All Present in the Nowhere Place
Of those ideal realms birthed upon the page in the still-roiling wake of Plato’s Republic, none, perhaps, has more closely followed the Socratic vision than the London of Huxley’s Brave New World. There the metallurgic castes of Plato’s allegory are scientifically proportioned, the need to observe a child’s propensities and talents and to nurture them accordingly obviated by the World-State’s human assembly line, its ceaseless mechanism churning out just so many Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and oh-how-pitiable Epsilons as needed to sustain itself.
Much as Huxley’s London models the Platonic state, it also more nearly mirrors the historical world which has unfolded since its conception than any other utopian commonweal. For all its hyper-organization, the World-State manages to speak to our own sexual fashions, our drug habits, our entertainments. In soma, in the vibro-vacuum massages, in the sensual immersion film experiences, Huxley has managed to free the vast majority of his creations from the temporal anxiety St. Augustine described as central to much of human sinfulness. The men of this new world are unconcerned with past or future. Theirs is the bodily presence, the perfect equilibrium, which seeks to replicate what once was called eternity. Theirs is a world without a place, cut off from the rhythm of nature.
In this nowhere land we are reminded of St. Thomas More’s Utopia. After centuries of ill-effected social experiment, we have come generally to take utopias as doomed but determined attempts at actual societies. So splendidly have such attempts failed, and so clever was More, that we have perhaps forgotten how thoroughly he himself denies, by way of Utopia itself, the possibility of constructing such Edens.
More’s game begins in his title. While the word utopia plays on eu-topos, the good place, u-topos rather means no place, a place which does not and cannot exist. Then, too, the tale of the Utopian island is told by way of a devilishly complex interaction of characters. Raphael Hythlodaeus describes Utopia to Morus. Hythlodaeus means “nonsense peddler,” a strange concept to pair with the name of Raphael, the unfailing guide of the Book of Tobit. And Morus, as More himself delighted in pointing out, means fool. So we have in Utopia an archangelic nonsense peddler telling a fool of a place which does not exist.
More makes it clear from the outset, albeit by obscurity, that we should not take Utopia seriously. He intends our skepticism, and our skepticism should be borne out when we find that the Utopians are more or less morally perfect because their society has been perfectly legislated. In any situation, law and custom tell them exactly what they ought to do. In such a world, one so well managed that human choice grows defunct, there is no room for virtue, however much Hythlodaeus extols the moral excellence of the Utopians. As Aristotle argues, and as experience shows, virtue is a matter of habit, a habit of acting correctly according to whatever circumstances arise. The state which legislates the need to choose out of existence also legislates virtue out of existence.
In the London of Brave New World, the world of Bernard Marx and Mustapha Mond, there is no need for ethical choice. All needs are provided for, and there are no cares for past or future. There, action is managed chemically and verbally. The State supplies its citizens with just enough labor to satisfy their intellectual appetites, just enough of the drug soma to prevent any anxious musing on past or future, just enough entertainment to stave off ennui. For each situation the state has an aphorism, and these are hypnopaedically propagated in the minds of the citizenry through soothing recordings played all through the night all through life.
Nonetheless, though it is generally agreed, having been repeated into everyone’s dreaming ears 150 times nightly for twelve years, that “Everybody’s happy now,” there are some in London who feel out of place. Bernard Marx, ostensible protagonist of the novel’s first half, nurses a melancholic streak, refusing amelioration in soma or the Solidarity Service orgies scheduled every other Thursday. In his anxiety he holds himself superior to the run of Alpha Plus men, despite, even perhaps because of, their greater physical stature. Instead of soma he seeks out experiences of the sublime, stopping over the English Channel, for instance, hovering a few hundred feet from the waves to feel that awful blend of terror and wonder wherein Kant recognized an essential element of the human spirit.
On the strength of his caste status and the impulse of his outlandish nature, Bernard, accompanied by Lenina Crowne, spends his vacation in a Savage Reservation, one of those places so desert and remote as to preclude civilization. There the two encounter John the Savage—the Malthus-defying love child of the Director for the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre—and Linda—a Beta who, lost in a desert storm, has spent the interim period soaking in peyote and un-learning her panamorous habits. John, like Bernard, stands outside his native civilization. And like Bernard and the other Londoners, John has come to encounter the world through a particular lingual lens. John’s library consists of Linda’s erstwhile operations manual and a complete, mouse-gnawed Shakespeare. The latter has almost entirely formed John’s own language. For all its poetry, though, John’s language remains as much a lens as the English lingo, a glass that keeps him arm’s length from, and often distorts, experience.
The difficulty for John is that his lingual interface with existence does not permit him to tap into any communal or ontological root whereby his own self may be sustained. The Shakespearean inheritance the English have utterly repudiated sets him at as great a cultural distance from the English as from the native inhabitants of the Savage Reservation. The latter, moreover, forbid his being woven into the ritual fabric of their society. We first meet John at a religious festival wherein a young man, beneath the gaze of a crucifix and a divine eagle, makes his way seven times around an arena, all the while being whipped. John groans to Bernard that he could easily have withstood twice as many lashes, had he only been admitted as victim. And we learn in John’s subsequent Savage history that he has throughout his life been barred from such sacrificial rituals as ushered the other young men into their spiritual majority. He could not descend into the frights of the cavern, nor could he go out with the others to dream of animals upon the mountainside.
Nonetheless, John manages a share in the community by way of two avenues, the first being art. Mitsima, one of the elders, teaches John the art of pottery, and the two spend days working and telling stories, and such days pass without the sense of having done so, “with an intense, absorbing happiness.” In the artistic experience, John encounters a similar timelessness to that the Londoners achieve by soma. However, whereas soma serves chiefly to dismiss the mind and press consciousness down into the animal level, artistic practice draws the mind up to the kind of contemplative experience Aristotle submits as fundamental to human happiness.
Thomas More’s Utopia
Art, in John’s case, leads also to violence, and in this, too, he accesses some portion of community. Mitsima, who teaches him to work in clay, teaches him, too, to build a bow. And Shakespeare, playing Caliban, stirs John to take up a knife and stab the sleeping Pope, chief among his mother’s lovers. Awaking from his peyote slumber, Pope seizes John. The two struggle, and eventually Pope laughs and dismisses the boy, now more a man in virtue of his violence.
Nonetheless, though he seeks admission to Savage manhood and goes so far as to crucify himself upon a cliff face, John remains without the ritual society whereby his manhood might be directed beyond its own needs and desires.
We can imagine his shock, then, on entering the brave new world, a place which in his mother’s loving tales took on all the allure of Heaven, and finding that its society serves only to satisfy the needs and desires of the individual in order to oil the wheel of its own self-propagation. There his cries of “Father!” serve only to elicit mirth from bystanders and to set the Director on his way into immediate resignation. There his adulation of Lenina melts into horror once, reciprocate, she races, stripping, into his arms. What education Shakespeare, Pope, and Linda could provide could not equip John with that submission to the state and personal inclination so necessary for flourishing in London.
At last, arraigned for disrupting soma distribution, John is brought before the court of the World State. Mustapha Mond offers him an opportunity to undertake an experiment in hermitage. He removes to a lighthouse away from the star-blotting lights of the city. He digs a garden. He reads. He flagellates himself. But people hear of this holy hermit. They fly out in their helicopters to meet him. For a time he rebuffs them. Eventually, though, inevitably, the great feely photographer of the day manages to capture the Savage on film and to present his findings to the world. Then the Kent sky darkens with helicopters. En masse the voyeurs prove too great a force to drive off. Among them is Lenina, and John attacks her for a strumpet with his flail.
Once again violence provides entrance to community. At the wonder of the whipping the crowd launches into a round of “Orgy-porgy,” the song of the communal love feast Bernard so abhors and John so desires to fend from his soul. Yet in the end he is overcome. His violence leads him into the debauch. On waking the next morning and remembering his fall, he goes into his tower and hangs himself. We are left with the image of his feet turning one way, then the other, an image of John as he was in life, lifted off the ground by his Shakespearean imagination, turned one way and the other by the gravity of society, unable to walk among his fellow men.
The hermit’s life cannot sustain John against the society he has fled. His ascetic practices, reminiscent of those St. Francis undertook, hurling himself into the roses at Subiaco, cannot avail him as they did Francis or Benedict or Anthony of the Desert.
Why, then, can John’s fasts and penances not sustain him? Perhaps again the answer lies in their being disconnected from a community and an orthodoxy in which they might be rooted and toward which they might be directed. John’s imitation of the eremitic model springs from the religious instinct but without the focal point true religion provides.
We see another counter example to John’s in the case of St. Thomas More, so often noted for his being the sole dissenter to Henry VIII’s program. And indeed, save for John Fisher, More was essentially alone in England, a fact which has led some to call his martyrdom one to his own conscience, the bull-headed last stand of an unrelenting idealist who believed that perfect societies could be established on the islands of the world. In his trial, though, More correctly pointed out that while he stood alone among the people of England, the rest of Catholic Europe stood with him, not to mention all the hosts of angels and saints. His was no death for the sake of his own conscience but was rather a prudential judgment rooted in the life of the universal church on earth as well as in heaven. And John, breaking from his Shakespearean savagery into the perfect mechanism of London, has no framework within which to make such prudential judgments.
The chief concern of any state, as of any man, must be happiness. As Mustapha Mond tells John and Helmholtz, “Happiness is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master...than truth.” The controllers of the World-State know truth, know Shakespeare, know, on some level, God. Yet they have found that such things make it difficult for humans to maintain that equilibrium which the human assembly line and soma provide and which may pass as a surrogate happiness. The way is much easier than Aristotle’s, that craft of choice which he calls virtue and which often takes a lifetime to perfect. Human nature resists, on some level, the way of the World-State. Even in vitro human maturation takes an exceptionally long time, a time which by its own length suggests the contours of the long road by which human happiness takes shape through virtue.
John’s own road is cut short by society. Watered too richly by the Bard, perhaps, rocketing toward virtue in its lighthouse, his religion could not withstand the demons which flocked to wonder at it. Yet his meteoric descent upon London sparks a new journey for Bernard as well as for Helmholtz. The latter in particular, awakened to his own poetic propensity, looks forward with hope and confidence to his banishment to the Falkland Islands, to one of those communities where, Mond says, only the most interesting people in the world live. John has set them on their way to their own Utopia, and we might hope that there, among the anxious and curious, the old way of virtue, the happiness that takes a lifetime and the Cross, might once again be found.
As humans we are called to exist in the presence which is prefatory to the eternity of the beatific vision, and that presence likewise demands our presence to the actual world around us, with its seasons, its foliage and beasts, its constellations and stormy seas. Such a world escapes the soma-enthusiasts of Brave New World, whatever their physical contentment. And such a world threatens to escape us as well, unless we turn again to a vision of man directed not simply to the propagation of our biological species but rather toward our natural end in eternal happiness.