Doomed to paradise

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Isabel Yap, 19, is an aspiring writer-entrepreneur. She is an incoming college junior taking up management. She is also desperately in love with words, and wants to share that love with the world. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Philippine Speculative Fiction Volumes IV and V, Heights, The Philippines Free Press, and Every Day Poets Online. She was a fellow at the 14th Ateneo-Heights Writers Workshop, and the 10th UST Writers Workshop.

Imagine a world where everyone is happy. There is no sickness or disease. There is no poverty, depression, or destruction. There are no wars, no worries, not even any wants — desires are readily fulfilled. There is no pain, no fear. Everyone gets along with everyone else. Everyone is content. Governments are stable. Society is one.

Sounds like paradise, doesn’t it?

Such is the setting of Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel Brave New World. Set several centuries into the future, Brave New World presents the Earth as a utopia, where the ultimate values of mankind are “community, identity, stability.” Indeed, almost everyone is perfectly happy — but that happiness comes at a hefty price. 

People are no longer able to decide their own futures. Instead, society’s Controllers predetermine everything. Society is divided into five classes: Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, and Epsilon. Each human is genetically engineered and conditioned to fit those roles: Alphas and Betas are tall and smart, while the rest are short, stupid, and ugly. Babies, instead of being conceived, are decanted in test tubes, then chemically engineered and sleep-conditioned to perfection. 

Love and passion are nonexistent. Society believes that “everyone belongs to everyone,” thus people talk freely about having each other, and sex is as casual as dinner. Work is programmed into people’s brains, and is now automatic, painless. Everyone does their tasks efficiently — those who don’t are severely punished.

Art has become extinct. Shakespeare’s romantic ideals have been replaced by books on embryonic development. The great musicians and composers have been traded for distorted nursery rhymes, such as “Bye, Baby Banting, soon you’ll need decanting.” God is taboo. In his place, people worship “the great Ford” — the American automobile magnate, who mass-produced the Model T in 1908 and, in so doing, inspired the new way of living. For every other problem, there is a foolproof solution: soma, a miracle drug that can intoxicate even the most troubled mind.

The story begins with Bernard Marx, an Alpha-plus engineer, who is uglier than the average top-tier human. Discontent with his work and physical features, he decides to take a vacation to a Savage Reservation in Mexico. Occupants of Savage Reservations are allowed to retain their old customs, as long as they don’t “infect” the rest of the world. Civilized people take tours in reservations to observe the grotesque practices of the past, like pregnancy and disease. Bernard brings along Lenina Crowne, a highly attractive Alpha girl.

During their trip, Bernard and Lenina meet John the Savage — a man who still believes in God and sacrifice, and whose entire vocabulary is based on The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. John stands out from the Reservation Indians because of his fair complexion. They soon learn that John is the child of civilized people, but was born and raised among Savages. Bernard decides to bring John to the civilized world as a social experiment.

John’s initial amazement at the wonders of the New World quickly turns into horror, as he discovers how ignoble life has become. He detests the use of soma, and how it serves as a cheap escape from everything. He hates how death is quickly disregarded. He is disgusted by the widespread promiscuity, and how easy love is.

John eventually wreaks havoc, and is brought before the World Controller Mustapha Mond. The debate that ensues is the climax of the novel: Mond represents happiness, security, and stability, while John symbolizes freedom, truth, and beauty. John demands to know why the world can’t have Jesus, Shakespeare, romance. Mond replies that one can’t have happiness and stability when there are tragedies like the strangling of Desdemona, and Jesus bleeding on the cross. Why would people need a suffering God? They already have universal happiness. They don’t want the inconveniences of the past. They don’t want sacrifice. 

John passionately declares that he doesn’t want comfort — he wants “God, poetry, real danger, freedom, goodness. (He wants) sin.”

To which Mustapha Mond counters, “You’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” says John defiantly. “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” 

Would you have made the same choice? No matter how many times I’ve reread this book, the gravity of such a decision, and what it eventually leads John to do, still chills me. What if we could live without sacrifice? What if we were all perfectly happy? What need would we have of art if we were content — if we were never hungry or in pain, if work was never tiring, if we could swallow some soma the minute we felt a tremor of sadness, of anger? How can the world be stable if we’re as different and conscious as we are now — how can the world be stable as long as art, and religion, both radical and life-changing, exist?

I don’t know. I don’t live in that world. I live in our world — where God does exist; where faith is known, necessary. Where art can be found everywhere, anywhere, allowing people to express the beauty in their hearts, that their minds can conceive. I know how wonderful these things are. I know how fulfilling it is to make my own choices, to have my own life to live. I agree that death is unpleasant. I agree that many things can be painful, disgusting, and terrible. I know there are sacrifices I would rather not make, that I would rather no one have to make. But if I didn’t feel these things — if there were no death, no pain, nothing ugly, nothing wrong — then I wouldn’t feel at all. I’d just be a shell, floating, wildly disconnected from what makes us human, what makes us real.

How far are we from the artificial existence of Mustapha Mond’s world?   It feels like something we draw closer to each day, with every advance in technology, with our increasingly fast and furious way of living. Huxley’s story tells us that we can’t have paradise on earth if we continue to believe in one after death. They just aren’t compatible. 

So which paradise are we moving towards? How many steps forward must we take for man, before we lose our humanity? Do we seek happiness or truth, stability or beauty, God or science? Can there ever be a balance? Huxley’s novel reminded me how important it is to ask these questions, and to find my own answers, because the real Brave New World is ours. It is defined by what we do and how we live, every shaky step we take towards tomorrow.