Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Predestination and Morality: the Battle of the Wits
Reading more and more of Brave New World I find myself continually going back the basic idea of the book explained in the middle of the first chapter. The idea being that the inhabitants of this time period are so driven to create stability that they predestine "humans" to become certain people, as in how some are shown the "horror of cold" so that they will migrate to the tropics to be miners and the such. The Director states that it "is the secrect to happiness and virtue-liking what you've got to do." This statement brings in the idea of aiming people into their inescapable social destiny. Going over this idea in my head it bring up the moral question of right and wrong. Is it right to predestine certain individuals for greatness while others are meant to suffer and toil? True it might make the community more stable and possibly more effective and easier to control, but is it right? Personally I believe that predestination is a wise tale that, possibly, later in the book will unfold as an unreal fantasy that can not possibly last. As it mentions in the book it is possible to create mass amount of identical beings, but it not possible to mold their mind to think the same.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I personaly do not beleive it is right to force people into social classes, so i agree with your general argument. It is not thier "destiny" to be thier lower class. How would the upper class people (alphas and betas) know that there is not someone(like Benard Marx)who is resisiting the social classes that have been forced upon them. i do not understand why there are social classes at all and why does there have to be any breaching of moral codes. can't everyone be upper class (alphas) and there for society can more foward, if the potential of the people are not limited. i mean, with all thier technology, you would think that they would have robots doing thier dirty work, no humans. mabey the upper class secretely take pleasure in making a lower class. this, in reality, makes thier society less stable.
ReplyDeleteI don't know exactly how I feel on this issue. Yes, because of the liberated society that we live in, we think that the way the society in the book performs is dirty and wrong. The cloning, the "alcohol surrogate", the way they torment babies to get them to behave a certain way and brainwash them with hypnomaedia; it all seems awful. But for the people that live in the society, they think it's wonderful. They love their position in society, they love not having to suffer, not having to deal with a nagging mother or a baby to take care of. Yes, it's awful and indecent for human beings to play God, but they are all trapped in a sphere of happiness that they love. So, if the people are happy and don't know what they don't have, is it truly wrong?
ReplyDeletelooking back on this older post after i've finished brave new world really puts things in to perspective. I still beleive that it is wrong to try to arrange the destiny of someone before they are created, but with difference comes disaster, acording to the minds of the people the utopia in Brave New World. In the minds of the people of Brave New World, what they are doing with predestination is morally correct. This is because they've rewritten what is "right" and "wrong". well, at least in the minds of the majority of the people on earth. Therefore they have become the authority on morality. they have become the standard. Morality is often based on standards, commonly accepted by a majority of people.
ReplyDelete