Brave New World: How Goodly and Beauteous We Are

All stories are about us, who we are and who we are not. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s message is that if we stopped to consider our lives and our civilization, we would hang ourselves now in shame and sorrow. 

Harry Lloyd as Bernard Marx and 
Jessica Brown Findlay as Lenina Crowne
In the book, Lenina appears once in a sailor suit
with bellbottoms and a cap, in mulberry for Betas.

This is who we were 1932 and who we were becoming. Collectivism was the norm; individualism was dead. Mustapha, Benito, Trotsky, and Hoover were to be the names of the future, the creators of central control and coordination, social stability and individual happiness. Henry Ford was the most successful of the planners. Ford enterprises were vertically integrated. Ford even built communities in the wilderness of Northern Michigan to mill lumber for the floorboards of the automobiles streaming from  his factories for everyone to enjoy. Seeing sawdust piled up, Ford ordered it pressed into bricks for fuel: Kingsford Charcoal. Ours is the year 642 AF and we are Fanny Crowne and Lenina Crowne no less than we are Bernard Marx and John Savage.

World Cup Soccer and Formula 1 

and every person carrying a gaming machine — 

“Real happiness looks squalid 

compared to the overcompensations for misery.” 

(page 221 Harper Collins edition 2017.)

Compelling though Huxley’s warning be, close reading reveals a lack of rigor. Despite the deification of Henry Ford, automation has stopped. Elevators have human operators. Farms with animals produce internal and external secretion even though fetuses are grown with blood surrogate. There is no attempt at colonizing the Antarctic or the seabeds or space exploration or a Lunar colony, even though such efforts would consume resources, which is the prime mover of that society. 

At Eton, an Alpha-double-plus learns Relativity. What is the motivation to learn a theory that was only good for astrophysics? 

Within the castes, individuals are further differentiated: Beta Plus and Alpha Minus, etc.. But they all dress alike and treat each equally according to that caste system. There seems to be no social advantage or deprivation for plusness and minusness. 

Reflecting Huxley’s society and his view of it, Alphas are males and Betas are females. And contrary to one of the basic lessons of hypnopaedia, they mingle. More aligned to the premise of social organization, we never see Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons associating outside of their castes.

Huxley asserts a basic human need for religion. Civilized people have the Solidarity Service and the Arch Community Songster of Canterbury and savages have ceremonies with Jesus and Pookong. Huxley is direct: “It reminds me of a lower-caste Community Sing,” she told Bernard. 

After 600 years of genetic and social conditioning of what use is a Ford Chief Justice? How deep is crime beyond what we saw with Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, settled as Marx says like a coffee klatch? Why is there a Young Women’s Fordian Association, in a society where all women are young? 

A society created for consumption and production must have an accounting system but Huxley delivered almost nothing about economics. There is one reference to the Bank of Europe. Bernard Marx worries that the open tap of eau de cologne will “cost me a fortune.” Marx is given six packets of sex hormone chewing gum as a noticeable politeness. John Savage pays a helicopter pilot but how much and with what the author does not say.  

In the brave new world 70% of females are fertile in order that there be a steady supply of different eggs for the factories that breed humans. We never see their eggs harvested. And how many different males would actually be needed? 

Leonard Nimoy
as Mustapha Mond (1998)

That a society entirely of Alphas would be unstable is an English point of view, an excuse for a class-based society rather than a meritocracy. It could be argued that 600 years after Ford, a totally automated world would be nicely enjoyed by all one million of Alphas. And they could apply Relativity to the problem of space travel. 

I found imperfections in the writing that an editor should have caught. Explaining that the horridly aged Linda was revulsive to all, Huxley says that she “cut no ice” an anachronistic phrase even in 1932. Viewing the native village, they observe “… smoke rising perpendicularly…” How else could it? Did he mean that it was undisturbed by wind? The reservation landscape presents “table topped mesas.” They are called that because “mesa” means “table” in Spanish. 

The characterization of Bernard Marx is the deepest. Marx is actually troubled, which no one else is, except John, of course, and as the theme of the book repeats for our conditioning: automatic happiness is the sine qua non of civilization. 

“… in spite of the fact that his friend's support and sympathy were now his only comfort, Bernard continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite genuine affection, a secret grievance against the Savage, to mediate a campaign of small revenges to be wreaked upon him. …One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Universal Television NBC 1980
Alphas wear gray, Betas mulberry, Gammas green
Deltas khaki, and Epsilons black, and styles are
fashionable not stark. Also, to the point here: 
no Alpha females, apparently.

“… Bernard's other victim-friend was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and asked once more for the friendship which, in his prosperity, he had not thought it worth his while to preserve. Helmholtz gave it; and gave it without a reproach, without a comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same time humiliated by this magnanimity–a magnanimity the more extraordinary and therefore the more humiliating in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to Helmholtz's character. It was the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday.”

Huxley admits to individual differences of character among a population that has been carefully conditioned by heredity and environment to be homogenous. That, like religion, may be a fundamental fact of humanity which Huxley announces but does not explore.

"In his apologia for chemistry, The Same and Not the Same, (Columbia University Press, 1995) Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann asserts that no two hemoglobin molecules are identical. So-called “identical twins” are not. Individualism is objectively real: both empirically knowable and rationally explainable.” Biohackers on NecessaryFacts https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2012/10/biohackers.html

The book has been adapted to screen with. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World_(1980_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World_(1998_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World_(American_TV_series)

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

When Worlds Collide 

This Island Earth 

Recent Science Fiction Reads (14 July 2024) 

Recent Science Fiction Reads (24 July 2024) 

Frankenstein, Rayguns, and Bicycles 

This Island Earth

Although some scholars find the roots of science fiction in ancient myths and fantastic poems such as A True Story by Lucian of Samosata, the fact is that science fiction depends on science which did not exist before the Enlightenment of the 18th century. The word “scientist” was invented by William Whewell in a moment of argument with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science on 24 June 1833. Coleridge insisted that these people did not deserve the title “natural philosophers” and Whewell replied with a parallel to art and artists: “We are scientists.” The first issue of Scientific American was published on 28 August 1845.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often cited but her own three versions tell only of Victor Frankenstein's explorations of medieval paradigms and the narrator is emphatic in not revealing his methods, lest they be duplicated with inevitably horrible consequences. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg insisted in To Understand the World, that science depends on experiments which are purposefully unnatural arrangements to isolate the essential distinguishing actions of objects. Considering that thesis, we must grant that Victor Frankenstein pursued science, not mysticism. 

Jules Verne and H. G. Wells are commonly credited as the first narrators of adventures based on new scientific theories and their applications. Prior to them, John Leonard Riddell, chief melter at the New Orleans Mint, and a professor of chemistry at the New Orleans Medical College (which became Tulane University), published Orrin Lindsey's Plan of Aerial Navigation in 1847. Presaging the “golden age” of science fiction before the 1960s, the trip to the Moon is supported by laborious footnotes providing calculations, even for recycling breathable air by the same chemical methods used today. Riddell’s explanation of anti-gravity drive is necessarily sketchy though no more so than our faster-than-light warp drives. At a lecture at Michigan State University about 1976 or so, Gene Roddenberry said that when they need gravity on board a starship, they flip the gravity switch to On. 

In the book and movie, The Right Stuff, a news reporter first asks, “Do you know what makes these birds fly?” and an Air Force pilot starts to say, “Why the aerodynamics alone would take…” and he is cut off. “Funding,” is the reply. “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” Every pilot at Pancho’s cantina knew exactly what was said. Later, the line is repeated by an astronaut arguing with a NASA administrator: “… and to the American people, we’re Buck Rogers.” 

This Island Earth is a 1955 American science fiction film 

produced by William Alland, directed by Joseph M. Newman 

and Jack Arnold, and starring Jeff Morrow, Faith Domergue, and Rex Reason.

The 1952 novel by [Raymond F.] Jones was originally serialized 

in the science fiction magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories as three 

related novelettes: "The Alien Machine" (June 1949), 

"The Shroud of Secrecy" (December 1949), and "The Greater Conflict"

(February 1950). Jones had taken the novel title from a line
in Robert Graves' poem "Darien":

It is a poet's privilege and fate
To fall enamoured of the one Muse
Who variously haunts this island earth

-Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Island_Earth

This Island Earth (NASA)
one of hundreds of science and
engineering titles de-acquisitioned by
the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

"This Island Earth. Edited by Oran W. Nicks. NASA SP-250. Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Division, Office of Technology Utilization, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1970. x+182 pages. For sale by Superintendent of Documents, $6.00 (Library of Congress Catalog Card no. 73-608969).  Reviewed by Julian R. Goldsmith, University of Chicago, The Journal of Geology, Volume 80 Number 3, May 1972. Also reviewed in Science News, Vol.117, P. 348, 1980, among other citations.

Previously on Necessary Facts

From Texas to the Moon with John Leonard Riddell 

Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with Science Fiction 

Monsters from the Id 

Psychohistory from Asimov’s Foundation to Big Data 

Answering G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) loved to debate. Among his interlocutors at public forums were George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, and H. G. Wells; he also enjoyed engaging over ideas as a recreational virtue. He wrote 80 books and 4000 newspaper columns. Today, he is best known for the Father Brown mysteries that stream on BritBox. (Originally, the books presented 51 stories in five volumes over three decades.) Chesterton supported liberal and even progressive social reforms but as a convert from Unitarianism to Anglicanism and finally Roman Catholicism, he was essentially conservative. Therefore, Chesterton condemned science fiction as “fear of the past.”

Chesterton writing from www.chesterton.org

To me, his literary style was “confectionary.” He wrote for people who have time to enjoy reading, for whom being in your own living room in an overstuffed chair with a book or newspaper is relaxing and refreshing because it is intellectually stimulating. So, he takes a long time to make a point. There are no punchy aphorisms here.

Gilbert Keith and Frances Blogg Chesterton
from www.chesterton.org

“The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen--.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen--.” The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.

[…]

Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”

(“Fear of the Past” in What’s Wrong With the World, 1910. (Scanned and archived by Project Gutenberg and also Wikisource).

In those days of cold type before photo-offset, books were reset by hand.
I found a discrepancy between two printings: in this essay
the word "brave" (Cassell, London) appearing as "braver" (Dodd Mead, New York).

"The charge of the Crusades was a charge; 

it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver."

Since my first professional sale in 1973, I have written three stories, two science fiction, one horror. Fiction is hard to write because you have to create people, and their actions must make sense because their universe is understandable. It is much easier to report on what I find: pet groomers, political lobbyists, computers, restaurants, stars, coins, robots, airplanes. I take the people as I find them and usually publicize the best side of them. I also read science fiction and participate in the culture of it through ArmadilloCon here in Austin. 

Before I could read, I watched Captain Midnight on television. The first science fiction book I read was The Magic Ball From Mars by Carl L. Biemiller (Curtis Publishing, 1953; website here: https://biemiller.com/bchapt1.htm.) I was nine. As wonderful as it was in two books to meet a boy from outer space, those were stories no different than Paul Bunyon and Davy Crockett. What changed was my library card. Entering the 9th grade, I traded my juvenile card for an adult card. After a few fruitless visits to the adult stacks and a last brief walk along the juvenile stacks, I asked the librarian for help. She gave me two books in one: When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. 

I knew end-of-the-world stories as matinee movies about World War III and I knew The Day the Earth Stood Still. But this was different. I could see myself in the story. If we are going to another planet with the smartest people around, I knew some girls I would like to have gone with, especially once we arrive on Bronson Beta. This was a planet with an indoor pool!  (It also had troublesome commies and fascists.) (Book and movie reviewed here: https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2021/01/when-worlds-collide.html)

Closer to this decade, I read and enjoyed The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice. They are also invented worlds where the reader can find a place. Fitzgerald and Austen are compelling. But their worlds are static, not merely unchanged but unchangeable. Elizabeth Bennett does not perceive the canals and steam engines that are reshaping her world.

Gatsby is close to science fiction but unintentionally so. The plot hinges on an automobile accident. A generation earlier it could have been a horse-drawn carriage or any other happenstance for which people refuse to accept responsibility. But it was not. It was a new invention that they could not control. 

by Alexandra Samuel, Ph. D. on JSTOR Daily February 19, 2019
https://daily.jstor.org/can-science-fiction-predict-the-future-of-technology/

Chesterton’s complaint is valid when people are taken out of their social context. He is concerned with eternal moral problems. Those never change. But the external world and our society within it all do change, especially now. And we believe that we have some control over those changes. 

Our choices are greatly consequential. Ivanhoe could help King Richard but he could do nothing about feudalism, even though Walter Scott (1771-1834) lived in a time of rapid and powerful changes. 

The Thomas Theorem of sociology says, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Science fiction gives reality to unreal situations: colonies in space; plastic-eating bacteria; computer programs you can live inside of; artificial super humans with a four-year lifespan.“I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Like rockets into outer space, robots, and cloning, plastic-eating bacteria are now real. It is not that science fiction predicted those and multiverses more but that it allows us to model them, test them, plan our responses to them, and prepare for the changes we cannot predict and do not expect. 

For Chesterton, the most important problems were moral, and so they remain for us. 

Science fiction is not a set of engineering drawings—though you can buy the plans to the starship Enterprise—it is about the moral problems that people will solve in new  circumstances. That is the "science" in the fiction as defined by Steven Weinberg who identified the experiment as an unnatural arrangement designed to test a hypothesis. 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Anthropocene: A Bad Name for a Good Thing

Coins and Stamps

Females and Women

Psychohistory from Asimov's Foundation to Big Data

MERRY NEWTONMAS 2025

Sir Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642. Following the Gregorian calendar, Newtonmas would be on January 4. One advantage to keeping the traditional date is that this coincides the year of Galileo's with the year of Newton's birth. Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, many of my friends were Ukrainians and others whose churches kept the old Julian calendar, giving some of the kids two dates for presents. (It also explains Tom Clancy’s Red October, even though the Bolshevik phase of the 1917 Revolution began on November 7.)

THE LEGEND OF THE MARTIANS 

György Marx (Eötvös University Department of Atomic Physics)

There is a rumor in America that there are two intelligent races on Earth: humans and Hungarians. (Isaac Asimov)

The story is here from Page 116 forward.
Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1994, 1997, 2001

- Enrico Fermi was an outstanding talent who was interested in many things besides nuclear physics. He was also known for asking famous questions. Fermi questions have a long introductory text, for example: - "The Universe is vast, with billions of stars, many of them similar to our Sun. Planets may also orbit many stars. A significant proportion of these planets may have liquid water and a gaseous atmosphere on their surfaces. The light from the star may have triggered the synthesis of organic compounds on them, turning the ocean into a thin, warm soup. The carbon compounds linked together to create self-reproducing structures. The simplest living things reproduce, develop through natural selection, become increasingly complex, and eventually develop into active thinking beings. Civilization, science, and technology develop. Longing for new and fresh worlds, they travel to neighboring planets, later to planets of nearby stars, and thus spread throughout the Galaxy. Such highly developed, talented peoples can hardly ignore this beautiful planet, Earth. - And then Fermi he came to his essential question:  - If all this is true, then where are they?

Szilárd Leó had a good sense of humor, and he answered Fermi's rhetoric this way:

- They are here among us, but they call themselves Hungarians.

Online in Hungarian at the HUNGARIAN ELECTRONIC LIBRARY / MAGYAR ELEKTRONIKUS KÖNYVTÁR

https://mek.oszk.hu/03200/03286/html/tudos1/marsl.html 

I cut and pasted it into Google Translate to provide the text above. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Still Riding the Gray Planet 

Star Trek Discovery and the Conflict of Values 

Monsters from the Id

A Numismatic History of Hungary