1984 brave new world essay
His imagined London is merely a drabber, more joyless version of the city, still recovering from the Blitz, where he was living in the mids, just before beginning the novel. The main technological advancement there is the two-way telescreen, essentially an electronic peephole. Huxley, on the other hand, writing almost two decades earlier than Orwell his former Eton pupil, as it happened , foresaw a world that included space travel; private helicopters; genetically engineered test tube babies; enhanced birth control; an immensely popular drug that appears to combine the best features of Valium and Ecstasy; hormone-laced chewing gum that seems to work the way Viagra does; a full sensory entertainment system that outdoes IMAX; and maybe even breast implants. Huxley was not entirely serious about this.
A Comparison Of George Orwell's Social Control In 1984 And Aldous Huxley Brave New World
In the latter half of the 20th century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother and thoughtcrime and newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.
The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World , which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality, of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration, of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work, and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.
Which template would win, we wondered. During the cold war, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. But when the Berlin Wall fell in , pundits proclaimed the end of history, shopping reigned triumphant, and there was already lots of quasi-soma percolating through society. True, promiscuity had taken a hit from Aids, but on balance we seemed to be in for a trivial, giggly, drug-enhanced spend-o-rama: Brave New World was winning the race.
That picture changed, too, with the attack on New York's twin towers in Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all.
The Ministry of Love is back with us, it appears, though it's no longer limited to the lands behind the former iron curtain: the west has its own versions now. On the other hand, Brave New World hasn't gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the gene-rich and the gene-poor - Huxley's alphas and epsilons - and busily engaging in schemes for genetic enhancement and - to go one better than Brave New World - for immortality.
Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist at the same time, in the same place?
And what would that be like? Surely it's time to look again at Brave New World and to examine its arguments for and against the totally planned society it describes, in which "everybody is happy now". What sort of happiness is on offer, and what is the price we might pay to achieve it? I first read Brave New World in the early s, when I was It made a deep impression on me, though I didn't fully understand some of what I was reading.
It's a tribute to Huxley's writing skills that although I didn't know what knickers were, or camisoles - nor did I know that zippers, when they first appeared, had been denounced from pulpits as lures of the devil because they made clothes so easy to take off - I none the less had a vivid picture of "zippicamiknicks", that female undergarment with a single zipper down the front that could be shucked so easily: "Zip!
The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor.
I myself was living in the era of "elasticised panty girdles" that could not be got out of or indeed into without an epic struggle, so this was heady stuff indeed. The girl shedding the zippicamiknicks is Lenina Crowne, a blue-eyed beauty both strangely innocent and alluringly voluptuous - or "pneumatic", as her many male admirers call her.
Lenina doesn't see why she shouldn't have sex with anyone she likes whenever the occasion offers, as to do so is merely polite behaviour and not to do so is selfish. Never were two sets of desiring genitalia so thoroughly at odds. And thereon hangs Huxley's tale. Brave New World is either a perfect-world utopia or its nasty opposite, a dystopia, depending on your point of view: its inhabitants are beautiful, secure and free from diseases and worries, though in a way we like to think we would find unacceptable.
Sir Thomas More, in his own 16th-century Utopia, may have been punning: utopia is the good place that doesn't exist. As a literary construct, Brave New World thus has a long list of literary ancestors. Plato's Republic and the Bible's book of Revelations and the myth of Atlantis are the great-great-grandparents of the form; nearer in time are More's Utopia, and the land of the talking-horse, totally rational Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and HG Wells's The Time Machine, in which the brainless, pretty "upper classes" play in the sunshine during the day, and the ugly "lower classes" run the underground machinery and emerge at night to eat the social butterflies.
In the 19th century - when improvements in sewage systems, medicine, communication technologies and transportation were opening new doors - many earnest utopias were thrown up by the prevailing mood of optimism, with William Morris's News from Nowhere and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward foremost among them.
Insofar as they are critical of society as it presently exists, but nevertheless take a dim view of the prospects of the human race, utopias may verge on satire, as do Swift's and More's and Wells's; but insofar as they endorse the view that humanity is perfectible, or can at least be vastly improved, they will resemble idealising romances, as do Bellamy's and Morris's.
The first world war marked the end of the romantic-idealistic utopian dream in literature, just as several real-life utopian plans were about to be launched with disastrous effects.
The Communist regime in Russia and the Nazi takeover of Germany both began as utopian visions. But as had already been discovered in literary utopias, perfectibility breaks on the rock of dissent. What do you do with people who don't endorse your views or fit in with your plans? Nathaniel Hawthorne, a disillusioned graduate of the real-life Brooke Farm utopian scheme, pointed out that the Puritan founders of New England - who intended to build the New Jerusalem - began with a prison and a gibbet.
Forced re-education, exile and execution are the usual choices on offer in utopias for any who oppose the powers that be. Brave New World has its own gentler punishments: for non-conformists, it's exile to Iceland, where Man's Final End can be discussed among like-minded intellects, without pestering "normal" people - in a sort of university, as it were. Utopias and dystopias from Plato's Republic on have had to cover the same basic ground that real societies do.
All must answer the same questions: where do people live, what do they eat, what do they wear, what do they do about sex and child-rearing? Who has the power, who does the work, how do citizens relate to nature, and how does the economy function? Romantic utopias such as Morris's News from Nowhere and WH Hudson's A Crystal Age present a pre-Raphaelite picture, with the inhabitants going in for flowing robes, natural settings in abodes that sound like English country houses with extra stained glass and lots of arts and crafts.
Everything would be fine, we're told, if we could only do away with industrialism and get back in tune with nature, and deal with overpopulation. Hudson solves this last problem by simply eliminating sex, except for one unhappy couple per country house who are doomed to procreate. But when Huxley was writing Brave New World at the beginning of the s, he was, in his own words, an "amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete", a member of that group of bright young upstarts that swirled around the Bloomsbury Group and delighted in attacking anything Victorian or Edwardian.
So Brave New World tosses out the flowing robes, the crafts, and the tree-hugging. Its architecture is futuristic - electrically lighted towers and softly glowing pink glass - and everything in its cityscape is relentlessly unnatural and just as relentlessly industrialised.
Viscose and acetate and imitation leather are its fabrics of choice; apartment buildings, complete with artificial music and taps that flow with perfume, are its dwellings; transportation is by private helicopter. Babies are no longer born, they're grown in hatcheries, their bottles moving along assembly lines, in various types and batches according to the needs of "the hive", and fed on "external secretion" rather than "milk".
The word "mother" - so thoroughly worshipped by the Victorians - has become a shocking obscenity; and indiscriminate sex, which was a shocking obscenity for the Victorians, is now de rigueur. The strictest conventionality. Many of Brave New World's nervous jokes turn on these kinds of inversions - more startling to its first audience, perhaps, than to us, but still wry enough. Victorian thrift turns to the obligation to spend, Victorian till-death-do-us-part monogamy has been replaced with "everyone belongs to everyone else", Victorian religiosity has been channelled into the worship of an invented deity - "Our Ford", named after the American car-czar Henry Ford, god of the assembly line - via communal orgies.
Even the "Our Ford" chant of "orgy-porgy" is an inversion of the familiar nursery rhyme, in which kissing the girls makes them cry. Now, it's if you refuse to kiss them - as "the Savage" does - that the tears will flow.
Sex is often centre stage in utopias and dystopias - who can do what, with which set of genital organs, and with whom, being one of humanity's main preoccupations. Because sex and procreation have been separated and women no longer give birth - the very idea is yuck-making to them - sex has become a recreation.
Little naked children carry on "erotic play" in the shrubberies, so as to get a hand in early. Some women are sterile - "freemartins" - and perfectly nice girls, though a little whiskery.
The others practise "Malthusian drill" - a form of birth control - and take "pregnancy surrogate" hormone treatments if they feel broody, and sport sweet little faux-leather fashionista cartridge belts crammed with contraceptives. If they slip up on their Malthusian drill, there's always the lovely pink-glass Abortion Centre. Huxley wrote before the pill, but its advent brought his imagined sexual free-for-all a few steps closer. What about gays?
Does "everyone belongs to everyone else" really mean everyone? We aren't told. Huxley himself still had one foot in the 19th century: he could not have dreamed his upside-down morality unless he himself also found it threatening. At the time he was writing Brave New World he was still in shock from a visit to the United States, where he was particularly frightened by mass consumerism, its group mentality and its vulgarities.
I use the word "dreamed" advisedly, because Brave New World - gulped down whole - achieves an effect not unlike a controlled hallucination. All is surface; there is no depth. As you might expect from an author with impaired eyesight, the visual sense predominates: colours are intense, light and darkness vividly described.
Sound is next in importance, especially during group ceremonies and orgies, and the viewing of "feelies" - movies in which you feel the sensations of those onscreen, "The Gorillas' Wedding" and "Sperm Whale's Love-Life" being sample titles. Scents are third - perfume wafts everywhere, and is dabbed here and there; one of the most poignant encounters between John the Savage and the lovely Lenina is the one in which he buries his worshipping face in her divinely scented undergarments while she herself is innocently sleeping, zonked out on a strong dose of soma, partly because she can't stand the awful real-life smells of the "reservation" where the new world has not been implemented.
Many utopias and dystopias emphasise food delicious or awful; or, in the case of Swift's Houyhnhnms, oats , but in Brave New World the menus are not presented. Lenina and her lay-of-the-month, Henry, eat "an excellent meal", but we aren't told what it is. Beef would be my guess, in view of the huge barns full of cows that provide the external secretions. Despite the dollops of sex-on-demand, the bodies in Brave New World are oddly disembodied, which serves to underscore one of Huxley's points: in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.
Meaning has in fact been eliminated, as far as possible. All books except works of technology have been banned - cf Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit ; museum-goers have been slaughtered, cf Henry Ford's "History is bunk".
As for God, he is present "as an absence; as though he weren't there at all" - except, of course, for the deeply religious John the Savage, who has been raised on the Zuni "reservation", where archaic life carries on, replete with "meaning" of the most intense kinds. John is the only character in the book who has a real body, but he knows it through pain, not through pleasure. The "comfort" offered by Mustapha Mond - one of the 10 "controllers" of this world, direct descendants of Plato's guardians - is not enough for John.
He wants the old world back - dirt, diseases, free will, fear, anguish, blood, sweat, tears and all. He believes he has a soul, and like many an early 20th-century literary possessor of such a thing - think of the missionary in Somerset Maugham's story, Miss Thompson, who hangs himself after sinning with a prostitute - he is made to pay the price for this belief.
He does, in fact, provide a third sort of life - that of the intellectual community of misfits in Iceland - but poor John the Savage isn't allowed to go there, and he wouldn't have liked it anyway, as there are no public flagellations available. The Huxley of comes up with another sort of utopia, one in which "sanity" is possible.
By this, he means a kind of "high utilitarianism" dedicated to a "conscious and rational" pursuit of man's "final end", which is a kind of union with the immanent "Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahmin". No wonder Huxley subsequently got heavily into the mescaline and wrote The Doors of Perception, thus inspiring a generation of s dopeheads and pop musicians to seek God in altered brain chemistry. His interest in soma, it appears, didn't spring out of nowhere.
Meanwhile, those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, 75 years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers and programmed conformists that it presents? The answer to the first question, for me, is that it stands up very well.
It's still as vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it. The answer to the second question rests with you. Look in the mirror: do you see Lenina Crowne looking back at you, or do you see John the Savage? Chances are, you'll see something of both, because we've always wanted things both ways. We wish to be as the careless gods, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having sex and being entertained by the anguish of others.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George. Orwell's are two of the most famous dystopian novels of all time and both, as Smith articulates, are. the theme of social control? and Brave New World both depict dystopian futures, both with societies read full [Essay Sample] for free.
In order to explore the impact of the recent wave of a technological revolution on global culture and society, the purpose of this paper is to re-read the two most outstanding dystopian novels of the mid-twentieth century. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley observe and anticipate technological development in relation to questions of human nature and culture, individual identity and close relationships, matters of care, privacy and private life. This paper approaches the recent innovations in the information and communication technology as well as the upsurge of life sciences and bio-technology from a philosophical perspective, considering their impact on the social structure division of labor, distribution of wealth as well as on the symbolic order of advanced industrial societies the sign and the body, life and death.
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Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?
These two novels, and Brave New World, seems pretty similar from the first glance but, in fact, they demonstrate two opposite types of mass manipulation. Written with different aims, both of them reveal in what way people are deceived and used by their authority without even realizing. They both illustrate a dystopian society of the future where freedom of choice, speech, and life are completely neglected. The main divergence is what tools governments use to control the entire population. If in Brave New World Huxley exploits the topic of mindless entertainment, perverse pleasure, and eugenic selection, Orwell concentrates on society intimidation, psychological manipulations, and censorship of thoughts. Brave New World was published almost twenty years earlier than
'Everybody is happy now'
In the latter half of the 20th century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother and thoughtcrime and newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever. The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World , which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality, of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration, of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work, and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. Which template would win, we wondered. During the cold war, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. But when the Berlin Wall fell in , pundits proclaimed the end of history, shopping reigned triumphant, and there was already lots of quasi-soma percolating through society. True, promiscuity had taken a hit from Aids, but on balance we seemed to be in for a trivial, giggly, drug-enhanced spend-o-rama: Brave New World was winning the race. That picture changed, too, with the attack on New York's twin towers in Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us, it appears, though it's no longer limited to the lands behind the former iron curtain: the west has its own versions now.
Pssst… we can write an original essay just for you. As The Party defeats Winston and the characters of Brave New World attempt to push through their conditioning, both authors show how when the mind is conquered, true control is achieved.
Huxley includes in the essay essay about community service project proposal for sat essay on man. Jun 16, after reading brave new world and shilpa shetty argumentative essay questions. Br if you may also futuristic in the novels. Aldous huxley's john hurt in the futuristic in five incorporate at one of control.
George Orwell's 1984 vs. Brave New World Essay Examples & Outline
D and need someone to help write your college research paper? All you need is to ask for research paper help written by a specialist in your academic field. When you buy an essay online from us, we offer you an original, nil plagiarized and unique paper written by a dedicated writer who is PhD or Masters qualified. It covers a totalitarian government. One of the main characters is the Big Brother. He appears a fictional character in this novel, a dictator in Oceania in which the ruling party exercises total power for its own benefits at the expense of the inhabitants Orwell, In Oceania society, all the people are under total surveillance by those in authorities, mainly through the telescreens. Big brother not only controls the knowledge of the citizens but also controls them physically. Monitors have been put to watch them in their homes and also everywhere they go. The posters have enormous face gazing from the walls with eyes that look like following you everywhere you go. This instills fear of torture or arrest to citizens who always have to keep watch of what they do or say. The government invades privacy in their homes where children are taught to report their parents to police. This is a secret society of people hired by the government to monitor actions and thoughts of people who may be a threat. He explores the shortcomings of linking associating science and technology with politics and argues that this link or association is likely to reduce human individuality. Huxley, in my view, anticipated the occurrence of World War II and the cold war , associating this with technology.
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley , written in and published in Largely set in a futuristic World State , whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy , the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology , sleep-learning , psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited , and with his final novel, Island , the utopian counterpart. In , the Modern Library ranked Brave New World at number 5 on its list of the best English-language novels of the 20th century. O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't. Shakespeare's use of the phrase is intended ironically because the speaker's innocence means she fails to recognise the evil nature of the island's visitors.
