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends to increase in compensation. “Individuality and privacy are treated with suspicion.
The infantilization of the population is a policy of government. It suppresses and prevents the aging of the body and the maturation of character and spirit, maintaining the skills and predilections of the citizens of the world state in a permanent adolescence condition A homogeneous culture of mass spectacle fosters social cohesion and immobility. Feeling sensitive? (a sensually enhanced form of cinematic entertainment) popular sports encourage people to be children’s toys of their impulses and desires, unable to delay gratification, develop convictions, feel intensely or devote themselves entirely to any cause. Spirits saturated with sensation and pleasure, mainly through the wonder of the hallucinogenic drug?Soma?? are immune to reasoning, reflection and non-compliance.
The book’s title is an ironic allusion to a verse from Shakespeare’s tempest. Despite its apparent convenience, technocratic society that spoils the pleasure of the world state suffocates all the passions, goals, ideals and values of Shakespeare’s high-character writing. Easy sex stifies romance. Conditioning and efficiency?Pharmaceuticalally guaranteed replacement, self-denial and character training Comfort, pleasure and lack of tireless struggle make nobility and heroism useless. Poetry, sacrifice, meaning and God Himself have no place in this world.
Unimaginable reality
Reading A Happy World can be a special experience, as the reader is impressed by elements of fun curiosity and scary news. Although the work has survived surprisingly well over time, considering it a future fiction, it is nevertheless a product of its time. Despite Huxley’s premonition and intuition, his vision was largely a projection and escalation based on emerging dynamics from his era of mass production, consumption and society.
These dynamics have been overcome, or at least considerably hampered by many subsequent developments. In a postfordist economy and in the digital age of custom devices, mass society is not as crystal clear as it used to seem. Far from being perceived as a threat, for example, individuality is now deeply assimilated to our economic system, as we are encouraged to differentiate ourselves, identify ourselves and alienate ourselves through the forms of consumption we choose. The fact that we are all wrapped in the same system is less evident when we use all the custom wives we choose for ourselves.
In fact, from our privileged contemporary position, a number of elements, according to Huxley, seem too conservative. Writing before the advent of modern genetics, Huxley would hardly have imagined genetic engineering applied directly to humans as it appears on our horizon today. , nor the degree of domination over our nature offered by science. Doesn’t he even seem to have anticipated the form of sexuality of our time?All promiscuous sex in A Happy World is heterosexual. Moreover, if it exists within a global state, England, which serves as a framework for the Huxleyen narrative, seems surprisingly provincial in some respects: radical globalization has apparently had limited effects.
An impressive detail in Huxley’s description is that while the state of the world is based on mass production, the automation process is suppressed, and humans perform tasks that could easily be assigned to machines or humans. algorithms (Huxley barely explores the possibility of smart machines). From a contemporary privileged position, it may require a significant suspension of disbelief to imagine that such an economy can be domesticated to serve a broader, if dystopian, social purpose. Could it be that Huxley feared a fordist ideology forged and imposed by “world controllers”?within a controlled economy?not an unreal fear at the time of the rise of communism and fascism; today it seems that we have many more reasons to fear our submission to the insatiable and autonomous logic of an unbridled capitalist system beyond human reach or control [5].
The global state is an intensely planned society, which can be presented directly in proposals and is composed of a unified human vision. Much of A Happy World consists of an explanatory dialogue, in which the human ideology underlying the global state is explicitly articulated. , the social developments that shape our world in a very powerful way no longer seem to be planned and certainly are not presented directly to us, but are these generally technological and social dynamics that we liberate, whose long-term objective is confusing and whose progressive effects on us, although vast globally and retrospectively, are perceived only at the time and in particular , when they are actually perceived. Although we may be subconsciously conditioned, the conditioner is more of a technology like the Internet than a human intelligence.
Dominated by desire
Today we must fear the uncontrollable and inexorable inhuman processes that we have unreleased, which develop in society with a demoralizing inevitability, our world is at the mercy of the Siamese forces of total capitalism and cutting-edge technology. the scope of the possible, stimulates the increasing levels of consumption and our unlimited capacity and encourages us to do so, overcoming all the barriers that may restrict them. He dominates them.
This is the key point at which the vision of A Happy World resounds. Huxley perceived, better than many, the degrading slavery in which we can be driven by our desire for pleasure. Neil Postman memorably contrasts Huxley’s work with George Orwell’s in 1984, noting that Huxley acknowledged that we can be destroyed and dominated more easily by our desires than by our fears. Anesthetized by pleasures, entertainment, trivialities, distractions, lusts and sensuality, we can get used to the constant erosion of our humanity.
In today’s world, like Slavoj? ME? Ek observed, we are subject to the soft totalitarianism that continually pushes us to “enjoy!” The market has surrounded us with products and advertisements that have been used as weapons to excite and mobilize our desire to consume and break whatever resistance we may offer. In our supersaturated and hyper-realistic world, are we exposed to a horde of artificially created stimuli that far outweigh anything we had previously encountered naturally? from chemically modified foods to beautiful game graphics, psychotropic drugs, vibrant images on our screens. , online pornography, carefully crafted tourist destinations, models created on magazine covers, and the sociability of a website like Facebook – all of this is calculated to excite our appetite, overcome our resistance, and lead us to abandonment. The wave of drunken pleasures? of capitalism remove all obstacles that are presented to it: censorship, legal restrictions, cultural taboos, social norms, religious virtues, control.
Edmund Burke argued that controls and restrictions on human appetite are essential to human freedom and one of our fundamental rights; without these controls, we are reduced to children trapped in pleasure, unable to govern ourselves. A tragic example is the immense damage caused by pornography. , its power to dominate people increased with new technologies and market strength, making it more attractive to consume and harder to oppose. of our own social obsession with these things – and our relatively topical consumption, as Christians, of pop culture – has been shown to be unprecedented and worthy of real alertness.
Dehumanized objects
Huxley also recognized the danger of human nature being subjected to the logic of production. Perhaps the most central reality of the world state is the substitution of technical production for sexual procreation: the human being stops procreation and begins to manufacture himself. , realizes how crucial this change is and draws attention to its various aspects in great detail: a purely contraceptive sexual culture and relative gender neutrality, the formation of children through processes similar to conveyor belts, the elimination of family and the limits of love. in which children are naturally welcomed Etc.
Once again, this aspect of Huxley’s work finds a disturbing echo in our contemporary world. Through things like abortion ideology, advances in reproductive techniques, and gender-neutral marriage standardization, children are increasingly subject to the logic of choice and construction. Human dignity itself based, in large part, on the fact that we are not manufactured, but procreated, conceived through an affective donation of bodies that precede and transcend the political, legal, economic and technological spheres of human activity. Neglect this truth, as ours tends to do, it risks changing its own understanding and approach to humanity itself.
Fighting for freedom
As 21st-century Christians, we face a growing and deeply hercúlea struggle for human nature and dignity. We must fight against the subjugation of humanity to the tyranny of pleasure, against the amniotic sensuality in which our culture encapsulates us, peeking into any reality that can elevate our nature by rising in duty, love or love. ‘Adoration, should we resist the fascination of mastering the technique over nature?an area that exposes us to dehumanization. And in order for us to do these things, we need to recognize and overcome the infidelity that exists in each of our hearts and that would bring us down from within. Faced with these accelerated developments, Huxley’s Happy World has never been more current, and the warning does not seem so urgent.
In the face of these things, we must reaffirm the importance of moral self-control, the relationship between man and woman and the gift of life that can result from their love, the moral limits that restrict the scope of the market and the development of technology, and the Lord. and Giver of life to whom we are all indebted. If we do not, we run the risk of subjecting ourselves to the most insidious slavery that ever existed.
[1] This text was written last year. [Translator’s Note. ]
[2] Huxley, Aldous. A new admirable world. Blue Library, 2014, Kindle Edition, 836, translation by Leonel Vallandro and Vidal Serrano.
[3] In addition, No. 711.
[4] Indem, position 190
[5] The author’s opinion on this subject does not represent EV’s position. [Translator’s Note].