Happiness in Brave New World :: Brave New World Essays

Happiness in Brave untested World     Huxley implies that by abolishing nastiness and mental throe, the brave new worlders have got rid of the near profound and sublime experiences that life can offer as healthy. approximately notably, they have sacrificed a mysterious deeper happiness which is implied, but not stated, to be pharmacologically inaccessible to the utopians. The metaphysical basis of this presumption is obscure.   There argon hints, too, that some of the utopians may feel an ill-defined maven of dissatisfaction, an intermittent sense that their lives are meaningless. It is implied, further, that if we are to find true fulfilment and meaning in our own lives, then we must be able to contrast the salutary parts of life with the bad parts, to feel both joy and despair. As rationalisations go, its a good one.   barely its still wrong-headed. If pressed, we must concede that the victims of inveterate depression or pain today dont need in terludes of happiness or anaesthesia to know they are suffering horribly. Moreover, if the mere relativity of pain and pleasure were true, then one might imagine that pseudo-memories in the produce of neurochemical artefacts imbued with the texture of pastness would do the job of contrast just as well as raw nastiness. The neurochemical signatures of deja vu and jamais vu provide us with clues on how the re-engineering could be done. But this sort of stratagem isnt on Huxleys agenda. The clear implication of Brave New World is that any kind of drug-delivered happiness is false or inauthentic. In similar fashion, all forms of human genetic engineering and overt behavioral conditioning are to be tarred with the same brush. Conversely, the indwelling happiness of the handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed(a) Savage on the Reservation is portrayed as more actual and authentic, albeit transient and sometimes interspersed with sorrow.   The contrast between true and false happiness, however, is itself problematic. yet if the notion is both intelligible and potentially referential, its not clear that natural, selfish-DNA-sculpted minds offer a more authentic consciousness than precision-engineered euphoria. Highly discriminating and site-specific designer drugs and, ultimately, genetic engineering wont make things seem weird or alien. On the contrary, they can deliver a greater sense of realism, verisimilitude and emotional abstruseness to raw states of biochemical bliss than todays parochial conception of Real Life.