Brave New World Do., 28.08.08
RL
Chapter One
First impressions and remarks after having read chapter one
After having read chapter one, I was first of all suprised of the detailed way Aldous Huxley describes the Bokanowsky Process in which artificial foetices are produced and prepared for their lives, because he wrote this distopian story in 1932.
In chapter one students are given a guide tour through the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The director of this centre and Mrs. Foster, a specialist who joins the groupe after a while, explain with great enthousiasm what happens in the different rooms of the factory. Especially proud they are of their invention to make people have perfectly happy lives. After a foetice has gone through several steps and rooms, it is sent to the “Social Predestination Room” to which they are transported in an escalator. Here we see a first example of the drastically ironic and critic language the author makes use of. The foetices are of different qualities. So, the predestinators in the Predestination Room sent figures to the Fertilizing Room which amount of which qualitiy is needed. In the Social Predestination Room these foetices are then distibuted and sent to the “Embyo Store” again by the escalator. As people can climb up and down the “social ladder”, here they are brought to their social caste by a more modern and technical escalator. In the “Decanting Room” it is decided whether female foetices become freemartins or normal females. Freemartin means that they will be infertile – of course there have to be many infertile females, to secure the factory. After that, the conditioning of the embryos start. Depending on the caste they will live in, they have to procede several operations. “The lower the caste, the shorter the oxigen.” (p.15, l.7), decribes Mr Foster the way lower caste epsilon embryos are made less intelligent. By that they can never rebell. Whereas “Alpha Plus Intellectuals” who are conditioned on the “First Gallery level” do not have to fight for oxigen but just at the moment have their afternoon sleeps and therefore cannot be disturbed. These people will later work in the factory.
The intellectuals have the power. They decide about the lives of all the other people by oposing them their caste, their intelligence and even their jobs. Tropical workers are for example inoculated at metre 150., chemical workers are trained in areas of chlorine and other chemicals.
By having a look again at the time the book was writen, it seems to me that Huxely may have wanted to criticise or to warn the people of the way Hitler trained the young people in the Hitler Youth and other organisations. This training was also not recognised by the people. Comparable to the Predestinators, the grade the young man had in the Hitler Youth was also matched with their “quality” in reliance to a further war. But he could also have ment the way intelligent and cross thinking people were kept at bay by the obliged biases and punishments.
The fact that this chapter could have been seen as a preview of what might happen in future and today as well as a critic of genetic surgery and cloning, makes it in my opinion quite interesting.
