Miranda's Utopia

I recently reread Huxley's Brave New World--it was one of the books for my tutorial this semester. It is, in case you were wondering, still a masterpiece.

Huxley's world is often labeled a dystopia, but what interests me so very much about the book is that people call it a dystopia. Consider: What exactly is wrong with Huxley's world? Everyone is happy, very very happy. If they ever aren't happy, they take soma, a pleasant drug with no ill side effects. Everyone loves his job because he has been conditioned since birth, or actually since conception, to love his job. There is no marriage, so there is no romantic jealousy. Everyone is friends with everyone else. Sure, there are a few malcontents, but they are sent off to an island with other malcontents (Iceland, for example) and then they can enjoy their lives living with others like them. Movies have advanced to the point where you not only can see and hear, but also smell and feel the action on the screen--and the plots of these feelies are all designed to make you quite happy. So, what exactly is the problem with this world? It is, after all, exactly the sort of world the Modern Age wants to design. And, yet, everyone who reads it knows instinctively it is wrong, very very wrong.

Defending the glories of the Brave New World is a very merry experiment. It is painfully easy to do. And yet, it is nearly impossible to convince someone that the society is good. Why?

I suspect that the instinctive wrongness of the society is the instinct we all feel that there is more to life than simply being happy. We know that the purpose of life must be bigger than that. Being happy for the wrong reasons is not satisfying. The implications of that statement are rather profound--once that statement is acknowledged, simply saying that something will make people happier is no longer a sufficient rationale for doing it. And that thought leads to all sorts of interesting questions about the Chief End of Man, which are of course the very sorts of questions the Modern Age, the Brave New World in the making, wants to avoid asking.

Which brings me to the most important problem raised by this book: The cover is falling off my copy of Brave New World. So, I suspect the next time I read it, I will have to buy a new copy. Or I can just never reread it and keep my old copy. I think it is probably odd that I am already thinking about the fact that a future decision about whether to reread this book has implications for whether I have to ditch the copy of it I have had for decades. My copy, by the way, is an old paperback which once was a library book, originally checked out with a due date of January 10, 1978, then re-checked out with due dates of 5/30/78; 4/21/81; 12/8/81 and finally 10/12/82. After that, it seems that nobody checked it out, and then I bought it, probably at a library book sale. Now the cover is falling off. It's not quite dead, yet, but I am afraid that if I ever read the book again it will die, and then I will be responsible for the death of my book. I don't want to kill my book, but I also don't want to imagine never rereading it. And, I know what you are thinking--why don't I get a new copy and just keep my old copy?--that just proves you don't understand books--having a book is like having a wife--I can't get a new copy of this book because it would be like getting a second wife. So, if I get a new copy, I have to get rid of the first copy. Now I can do that for other books if the new copy is an improvement over the old copy--that seems like a software upgrade. [Don't worry, my analogy isn't breaking down with dire consequences--my current wife is perfect, so there are no conceivable software upgrades for my spouse.] But, just getting a new book to replace an old, favorite with whom I have lived for decades is simply wrong. So, if I get a new book, I have to bury this one. This is getting really depressing.