Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Joe writes: 
I am reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.  I finished the book when I had a lot of time to read over Christmas break (23 hour drives force one to do something, which for me meant finishing the book) but I have to write something, so I will just say for the sake of this assignment that I read to about page 170 or so, right after Bernard has visited the savage village. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
            Brave New World is a strange, dystopian book set about 500 years in the future.  Babies are born from a bottle, or “decanted”, and men take home different girls pretty much every night (need I say more) and the idea of “family” is considered so weird as to cause revulsion.  There are five different social classes, with plusses and minuses for each.  There are Alphas and Betas, the upper castes (Alphas are the highest) and Deltas and Gammas, and the lowest of them all, Epsilons.  Babies are born in sets of hundreds of twins so as to provide laborers for each different social level.  For example, a set of Epsilon twins would be conditioned (as in have specific chemicals put in their bottle as they develop) to be miners.  There is no individuality.  People are part of that great sweeping mass of society.  As infants and toddlers, people are sleep-taught (had lessons repeated over and over to them when they are asleep; like hypnosis, these mantras become rules to live) so as to keep societies well-behaved.  There are no books; there is no Shakespeare, as the novel takes special care to point out.  For entertainment, people go to “feelies”, which are movies in which people experience what happens to the characters.  If people get tired of life in that society, they can take “soma holidays” – soma is an LSD-like drug that induces hallucinations – it is perfectly safe and allows people to take a rest from the regular realities of real life.  It seems to us a pale, sanitized version of real life, but the people in the book are quite happy with the current situation, except for a few people who are somewhat outcast for the society, Alpha Pluses of higher than normal intellectual ability.  These are Bernard Marx and Heimholtz Watson and they are very important to the book.
            As the novel starts out, a group of students is being taken around the “CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERYAND CONDITIONING CENTER” and get to see the process of how babies develop in the bottle.  They are directed by the director of hatcheries, and get to hear the World Controller for that sector of the world.  After that, we zoom in on two women, Fanny and Lenina Crowne, who are discussing which men they will “have” that night.  We are also introduced to Bernard Marx, an Alpha Plus who somehow came out slightly different than other Alpha Pluses – there are rumors that alcohol was put in his bottle by accident.  We are also introduced to some of the other characters at the Hatcheries.  We see that Bernard is an awkward, slightly out of place in his surroundings man who is uncomfortable with many of society’s preeminent ideas, such as a lack of individuality and promiscuity.  He has a slightly more confident friend Heimholtz Watson, who is also unsure of society but has the advantage of feeling superior to his peers, unlike Bernard who has the opposite feeling.  They commiserate about their insecurities about society and their empty feeling of meaninglessness about life in general.  Finally, Bernard Marx decides to go to the savage reservation in New Mexico.
            There are parts of the world that the post-Ford world considers not worth civilizing and are left alone and become savage reservations.  Bernard takes Lenina to visit one on a date and Bernard meets a savage whose mother had accidentally given birth to him while she visited the reservation.  The savage tells Bernard his life story:  a mishmash of experiences from growing up with a mother who was considered somewhat of a prostitute and he was bullied for it; how his mother, Linda, from the civilized world, would drink alcohol and get drunk to try to mimic the effects of soma; a mismatch of occult paganism – traditional Native American religion – with Christianity; of living a life much like Native Americans.  Bernard agrees to take Bernard back to London with him, and show him the “Brave New World”, along with taking Linda back to the civilization she misses, and he will try to use them in a plot to discredit the director of hatcheries, who is threatening to move Bernard to Iceland.
            So far Brave New World is good if somewhat disquieting.  It makes one think about what makes our world society better than the one in the book and helps remind one what they stand for.