eseu mirela(huxley)

8/8/2019 ESEU Mirela(Huxley)

1/5

Mass culture in a consumerist society: Huxleys anti-utopia

Utopia is a name for an ideal community or society, taken from the title of a book written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean, possessing a seemingly perfect socio - politico -legal system .

Utopia has performed many functions in its long history, and systematic thinking about the futureof society is only one of them. The same is true of the design of the perfectsociety(Kumar:2001,22). The different forms of utopia-from Socratic dialogues and Biblical

prophecies to ideal cities and ideal societies, from social and political speculation to satires andscience-fiction, from the realist novel to the popular culture of films and television-need to betreated with respect for those differences, and the different aims and meanings that they carry.

As referring to the society an utopia supposes, this may be a totalitarian one, a society where thestate regulates nearly every aspect of public and private life. Totalitarian societies maintainthemselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propagandadisseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state,

personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion andcriticism, the use of mass surveillance.

Totalitarian societies, along with liberal democracies, have been viewed as types of mass society.The concept of mass society has formed one important perspective on the role of mass media andmass culture in modern capitalist societies.

Mass culture is a set of cultural values and ideas that arise from the common exposure of a population to the same cultural activities, communications media, music and art, etc. Massculture becomes possible only with modern communications and electronic media. Mass culture

is imposed on individuals, rather than arising from people's daily interactions, and therefore lacksthe distinctive content of cultures rooted in community and region. Mass culture tends toreproduce the liberal value of individualism and to foster a view of the citizen as consumer.

Webster's dictionary defines consumerism as "the promotion of the consumer's interests" or alternately "the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable". It isthus the opposite of producerism. Consumerism is the equation of personal happiness withconsumption and the purchase of material possessions.

In the modern era popular culture has been identified with mass culture. The debate over massculture isnt something totally new in the modern times.

There is a sociological theory that says that technology, the loss of the support of religion haveled to cultural chaos. However this theory is disproved because culture puts the same label oneverything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and inevery part. The building and exhibition centres in authoritarian countries are much the same asanywhere else. The houses outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and the new

bungalows are very up to date. The inhabitants, as producers and consumers are drawn into thecentre in search of work and pleasure. Mass culture is identical because of monopolism. Those

1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Thomas_Morehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islandhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_systemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_systemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(book)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Thomas_Morehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islandhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_systemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_systemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State


2/5

things that ceased to be called art became industries and the only purpose is to make money. Inthis situation are movies, radio and other forms of art that changed their statute.

The major claim of mass society theory refers to the disruptive consequences of industrialisationand urbanisation.

There is a theory on mass culture that argues that industrialisation and urbanisation serve tocreate what is called atomisation. A mass society consists of people who can only relate to eachother like atoms in a physical or chemical compound. Mass society consists of atomised people,

people who lack any meaningful or morally coherent relationships with each other. The links between people are said to be purely contractual, distant and sporadic rather than close,communal and well integrated. In a mass society, there are fewer and fewer communities or institutions in which the individual may find identity or values by which to live, and has less andless idea of the appropriate ways to live.

This theory is available also in the case of Aldous Huxleys anti-utopia, Brave New World (1932).Written in 1931 and published the following year, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is an anti-

utopian novel. In it, the author questions the values of 1931 London, using satire and irony to portray a futuristic world in which many of the contemporary trends in British and Americansociety have been taken to extremes. Though he was already a best-selling author, Huxleyachieved international acclaim with this now-classic novel. Because Brave New World is a novelof ideas, the characters and plot are secondary, even simplistic. The novel is best appreciated asan ironic commentary on contemporary values.

The story is set in a London six hundred years in the future. People all around the world are partof a totalitarian state, free from war, hatred, poverty, disease, and pain. They enjoy leisure time,material wealth, and physical pleasures. However, in order to maintain such a smoothly runningsociety, the ten people in charge of the world, the Controllers, eliminate most forms of freedom

and twist around many traditionally held human values. Standardization and progress are valuedabove everything else. These Controllers create human beings in factories, using technology tomake ninety-six people from the same fertilized egg and to condition them for their future lives.Children are raised together and subjected to mind control through sleep teaching to further condition them. As adults, people are content to fulfill their destinies as part of five social classes,from the intelligent Alphas, who run the factories, to the mentally challenged Epsilons, who dothe most menial jobs. All spend their free time indulging in harmless and mindless entertainmentand sports activities. When the Savage, a man from the uncontrolled area of the world (an Indianreservation in New Mexico) comes to London, he questions the society and ultimately has tochoose between conformity and death.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a startling depiction of someone's vision of utopia. Thisfictional novel is the same as Orwell's 1984 and W.M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle of Leibowitz ,which all deal with philosophical and ethical controversies brought about by advances in scienceand technology in a future society. Brave New World portrayed a hedonistic paradise in which allneeds and desires were painlessly satisfied-but also rigidly shaped-by the ruling elite of scientificcontrollers in the interests of social stability. The causalities, Huxley suggested, were freedom,love and creativity, indeed all that made life truly worthwhile. Huxley meant to write a satirical

2
http://www.enotes.com/authors/aldous-huxleyhttp://www.enotes.com/authors/aldous-huxley


3/5

and fictional novel, but it turned out to be a scientific prophecy. We can see in his book aconsumer society, dominated by mass culture.

The inhabitants of London in 632 A.F. prey to Our Ford, instead of the Christian Our Lord. Thismeans that Henry Ford is now a cult figure. Aldous Huxley knew perfectly well Fords life andalso his theories, so he picked out some dangers of Fords theses. Ford himself was aware of thedangers of mass production and industrial progress in general, although he was strongly in favour of the industrial era. One of Henry Ford famous sentences is: "...absence of fear of the future andof veneration for the past...What is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means of progress".He defended progress, and found that the probable consequences were worth it. Fordsconception of history is a chain of technological progress. There are social problems but this areonly temporary. Ford distinguishes two types of working personalities: there are the manualworkers and the manager. We can also see this distinction, which is followed by caste and classdifferences, in Brave New World . Standardization is the key of mass production. Huxley issarcastic and he exaggerates the principle of standardisation by grotesquely applying it to human

beings. The society in the Utopian World is so dehumanized that mass production is even appliedin creating babies, but this is a way of having lots of people working for such a consumisticsociety and these people dont even care because they hardly think. Thinking is quite like bannedin this society, and to be free you have to think first, as Hume said. One of Humes most famoustheories was the one on freedom; according to it, you are only free and act freely when you areable to analyse the different options between which you can choose; the more you know aboutthese options, the better, because you will then be able to analyse which is the best of thedifferent options, and decide by yourself. But in Brave New World , there are no alternatives, nooptions, you cant decide by yourself because the state and the Controllers decide for you. Thesecitizens are not free. They all live in a bottle, limited, and even more so the lower castes, althoughthey dont notice it. Is the perfect system for a society that wants stability. Manual workers dontget fed up with their work, they dont protest, and work is efficiently done, because these peopleare created only for this cause, for working, and making people from other castes lives easier.

The assembly line is the instrument of standardized manufacturing, therefore the most preciseengineering is needed; we can see all these technological machines in the first chapter, for example. Working in an assembly line also makes work a routine, and this is what the Controllerswant, because routine gets the workers away from thinking.

Progress is very present in Brave New World ; it is a society focused on progress, and createdaccording to it. The world has changed a lot since the Nine Years War; it is as if the world had

been born again but with all technological devices and facilities there so that people could usethem. They dont want to look at the past; their new world is happy, without dangers or wars or

problems; and progress has been the method of achieving this situation. Without this system of

mass production in terms of creating embryos, stability wouldnt have been achieved. The way of creating human being assures the state a whole caste of people who are glad doing the worst jobof all. But Huxley wants to warn us: there is a big danger in progress; there are horribleconsequences when technologies are applied without rational methods. When dealing with

progress, you have to be rational, measuring every step and the possible results, and even though,you sometimes fail to control every aspect. With this satire, Huxley tells us that, instead of livingin a perfect Utopia with all these technological facilities, as in Brave New World , the situationmight turn out to be as dystopia, as it really happens in the novel. Is all the progress worth having

3


4/5

lost things like feelings, individualism, and so on? You have to decide between completelydehumanized progress and real love, feelings, literature...

Another thing Huxley is very critical with is the political system. He lived through fascism andcommunism, and also capitalism, and he disagreed with all three systems. The state or

government of Brave New World is a mixture, a synthesis of capitalism and communism. Theaim of capitalism is to encourage trade markets to generate more and more money which resultsin the economic benefits of the state and of the country in larger terms. The similar aspect withthe ruling system in Brave New World is the importance that the state has in the functioning of the country, and the tendency towards consumerism. In the New World, there are no wastes,everything is used, and even the dead bodies are useful, whereas consumerism is what they try todevelop. This idea also has a Fordian basis. Ford created the T-model, which is also a symbol inBrave New World, for example, people make the T sign, instead of the cross sign. By the time itwas created, people started to complain because cars were dangerous for nature, but all Ford saidwas that, instead, the cars would allow people to get to know nature better; so nature was anincentive to buy a car, according to Ford. In one passage in Brave New World, it is explained to

the students that people are not supposed to like nature for its own sake, but only insofar as ithelps intensify the consumption of transportation, so that people may be able to play certainoutdoor games.

The political system of Brave New World is also similar to communism, as it is a dictatorship. In both systems, the rulers try to control everyone and everybodys way of thinking, although theydont always achieve this aim (there are a lot of people who go away from countries of communistic ideologies, because they dont agree with this system, and, in Brave New World ,there are also some people who dont want the state to control them, who really want to be free,like Watson or Marx. George Orwell was a contemporary of Aldous Huxley, and they were oftencompared. In Animal Farm , Orwell criticises the communistic method of ruling, which is similar to Huxleys criticism. Orwells 1984 also reminds us of Huxleys anti-utopia, and the oppressivemethods that the rulers use.

There is a chapter in Brave New World that emphasizes the most important aspects of thetheories that were used in order to build this Utopian World; there is also a lot of philosophy inthis chapter. The conversation between Mustapha Mond and John the Savage starts in chapter XVI. Bernard, Hemholtz and John are in the Controllers study. The Resident World Controller of Western Europe asks the Savage if he doesnt like civilization; the answer of the Savage isnegative. So both of them start discussing about the methods that the state uses to achievehappiness among the citizens. They have created a caste system that is useful for society andkeeps everyone happy. The twins from the lower castes are the basis on which everything else is

built, and, as someone has to do the nasty jobs, these twins do it; stability is achieved. John proposes that they create an Alpha Double Plus society, but the Controller tells him, that theseAlphas wouldnt be happy, because they would go mad doing Epsilon work. An Epsilon can dogreat sacrifices because they are so conditioned that these arent real sacrifices for them, they justdo their work, and they obey. Mond narrates to him the Cyprus experiment, undertaken in 473A.F. Cyprus was cleared of all its inhabitants and recolonized with Alphas that had agriculturaland industrial equipment necessary to survive. The result of this experiment was that the landwasnt properly worked, there happened to be strikes, orders were disobeyed, ambition grew. So,in six years, the first-class civil war took place. The optimum population, as described by the

4


5/5

World Controller, is the one that is like an iceberg; there are only very few at the top. The lower castes are happy because they do unexhausting labour, they have soma and unrestrictedcopulation; they are so conditioned that, having very few things they are happy and think thatthey cant be happier, that there isnt a situation better than theirs. The hypnopaedia lessons teachthe children that they have to be happy with their own caste, the other castes have worse lives.

The state could reduce the lower caste workers their working hours, but this would only increasethe consumption of soma. So with this perfectly ideated caste system, stability has been achieved,and they dont want to change anything, because each change is a menace to stability.

With this book, Aldous Huxley tried to create a new world,different from that he lived in and sohe hoped to change something,but he himself states: I wanted to change the world. But I havefound that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

As presented in Huxleys anti-utopia, mass culture is therefore a culture which lacks intellectualchallenge and stimulation, providing instead the undemanding ease of fantasy and escapism. Thisculture discourages the effort of thinking and creates its own emotional and sentimental

responses. It does not demand that its audience think for itself, workout its own responses, andentertain responses which are intellectual and critical. In this sense, it begins to define socialreality for the mass public. It therefore tends to simplify the real world and gloss over its

problems. It equally encourages commercialism and celebrates consumerism. It tends to silenceother opposing voices because it is a stultifying and pacifying culture.

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor, 2001. Free time, The culture industry. Selected essays on mass culture, London and New York

Adorno, Theodor; Horkheimer,Max,1993. The culture industry: Enlightenment as MassDeception, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum

Kumar, Krishan; Bann Stephen, 2001.Utopias and the Millennium, London: Reaktion BooksLTD

Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences URL: http://bitbucket.icaap.org/dict.pl ? (visited on2009/03/10)

http://mural.uv.es/~mifepra/mainthe.htm

5
http://bitbucket.icaap.org/dict.plhttp://mural.uv.es/~mifepra/mainthe.htmhttp://bitbucket.icaap.org/dict.plhttp://mural.uv.es/~mifepra/mainthe.htm

eseu mirela(huxley)

Documents