The Brave New World
... handle. He also said that science is a great part of human life and as time progresses there is, or will be, a great concern about how far science has developed and if that is good for human society. In addition, he said, “The triumphs of physics, chemistry and engineering are tacitly taken for granted. The only scientific advances to be specifically described are those involving the application to human beings of the results of future research in biology, physiology and psychology”(xi, Huxley). The misuse of technology and the ethical problems that technology caused were a big part of this. For example, birth control, abortions, and other such life altering decisions. “Indeed unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supranational totalitarianism called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular and developing under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia”(xvii, Huxley). The misuse of weapons and technology was a great concern of Huxley’s, and well deserved at that. He lived in the time of the atom bomb and has seen the type of destruction technology can cause. He realized, as did many others, that violence, using technology, would be the destruction of the world. Just look at the war in Iraq. Who would have ever thought that we would be fighting a chemical war? Huxley was also concerned greatly about the way people treat birth so nonchalantly. The human hatchery was a satire about how people get pregnant and don’t even think twice about the responsibility at hand and the choices they have to make. So instead children are taken and molded into whatever class they are randomly selected to be in, and that decides how developed they are allowed to become. It also satirizes technology in a way, because it shows yet another way that man becomes, or tries to be God. For example, “Over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and, in a shield, the World States motto, Community, Identity, Stability”(3, Huxley). This is satirical for many things, because it deals with so many different topics. First of all technology and cloning, even though Huxley himself never got to see Dolly, the sheep, being cloned, he knew it was inevitable, and that eventually man would try and play the role of God. With the new stem-cell research that is going on we could very well be hatching humans in less than a decade. Also, another thing that was going on during Huxley’s time was communism, which is what the conditioning center is satirical for. It’s alluding to both communism and how it will eventually be, and also the way society is. He captured the essence of society, and also why communism would work in some countries, because people, in a mob mentality, don’t realize the harm they actually cause if they are causing any. They rely on each other to be the correct decision maker, and everyone just does what everyone else is doing because it seems right at the time. This also ties in to how society overlooks things because they don’t want to “see” it, just like the subject of birth control, and abortions. Huxley’s point of view is accurate, for we are staring God in the eye and forcefully putting his decisions in our hands. Soma was another reference made by Huxley. It alludes to...