Brave New Adulthood

A most insightful and prescient book, that one.

Observer,

Neither *Brave New World* nor any other book was "forced down [your] throat" in school.

There were books you chose to engage and books you did not.

When you chose not to engage books, it was not because the books were "boring" but because you were.

JSP,

I'm a huge fan of literature, but there are fewer ways to make it intolerable than to have a teacher who doesn't understand it or care for it teach it in school.

Many books need to be read but not in class. Shakespeare should never be read before it is heard and seen.

There are good teachers, but they need to take some advice from Mark Twain, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

You can talk about how these things affect a book, but what the author intends and what the reader gets out of it are not always the same. If they are, the author was far too didactic to be worth reading.

Rod, the most fascinating prediction made by Huxley in that book is the one which has not yet borne fruit but is roaring down the pike. We see it's antecedents already (via surrogate mothers and the sort):

the artificial uterus. Be advised, that technology is being developed right now and will be perfected for human use within our lifetimes. It will change everything about what it means to be born, to have parents, to have children. It will turn reproduction debates upside down, and it is coming.

There was nothing wrong with Bernard Marx that could not be cured with the proper therapy. That he was troubled by some deep-seated anxiety is obvious but there is medication to deal with that and allow him to live a normal, happy life untroubled by such petty concerns.

I found a free text copy of Brave New World in full on the Internet.

What you have found appears to be a blatant violation of copyright law.

When the individual feels, the community reels.

Ain't it the truth.

I shouldn't have said "tip-off". The failure to address copyright doesn't necessarily mean they don't have the rights. It's just quite suspicious.

I first read BNW in 1964, and it didn't quite hit the mark.
Since then I've seen that Huxley was REMARKABLY prophetic
of post-1970 America. He got almost everything right.

1984, by contrast, wasn't prophetic and wasn't really meant
to be ... Orwell just translated contemporary Soviet life
to England so British socialists could see that their goal
wasn't so wonderful.

I'm not trying to thread-jack, but this is too good to not quote now that, inspired by this thread, I found a free text version of "Anna Karenina" on the internet:

"Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? And
could one say anything more senseless than what he said? He said
that one must not live for one's own wants, that is, that one
must not live for what we understand, what we are attracted by,
what we desire, but must live for something incomprehensible, for
God, whom no one can understand nor even define. What of it?
Didn't I understand those senseless words of Fyodor's? And
understanding them, did I doubt of their truth? Did I think them
stupid, obscure, inexact? No, I understood him, and exactly as
he understands the words. I understood them more fully and
clearly than I understand anything in life, and never in my life
have I doubted nor can I doubt about it. And not only I, but
everyone, the whole world understands nothing fully but this, and
about this only they have no doubt and are always agreed.

"And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a
miracle which would convince me. A material miracle would have
persuaded me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible,
continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never
noticed it!

"Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That's
comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can't
do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the
same Fyodor says that one mustn't live for one's belly, but must
live for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And I
and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now--
peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned, who have thought
and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same
thing--we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live
for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm,
incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be
explained by the reason--it is outside it, and has no causes and
can have no effects.

"If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a
reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the
chain of cause and effect.

"And yet I know it, and we all know it.

"What could be a greater miracle than that?

"Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be
over?" thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing
the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief
from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it
seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and
incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the
forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass.
He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in
the lush, feathery, woodland grass.

"Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand," he thought,
looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and
following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a
blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of
goat-weed. "What have I discovered?" he asked himself, bending
aside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle's way and twisting
another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over onto
it. "What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered?

"I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew.
I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too
gives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have found
the Master.

"Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of this
grass and of this beetle (there, she didn't care for the grass,
she's opened her wings and flown away), there was going on a
transformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical,
and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in the
aspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a process
of evolution. Evolution from what? into what?--Eternal evolution
and struggle.... As though there could be any sort of tendency
and struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spite
of the utmost effort of thought along that road I could not
discover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and
yearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: 'To
live for God, for my soul.' And this meaning, in spite of its
clearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is the
meaning of everything existing. Yes, pride," he said to himself,
turning over on his stomach and beginning to tie a noose of
blades of grass, trying not to break them.

"And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect.
And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness of
intellect. The cheating knavishness of intellect, that's it," he
said to himself.

And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of his
ideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was the
clear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brother
hopelessly ill.

Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, and
himself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death, and
forgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life was impossible
like that, and that he must either interpret life so that it
would not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil,
or shoot himself.

But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, and
feeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had many
joys and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaning
of his life.

What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly,
but thinking wrongly.

He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritual
truths that he had sucked in with his mother's milk, but he had
thought, not merely without recognition of these truths, but
studiously ignoring them.

Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the
beliefs in which he had been brought up.

"What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if
I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live
for God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed and
lied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my
life would have existed for me." And with the utmost stretch of
imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would
have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

"I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could not
give an answer to my question--it is incommensurable with my
question. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my
knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge
I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all
men, GIVEN, because I could not have got it from anywhere.

"Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at
knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was
told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they
told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not
reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the
law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction
of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving
one's neighbor reason could never discover, because it's
irrational."

and ... just as important ...

"Well, what is it perplexes me?" Levin said to himself, feeling
beforehand that the solution of his difficulties was ready in his
soul, though he did not know it yet. "Yes, the one unmistakable,
incontestable manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right
and wrong, which has come into the world by revelation, and which
I feel in myself, and in the recognition of which--I don't make
myself, but whether I will or not--I am made one with other men
in one body of believers, which is called the church. Well, but
the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists--what of
them?" he put to himself the question he had feared to face.
"Can these hundreds of millions of men be deprived of that
highest blessing without which life has no meaning?" He pondered
a moment, but immediately corrected himself. "But what am I
questioning?" he said to himself. "I am questioning the relation
to Divinity of all the different religions of all mankind. I am
questioning the universal manifestation of God to all the world
with all those misty blurs. What am I about? To me
individually, to my heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond
all doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here I am obstinately
trying to express that knowledge in reason and words.

"Don't I know that the stars don't move?" he asked himself,
gazing at the bright planet which had shifted its position up to
the topmost twig of the birch-tree. "But looking at the
movements of the stars, I can't picture to myself the rotation of
the earth, and I'm right in saying that the stars move.

"And could the astronomers have understood and calculated
anything, if they had taken into account all the complicated and
varied motions of the earth? All the marvelous conclusions they
have reached about the distances, weights, movements, and
deflections of the heavenly bodies are only founded on the
apparent motions of the heavenly bodies about a stationary earth,
on that very motion I see before me now, which has been so for
millions of men during long ages, and was and will be always
alike, and can always be trusted. And just as the conclusions of
the astronomers would have been vain and uncertain if not founded
on observations of the seen heavens, in relation to a single
meridian and a single horizon, so would my conclusions be vain
and uncertain if not founded on that conception of right, which
has been and will be always alike for all men, which has been
revealed to me as a Christian, and which can always be trusted in
my soul. The question of other religions and their relations to
Divinity I have no right to decide, and no possibility of
deciding."