Haunted Week is hosted by
Cheyenne at {This Girl Reads}
For the final day of
Haunted Week, we are posting a review of a scary story of our choice.
I’ve decided to review
the scariest book I’ve ever read.
“Can’t
you see?...Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social
stability!”
Major instruments of social stability.
Standard
men and women; in uniform batches… “Ninety-six identical twins working in
ninety-six identical machines!...You really know where you are. For the first
time in history.” He quoted the planetary motto. “Community, Identity,
Stability.”
Huxley’s vision of the
future is, as Neil Postman points out in the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, often
overshadowed by George Orwell’s 1984.
But as Postman points out, we do not appear to be on a path toward
totalitarianism. Many of these regimes around the world have already fallen.
Big Brother is likely easier to see coming than Huxley’s version, Brave New World, in which we
are distracted by entertainment, pacified by mindless slogans, and utterly
seduced by science.
Anyone who spends time
with teenagers today, whether they themselves are a teen or not, can see the
sort of passive indifference to learning that characterizes the denizens of the
Brave New World, a world in which nobody protests when the collective works of
Shakespeare are destroyed. And perhaps even more upsetting, today’s adults are
often infantilized by video games, smartphones, reality TV…
Meanwhile, though, not everyone has given up thinking. Our ability to manipulate nature through science marches forward. It’s not all that difficult to imagine that today’s ability to alter genes to select a child’s gender or screen for genetic defects—or clone living things—will lead us to the ability Huxley predicts: The Bokanovsky Process, in which people’s destinies are determined by the state before they are even born. Some are born Alphas or Betas, and they are individuals, after a fashion, with jobs and a degree of free will. Some are Deltas or Gammas, who go where they are told, never asking questions because the ability to think has been taken away from them. Deltas, for example, are conditioned to dislike flowers. They are conditioned the way I trained my puppy to behave for cookies.
The architects of the
Brave New World believe that they have perfected mankind, and created a world
of stability and order.
In many ways, this notion
of free will versus well-intentioned control is the theme of all science
fiction. It was echoed in one of my favorite films, Serenity, when Mal decides to stay and fight the Alliance, to take
a stand against a government that tried to use drugs in the air supply to keep
the population calm:
“Sure as I know anything, I know this
- they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept
clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can
make people... better. And I do not hold to that.”
“Our world is not the same as
Othello's world… you can't make tragedies without social instability. The
world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never
want what they can't get.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ll take the tragedy—I’d rather
know what I’m missing.
