More Machine Now Than Man

Laura hoar, in her layaboutvas Huxleys Feelies The Cinema of Sensation in unafraid(p) New service earthly concern, states that stand New introduction has typic tot completelyyy been file as the classic denunciation of survey flori purification in the interwar years (Frost 448). This is true to an extent, as Frost points out. The sassy explores the effects of circle floriculture and the implementation of eugenics and portion reading to serve an change nine of consumption. Aspects of culture, such as the arts, build been reduced to pleasure seeking, and the population as a whole is kept within the machine of culture by means of pharmaceuticals.Much of this pile is drawn from Huxleys experiences during the interwar period and for that reason, an exploration of his reactions to mass culture and his philosophy of culture prove put onful in understanding the invigorated. This move testament be exploring valiant New worldly concern according to Huxleys reactions to the culture of the twenties and the early 1930s, specially to aspects of mass culture, go acrossrism and scientific and technological approaches to tender-hearted existence growth and reproduction.Huxley wrote a number of essays in the late 1920s and early 1930s that deal with these issues and several of these serve as the primary focus of this essay. Prophecies of the future, writes Huxley in a 1927 essay, if they be to be intelligent, non merely fantastic, must be establish on a turn over of the present. The future is the present projected (The Outlook for American Culture 187). This sentiment must be productionn to heart if whiz is then to read a prophetic book by the author of the quote.Aldous Huxley was breathing and writing during the so-called go to sleep Age, an age of increasing commercialism, consumerism and mechanization. The age saw a massive gain in the production of consumer goods and technologies, idealized in the streamlined forum lines of Henry Ford , which provided goods for consumption, nonwithstanding demanded a big rangeer class to fuel the boom. The further development of mass culture, thanks to the growth of medicinal drug and charter industries, was spurned by this growth in the working classes. Aldous Huxleys novel is, at least to a degree, a product of this present.Consumerism and substantialism are central to Brave New origination any work that features Henry Ford as a god figure would surely have to be. Huxley writes in 1931 The perfection of Industry supplies his worshipers with objects and can all exist on condition that his gifts are gratefully accepted. In the eye of an Industriolater, the first duty of man is to collect as many objects as he can (On the Charms of History 131). Huxley accepts that capitalists and industrialists adopt tidy sum to want the stuff produced.He argues that Ford, to whom Huxley refers earlier sarcastically as the saint of the vernal dispensation, and other industrialists have no choice tho to hate history, literature, the arts and others be form all these mental activities concord away mankind from an acquisitive interest in objects (131-132). The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in the spread outing section of the novel speaks of how mental activities in the lower classes, in this case a Romantic notion of nature, are deter in the hyper-consumerist society in Brave New World A love of Nature keeps no factories busy.It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes to abolish the love of nature notwithstanding not the tendency to consume transport We condition the masses to hate the country but simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the corresponding time we see to it that all country sports shall entail the intake of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport (23). The goal in the society of the novel is to adhere to what Huxley argue s is the first duty of man to industrialists, owning and victimisation the goods produced by industry.E really aspect of the World estate is crafted to maintain production and/or to encourage consumption. Those aspects of culture that wipe out surplus time, the time spent not producing, have ii attend tos the consumption of material or the drugging or consolationing of the producer so that he or she result continue to produce. The latter function is expressed by the Twentieth-Century theorist, Theodore Adorno. Shane Gunster, in his book Capitalizing on Culture Critical Theoryfor Cultural Studies, summarizes Adornos theory involving this idea of free-time Bored by the end little repetition of the assembly line or gross sales counter, wad want renewal in their leisure time While leisure masquerades as free-time, it is an open secret that its true purpose is to replenish nonpareils working energiesWork and leisure are bound to induceher in an unholy alliance the culture indus try openly celebrates its independence from production, marketing its products as freedom from the drudgery of the e genuinelyday, all the while secretly de residering its consumers ever-deeper into the clutches of a world from which they so anxious(predicate)ly desire to omit (Gunster 42-43). This theory of the culture industry, feeding the consumer with entertainment during free-time so that the work will not suffer, is the driving force behind the Fordian culture that Huxley writes a good deal or less in the 1920s and 30s and satirizes in Brave New World .Adorno, whose major works were not written until the Second World War, is analyzing a existence of mechanized society and mass culture that Huxley wrote of years before. As a writer during the Jazz Age, Huxley would oblige witness to the rise of commercial symphony as the record industry created a best-selling(predicate) symphony that Huxley viewed in a negative light.In a 1925 essay on music, Huxley describes a pie ce of popular music There is a certain jovial, bouncing, hoppety little tune with which any one who has spent even a few weeks in Germany must be familiar. Its name is Ach, du lieber Augustin. It is a merry little affair in three-four time in rhythm and melody so simple, that the village idiot could sing it after a first hearing in sentiment so innocent that the heart of the most susceptible amah would not quicken by a beat a minute at the sound of it. Rum-tiddle, Um belly tum, Um tum tum By the very frankness of its cheerful imbecility the thing disarms all criticism. (Collected Essays 173) Huxley finds this object lesson of popular music simplistic and moronic, not even worth a real reappraisal.He continues on the flying field by comparing the tune to an eighteenth- degree Celsius waltz of the same name and to all music prior to the mid-Nineteenth century The difference amidst Ach, du lieber Augustin and any waltz composed at any date from the middle of the 19th century onw ards, is the difference between one piece of music almost completely empty of stimulated content and another, densely saturated with amorous sentiment, languor and voluptuousness. (173) Huxley then expands his critique to criticize all contemporaneous popular music as lacking the meaningful emotional content that was, he feels, characteristic of all pre-mid-nineteenth-century popular music.In his essay The Music Industry, published in 1933, the year after Brave New Worlds publication, Huxley writes about the short life-span of popular music and declares his era as an age of rapid technical foul progress, and the desire for incessant novelty is a natural product of environmental change and adds that the tendency for novelty increases consumption and is therefore, encouraged by manufacturers (The Music Industry 101). The music betoken that Lenina and Henry attend towards the startle of the novel echoes Huxleys fears from The Music Industry regarding the need for novelty in popula r culture. The advertisements for the show invitingly declare it, in all-capital letters, LONDONS FINEST SCENT AND COLOR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC medicament (BNW 76).There is an emphasis placed on the latest, favoring that novelty which fuels consumption. Again there is an echo in Adorno.Gunster looks at an essay Adorno published highborn On Popular Music On the one hand, he argues, the fundamental spot of popular music is that it is unremittingly standardized every detail is substitutable it serves its function only as a cog in a machine On the other hand, marketability demands that repetition be hidden on a lower floor the illusion of various(prenominal)ity, difference, and novelty (Gunster 24). Adornos culture industry is again reflected in the popular music. His descriptions of popular music are very similar to way Huxley describes popular music as simplistic and standardized. Likewise, both ac acquaintance that the culture industry markets its goods to consumers base d on supposed novelty.Within Brave New World, Huxleys critique of popular music bugger sours through in his descriptions of the music of the World State. The music, uniform the example song Huxley set forth from Germany in 1925, is cheerful, with simple, formulaic, verses and utter reeling with meaningless phrases and clich. An excellent example of this is the Solidarity Hymn of Orgy-porgy Orgy porgy, Ford and fun, Kiss the girls and make them One. Boys at one with girls at peace Orgy-porgy gives release. (BNW 84) This song not only contains little real meaning, a critique that Huxley aims at all popular music, but also contains, as most music in the novel does, strong knowledgeableity.In that same essay on popular music, Huxley is critical of what he calls a certain vivacious sexuality of popular music describing it as vulgar, savage and barbaric (Collected Essays 174-175) and maintains that the sexuality and barbarism are permeant Whether, having grown inured to such viole nt and virtuously physiologic stimuli as the clashing and drumming, the rhythmic hammer and wailing glissandos of modern jazz music can supply, the world will ever revert to something less crudely direct, is a matter about which one cannot prophesy. (175)This description of the clashing drums and glissandos certainly is echoed in the shot wherein Lenina and Henry watch Calvin Stopes and His Sixteen Sexaphonists with the sexaphones ( all the way a play on one of staples of jazz music, the saxophone) wailing like melodious cats with moaning tenors and altos as though the little death were upon them. (BNW 76). The implication is that of sex and orgasm in music form Aldous Huxleys vision of jazz music taken to the extreme of purely physiological. This critique of mass music is also repeated in a supposed selection to mass culture, the Savage Reservation.Huxley, at the time of writing the novel, had never been to New Mexico, in spite of the fact that his friend D. H. Lawrence owned a ranch there stupefyning in 1924. Peter Firchow, in his essay Wells and Lawrence in Brave New World writes that the fact troubled Huxley, but quotes the author as having get intoe an enormous amount of translation up on New Mexico since he had not yet been there (Firchow 272). Huxley relied on Lawrences writings about the Pueblo Indians as well as Smithsonian reports of the place (Firchow 272-273). In spite of of his relative inexperience with historic New Mexican native cultures, Huxley creates a culture for the Pueblo and, in doing so, creates one that is at times improbably similar to World State.Lenina draws comparison between the drums of the Pueblo religious dancing to the music of the Solidarity Service hymns in the World States piety of Fordism. Lenina liked the drums. Shutting her eyes she abandoned herself to their soft repeated thunder, allowed it to invade her consciousness more and more completely, till at last there was nothing left in the world but that one d eep pulse of sound. It re school principaled her reassuringly of the synthetic noises make at Solidarity Services and Fords Day celebrations. Orgy-porgy, she whispered to herself. The drums beat out further the same rhythms (BNW 113). Here we have a sexual response to music as Lenina abandons herself and allows the music to take her, in spite of it coming from a contradictory place and culture.The drums here are strikingly reminiscent of the way that Huxley describes the Jazz and popular music of the 1920s. He talks about how popular culture has grown inured to such violent and purely physiological stimuli as the clashing and drumming and this he attributes to the influence of barbarous pot (Collected Essays 175). By supplying the Indians and the mass culture of the world state with similar music, music that Huxley himself finds void of real emotion, he is equating the two cultures intellectually. The Reservation within Huxleys novel becomes a mirror to the World State culture, a n echo of Huxleys fear of growing barbarism in popular culture. There are some points of contrast between the two.For instance, materials in the reservation are made by the individuals and are rated enough to be repaired rather than replaced as is the expectation in the World State when, say, an article of clothing becomes worn out. There is a passage on labor wherein privy is working clay and through this action he becomes fill up with an intense, absorbing happiness (BNW 134). However, these differences are superficial. There is still a value placed on productivity just as in the World State.John is made happier and feels more a part of his culture when he is allowed to work the clay. Just as the World State has the Community sings to promote Community, Identity and Stability, religion of the pueblo serves a function for productivity. John explains the whippings that Lenina and Bernard witness as being For the sake of the pueblo to make rain come and corn grow.Adherence to re ligion provides Stability and Community for the Indians. To further the comparison between the Savage culture and the World State, Huxley gives the Indians their own drug, mescal, to help cope with life just as soma does the job for the World State citizens. Similarly, Johns redact within, or rather without, the Pueblo society is similar to Bernards position within the World State culture. Both are outcasts for their appearances and therefore both appear more only than the others If ones dissimilar, ones bound to be lonely. Theyre beastly to one (137). This humor mirrors the values of Community and Identity contained within the World States motto.Identify as an individual and you are hurting the community when the individual feels, the community reels is what Lenina recites, which is most likely some hypnopaedic verse (94). These characteristics, exemplified most clearly by the music of the two cultures, show that the reservation society is not a true alternative to the degrada tion of culture prevalent in the World State it is just many of the same turnes in a different form and to a different extent. A second form of mass culture within the World State is the feelies. Laura asserts that the feelies, a cinema of titillating, pansensual stimulation, are clearly a response to the talkies, and that Huxley is extending the inclusion of sound in depiction to the rest of the senses (Frost 447).Huxleys reaction to the talkies, specifically to the first talkie The Jazz Singer, expressed in an essay titled pipe down is Golden is, as Frost points out, one of scorn and fury (Frost 443). He is absolutely disgusted by the film as he writes Oh, those mammy-songs, those love-longings, those loud hilarities How was it feasible that benignant emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied? I felt like a man who, having asked for wine, is offered a brimming bowl of hog wash. And not even fresh hog wash. glum hog wash, decaying hog wash. (Silence is Gol den 21) He sees in film the same degeneration of human emotion and integrity that he sees in popular music.That the first talkie he saw was about a singer of popular music only solidified his dislike and in the end he feels ashamed for himself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which these things are addressed (Silence is Golden 23). The feelies in Brave New World are described in similar stylus as Huxleys description of The Jazz Singer. The film that John and Lenina see, Three Weeks in a Helicopter, is described as having an extremely simple plot, with the real focus placed on the effects of the movie, as with the notable bearskin every hair of which could be separately and distinctly felt (168).The images and effects come off as more solid-looking than they would have seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than world just as Huxley, whose vision had worsened following an eye infection during his teenage years, described the images i n the talkie A beneficent providence has dimmed my powers of sight, so that, at a distance of more than four or five yards, I am blissfully unaware of the average human countenance. At the cinema, however, there is no escape Nothing short of total blindness can preserve one from the spectacle. The jazzers were forced on me I regarded them with fascinated horror. (Silence is Golden 21) More solid-looking than real life is barely the reaction Huxley had to seeing the film, since the real world was not that solid to him because of his impaired vision.Frost accepts that Huxley is at least half(a) feigning his reactions to the films (Frost 443) but she points to a moment in Huxleys Silence is Golden when he condemns film as the latest and most frightful creation-saving device for the production of standardized delight (Silence 20). The normalisation of amusement is what frightens Huxley, be it in music or film or in literature. In his fictionalized culture, these devices for amusemen t standardization are taken to the extremes. They are more than human, more real than reality at the same time that they are void of substance. The subject of substance within art is brought to the foreground in the talk between John and Mustafa Mond in the later parts of Brave New World. The Controller argues, Youve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art, and he concludes Weve sacrificed the high arts.We have the feelies and the scent pipe organ alternatively (BNW 220). There is a hierarchy wherein pleasure replaces the need for aesthetics. John responds by stating that the feelies and the other elements of mass culture in the World State do not mean anything. Mond then replies that these things mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience (221). The feelies are horrifying to John because the end result is not knowledge of the human condition, but rather pleasure seeking. And in the world of hyper-pleasure, it is difficult to find anything on w hich to base meaningful art. That is the problem Helmholtz Watson struggles with writing when theres nothing to say (221).In an essay from 1923, Huxley writes The poetry of pure sensation, of sounds and bright colors, is jet enough nowadays but amusing as we may find it for the moment, it cannot take prisoner the interest for long (Collected Essays 93). One can easily draw comparison to the feelies and the music of the World State here as something that amuses but that fails to, as John or even Mustafa Mond tycoon say, mean anything beyond itself. The inclusion of Helmholtz Watson brings up another issue of mass culture, namely the place, if there is one, for the intellectual or the artisan within mass culture.Towards the end of the novel, Bernard and Helmholtz are to be sent to an island. Mustafa Mond speaks of Bernards fate Hes being sent to an island. Thats to say, hes being sent to a place where hell meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world.All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who arent satisfied with orthodoxy, whove got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, whos any one (BNW 227). This is a clear separation between the intellectual free-thinkers and the mass population. As Mond points out, there is no room in the World State for individuality and the search for truth and meaning since truths a menace. He concludes by adding that Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning truth and beauty cant (228).In the movement towards mass culture, artists and intellectuals, like the aspiring poet Helmholtz Watson, and individualists have no place. In a 1929 essay Huxley raises this disbelief of the possibility for the individual in a mechanized state Is it possible fo r a human being to be both a man and a citizen of a mechanized state? Is it possible to assent the material advantages which accrue to those living in a mechanized world with the psychological advantages enjoyed by those who live in pre-mechanical surroundings? Such are the questions which future politicians will have to ask and effectively arrange in terms of laws and regulations. What sort of answers will they give? Who knows? Not I at any rate.I am even a little doubtful whether the questions are answerable (Machinery, Psychology, and Politics 221). Huxley sees the war between individual and the industrialised state but provides no solutions to this issue and even has doubts whether the issue will ever be resolved. In his novel he has the rulers simply separate those that become too individualistic from the mass-minded because they are desperate to the sedated, pleasure-driven masses. Furthermore, Huxley fears that through mass schooling, those intellectuals great power be eliminated. In a 1927 essay titled teaching method Huxley writes on the defects of Mass education Under the present system of mass education by classes too more stress is laid on the teaching and too little on active learning.The child is not encouraged to discover things on his own account. He learns to rely on outside help, not on his own powers, thus losing intellectual independence and all the capacity to judge for himself. The over-taught child is the father of newspaper-reading, advertisement-believing, propaganda-swallowing, demagogue-led man (Education 205-206) This analysis of mass education makes the learner dependent upon the system, which Huxley sees as fueling advertising and propaganda. Huxley wrote in 1929 on the effects of mass education on society We have had universal education for about fifty years the supply of Isaac Newtons, however, has not perceptibly increased.Everybody, it is true, can now read with the result that newspapers of an unconvincing stupidity and baseness have circulations of millions. Everybody can read so it pays rich men to print lies wholesale. Everybody can read so men make fortunes by inventing specious reasons why people should buy things they dont really want (The New Salvation 212-213). Huxleys view on mass education is that it does not better society. No more geniuses are to be found in a solely educated society as in a partially educated one. The effect in his mind is that capitalists have more means through which they can influence people into desiring and buying the goods they produce.His obvious prejudices and elitism aside, the government note about separate newspapers that target certain intellectual class levels of society is reflected in the various periodicals aimed at the classes of the World State like The Delta Mirror or The Gamma Gazette. The shape is taken one feeling further in Brave New World by having the education system emphasize the value of consumption of goods, rather than that consu mption value being pushed by the writers of the newspapers as Huxley wrote about in 1929. Consumerism is more standardized. Education is not the only means of control of the masses employed to maintain production, the population itself is in the management of the state.The populous is bred systematically in a process much like that of a Fordian assembly line using bottles and genetic manipulation instead of the natural process of human reproduction. With the bottling, the creation of the stereotyped free-martins and the rigid implementation of cont belt alongptives like the Malthusian belts, the population of the world is entirely in control of the industrialized state. This culture also employs scientific methods such as Bokanovskys Process and Pavlovian conditioning to conservatively craft a society of rigid clubs. The function of education is to teach the members of those castes their respective roles and the roles of others and the requisite of these roles in the greater con text.This process of industrialized reproduction makes raising and educating citizens much easier for the World State since they can begin that conditioning during the embryonic stage of production. Additionally, the levels of society, the castes alpha through gamma, can be predetermined and separated strictly. Education is begun at the fetal level, thanks to hypnopaedia, saving time. Since reproduction is standardized and contained wholly within a factory, the leaders of the mechanized society do not have to wait until a semblance of character starts to show in people to condition them towards a certain way of life the genetics do that for them. This process reflects Huxleys views of the potential of science from his 1930 predictive essay Babies State Property.He writes Psychologists having shown the enormous importance in every human existence of the first years of childhood, the state will obviously try to get hold of its victims as soon as possible. The process of standardizati on will begin at the very moment of birth that is to say, if it does not begin before birth (231). He goes on to predict that this process of standardization at or before birth will be destructive to the family. save, unlike in his novel, he predicts that the family will emerge again when the danger is past (231). This careful selection of genetic material is the idea of eugenics, a term that is hard to separate from the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s, especially the National Socialists in Germany. earlier to that period though, Huxley oftentimes expounded on the ideas of eugenics.In a 1927 essay called A Note on Eugenics Huxley expresses a common fear of the time period that scientific and technological processes were preserving physically and mentally defective individuals and that the quality of human reproduction was diminishing (A Note on Eugenics 281) In her essay Designing a Brave New World Eugenics, Politics and Fiction, Joanne Woiak addresses this subject by writing Hu xleys ongoing support for so-called race betterment was typical of left-leaning British intellectuals in the inter-war period (Woiak 106).Huxleys own feelings on the subject seem mixed. Also in 1927, Huxley wrote an essay dealing with the subject of equality and democracy We no longer deal in equality and perfectibility. We know that nurture cannot alter nature and that no amount of education or good government will make men completely virtuous and reasonable, or abolish their living creature instincts. In the Future that we envisage, eugenics will be practiced in order to improve the human get across and the instincts will not be ruthlessly repressed but, as far as possible, sublimated so as to express themselves in socially harmless ways (The Future of the Past 93).He continues to predict that education will not be the same for everyone and that this education system will teach the members of the lower castes only that which is profitable for the members of the upper castes tha t they should know (93). Huxley is arguing that the nineteenth-century ideals of democracy and universal equality are not a reality and predicts a future of selective reproduction and a defined caste system based on genetic stock. Brave New World certainly reflects this prevision eugenics policies have been implemented but there are certainly instinctual processes, like violent passions, that have to be expressed in socially harmless ways the Violent Passion Surrogates.But that sort of hope-filled view of the possible benefits of eugenics is not wholly what is at work in Huxleys Brave New World. In that 1927 prediction, the intellectuals control the selective processes for determining the caste system. However, in 1932, the year of Brave New Worlds publication, Huxley returns to the issue of eugenics by writing that The humanistic would see in eugenics an instrument for giving to an ever-widening circle of men and women those heritable qualities of mind and body which are, by his highest standards, the most desirable (Science and Civilization 153). This is in line with his earlier views on the possible benefits of eugenics.But Huxley acknowledges that it might not be the humanist that is in charge of the process. But what of the economist-ruler? Would he necessarily be anxious to improve the race? By no means necessarily. He might actually wish to decay it. His ideal, we must remember, is not the perfect all-around human being, but the perfect mass-producer and mass-consumer. Now perfect human beings probably make very bad mass-producers. It is quite in the cards that industrialists will find, as machinery is made more foolproof, that the great majority of jobs can be better comeed by stupid people than by intelligent ones (154). This is the society of Brave New World.As Mustafa Mond puts it, The optimum population is modelled sic on the iceberg eight-ninths below the body of water line, one-ninth above (BNW 223). The population, as mentioned earlier, i s conditioned to consume and to produce, and the eugenics policy helps create the society can perform the necessary tasks. Taken that way, the novel seems to be a satire and condemnation not of eugenics, but of eugenics serve by the industrialist to create masses of dumber humans to buy and consume stuff. This then returns the mind to Huxleys 1927 prediction of eugenics and those instincts that have to be expressed in socially harmless ways (The Future of the Past 93).Realizing the necessity for emotion, they employ Violent Passion Surrogates to flood the whole system with adrenin in order to contact what Mustapha Mond calls one of the conditions of perfect health (Brave New World 239). In short they are simulating the dangers of life in a safe and systematic way. Freedom of sex covers the sexual instincts and has the benefit also of providing pleasure during free-time. One of the great forces of belongings the workers producing is through the drug soma. The perfect drug Euphori c, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol none of the defects (BNW 53-54). underframe is the release and the reward for the obedient mechanized worker of the world state.Combined with the feelies and all the other aspects of mass culture in the World State, soma helps keep the society in order by keeping the workers pleased. industrial civilization, as Mustafa Mond puts it, is only possible when theres no self-denial. Self indulgence up to the very limits of imposed hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning. (BNW 237). As with eugenics, Huxleys writings on drug use varied, especially following the Second World War with his explorations into psychedelic drugs in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. But even around the time of Brave New Worlds publication he often was writing on drug use.In 1931 he addressed the issue of drug as an escape in a brief essay titled Treatise on Drugs Everywhere and at all times, men and wom en have sought, and duly found, the means of taking a holiday from the reality of their dull and often acutely sharp-worded existence. A holiday out of space, out of time, in the eternity of sleep or ecstasy (A Treatise on Drugs 304). For Huxley, drug use seems inevitable. This holiday is certainly mirrored in Brave New World. The cause of drunkenness and drug-taking is to be found in the general dissatisfaction with reality, he writes in a 1932 essay titled Poppy Juice, an essay talking about the effects of drug policing. But Huxley continues by including the sort of people that might not be dissatisfied with life and the possibility of drug use among them.Alcohol and drugs offer means of escape from the prison of the world and the personality. Better and securer conditions of life, better health, better upbringing, resulting in more harmoniously fit character, would do much to make reality seem generally tolerable and even delightful. But it may be doubted whether, even in Utopi a, reality would be universally satisfying all the time. Even in Utopia people would pine for an occasional escape, if only from the radiant monotony of happiness (Poppy juice 317). This idea of people using drugs to escape monotonous Utopia seems one of the probable reasons for somas pervasiveness in the World State.The hypnopaedic chorus A gramme is better than a damn reflects those moments when reality might not wholly satisfy rather than cursing the situation, just take soma to escape on holiday. But escapism is not the only use of soma. Or rather, the effect of escapism soma has is not just beneficial for the individual. John Hickman, in his essay When Science Fiction Writers Used Fictional Drugs Rise and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Drug Dystopia, writes that The use of the recreational drug soma is one of several aspects of dehumanization made possible by the scientific expertise wielded by amoral elites (Hickman 144). Whether or not the industrialists of Brave New World are amoral is beyond the cranial orbit of this essay.Nonetheless, Hickmans point about the dehumanizing effects of soma remains true. The drug is used by the World State to keep the masses in check. One of the hypnopaedic lessons Lenina recites is Was and will make me ill I take a gramme and only am (BNW 104). The sentiment here is that thinking of past occurrences or having ambitions or fear does not help, and that soma can help keep you in the present. There is no need for rebellion or trying to better ones position if soma can take the individual out of the negative moments. The lack of downside and the steady stream of governmental supply of soma realize that the citizens are kept in a pleasure-filled world so that they might continue to produce and consume more.Hickman concludes, based on those later novels by Huxley and on the comparison with the mescal used in Pueblo society, that Huxley is not against drug use as a more direct route to ghostlike development, but was instead opposed to recreational drug taking that would render a population docile (Hickman 145). In the 1931 Treatise on Drugs, Huxley was dreaming of a super soma-like drug when writing about the history of drugs and how all of the drugs present in the world are treacherous and harmful The way to prevent people from drinking too much alcohol, or to becoming addicts to morphia or cocaine, is to give them an efficient but wholesome substitute for these sexually attractive and (in the present imperfect world) necessary poisons The man who invents such a substance will be counted among the great benefactors of suffering humanity (Treatise on Drugs 304-305).Huxleys perfect drug was achieved in the fictional soma. But as was the case with eugenics policies, this too fell into the hands of the industrialists who used it to benefit the mechanized society by keeping the mass culture satiated with pleasure and escapist trappings. The drug, as Hickman points out, is used to keep the masses producin g and consuming, just as all other aspects of the culture had those goals in mind. Brave New World is a vision of a future that is based on Huxleys reactions and interpretations of the 1920s. His strong favoring of an intellectual culture over a mass-produced comfort driven culture is abundantly made clear in the novel.In a different 1931 essay titled To The Puritan, Huxley pushes the idea that Fordism as a philosophy could prove destructive to humanity if act fully. There is no place in the factory, or in that larger factory which is the modern industrialized world, for animals on the one hand, or for artists, mystics, or even, finally, individuals on the other. Of all the ascetic religions Fordism is that which demands the cruellest sic mutilations of the human psyche demands the cruellest sic mutilations and offers the smallest spiritual returns. Rigorously practiced for a few generations, this dreadful religion of the machine will end by destroying the human race (To the Purit an 238-239).