The daily Astorian., January 07, 2019, Page A4, Image 4

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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, JANUARY 7, 2019
OPINION
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
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Systems Manager
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Sober thoughts for a new year
A
ldous Huxley’s 1932 novel
“Brave New World” is back and
more relevant than ever. The
title alone is a meme for our genetically
engineered, social media besotted soci-
ety, where individuals speak as “ava-
tars” and conversations between family
members take place on a touch-screen
keypad.
Ursula K. Le Guin,
who knew her way
around dystopia, writes
in the essay “Huxley’s
Bad Trip” that “Huxley
was brilliant in his par-
R.J.
adoxical depiction of a
MARX
perfect heaven which is
a perfect hell.”
Like another futuris-
tic fable of the time — Herman Hesse’s
“Steppenwolf,” in which citizens strive
to stop the inexorable fl ow of technol-
ogy by aiming pistols at drivers of auto-
mobiles — Huxley brings a mix of
highbrow humor, stunning wordplay
and science-fi ction narrative decades
before the term science fi ction was even
coined.
The term “Brave New World” is
probably as abused as any cliché in
modern language. Take a look at today’s
headlines — not just news, but sports
and entertainment.
These are actual headlines from news
sites around the world:
Forbes: “A brave new world of brand
alignment.”
USA Today: “Welcome to the brave
new world of spirit-free drinks.”
And my favorite, from the Herald
in Everett, Washington: “It’s a brave
new world for the Seahawks minus Earl
Thomas.”
There are pages and pages more.
To be sure, many do take over from
Huxley’s theme of genetics (“China’s
Brave New World of Editing Human
DNA,” as headlined in the Washing-
ton Post) and gene editing (“Brave New
World of Editing Human DNA Starts in
China,” Bloomberg News). All is geared
for what Le Guin described as the
planned and organized delivery of pro-
grammed, uniformed children living in a
materialistic paradise, where nothing is
lacking except “imagination, spontaneity
and freedom.”
In Huxley’s brave new world, preg-
nancy and birth are mechanized and
women are designed to provide the
eggs for the next generation. Babies are
“decanted” through the “Bokanovsky
process” in bottling-rooms, assigned to
ranks from the elite Alpha-Plus to the
nearly subhuman Gamma-Minus.
Time is measured from the intro-
duction of Henry Ford’s fi rst Model-T,
inspiring the supreme being known as
“Ford.” Techniques to ensure unifor-
mity of caste are gruesome precursors of
the most selective genetic engineering.
Unorthodoxy “strikes at Society itself.”
(capitalization is Huxley’s).
Techniques like infant conditioning
and narco-hypnosis are used, Huxley
writes, as “instruments of government.”
Control is maintained by “suggesting”
people into loving their servitude, a
technique as effective as “fl ogging them
and kicking them into obedience.”
As an Alpha-plus, Huxley’s protag-
onist Bernard Marx (the name threw
me for a loop) is predestined to a life of
pleasure and privilege.
But he yearns to experience a world
outside of the strictures of his world,
“where every man, woman and child” is
compelled to consume so much a year in
the interests of industry.
“One of these days,” he is warned,
“you’ll get into trouble.”
To overcome his angst, friends urge
him to a take a “gramme of soma,” a
sedative that quickly submerges those
who take it into a pleasant “holiday from
reality, and come back without so much
as a headache or a mythology.”
But the character’s stubborn quest —
or is it simple curiosity? — takes him to
the “reservation” in New Mexico where
he encounters a “savage” named John
living a pre-civilization lifestyle, iso-
lated in the desert outside the purview
of the new world and its cookie-cutter
genetics. John is recruited for a debut
in the Brave New World, cast as a side-
show freak.
In that realm the savage is some-
thing of a media idol — shades of Andy
Associated Press
Aldous Huxley, 61-year-old British novelist, and his bride of eight days, Laura Archera, 40-year-old Italian concert violinist, at their
Hollywood home in 1956.
Associated Press
Aldous Huxley in 1938.
Warhol’s “15 minutes” — sought after
by the new world’s elite as a relic of
a time go. Once inside the civilized
world, there is no retreat — culminat-
ing in a violent orgy of frenzied crowd-
lust as insidiously violent as the simmer-
WHEN WE SAY ‘BRAVE NEW WORLD,’
WHAT DO WE MEAN?
ing mob in Shirley Jackson’s short story,
“The Lottery.”
Le Guin, the Cannon Beach resident
who died in 2017 and left a legacy of
work thematically linked to the concept
of freedom versus societal groupthink,
wrote that Huxley was speaking of his
novel not only as a cautionary tale, “but
as describing nascent reality.”
Huxley’s vision predates brainwash-
ing, operant conditioning, subliminal
seduction, verbal cues and repetitions
by decades — now all part of our daily
world as we turn on the television or
radio, along with the use of psychotro-
pic drugs and narcotics from Prozac to
Zoloft. “A masterpiece in the age of anx-
iety,” Le Guin concludes.
Writing his retrospective “Brave New
World Revisited,” an extended essay
published in 1958, Huxley gives this
refl ection: “At this point we fi nd our-
selves confronted by a very disquieting
question. Do we really wish to act upon
our knowledge? Does a majority of the
population think it worthwhile to take
a great deal of trouble, in order to halt,
and if possible, reverse the current drift
toward totalitarian control?”
The Columbia Journalism Review
recently warned of a “brave new world”
of the rich and powerful who can
afford to “bankroll their own personal
Pravdas.”
Sober thoughts for a new year as
we stand at a national launchpad of
uncertainty.
Huxley’s own prescriptive offers
promise. “We can be educated for free-
dom. Much better than we are educated
at present.”
R.J. Marx is editor of the Seaside Sig-
nal and Cannon Beach Gazette, and cov-
ers South County for The Daily Astorian.