Brave New World: The Destruction of Family

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Is the push for a perfect utopia enough to siphon motherhood, family, and love? As in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley illustrates the destruction of the idea of family in this ’perfect world‘. People in the world today have the ability to express love and obtain a family. Huxley explores the futuristic outlook on a world (in many ways similar to ours) that would not allow such humanistic traits. Science is so called the ’father of progress’ and yet the development of Fordism and the evolution of artificial fertilization deteriorates the social value of science. Brave New World offers incites on an innovative world trying and, even more frightening, succeeding to create a utopia while destroying family and erasing the humanity in people.

Humanity is the qualities or characteristics that, considered as a whole, to be characteristic of human beings. Qualities like love, marriage, commitment, and family. One of Huxley’s characters, John, tries to point out these characteristics to Helmholtz, a man who has been taught the beliefs of the World State, but utterly fails. Helmholtz only laughs at the ’ridiculous’ ideas of love, marriage, and parents as John recites a serious passage from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to him (Huxley 184-187). Helmholtz finds humor in these new ideas that he has never learned about before. This obliviousness to traits that make people human is the attitude of the whole society in Brave New World, and because of this viewpoint, leaders of the World State have no moral regret manufacturing humans their number one priority.

Brave New World shows a society main purpose is to increase the population of the world while brainwashing these people to believe that family is insignificant and, therefore, rendered...

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...y or genuine love for one other person. No more love because society calls it taboo and there is always soma for those who have anguish for feeling this way. Without family people are animalistic, people without responsibility; people without someone else to grow old with. These people are living lonely lives without even knowing about the joys of being apart of a family because the World State has convinced them that it is okay to sacrifice love, marriage, commitment, and family so that society can become a utopia.

Works Cited

Huxley, Aldous. Brace New World. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998

Gama de, Katherine. “A Brave New World/ Rights Discourse and the Politics of Reproductive Autonomy.” Journal of Law and Society 201 (1993): 114-30.

Donchin, Anne. “The Future of Mothering: Reproductive Technology and Feminist Theory.” Hypatia 1.1 (1986):121-38.

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