Website review: Aldous Huxley : Brave New World
Someone discovered this in Literature
•35 reviews since Jun 21, 2002
literature, brave-new-world, aldous-huxley
•huxley.net
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Reviews of this website
Toby-Linn rated 17 hours ago- Such a great book, I must reread it again!
- Innomen rated 5 weeks ago
- Learn to use the break tag people. Or tell stumble upon to preserve formatting.
Anyway, the biggest irony here is that the very fear they express in attacking this position is the primary thing that will be eliminated when this theoretical application becomes a reality. Almost as if fear were a living thing that has fears of its own.
Besides its not like we'd force this on you. If you want to flog yourselves till the end of time and live like Amish masochists, have at.
Weather you're behind it or not this is the future of our race. Fear, pain, and curiosity will settle for nothing less.
I for one welcome our pain free future. - Learn to use the break tag people. Or tell stumble upon to preserve formatting.
- coolnicktaken rated 6 weeks ago
- From the page: "John the Savage commits suicide soon after taking soma". Granted, it's been a while since I last read BNW, but I don't recall John the Savage dying. Regardless, both the writer and Bransby here seem to be going to extreme pains to read things backwards. Brave New World is about the human society and its evolution towards an empty existence, devoid of feelings and spirituality and completely mechanized (with humans mass-produced, just like the items they consume), having all of what is human replaced by a modern surrogate (dreams to drugs, love to sex, family to society, culture to movies/'feelies', relationships to promiscuity and so forth). And some 80 years later, I can't say he was being pessimistic, really; more like realistic. Conversely, the savages represent the other side of things, those who've shunned civilisation with all its advantages, wrapping themselves in a blanket of excessive superstition, emotion and other less cultured pleasures. Ultimately, it's about the conflict of man to balance his life between the evergrowing pressures of society (hence spiritual decay) and simple natural desires (also manifested through the infants' attraction towards books and flowers in the "training room").
- ywser rated 7 weeks ago
- Thumbs down to this. Thumbs up to what Bransby wrote.
- Bransby rated 7 weeks ago
- Sorry to be a party-pooper here, but can't help thinking that the author has singularly failed to understand what BNW is actually about. This essay essentially suggests that Huxley got it wrong in suggesting that a chemically-driven, bio-engineered society would inevitably lead to a far from perfect dystopia. The author is suggesting that through technical advances such a paradise is achievable and desireable, and that Huxley's vision of such a society is flawed and unnecessarily pessimistic. Essentially it's an argument about the degree of technological advance, and looking at such technological advances in an optomistic light, suggesting that they can in fact lead to a paradise-like utopia, if pursued "properly". Again, I think the author has missed the point entirely. What Huxley is actually suggesting with BNW is that the entire premiss of engineering a society for "perfect happines" is a false one, because it is impossible to define what would make everyone "happy". The author of this piece reduces it scientifically in terms of dopamine and serotonin levels, and that's far too simplistic. Is happines the one desire of all humanity? Can the entire human race agree to a fundamental way to achieve happiness for the entire race? I would suggest that the answer is obviously, and demonstrably "no", and I think that's what Huxley was saying. The reason Huxley's BNW is so disfunctional, boring, and ultimately a failure as a utopia is not because they didn't get the bio-engineering right, or because their drug of choice was flawed, it's because even with all their technological ability and scientific advance, they were unable to solve the problem of how to keep all of the people happy all of the time, and I believe that Huxley wrote it in this way to suggest that achieving a utopia in this way is fundamentally impossible. The suggestion is not that their approach was wrong, but that achieving a utopia, through any means, is fundamentally impossible. Personally, that's how I have always intepreted this book. The author's suggestion that Huxley is being unnecessarily pessimistic, or not allowing for advances in technology, and suggesting that paradise can be achived through genetic engineering and drugs belies the essential point that Huxley was making: before you can construct paradise, you have to agree on what paradise is.
- ppersivo rated 3 months ago
- a great explanation of a great book
- Penelopy rated 6 months ago
- Wr\\Good stuff
- challengeme rated 7 months ago
- nice essay about Brave New World
- blueangels007 rated 8 months ago
- Just this week an article came out in Science of Mind about how researchers are studying the effects of LSD, and other psychedelic drugs in treating various forms of depression, alcohol withdrawal, migraine headaches, with good results. What most people today don't realize is most of pharmaceutical drugs prescribed today come from plants. But the most common thing of all that 90% of people don't understand is the workings of basic brain chemistry, neurotransmitters. So just because you don't get it don't knock it. In the 1950's people laughed at Buck Rogers going to the moon in his tin space ship and look what happened less than 20yrs later. Nothing is impossible if you believe. Close you mind and you die.
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