Baby-Making at its finest.

Try living in a world where all people are biologically created and born into a predestined life chosen by the government. Not only did the government create you with specific qualities, but you were only one of the hundred they were able to spawn with the same identity. In the first few chapters of Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, he describes the harsh reality of the scientific advances humanity is reaching to create a perfect world.

His depiction of the future is truly frightening. The way people are brought into life appears to be an enormous lab experiment run by those trying to keep society and social groups in check. They call this the Bokanovsky’s Process, “one of the major instruments in social stability” (Huxley 7). This is completely unethical. How can people even begin to think of creating the same identical children by the hundreds with their life predestined for them? Identity and individuality completely vanish when people are created this way. The meaning of life is destroyed as well. People have this life to experience emotions, to create friendships, and to succeed or fail. Whether their life turns out good or bad, the whole process life helps people learn by improving their judgment and decision making in the future. But this meaning of life is pointless when it becomes predestined for you and there is no possibility of changing who you are. These “people” they are creating should not even be called people but slaves who help fuel the power of those already at the top of the social pyramid.

In Huxley’s society, the main social groups are, from highest to lowest, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Throughout our history, we have the upper, middle, and lower class. The Alphas always dominated over the Epsilons by telling them what to do and by making them feel powerless and inferior. This relates to the times of slavery and discrimination. The African American was always being suppressed, from being the slave worker out in the fields to the one having to sit in the back of the bus for reasons of skin color. Do you remember the Grandfather Clause and the poll tax? These were tools of absolute manipulation by the superior “White Man,” trying to exclude African Americans from their right to vote. Those at the top will always try to hinder the ones under them to keep their power from being diminished. That is why the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where all the babies come from, is run by the Alphas, the social group that the Betas believe “[works] much harder than [they] do, because [the Alphas] are so frightfully clever” (Huxley 27). This novel grasps the troubles of our social ladder, and how that itself is the tool which degrades our humanity.

Although wrong and twisted, I do see some beneficiaries in this process of creation if ever applied in the future. We would no longer have to worry about cancer or diseases if we were able to create children with super immunities. Parents would also be able to choose the qualities of their children and their physical features. But this slowly creeps its way around moral values and the beliefs. People opposing the use of this “new technology” would say that this is against our human nature to be able to pick and choose the child we want. They would also state that the creation of life is “God’s power,” and how the human race should not interfere with such ideals. Although the picking and choosing of the perfect child may be a little extreme, I still see benefits that can come from new discoveries and technologies in DNA engineering.

Well to sum it all up, I must say I still have a hard time getting through each chapter of this book; for example, chapter three’s insane decision to jump from plot to plot after every line. Maybe it’s because I can’t pay attention very long or focus just on one subject. And I am sincerely sorry for the super, mega lectures I’ve been posting. I know that a long passage can get pretty boring at times. Anyways, I’ve decided that with every blog entry I’ll leave you guys with a little inspirational quote starting with today’s.

“Give the world the best you have and the best will come back to you.”
~ Madeline Bridges