To start off with a more familiar anecdote, consider smartphones and social media. I don’t know about most people, but when I’m having a bad time I’m likely to open my phone and lose myself for a few minutes (hours). I can’t go thirty minutes without checking it. There’s something appealing about being able to, with a few clicks, forget everything for a while, and it’s so easy to do so. There’s something appealing about choosing happiness, even though, in truth, you know that social media is bad and unhealthy and a first-world epidemic.
This goes for anything – food, cigarettes, binge-shopping, video games – it’s in human nature to seek escape and stress relief, and it’s being shoved down our throats. The idea of instant, shallow gratification is more prevalent now than ever before.
The way social media treats relationships, too, can be compared to the constant hustle and bustle of London. You’re connected to millions of people throughout the world – on the internet, you’re never truly alone. But at the same time, you’re farther away from anyone else, locked away in your room.
In my experience, social media is conditioning us to prize online interactions more than that of real people. The people on TikTok always seemed more welcome and opening (likely due to the anonymity of an online presence) and with so many people on it it’s near impossible not to find someone who shares the same interests and values as you. Naturally I grew closer to my online friends than people in real life, and to be honest, I was a little miserable. (Things have changed now.) But this goes to show just how influential apps like these can be, especially to younger adolescents and children, and how it can deeply affect their social and personal lives. You've seen it before a thousand times. Social media connects you to more people than you can possibly imagine and makes you more alone than ever before. Much like in London, where, despite constantly being in contact, deeper connections can never – mustn’t – be made.
I’m inclined to think that we are dependent on all kinds of technology, not just the kind that we can keep in our pockets. What happens when phones run out of battery, or the power goes out? When the cyber attack happened, the city workers’ paychecks were delayed and people weren’t able to access library books. It’s the seemingly little things that add up – complete dependence on technology, I think, is inevitable.
In our modern world, when help is all around us, it’s time we start double thinking our actions. The innovations that we have created will some day control us, just like how the London citizens rely on theirs for everyday life. Take, for example, Bernard and Lenina’s trip to the reserve: the lack of soma deeply troubles Lenina and the sight of old age and disease rattles them both. They're not used to reality and this stint does a good job of highlighting just how strange they are in the real world.
I think this idea of the shift in power is expressed perfectly in the short story The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, though the delivery is much heavier. Here is a passage:
Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. (Forster, 25)
As soon as this garment becomes something necessary, when we all decide to choose happiness and ease, we’ve rendered ourselves reliant. We no longer control our innovations – they control us. Huxley wants us to know the consequences of our decisions and the dangers of relying on technology before we become completely disillusioned with reality.
https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf
Genetic engineering is not a new technology. We’ve been doing it for years, both in research and in industry (such as agriculture: the creation of GMOs). However, the emergence of modern technologies such as CRISPR boost this field of research faster than society can react to it.
CRISPR (clustered interspaced short palindromic repeats) is basically the immune system of bacteria. Here are the basics on how it works:
DNA is double-stranded. When a bacterium encounters a virus, it notes a strand of the invader’s DNA and stores it in its own DNA sequence to generate an immune memory. The next time the virus tries to infect the cell, it takes a complementary strand of the stored viral DNA (crRNA) and uses this as a guide to hone in to the virus and cut it, more or less killing it.
Knowing this, scientists were able to generate their own crRNA to target specific parts of the human genome and snip it out. CRISPR has the potential to cure genetic diseases and cancer – it’s been used in the past to treat sickle cell anemia. It can also be used to create more effective GMOs. Good things, right?
Near the end of 2019 it was brought to light that a researcher by the name of He Jiankui edited the genome of two human embryos and brought them to term. The gametes, or the sex cells, were also affected, meaning the changes he wrought might be passed on to the next generation. He was immediately scrutinized for his actions, but now we know we are able to modify these eggs to alter the human they will grow into, and possibly their children.
It’s obviously nothing like what they do in the Hatchery, but this anecdote really brings to life just what we are capable of. But does that mean we should? It’s something we’re still trying to figure out.
I held a small survey attacking the question of the ethics of using humans as they do in Brave New World to do autonomous jobs. The results are from 45 high school students.
I opened with more of a familiar question involving machinery: Would it be unethical to use robots to complete menial (repetitive) tasks? The robots are unable to feel, thus can't feel sad about the tasks they're assigned.
83% answered, No, it's ethical because the robots don't feel anything.
The next question dives into the ethical implications of using humans instead of machines: Would it be unethical to use humans to complete similar tasks? These humans are genetically engineered as embryos to like their jobs. It's impossible for them to feel sad about their jobs, so they're always content.
The results weren’t as I was expecting. 52% of people answered that Yes, it's unethical because the people are born for this job and have no other option. Almost half of the population thought creating and using genetically modified humans is an okay idea. Human modification such as presented in Brave New World might not be as far-fetched as once thought.
The next question asks: Which is more unethical?
Half of the participants decided that using humans is more unethical, 41% thought both are equally unethical, and the remaining 9% thought that using robots is more unethical.
I conducted this survey partly out of personal interest and partly because they (we) will likely have the jurisdiction to make these decisions in the future. Already the idea of “designer babies” is on the rise – genetically modified children – the implications of which are a whole other dystopian nightmare of their own. The scariest part to me, though, is that it's possible. This silly little dystopia created in the mind of a skeptic nearly 100 years ago doesn’t look so silly anymore. Cool, yes, but there’s a fine line between that and playing God. But saying this just makes me feel like one of those letters to the future from hundreds of years ago that says we’ll be having flying cars in the 21st century, so who knows what goes in the future. That’s the point. It’s possible.
https://ag.purdue.edu/gmos/what-are-gmos.html
https://www.ashg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ASHG-Success-Stories-Crispr-9-final.pdf
https://www.synthego.com/learn/crispr
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/01/perspectives-on-gene-editing/
Consumerism and media are a big deal in London. People are encouraged (conditioned) to buy to boost an invisible economy. There’s an industry behind advertisement (Helmholtz teaches a class about this as an Emotional Engineer). The need to have more is greater than ever – as they say, “Ending is better than mending” (35). We can attribute this urge to buy as another eye-grabber to keep the public’s eyes busy and vacant, away from what's really important – reality.
In real life, advertising is also a huge market – in the US alone, an estimated $400 million was spent on advertising in 2023. It’s hard to go anywhere without seeing an ad. Ads on billboards, ads on the radio, popups littering every webpage you use. Websites ask for cookies (user data) which can be used to create targeted advertisements based on what you look at. People are constantly pressured to have more, and it works. Based on the reasoning for this in the novel, what does that say of us now?
https://www.statista.com/chart/19241/top-10-digital-ad-spending-verticals/
https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/cookies
At first it might be difficult to see the story’s relevance. Life as we know it (at least my life) is nothing like the dystopia represented in this novel. What remains the same throughout all these years, however, is human nature. Now, almost 100 years after the book’s publication, we see how people react to constant stimulation. We see the way consumerism has been ramped up, and we see how connection just sets us even more apart. We see new, exciting discoveries that have the potential to change the world, and we see how technology, at the same time, can prove to be a double-edged sword.
There's one more important aspect of the book I haven’t touched on yet, and that’s the age-old dilemma that we have been arguing about for hundreds of years. You see it in the Matrix. You see it in Madagascar.
Truth or happiness?
When I asked around, the answer I usually faced was “truth.” People argued that being truthful to yourself results in ultimate happiness. They wanted the freedom to feel any emotion they chose and argued that humans are meant to feel all of these emotions.
I don’t think there’s truly a right answer – I think it depends on the current state of mind. Let’s first look at how our main characters see this:
Bernard is from a point of disadvantage. He’s the laughingstock of his caste, and there’s really not much he can do about it, so he scorns and avoids society and the way they operate as a way to cope. Despite being critical of the current state, he does little against it, and is terrified of the notion of being sent away. At the end he even grovels and begs Mustafa not to do so, showing that he would rather take the blue pill and remain in the ignorant society he so despises.
Helmholtz, on the other hand, is from a point of advantage. He wants to break free of society’s constraints and actually does things to piss off the upper brass – for example, when he wrote his own piece about being alone (another taboo subject) and showed it to his Emotional Engineering students (as established, the children are brought up on a rigid curriculum so as not to deviate from the norm even slightly). After the skirmish with the Delta workers, he requests Mustafa that he be moved somewhere especially remote and harsh, so that he’ll have no choice but to be locked up and focus on his writing.
I think it’s about time we start asking ourselves these kinds of questions, whether we are a Bernard or a Helmholtz. Brave New World is one of many warning shots fired from a time of speculation; the world is transforming, and the bullet has grazed us. Now is the time to find ourselves, to know exactly where we want to fit into our evolving society and how to do so, before it’s too late.