The epigram to Brave New World
Here’s my shot at tranlsation:
Utopias appear to be more realizable than believed before. And we find before us a new question that is agonizing in a very different way: how to avoid their definitive realization? Utopias are realizable. Life marches toward Utopia. And perhaps a new century will begin, an age where the intellectuals and cultivated classes will dream of the means to avoid Utopias and return to a non-Utopian society, less “perfect” and more free.
I know very little about Nikolai Berdyaev, but he was a disillusioned former Marxist who rejected Marxian thinking after the Bolshevik revolution. He embraced a kind of existential Christian Universalism.
Here in the first years of the 21st century, I see little danger of our society at least marching toward any kind of Utopia.
How is Berdayev using the word “Utopia” – it gets tossed around in a lot of different ways and in different contexts. Who are the “intellectuals and cultivated classes” he speaks of? Why might Huxley have chosen this statement for his book?
katie wrote:
The temptation of perfection is immense. I know that most of us here at Pomona have been known to classify ourselves as perfectionists – individuals who aren’t happy unless they strive for and achieve excellence. But perfection is a cage, as Berdyaev notes. Perfection requires the individual to give up their freedom and subscribe to a group conscious. Perfection requires the individual to blindly follow, to do things the way they are supposed to be done, to follow rules and not to think.
Utopias are “perfection”. They create a way of life in which everything just works. It runs smoothly, everyone is happy. No one is free. And that is the danger of Utopian societies: they are so tempting. Intellectuals, those high minded individuals who are so caught up in their theories and their studies to consider the practicality of their ideas, will constantly be tempted to work to create Utopias. They must resist this urge, and instead embrace the freedom that is intrinsically linked with the ability to be unhappy, to experience less than perfection, to think and make mistakes, to live in a non-Utopian society.
Posted 15 Oct 2007 at 12:46 pm ¶
Jamie Goldberg wrote:
At first glance, it seems strange to strive for a non-utopia. With all the pain and violence in today’s current world, it would seem obvious to want to create a perfect world. Marxism was an attempt at utopia, although in cases in which Marx’s communist ideas have been applied, societies very different from utopias have been created.
This quote defines Huxley’s story perfectly. The reader is given a setting where everyone is happy all the time, the quintessential utopia. However, it becomes clear that by calling for a perfect world, humans are forced to give up a lot of what makes them human. Love and desire and growing old are thrown out, replaced by promiscuous sex, drug use, and youthfulness. What on the surface seems like a good idea, really just destroys all freedom and emotion of human kind. Huxley seems to want to show humanity that they need to give up their desire for utopias and be thankful for the dis-utopia that they have created.
Posted 16 Oct 2007 at 10:11 pm ¶
Lindsay wrote:
A utopia can be defined simply as a society where everything is easy. In a Utopia there are no challenges to shape your personality and make you unique. We will lose many of our natural human experiences and emotions. I think in the 21st century we are constantly trying to make our lives easier with new technology. I’m not saying we are focused on becoming a utopia as a whole, but this strive to have everything we want when we want it. This desire for instant gratification in society is in some ways a desire for utopia. We have to know what it is like to be without to appreciate what we have. We define words by their opposites and if in a utopia you don’t know what it is to be sad you can’t know what it is to be happy. The upper-class would have to stop trying to make everything as easy as the click of a button.
Posted 17 Oct 2007 at 9:32 am ¶
pink martini wrote:
To me, a Utopian society is one in which every individual is free to desire and obtain the desired and is actually able to indulge this freedom without hurting anyone else. Blissful ignorance, however, is unacceptable: information should be present and thorough. Like in a well-functioning market. In this sense, it seems that Utopias are possible in healthy economies. When looking at society as a whole (without abstracting the “unnecessary“ the way an economist would), things seem much more complex. I do not think that Utopias are possible nowadays or in the future. They are outdated; there is awareness. This does not mean that the world is safe from going in dystopian directions, though.
Posted 17 Oct 2007 at 11:46 am ¶
hammad wrote:
I find the first sentence of the epigraph to be true, especially with regards to the way in which technology brings us as a society closer to utopia. We are more efficient than ever before and have access to a wide variety of goods and services. However, technological growth also correlates with possible drawbacks of a utopian society. In my politics class, we concluded that, as a trend, government is becoming more and more involved in people’s lives. One of the ways in which such a phenomenon occurs is through the use of technology. The government can monitor phone calls and emails, and we are more dependent on government services than ever before. Too much government involvement could move society closer to a utopia, in which a ruling body controls the subservient masses. This is an eerie picture, but a picture that could eventually become a reality, especially with the rapid pace of technological innovation characteristic of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Posted 17 Oct 2007 at 8:11 pm ¶
Jamie Goldberg wrote:
This may connect a lot to my previous comment, but here are some ideas that I felt I still had at the end of last class.
What are the effects of moving toward a Utopian society? People feel that a Utopian society would bring them happiness and comfort. However, already in the United States, as we have progressed and industrialized, we have found that added comfort doesn’t always bring happiness. The wealthiest counties in the nation suffer from some of the highest alcohol and drug rates as well as depression rates (ex: my home Marin County) proving the luxury doesn’t provide people satisfaction. Even in Brave New World people are forced to be brainwashed and take drugs in order to live a seemingly satisfied life. People want to live in a dystopia by human nature, even if they don’t see it. People complain about too much work, but at the same time need work to keep them occupied and happy. In order to achieve a utopia, according to Huxley, society must control science and progress. Society must destroy art and some of the greatest human creations, to gain a seemingly perfect world. And the price of perfection just doesn’t seem worth it.
Posted 18 Oct 2007 at 3:46 pm ¶
Kennedy wrote:
When we started to discuss a brave new world I started to remember other discussions i had had in my other classes. We have focused on th idea of Utopian society and entertained many of the different paths to utopias. The main focus in the last few weeks of my I.D. course has been the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. This story describes how we were cast out of gods perfect land into true nature. Eve was tempted by a snake to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and in result the fall of man and nature was set in motion. After the fall there was no longer a perfect place on earth. Everything was wild and unpredictable. This is very important to todays society. We have begun to get so far away from a Utopian society that we have almost lost sight of what it is to be closer to purity and nature. Technology is a double edged sword in that is makes our lives easier, but also creates new environmental problems. We can never take away free will, but we should start to really consider what it is to be striving for a Utopian society.
Posted 18 Oct 2007 at 9:29 pm ¶
alison wrote:
I have a lot of trouble with the concept of “utopias” because, to me, they are right on par with “perfection”, and I find it relatively universally acknowledged that there is no such thing as perfection. I just don’t know how to even begin to define or address it. What is it? No one knows, and if they know it for themself, they don’t know it for someone else. One person may be able to achieve a state of contentedness, but there is no way for a such states not to clash within a society. We mentioned the etymology of “utopia” in class, which I found fascinating: No topia. There is no place for it. Another point of interest in our class today was the discussion of progress. If it is impossible to progress to utopia/perfection, then it stands to reason that we should question any progress. There are downsides to be found to all sorts of “improvements.”
Posted 24 Oct 2007 at 4:14 pm ¶
pink martini wrote:
The new reading, “We Can Remember It For Your Wholesale,†in a way responds to the epigraph of Brave New World. “And perhaps a new century will begin, an age where the intellectuals and cultivated classes will dream of the means to avoid Utopias and return to a non-Utopian society, less “perfect†and more free,†Berdyaev says, while Douglas Quail suggests the imprint of a false-memory template about an “average, routine life†as a solution to his highly complicated futuristic problem. His suggestion is ironic; I guess, one of the goals of the story is to dismantle the perfection of the Utopia and to show that, even though people will always strive for them, Utopias will never work.
Posted 25 Oct 2007 at 6:29 pm ¶
pink martini wrote:
Correction: people will always strive for the advancement and development attributed to a Utopia, not for the Utopian structure itself.
Posted 25 Oct 2007 at 6:31 pm ¶