Happiness in Brave New World :: Brave New World Essays

Happiness in Brave New military personnel     Huxley implies that by abolishing skank and mental pain, the brave new worlders throw got rid of the most cloggy and sublime experiences that life understructure tenderize as well. Most 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 are hints, too, that rough of the utopians may feel an ill-defined sense 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 deliver lives, then we must be able to contrast the good part of life with the bad parts, to feel both joy and despair. As rationalisations go, its a good one.   But its still wrong-headed. If pressed, we must concede that the victims of chronic belief or pain today dont need interl udes of happiness or anaesthesia to know they are suffering horribly. Moreover, if the mere relativity of pain and pleasance were true, then one might imagine that pseudo-memories in the form of neurochemical artefacts imbued with the metric grain of pastness would do the job of contrast just as well as nude nastiness. The neurochemical signatures of deja vu and jamais vu provide us with clues on how the re-engineering could be done. But this var. 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 mistakable fashion, all forms of human genetic engineering and overt behavioural teach are to be tarred with the same brush. Conversely, the natural happiness of the handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed boom on the Reservation is portrayed as more real and authentic, albeit casual and sometimes interspersed with sorrow.   The contrast between true and false happiness, h owever, is itself problematic. Even if the concept 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 selective and site-specific causality 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 depth to raw states of biochemical bliss than todays parochial conception of Real Life.