Running head: NOT EXACTLY BRAVE
Not Exactly Brave
Not Exactly Brave
In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, a dystopian society is portrayed in which everything we view as correct and moral, society views as wrong, immoral, and absurd. The novel is written in the early 1930s, a decade after the roaring 1920s in which many political, social, and scientific advances took place (History, 2010). A major controversy of the decade involved science and religion, which can be seen in the Scopes Trial of 1925, a trial which brought Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to the table and argued that evolution is a reality and should be taught in school (Wilson, 2006). Due to such theory, many started questioning religion and opted to believe science rather than god. This phenomenon can also be seen in Brave New World, where society completely ostracizes religion out of their lives and believes science instead. People relied on medicine as a cure for everything instead of relying on god, people only worry about themselves; displaying the ignorance blindness of society. Huxley wrote this novel in order to depict the unscrupulous actions of humans, how we let science and technology drive our lives, and illustrate superiority over those who are different from us. Not only was science a major subject of the 1920s and of the novel, but social freedom was also very pivotal. People usually are encouraged to be different, brave, and to not follow the crowd, but ironically in Brave New World people are discouraged from being different and are nowhere near brave, if someone intended to do something they are not told to do or out of the expectations of their class, they are seen as an outcast not only to their cast, but also to society as a whole.
In Brave New World, society was blinded as a result of science. People stopped believing, loving, caring, learning, and just simply left everything at the hands of laboratories. Instead of a Christ, people believed in Ford, who was their so called “god”, founder of mass production. Society alleged that the way god had created a man and woman to populate the world, Ford was brought to the planet with the help of science to help populate the earth via mass production (Smith, 2012). In the early twentieth century the man who had started mass production was called Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company’s who was the catalyst of mass production through the construction of the assembly line (History, 2009). As a result, in this novel people were seen as items of an assembly line and were created in a very similar way. Women no longer were childbearing, instead children were made with the help of science in laboratories and everyone was sterilized due to the pain and aftermath of child bearing. Just about everyone in society viewed science as “...an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook (Huxley, 1998, pg. 225)”. Th...
