Sahityasetu

Abstract:

Huxley’s Brave New World has always been a fascinating speculative fiction. It imagined a super advanced man-made and man-ridden future, a future where men are scientifically and psychologically manipulated to think alike. One of such alike thinking is the belief that as long as humans have control over machines, it is not necessary to hold onto Nature because Nature has nothing useful to offer to humanity. This vital layer gets avoided every time this novel is taken into account. This paper tries to concentrate on the concern that the novel hints at, that technology can unyoke the human future from the natural ecosystem. Coupled with this, the aim of this paper is also to establish Brave New World as a Climate Fiction. Considering the visible decay of nature and climate change at hand, climate- fiction is a rapidly growing genre of the present century and claiming Brave New World as the same will further establish the multidimensionality and perenniality of the novel.

Key Words: Anthropocentrism, Biodiversity, Climate Fiction, Ecosystem, Monoculture

Introduction:

There is not an iota of doubt in the fact that Aldous Huxley’s famous novel Brave New World is the quintessential example of what we consider to be the typical dystopian science fiction. Published in 1932, this novel has captured more or less all the primary and important qualities and characteristics of the science fiction genre; a futuristic setting, a staple prediction of the future of humankind and imaginary inventions which can change human lives forever. According to Roger Luckhurst, “every technological breakthrough tends to be accompanied by anxious announcements of its catastrophic effect on literature.” Perhaps that is why the novel saw immediate recognition as both the time of the publication and the theme of the novel coincided with a time of newly found and rapid technological growth of the twentieth century. Brave New World satisfied the anxiety of the twentieth century by proposing a much logical and relevant “catastrophic effect” of the rapid change in society brought in by the advancement of science. But what makes this novel more special is not the fact that it predicted a future likely to become real, but the fact that it predicted a future so layered and detailed, that now, even after almost a century, the novel still evokes interest. The relevance has not died out. In the view of Margaret Atwood, the book is “still as vibrant, fresh and somehow shocking as it was”, when she first read it. This freshness and shock remains always there mainly because, even with the changing priorities and shifting focuses within the sci-fi genre; the novel never fails to live up to them with changing times. One such new focus of the sci-fi can be found on environmental matters, because “climate change is no longer just a scientific concern, but encompasses economics, sociology” (Maslin) and even literature. This led to the emergence of a new subgenre called climate fiction or cli-fi in short. Climate fiction is a relatively new genre and mostly structured on the sci-fi model, but this time the focus remains on the “catastrophic effect” on nature and environment as a whole. From the early 2000s, this genre is becoming widely popular with the fiction writers and fiction readers. With global warming and environmental issues becoming household concerns, with the gradual advancement of science and technology, and increasing population; a vast majority of natural scientists now regard dramatic climate changes as inevitable. Following this fear, the contemporary sci-fi writers made climate crisis as the focal issue of their stories. Based on the new priorities of the dystopian fictions, if Brave New World has to survive with the still relevant tag, then, we are desperately in need of something like a Climate fiction version of the book.

It is true that back in 1932, when the novel was published, climate change was not an alarming issue like today. But if discussed thoroughly, it will be discovered, that along with the theory of the de-humanization of the humans in a highly fashioned and architectured society, Huxley has predicted a climate change as well, which is not at all favourable. The change is manifest in today’s time and is eerily similar to what Huxley has presented in this novel. This paper will try to re-observe Brave New World in a new light and tries to find out how it can also be re- read as an eco-dystopia or cli-fi. In the process of doing so, the paper will first talk about climate fictions in general; what it is all about and what it inculcates. Then, this paper will attempt to situate climate fictions within the broader category of science fiction and environmental writings. And finally it will do an in-depth study of Brave New World from an ecocritical perspective and will try to locate it as a cli-fi written at a time when the term itself did not exist.

Climate Fiction

Climate fiction or cli-fi (a play on sci-fi) is used to describe books in which an altered climate is part of the plot. “Climate fiction or cli fi came into use in the late 2000s as a fictional literature genre dealing with man-made climate change” (Reitsma et al S1819). No matter how distant it seems, this change is for real and the most alarming part of this problem is that it is hugely a “man-made” crisis. Climate fictions only dramatised this already existing, but now glaringly visible, problem. Sir David Attenborough, an English broadcaster and natural historian, in his 2020 Netflix documentary film A Life on Our Planet describes how human beings can alienate themselves from the overall ecosystem only because they are intelligent creatures. Attenborough opines that “our intelligence changed the way in which we evolved”; while the rest of the world need to develop physical abilities to have sustainable lives; for the humans “only an idea could do that”, because it could be passed on from one generation to the next. Apart from personal morality and sense of ethics, on the practical ground humans do not face any corporeal restriction; there is literally nothing that can stop man to prosper. This prosperity is no doubt always man-centric, without taking into account the larger part of the ecosystem. The more we acknowledge the accelerating power of humanity the more we make the Earth prone to change its ecosystem, rendering it as vulnerable as a child. This crisis is a direct result of anthropocentrism, a belief that human beings are the most important and valuable creature in the world, they are at the centre of all the needs, so the remaining species and the whole ecosystem of Earth are forced to arrange and re-arrange their position according to the priority of humankind. Keeping up with the proportion, the growth of population adds more and more to the intrinsic value of the humankind. Nature then becomes an external environment, without any innate usefulness. The preservation of nature then is totally depended on the instrumental value it has in human life. Nature will be protected only if it serves as food, as fuel or even as beauty. So, in the anthropocentric world, the environment is nothing more than a designed orchard, which has a sole purpose of keeping human life moving. So, the idea of Climate Fictions is not limited to describing the declining and damaging effects on the environment; it is far more layered. It is about the collapse of a system, the loss of a balance. The concept of climate change includes the expansion of the city but also does not exclude the agriculture and the “untouched wilderness”. For a balanced sustainability, the ecosystem needs to keep its diversity intact. But the population growth indicates the need of more farmland and more focus on the profit margin gained from agriculture. No matter how green- friendly it seems, but unregulated farming actually takes away the diversity of the wilderness. For humans natural forests have no intrinsic value, as they do not contribute to the immediate human interest.

As the world is becoming more and more anthropocentric and more technologically developed, NATURE as a phenomenon is neglected and simultaneously exploited for fulfilling human needs. But according to Sir Attenborough this development has also made the humans realize that we are “ultimately bound by and reliant upon the finite natural world about us”. He states that the moment humanity reached space; the minute it saw planet earth hovering like a little marble around the vast emptiness, humanity rediscovered a fundamental truth about their beings that “our home is not limitless. There was an edge to our existence.” Science fictions, over the years have portrayed this present truth through an imagined future. That is why, whenever a science fiction takes a dystopian turn (as Huxley’s novel does), the presentation of nature and environment in it dramatically becomes bleak and damaged. Somehow ecology and technology do not go hand in hand. Now, as the environment is visibly and universally suffering from a manmade situation, the concern has become too indispensible to be reflected in the fictions, now categorized as climate fictions. Although Brave New World is not a novel that immediately draws our mind to environmental concerns; climate change here is only hinted, not explained. But if investigated minutely one can find that in the background of the main story there is always, though fainted but strong portrayal of a decreased nature which Huxley has connected with the advancement of technology.

Huxley’s Brave New World is set in a futuristic World State, a city in London in AF (After Ford 632), where the structure of the city is totally different from what we see in today’s time; it is far more advanced in architecture and in its use of devices. It is totally city-based without the faintest trace of agrarian land. Here humans are not born out of the womb; they are biologically engineered and conditioned as the most intelligent species of all. In World State, medical science is so up to the mark that ageing and disease are alien concepts for the people. They do not know about religion, other languages, culture or even love and pain. All kinds of emotions, species and even the environment and the seasons are monopolized here. Diversity only remains in the caste system among the people which also is artificially generated. People of each caste are conditioned to accept and be happy in whatever position or situation they are in. World State has a society of no conflicts. It is manipulated to perfection because the human interest is the only priority here; there is no room for other aspects, the environment included. The novel really tells about how “anthropocentric attitude” works against nature in a “technologically empowered society” (Fredriksson 4) like this.

As has already made clear, the paper will try to re-read Huxley’s masterpiece as a climate fiction and for making it clear and focused it will mainly focus on two very important aspects of the novel related to environmental problems. The first focus will be on the fact of how the people of the civilized World State are conditioned to detest nature so that this hate can be converted into a wish to create a more advanced and city oriented society and the second one on how a totally uncivilized Savage Reservation has to suffer climate disaster as a compensation of civilization process. To attempt an in depth analysis of the above-mentioned issues, this paper will study of this text from an ecocritical perspective. This will allow the paper to focus on “the binary opposition of the culture versus nature as a dangerous dualist hierarchy.” (Setyorini 103)

Conditioning Against Nature and the World State

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate” (Huxley 18).

This is the motto of the ultra civilized World State, where the only concern is to keep the factories busy. Aspirations for a planned, ordered human society sprang up in the early twentieth century in the form of city planning. Brave New World is all about this city planning; a planning of a technologically advanced anthropocentric society where everything natural has been eradicated. The very natural basis of humanity, breeding and childbirth, is artificialized in this society. Children here are biochemically engineered in a science lab instead of biological birth. In consequence, motherhood, family, emotion and feeling everything have been excluded as nasty country phenomenon. Anthropocentrism does not necessarily promote individualism; instead, as presented in the text, it makes the society a systematic “well-oiled machine”, “sterile and efficient” (Fredriksson 5), but devoid of any respect toward nature or anything natural. Highly scientific approach turns human lives into objects of analysis. According to the analysis enjoying the company of nature means to admire something which is not a human creation, which cannot follow instructions given by them. So, it is a waste of time to be in awe of nature and appreciate it. Appreciation of nature begets tranquillity in human mind; tranquillity in turn begets a craving for loneliness which is completely out of the design of the conditioning system of the World State. Spending some time alone allows the humans to reflect on him/herself which is not welcomed in this brave new world. So it is decided that humans should be conditioned to hate and neglect nature from the very childhood. The human mind should not have any room for any kinds of useless emotions, especially those which are direct threats to the ever expanding city plan. Thus, in human mind the hate for anything natural and emotional should be as instinctive as hunger or sexuality.

The opening scene in the novel itself draws a parallel between the grey buildings, machine/business-like atmosphere and the frozen gloomy environment; “wintriness responded to wintriness” (Huxley 1). The frozen light is so dead that Huxley calls it a “ghost”. Such ambience, coupled with the hate conditioning is bound to put nature in a powerless position. The most impactful engineering to generate the instinctive disgust for nature described in the novel is the Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning. In the process little boys and girls of certain age are divided in certain groups and in front of them a bunch of roses and a pile of books are placed. Whenever they try to grab a book or touch some roses they are given electric shocks. This process is continued till the reflexes are “unalterably conditioned” to generate “what the psychologists used to call “instinctive” hatred of books and flowers” (Huxley 17). Rose stands for both nature and beauty and something which is old; but according to one of the world controllers Mustapha Mond, “beauty’s attractive” and they don’t want people to be “attracted by old things”. At one hand, when the conditioning process engenders instinctive disgust towards nature, it simultaneously keeps the love for country sports intact to encourage travel and transport consummation. If anyone goes wrong in keeping the ideal of the state, sending him/her to an island to live alone only in accompaniment of the with the wild is ironically the biggest punishment for the people.

A comparative study of the characters of Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne can reveal the differing attitude towards nature in World state. Bernard and Lenina, when placed together make the nature/culture debate more vibrant. Bernard, supposedly mistakenly injected with alcohol while still an embryo, could not be conditioned properly and behaves strangely according to the standard norms of the state. He loves to be alone, he wants to “look at the sea in peace”, which makes him feel more like “him”, “not just a cell in the social body”. But on the other side, to Lenina, a starry night is on the whole depressing and in her words “horrible”. The relationship between Bernard and Lenina is so artificial that a potentially romantic date between the two finds its objective correlative in the most bleak and ‘unnatural’ and ‘unromantic’ natural setting. The night is empty, the water “black foam-flecked” and the moon “haggard and distracted” (Huxley 78). Throughout the novel, in the background of the story, the portrayal of environment remains the same, unfavourable and less hospitable.

In Fredriksson’s view “Brave New World comes to mirror ecological thoughts, making society itself subject to natural imagery” (Fredriksson 19). The intentional and created loss of fertility of women is equated with the infertile landscape; the loss of human warmth and fraternity is reflected through the frozen air; the incessantly flying helicopters with the loss of real birds and bugs from the natural setting.

The most ambiguous and ironical aspect can obviously be found in the fact that nowhere in the book can we detect what kind of food the citizen are consuming. The information that we get about the food habit of the denizen of the State is only limited to the artificial drug soma consumed occasionally to destroy the tiniest sadness in this otherwise happy world. It can easily be conjectured that soma is an artificially created drug made with chemical substances which is completely human made. No matter how one sees it, human food definitely comes from nature be it tress or animals. Generally, in city areas the grains and meat comes from the rural agrarian areas. In the novel the only representative of such areas is The Savage Reservation, which has been presented and situated solely as a contrast to the planned city sans any defining individuality. The portrayal of the Reservation also lacks the food habit of the people there; do they collect food from the wild jungle like tribal people do, do they kill animals for their flesh; these questions remain unanswered till the novel ends. There is only a hint of the Savages growing crops as food; but only in connection with a religious tradition, where they follow some rituals to please the Gods and pray for rain. The point here was to strike a contrast between the World State and the Savage Reservation; point of convergence being the belief in God. So, there is no way to confirm that The World State was exporting edibles from the Savage Reservation. Huxley must have been found it impossible to talk about food in the novel; as he is putting emphasis on an all in all city based culture. It is hard to conjecture now, whether it was deliberate or unintentional on Huxley’s part to avoid the matter. But it is interesting to note that the avoidance seemed pertinent and apt with the prevalent theme of the novel; the celebration of artificiality has to be at loggerheads with anything natural.

The Savage Reservation and Nature

Unlike most of the climate fictions Brave New World is understandably not a post-apocalyptic or post-nuclear fiction; it concentrates not on a single cataclysmic event triggered by intentional or accidental disaster, but on the most dangerous way of harming nature, on the consequences of everyday human behaviours enacted repeatedly over a prolonged period. The state sees the environment as something to be exploited. This exploitation is evident in the representation of the Savage Reservation and informed to the readers when John savage comes to the World State as a contrasting force and as an eye opener, who finally recognizes the wrongs being done to nature as a whole in the name of civilization. Savage Reservation is situated outside the city area and still follows the old rule of living. Huxley opposes his ultra-civilized dystopia with the wild and non-civilized Savage Reservation which is rich with traditional religious energy. But with Savage Reservation the technology ecology binary hardly finds validation. “Huxley hardly presents it (the Reservation) as an ideal alternative to his godless dystopia” (Booker 50). In spite of not “spoilt” with any kind of scientific advancement the place and its environment are still ruined because it easily falls prey to the destructive attitude the city has for nature.

During his stay in the city, John Savage learns that “a savage reservation is a place which, owing to unfavourable climate or geological conditions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been worth the expense civilizing” ( Huxley 141). Savage Reservation exists only because there are no natural resources to be utilized by the city. But this bleak and infertile place, does work as a dumping ground. All the emission from the World State goes directly into the Savage Reservation compelling the savages to live “in the dust” and “among the garbage”. The World State’s motto cleanliness is next to fordliness could be implemented because Savage Reservation was there to devour all the rubbish, all the dirt. The science and technology cannot be wasted for the management of garbage and city pollution. Just like the World State, the environment of the Reservation is also manmade be it intentionally or unintentionally. This is the result of anthropocentric central planning combined with the technology to make plans come true. Nature is almost powerless before these plans. This powerlessness is further endorsed by the warden of the Savage Reservation when she says that the area is divided into four Sub-Reservations, each surrounded by “a high-tension wire fence”. A natural landscape, when controlled by a “symbol of triumphant human purpose (the Wire)”, is bound to become a slave of the power of human made technology, because nature does not have a weapon to counter the attack on it. The warden’s very symbolic line “to touch the fence is instant death” (Huxley 88), is highly important in the understanding of how triumphant human purpose can be. Humanity relentlessly invades nature anywhere on the planet and brings instant death. To come into contact with the symbolic wire-like civilization is to die (Fredriksson).

The Comparison

Bernard has rightly said to John Savage that they “were living on different planets, in different centuries” (Huxley 106). Really, the two worlds have very different approach to nature because they two have two distinctive cultures and as we know that “nature is thoroughly implicated in culture and culture is thoroughly implicated in nature” (Phillips 577-78). World State evidently has all the natural resources but visibly no respect for nature. On the other hand the savage Reservation has the respect but no resource. This respect obviously comes from a highly religion based social culture. For food the Reservation completely rely on nature and the atmosphere, and “to make the rain come and the corn grow”, the people here perform bizarre religious rituals which make their connection with nature even more strong. Their pray for rain also is suggestive of a very alarming issue here; the loss of the rhythm of the seasons. What is the dominant season in the World State or whether the season changes at all there is completely non- determinable. The said “wintriness” at the very outset of the novel is symbolic, as it tries to work as the correlative of the wintriness of the peoples’ heart there. But the reflection of this literal wintriness can be found in the prayer of the ‘Savages’ for timely rain. So, in the case of the savages religion could form a ground to nourish the respect towards the environment. Totally opposite thinking can be found in the city where the religious texts are rejected as “a whole collection of pornographic old books” (Huxley 204). As has just been noted, religion is inclusive and important in forming a positive attitude towards nature. But in World State this attitude does not bloom, because awakening of spiritual awareness requires solitude which is a crime there.

The negotiation part between Mustapha Mond and John Savage finally makes it clear that if civilization is expected to flourish then nature has to take the back seat. In every respect this negotiation becomes a duel between civilization and environment, where Mond is on the side of civilization. He seems to counter every criticism of his planned society by the Savage, with various rationalizations that justify, at least to him, what Mr Savage and probably the readers too, judge as insane. Though Mond agrees that nature does makes a man feel independent and creative and individual. Living in an island alone far from civilization actually opens up new arenas for a person. A punishment of being an exile in an island is in reality a reward. But he also believes that zero civilization will bring inconveniences with it, namely tropical heat, religion with harsh punishments, old age, disease, unhappiness, mosquitoes, flies etc. For Mond the task of civilization is not empowering humans, but to get rid of annoying phenomenon nature has to offer. To live efficiently and without any annoyance, people paid the cost of not living independently, not living with any sense of beauty and love for nature. Along with all the civilized people Mond also paid the cost, he got rid of all the mosquito stings centuries ago. But according to John nature is only a giver and technology, instead of admiring it, only work as a drug whose only task is “getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it” (Huxley 210).

John Savage, toward the end of the novel becomes the true symbol of nature when he finally decides to take shelter in a lonely lighthouse among the trees far from the city claiming “I ate civilization” (Huxley 213). For a brief time the readers could find nature in its romantic form, “blue”, “seductive”, “beautiful” with its woods, shining ponds, water lilies. But soon helicopters poured in, disturbing the pristine silence and with John’s death technology won the battle, civilization ate nature.

Conclusion

“It is a recurring assumption in Huxley studies that the novel is a warning against technology” (Fredriksson). In this paper the warning is extended to the environmental issues as well, which was there always, although buried deep. But the emergence of climate fictions finally helped the topic come out. Re-imagining Brave New World as an eco-dystopia can definitely engage the readers to discuss the climate crisis at hand. Society in Brave New World treats nature in various destructive ways; people in general do not care about the environment, “they could just well have cared about, had the government wanted them to” (Fredriksson 26). It is widely accepted that this novel along with Nineteen Eighty Four established the ‘conventions’ and ‘themes’ of the dystopian literature. Those conventions explicitly did not consist of the concern regarding climate change, it was absent. But it was this absence that emphasized the given concern even more in Huxley’s Brave New World. While exploring the brave new future, Huxley could not help but completely avoid any discussion regarding the state of the environment in his pseudo-utopian setting. But whenever he mentioned the environment it was always tinged with gloominess. This book showed that the more power humanity gains through technology, the more we are able to destroy the environment; which is likely to happen when the prevailing ideology is one of exploitation with no regards for nature and the ecosystem as a whole.

If focused on the bigger picture, this novel can be treated as a cautionary tale also, about how dangerous can the celebration of monoculture be in the process of damaging the rich Nature around us. The World State tries to promote a culture which is uniform. This uniformity affects the Savage Reservation deeply and robbed it of its pristine innocence, its stability. The ecosystem is balanced only because the “rich and the thriving living world around us has been key to this stability” (Sir Attenborough). The richness being collapsed means collapse in the whole system. The World State is the allegorical symbol of the human intervention in curbing and abolishing the diversity. The rigorous attempt of making the people of the State feel, think and be similar to each other can be viewed as the sign of the uprising skyscrapers in cities and excessive agriculture in the rural areas; similar looking cities expanding everywhere, single type of plants covering most of the land. This monoculture of the world State is spoiling the “dizzying diversity” of the Savage Reservation; the symbol of the “untouched wild”. No matter how one interprets it, but Huxley’s Brave New World does re-evoke some burning issues of the present century; be it failing biodiversity, rising temperature or losing interest in the discussion of the climate change.

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