Taylor's essay.....cool!

Taylor wrote a 5 page essay last week. I was really impressed with the writing and also the topic. Here is the opening part of the essay....thought you would enjoy this. I also thought the book selection by the school was interesting. (sorry about the formatting, the cut and paste did not work that well.)


The Conception of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Brave New World itself is a social criticism. Huxley’s major purpose in writing Brave New World was to reveal the horrifying future of “totalitarian ideology and uncontrolled advances in technology and science” (Baker 22). During the 1930’s many thoughts, ideas and events influenced and prompted Huxley to write a book in which the future was completely ruled by technology. Huxley found many faults with society in the 1930’s. He felt “in 1932 he was living in an age in which science had outstripped ethics, and in which there was ‘every reason to suppose that the world will become even more completely technicized, even more elaborately regimented than it is at present’” (23). He believed that ethics no longer played a part in modern society and science was becoming ever-more present. Through the influence of ideas of men like H.A.L. Fisher, events like failing democracies, and the behaviors of men like Marquis de Sade, Aldous Huxley formed his own thoughts and beliefs about society and wrote Brave New World as a warning that the advances in science and technology would increase governmental power and strangle individualism and morality. According to Robert S. Baker, many of Huxley’s ideas came from H.A.L. Fisher, one of the leading English historians of the period. Fisher “saw Europe on the threshold of a new period of ‘insane’ nationalism and extremist ideologies in which its ‘moral unity’ has decisively ‘broken’”(51). Huxley ‘took these ideas to the extreme and revealed the severity of a world where moral unity is choked by the government. Huxley “saw the rapid changes that scientific advancement was allowing in his society and, aided by a strong scientific background, imagined how much further it might go” (Bloom1 2). In World State the government holds so much power that human life itself “is carefully controlled from conception to death” by “outright control of the numbers and types of babies born and subconscious conditioning of people's thoughts” (Hochman 2). From what they look like to what they think, citizens of world state are completely defined and pre-destined by the government of world state. There are no morals in this world, because there God does not exist. The government suppressed all sort of individuality. Since Fisher was a prominent figure in the 1930’s Huxley was influenced by his thoughts, and many are found throughout the novel. Fisher found history to be “a cycle of achieved and lost unity, of social calamities, alternating cultural divisions and deepening lines of fracture” and Huxley agreed with him, and found history a complex tangled web of interacting forces (Baker 51-52). Huxley creates Mustapha Mund for the purpose of expressing that opinion. In the first few chapters Mund explains the way World State is run and informs the students “‘you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful inspired saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk. History,’ he repeated slowly, ‘is bunk’” (Huxley 34). The characters in Brave New World serve as pawns for Huxley to expose his own opinions through fictitious people.

footnote....TF 2009