Huxley's Brave New Research Articles

A Brave New World? How Genetic Technology Could Change us

Forthcoming genetic technologies will allow people to design their children. Although these tools are unlikely to produce a society of castes like the Alphas and Epsilons in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, they may already be changing our understanding of what it means to be human.

Oedipus in Dystopia: Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley'sBrave New World

Jreuďs role in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, has been much discussed, but little consensus has emerged, partly because of Huxley's apparent ambivalence about Freud's ideas and his growing reluctance, after he had written the novel, to admit that he had ever been in agreement with Freud's conception of human nature. In a 1960 interview, Huxley said, was never by Freud as some people were, and I get less as I go on.1 Although some have taken this statement as an unequivocal denial of any affinity Huxley may have had for Freud,2 it reads less as a repudiation of Freud than as a confession that Huxley was indeed intoxicated by Freud to a certain extent when he was younger, although he certainly never reached the stage of feverish zealotry achieved by some of his contemporaries.3 Indeed, Huxley's half-hearted protestations against Freud have prompted insinuations about the motives behind them. For instance, Charles Holmes claims: throughout his life Huxley rejected Freud, though the tone and intensity of his rejection varied. Given Freud's emphasis on sex and Huxley's near-obsession with it, the rejection implies unconscious incompletely understood.4 Philip Thody has undertaken to explain this resistance in biographical terms:

Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome

Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome

Oedipus in Dystopia: Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Freud's role in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has been much discussed, but little consensus has emerged, partly because of Huxley's apparent ambivalence about Freud's ideas and his growing reluctance, after he had written the novel, to admit that he had ever been in agreement with Freud's conception of human nature. In a 1960 interview, Huxley said, "I was never intoxicated by Freud as some people were, and I get less intoxicated as I go on." 1 Although some have taken this statement as an unequivocal denial of any affinity Huxley may have had for Freud, 2 it reads less as a repudiation of Freud than as a confession that Huxley was indeed "intoxicated" by Freud to a certain extent when he was younger, although he certainly never reached the stage of feverish zealotry achieved by some of his contemporaries. 3 Indeed, Huxley's half-hearted protestations against Freud have prompted insinuations about the motives behind them. For instance, Charles Holmes claims: "throughout his life Huxley rejected Freud, though the tone and intensity of his rejection varied. Given Freud's emphasis on sex and Huxley's near-obsession with it, the rejection implies unconscious resistance incompletely understood." 4 Philip Thody has undertaken to explain this "resistance" in biographical terms: [End Page 75]

Customized Filtering & Extremist Enclaves in Republic.com

This book review of Cass Sunstein's Republic.com, praises the book for raising some intriguing questions, but is very critical of the analysis and answers that the book offers. In particular it challenges Sunstein's analysis of the dangers to the U.S. system of democracy arising from increased public use of customized news services, dubbed the It argues that Sustein misunderstands how citizens are likely to use the Daily Me. Furthermore, the review asserts that, rather than undermining democracy, in the manner of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World's soma, Daily Mes are likely to improve citizen awareness of the important types of information that Sunstein is concerned about. The review also challenges Sunstein's fear that deliberative enclaves of extremists that the Internet may foster will pose a harmful speech problem that is not susceptible to a more speech response. The review suggests some potentially effective more speech proposals.

Dr. Daedalus and His Minotaur: Mythic Warnings about Genetic Engineering from J.B.S. Haldane, François Jacob, and Andrew Niccol's Gattaca

We are entering an era in which “cultural construction of the body” refers to a literal technological enterprise. This era was anticipated in the 1920s by geneticist J. B. S. Haldane in a lecture which inspired Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In that lecture, Haldane reinterpreted the Greek myth of Daedalus and the Minotaur as heroic fable. Seventy years later another geneticist, Francois Jacob, used the same myth as cautionary tale. Here I explain the Minotaur's “genetic” monstrosity in terms of disability and hybridity, using the movie Gattaca to argue that ancient fears of monstrously disabled bodies are being recycled as bioethics.

Developing a code of ethics for human cloning.

Under what conditions might the cloning of human beings constitute an ethical practice? A tendency exists to analyze human cloning merely as a technical procedure. As with all revolutionary technological developments, however, human cloning potentially exists in a broad social context that will both shape and be shaped by the biological techniques. Although human cloning must be subjected to technical analysis that addresses fundamental ethical questions such as its safety and efficacy, questions exist that focus our attention on broader issues. Asserting that cloning inevitably leads to undesirable consequences commits the fallacy of technological determinism and untenably separates technological and ethical evaluation. Drawing from the Report of the National Bioethics Advisory Committee and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, we offer a draft "Code of Ethics for Human Cloning" in order to stimulate discussion about the ethics of the broader ramifications of human cloning as well as its particular technological properties.

Orwell versus Huxley: Economics, Technology, Privacy, and Satire

Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's novel Brave New World have often been thought prophetic commentaries on economic, political, and social matters. I argue, with particular reference to the supposed applicability of these novels to issues of technology and privacy, that the novels are best understood as literary works of art, rather than as social science or commentary, and that when so viewed Orwell's novel in particular reflects a dissatisfaction with everyday life and a nostalgia for Romantic values.

History and Future of Animal Welfare Science

It is suggested that Mench give credit to the books that started the farm animal welfare movement--Harrison's (1964) Animal Machines and, arriving 1 year later, Huxley's (1965) Brave New Victuals. Huxley covered the use of chemicals on the land and "factory fanning," a phrase coined by Harrison. They both discussed the rearing of animals indoors in huge numbers, closely confined, artificially lit, mechanically supplied with food, and treated with drugs and hormones to prevent disease and to speed growth. Are intensive methods necessarily cruel to animals? Are agricultural and industrial chemical residues contaminating the environment? What is the influence of new methods on the quality of food and what are the effects on the human organism? These were relevant questions back then, and almost 30 years later Harrison (1988, 1993) wondered how much real progress has been made in answering them.

Sinclair Lewis's Cautionary Tale It Can't Happen Here (1935).

Today Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here (1935) is widely known only by its title, which is often quoted without any attribution to (the ironic intention of) the author, the first American winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930. In literary studies ICHH is usually considered in the tradition of the dystopian novel (e.g., Jack London's The Iron Heel. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984), but because Lewis grounded his satirical‐realistic novel in an intricate wealth of historical and contemporary detail, ICHH has over time been ignored or dismissed as a literary‘period piece’too demanding for today's reading public. However, in light of the 20th century struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, and particularly in view of the current resurgence of right‐wing extremism world‐wide, a re‐examination of Lewis's political cautionary tale in historical context, based on archival work in the Sinclair Lewis Papers (Yale) and the Dorothy Thompson Papers (Syracuse) as well as on extensive research into the contemporary literature and subsequent scholarship, should also demonstrate its continuing relevance.

AN UPDATE OF HAIR SHAFT DISORDERS

Most of the congenital and hereditary hair shaft abnormalities were well described many years ago in relation to the clinical and microscopic characteristics. Because of this, and in view of the fact that many of these have obvious pedigrees, there is feasibility of targeted topical selective gene therapy being developed for hair follicle fa~lts.9~ The unprecedented developments in molecular genetics in the past decade have led some sophists to predict a future like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Impressive progress has been made in our knowledge of genes that control normal development and differential, and the search is on to define these in hair diseases. At this stage of our knowledge, it is therefore important to lay down the up-to-date clinical and laboratory diagnostic criteria. Only those well-known conditions in which this information is accurately known are considered here. If more detail of other entities is required, more comprehensive texts should be Price118 classifies anomalies of the shaft into those that are associated with increased fragility, and those that are not. This distinction is useful because only the former present clinically as patchy or diffuse alopecia. The weathering process should be understood as a background to any overall assessment of hair shaft disorders. It is present in all people and lends features to both normal hair and hair with intrinsic weakness, such as that seen in trichothiodystrophy.

The Sorcerer's Broom: Medicine's Rampant Technology

Like the broom in Sorcerer's Apprentice, technologies take on a life of their own. To bring them under control, doctors must learn to tolerate ambiguity, resist the lure of the immediate, cease fearing uncertainty, and rechannel their response to wonder. Major changes are contemplated for health care in the United States, motivated by economic forces and maldistribution of health services. Technology, a thing unique unto itself, however, will confound most any attempt to change the health care system or redirect its fundamental goals. Further, if there is one thing that can be singled out as the engine of the medical economic inflation now occurring everywhere in the world, it is the seemingly irresistible spread of technology into every level of medicine--irresistible to doctors, patients, and nations alike. Evidence that technology is a problem is everywhere in medicine. In intensive care units the world over, the technology of monitoring, organ support, and resuscitation is used where it is appropriate--related to the aims and purposes of the sick person. It is also used where it is inappropriate, defined by the capabilities of the technology and the consequent expertise of physicians rather than--or even contrary to--the good of the sick person. Like the broom in Sorcerer's Apprentice, technologies come to have a life of their own, not only because of their own properties but also because of certain universal human traits. Technologies come into being to serve the purposes of their users, but ultimately their users redefine their own goals in terms of the technology. As a class, technologies are reductive, oversimplifying, impatient, intolerant of ambiguity, and democratic. They spread much more quickly than the ideas that inform them. Democracy has only gradually spread over the world: the transistor radio did it in a decade. It is not necessary or useful to revisit the long history of the debate about the wonders or dangers of technology except to acknowledge its existence and the literature it has engendered, from Goethe's Faust to Huxley's Brave New World. On the other hand, systematic concern about technology is largely a child of the second half of the twentieth century. (The famous 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica has no entry on technology, while the 1974 edition devotes thirty pages to it.) This is not an antitechnology essay. In medicine, one can no more be antitechnology than antiscience. There is no going back to a prescientific or nontechnological medicine--who would want to? The issue is how to solve the difficulty epitomized by Emerson's observation, Things are in the saddle and ride mankind. Technology is not the problem; it is the relationship to it of those who employ it that is problematic. If this is not solvable, our entire project is a waste of time. The definition of technology presents problems for which dictionaries are no help, because the term can be used in a manner so broad as to defeat understanding. Thus, any tool employed in a craft could be said to be that craft's technology. In this discussion, I want to limit the term to the modalities and instrumentalities that greatly extend the power of human action, sensation, or thought in Kays that are independent of the particular user. In addition to the instruments and devices usually considered as technology, we should include, for the sake of understanding, high-power medications--cardiac, antimicrobial, psychotropic, or whatever--that greatly extend our therapeutic power. It is our power that technology expands. Technology is not science. They are frequently lumped together--as in sci-tech--but they are distinct. Science is not my topic. The topic is to see what there is about PET scanners, MRI, angioplasty, endoscopy, automated chemistry machines, and so on--the whole wondrous parade, not the science that spawned them--that poses problems for medicine. Technologies are reductive and oversimplifying. …

Where the Senses Become a Stage and Reading Is Direction: Performing the Texts of Virtual Reality and Interactive Fiction

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), audiences flock to the feelies, a hybrid of cinema and Sensorama that communicates the kisses and couplings onscreen to the individual viewers, hunched in their seats clutching onto decidedly phallic knobs. Where audiences attending a performance of Pygmalion or King Lear might feel fear, anger, empathy, or pity, the feelies presumably supplant the audience's emotional interaction with the performance with a passive reception of the physical sensations experienced by the characters before them. In the future-world of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) trilogy, these real-but-vicarious sensations are interiorized as audiences turn to an entertainment implant called that completely immerses its users in a role they have chosen as part of an adventure. They become the characters instead of simply watching them. The sensations they experience are neither empathetic nor vicarious but real-although, if a simstim protagonist were to end up in the jaws of a hungry Bengal tiger during a jungle adventure, the user would presumably come out of the game with viscera intact. By 1992, at the Trocadero in London's Piccadilly Circus, teenagers were willingly surrendering fivepound notes in exchange for head-mounted displays and a crack at playing with Virtual Reality. When they move their heads, the scene before their eyes changes accordingly. When they are jostled in their cars or tanks or

Brave New World Revisited Revisited: Huxley’s Evolving View of Behaviorism

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has served as a popular and powerful source of antibehavioral sentiment. Several of Huxley's works are examined in order to ascertain his true thoughts regarding behaviorism. Early in his career Huxley failed to appreciate aspects of behavioral theory (e.g., an appreciation of heredity) or the good ends to which it could be employed. Huxley's later works portrayed behaviorism in a much more positive light, and he believed that behavioral science, along with spiritual enlightenment, might help save humanity from the Brave New World he predicted.

Behind the Scenes: How Ulysses Was Finally Published in the Soviet Union

Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost has resulted in an astounding flood of hitherto forbidden foreign classics. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories, and James Joyce's Ulysses were all published during 1988-1989, and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Saul Bellow's Herzog, and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Chaim Nachum Bialik, and Czeslaw Milosz have all been promised for 1990.' It is as if permission were given, a list of forbidden books were consulted, translations were commissioned, and the books were published. In the case of Joyce, for example, Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and Ulysses was published in 1989. Surely, it would seem, the Russian Ulysses was a child of glasnost.

Origins of Futuristic Fiction.

For nearly two thousand years, future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance Epigone, which carried subtitle the history of future century. Unlike stories of space travel that were popular at time, or tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age.Paul Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, forgotten writings of seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are precursors of such well-known masterpieces of form as H.G. Wells's Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984. The first secular story to break imaginative barrier against tales of future, Epigone marked emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin's courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as Memoirs of Twentieth Century, Year 2440, Last Man, and World As It Will Be.Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin's great metafictional Le roman de l'avenir, the novel of future. Both a narrative of future and a poetics of new genre, this book identified in previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define aesthetics of a major transformation in relation between literature and time still stands as basis for poetics of futuristic fiction.Tracing early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines key works of earliest writers of genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of future could achieve their full power in works of later novelists.

The Future in the Classroom Today

If only half the predictions for 1984 come true, what do we have to look forward to? That question is the focus of our first day's discussion in Alternative Societies, a ten-week senior English course. Answers vary from nilhistic (We're all going to be blown up, so what does it matter?) to simplistic (I'm going to get married and live in the same way my folks do), to optimistic (If we work together, the world can be in peace with resources for all). No matter what the answers, students agree we all have the future in common, and that bond carries us though out study of utopian and dystopian novels, as we try to discover what we want, what we can change, what we must fight, and what we must endure to be ready for the future. The dystopias are the most compelling reading, not only for their horrible views of the future but because the main characters are always cultural deviates, fighting for their beliefs against a repressive government. Montag (Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451), Equality 521 (Rand's Anthem), John Savage (Huxley's Brave New World), Winston Smith (Orwell's 1984), and Chip (Levin's This Perfect Day) begin alone, against overwhelming odds, to try to understand their individual longings in a hostile environment. These novels all provide exciting and scary reading. We also do Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, perhaps the most frightening because the nuclear war described could happen

Medical involvement in procreation: how far?

Towers speculates about the potential dangers of advances in reproductive technologies, especially in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer. Procreation to increase the power of the state, à la Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, is one feared result. Loosening the biological and/or psychological ties between mother and child is another. He advocates open discussion of these issues because society, not just doctors and patients, should choose the uses to which these technologies will be put.

Editorial: The Psychologist's Work in the Schools and Beyond

Today, more than ever before, psychologists working with each other could provide greater scope for the creation of a healthier future society. Working together, we could improve the plight of our present society and the world, and divert them from the dangerous course they appear to be taking. What is this dangerous course? Need I explain when signs and examples are all about us? Some of the problems are social, others ecological, and still others are due to psychological problems or economic deprivation, or to nationalistic rather than international considerations. Despite the comparative affluence of western society, some individuals fall through the net and fail to share in the wealth, do not desire it, or are unable to benefit from it. Additionally, with greater emphasis on technology and automation, there is a great danger that the human side of social development may be increasingly neglected. Thus we may find that the worst aspects of Huxley's Brave New World are likely to be our heritage or, at the other extreme, that we become a society of individuals who care little or nothing for the plight of our less fortunate neighbours.

Commentary: Ethics and Pragmatism in Scientific Affairs

The extraordinary probings of Limits to Scientific Inquiry (1978) and When Research May Be Stopped (Cohen 1977) suggest that science today has at best an uneasy accommodation with society. Without seeming overly dramatic, it must be likened to other transition periods in history when the course of science was challenged by religious thinking or the popular culture of the times. Although awestruck by technical achievements like recombinant DNA and in vitro fertilization, the including many scientists have grave anxieties about the consequences. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1949) is held up as a chilling prophecy come true, but the moral lesson of this analogy may be the evil of totalitarian control of science rather than too much scientific progress or freedom: The social order in Brave New World is maintained largely by denying access to history and to the pursuit of new knowledge. If a free press is the first guardian of democratic institutions, freedom of scientific inquiry cannot be much less so. Scientific freedom has never been without some limits, but challenges to the extent of that freedom on behalf of the public must be critically examined. Scientific freedom cannot, however, be used to justify blanket immunity from legitimate governmental and oversight, especially with federally funded programs. The trick is to balance the competing claims of autonomy and responsibility. Most people still expect more good than harm to come from research, especially in areas related to health. Although the erosion of the general public's confidence in the scientific enterprise is often overstated, the anxieties seem real and the margin of trust is narrow. The tabloid accounts of each new discovery gratuitously accompanied by mixed prophecies of universal good and disaster contribute much to the concern and misunderstanding. Sporadic reports of ethical misconduct in human research and the now-frequent breeches in the safety from toxic substances released into the environment fuel a drive for added external controls on science and its derivative technologies. Although there is obviously more to the problem than informational misadventures, much can be done to foster better communication between science and its patron public. Extreme positions for or against governmental regulations like those evoked by the DNA controversy provide little guidance for responsible policy. There is a clear need for scientists to understand and contribute constructively to the debate. If there are legitimate constraints upon science, they involve obligations to the purse, the safety, and the ethic. Ultimately, the trust will depend not so much on what is said, but upon the fidelity of scientists to the precepts of their own social institutions.