Brave new world Chapters 1-3
Chapters 1-3
The book begins in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning center, a squat grey building, the year is A.F. 632 (632 years after Ford). The shield outside proclaims the motto of the World State - “Community, Identity, Stability”. The DHC (Director of Hatchery and conditioning center) walks into a lab followed by a group of students. The Director shows them how the ovaries, excised voluntarily, are stored in optimum conditions and the produced eggs carefully examined for any abnormalities before being transferred to a porous receptacle. The egg is then fertilized in the lab and once the egg is fertilized, it is taken to the incubators, and the development paths for the fertilized eggs diverge. The Delta, Gamma, and Epsilon eggs are taken out of the incubation after 36 hours to undergo the Bokanovsky process, while the Alpha and Beta eggs are directly transferred to the lined bottles.
The Bokanovsky process introduces various hurdles in the development of the fertilized egg, and this hindrance causes it to bud and it forms multiple copies, in such a way a singular egg can produce 8 to 96 embryos. The directory fondly discussed the efficacy of the Bokanovsky process that allows them to create standard individuals all genetically related at a much faster pace than nature, which allows them to stabilize the world population. The director calls to a passing worker and introduces him as Henry Foster, and asks him to accompany them as the group views the various steps involved in the creation and conditioning of human babies. The Predestinators track the figures for the Hatchery and then communicate those figures to the Fertilizers who then provide the requested number of embryos for the specified castes. Foster explains how they alter the environment of the embryo as it develops in the embryo store to suit the role that it is created to fulfill. When the embryos' sex is determined, the males are labeled with a T, the females with a circle, and freemartins with a question mark. He elaborates that only 30% of female embryos are allowed to grow while the rest are injected with testosterone to create the sterile freemartins, as fertility is a 'nuisance' that should only be allowed in the minimum number of people.
The group comes upon a nurse, Lenina, a Beta-Minus worker who looks pretty despite lupus, and Foster asks her to see him on the roof later as usual. The group also encounters another worker that is slowing down the circulation of blood surrogate to limit development, as the director explains, an Epsilon must have an Epsilon environment. The director explains how they have managed to condition the embryos to enjoy their predestined environment, they are exposed to extreme temperatures, chemicals, diseases, and motion to acclimatize them to the conditions they are likely to encounter in the real world. The group is then led to the Decanting room for a glance, where the mature embryos are born.
Foster leaves the group in the Decanting room while the director leads the students to the infant nurseries and the Neo - Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms. He demonstrates to them how children are taught to hate books, and flowers by subjecting the Bokanovskied Delta children to electric shocks and loud noises when they try to touch beautifully illustrated books and flower petals.
The Director goes on to elaborate how in the past, humans were born through parents by viviparous means and raised by a mother and father, and Freud had revealed all the problems that arose from being raised in a family. In the present society, humans are born in labs and are raised by the state. He informs them of the discovery of sleep-teaching or hypnopaedia, wherein the state employs sleep-teaching to impart moral lessons. He then leads them to a nursery with 80 sleeping Beta babies. In the nursery, they discover they sleeping Beta infants being taught class consciousness. The Director describes hypnopaedia as 'the greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time'. He passionately explains how the state can inculcate these ideas into the children that grow to be adults with the same ideas and guiding ideology.
The Director leads the students to a garden where naked children play, they use a variety of machinery in their games, and the Director talks about the old games which required no apparatus and so discouraged consumption. The Controllers now only approved games that required the use of complex machinery. The group witnesses a nurse escorting a howling boy out of the shrubbery, and she explains to the Director that she is taking him for a psychiatric evaluation as he was reluctant to carry out erotic play. The director turns to the students and explains how in the past humans had discouraged and even forbidden sexual play among young children until at least the age of 20, a notion that the students find ridiculous. Just as the Director sits down, his speech to the students is interrupted by the Controller of Western Europe, one of only 10 Controllers in the world, the students salute him in shock and the Director stands bolt upright. All the clocks ring in the building, signaling the end of the day shift. Henry Foster travels on a lift with the Assistant Predestinator and Bernard Marx from the Psychology department. Lenina Crowne makes her way to the women's changing room that is bustling with activity.
The controller, His Fordship Mustapha Mond, sits down with the Director and begins to educate the students about how things were in the old world. How people lived in homes with mothers, fathers, and siblings, all crammed into a small space. He explains how that is now believed to be the reason why society was plagued by so many problems and issues, as people were limited by ideas like monogamy and marriage. In the modern world, no such notions remain, as Henry Foster discusses Lenina with the Assistant Predestinator and encourages him to 'have her'. On the other side, Lenina engages Fanny Crowne in conversation about who she intends to step out with that evening. Fanny disparages Lenina when she discovers that she had been with just Henry Foster for nearly 4 months, and encourages her to be more promiscuous. They all repeat the same mantra that has been fed to them since infancy, “everyone belongs to everyone.” Bernard Marx hears Henry Foster and the Assistant Predestinator discuss Lenina, and he finds it difficult to control his anger at how they talk about her like a piece of meat.
Mustapha Mond explains to the students how carefully their lives have been organized so that they don't have to experience any of the negative emotions that accompany a desire unfulfilled. He then discusses how the earlier governments had been averse to ideas that founded the present society, these old governments had instead paid more attention to arbitrary things like democracy, and liberty. Eventually, there was a war called the nine-year war, and its aftermath led the Controllers to understand that the world couldn't be changed by force.
Lenina gives in to the advice that Fanny offers and decides to take up the offer that Bernard Marx had made to take her to a Savage Reservation. Fanny criticizes Bernard, for even though he is an Alpha Plus, he is uncommonly small and has a reputation of often being alone. According to Fanny, this is extremely uncommon and unnatural, she discusses how there are rumors that he was accidentally drugged with alcohol during ectogenesis.
Mustapha Mond describes how the crosses of the Christian religion were hacked and made to look like Ts instead, inspired by the Model T Car created by Ford. How scientists were able to synthesize Soma, a substance that replaced all religious and substance needs of the population. How the problem of old age was solved, allowing old individuals to continue to work and function as they had done at the age of 17.
Analysis
The world state idealizes Henry Ford, who introduced the assembly line to manufacture the Model T car. In Huxley's world, the state utilizes the assembly line in human production where individuality is discouraged in the lower castes by causing their fertilized eggs to divide several times. It is also interesting to note that there is a seeming confusion between Freud and Ford, while the former had excelled in the study of psychology around sex, the latter was an industrialist that specialized in manufacturing.
The author emphasizes the effect of the conditioning by having the characters repeat phrases taught through Hypnopaedia. The treatment of sexual relations in Brave New World is the polar opposite of how George Orwell depicted it in 1984. While in 1984 sexual relations were prohibited by the government, in this book they are encouraged by the world state. In both, feelings associated with sex are considered important in conditioning and governing people. Surprisingly, sex in this book exists merely as a means of pleasure and socializing, but sex with the result of a child is considered abhorrent and words like father and mother are labeled as gross taboos.
