“Community, Identity, Stability”: The Scientific Society and the Future of Religion in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Abstract

Michel went over to bookshelf and took down What Dare I Think? and handed it to Bruno. was written by Julian Huxley, Aldous's older brother, and published in 1931, year before Brave New World. All of ideas his brother used in novel--genetic manipulation and improving species, including human species--are suggested here. All of them are presented unequivocally desirable goals that should strive for. Michel Houellebecq I take my epigraph, and starting point of this paper, passage from Michel Houellebecq's 1998 novel The Elementary Particles. When Bruno visits his brother Michel, he excitedly contends that everyone says Brave New World is supposed to be totalitarian nightmare, vicious indictment of society, but that's just hypocritical bullshit. Brave New World is our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, war against aging, leisure society (132). Michel, molecular biologist, agrees, arguing that both Huxleys (1) believed totally in kind of depicted in Brave New World (1932) and that it was only after Nazi experiment poisoned well of eugenics argument, and after Julian became director-general of unesco, that Aldous rewrote his own literary past, claiming that his novel had been dystopia all along. It is not difficult to counter Houellebecq's argument. A close reading of Brave New World reveals too many sites of satire simply to claim that Aldous was endorsing specific scientific he depicted. However, Houellebecq's argument correctly implies that reading novel in context of scientific discourse that surrounded its publication problematizes standard reading, which has led Brave New World to be recognized a kind of byword for in which values (or nonvalues) of scientific are dominant, and which therefore reduced to species of machine (Firchow, Science and Conscience 301). Several scholars have complicated simplistic dystopian reading of novel by analyzing it alongside Aldous's positive view of eugenics and scientific planning, which he elaborated in nonfiction essays and letters around time of Brave New Worlds publication. Robert S. Baker, David Bradshaw, and Joanne Woiak, (2) for instance, have argued that analyzing Brave New World in light of Aldous's interest in eugenics and scientific planning reveals highly ambivalent novel, one which cannot be simply read as cautionary tale about dehumanizing effects of technology (Woiak 107-08). Instead, Aldous's novel can be seen an imaginative engagement with contemporary scientific debate surrounding role of eugenics and scientific planning in future of society. Woiak's conclusion is that Brave New World offers sophisticated critique of how scientific knowledge emerges from and in turn serves social, political, and economic agendas of those in power (Woiak 124). Woiak concludes that target of novel's satire is not advanced science but ideologies of societies which may use it; however, more specific conclusion can be developed by reading Brave New World alongside What Dare I Think? by Julian Huxley. Following Woiak's suggestion to study the influence of relevant scientific ideas and sources (110) in creation of Aldous's novel, my reading complements these studies by examining ways in which novel can be seen text that reflects Aldous's positive views of eugenics. More importantly, it also goes beyond these studies, by identifying distinct areas of overlap shared with What Dare I Think?; in particular, Brave New World seems to be responding to Julian's call for controlled by man (42), his belief that such world will require preservations for strange human beings (24), and potential for use of advanced pharmacological substances (66-69). Of greatest interest is way in which Brave New World responds to Julian's belief in biological religious emotion (195). …