Brave New World is a first-class essay written as a third-class novel. It is intellectually stimulating, but emotionally and imaginatively barren, not to mention spiritually uninspiring — curiously similar to the world it envisions.
I had known about it for a long time, but had not read it firsthand, and would probably never read it, if the philosopher Dr. Peter Kreeft hadn’t recommended it as one of twenty-six books people should not die without having read. He promised that those books would challenge, if not change, minds, and that intelligent and thoughtful people would benefit from them.
Brave New World did challenge me intellectually as promised. For that reason, it is a worthy read, but then one-third of the book would suffice, namely, the first and last three chapters.
Self-Evident or Sleep-Taught?
In the Brave New World, all people of the state are “predestinated”, that is, pre-conditioned, to belong to certain classes, and to serve the state in their pre-conditioned capacities. All people are sleep-taught since infancy the “knowledge” they need to become functioning members of a “stable” and “happy” society.
To my mind, it challenges the notion of “self-evident” truth, among other things.
Are moral principles that we abide by self-evident because they are necessarily true, or only because we’ve been conditioned, brainwashed to accept them, ever since even before we were born?
For example, I once foolishly challenged the most cherished self-evident truth “All men are created equal”, by asking simply, “Equal in what sense?” Of all the college-educated, articulate and thoughtful members of that online forum, nobody gave a coherent answer, not one.
Plato writes provocatively that he who deceives is better than he who is deceived, because the former knows, but the latter doesn’t. Francis Bacon writes that both imposture and credulity concur in falsehood. It is the tragedy of the pre-conditioned to never know the truth. He may be re-conditioned to accept a different set of falsehoods, moving from one cave to another, so to speak, but never see the light of day, because he has nothing in him to discern truth from falsehood.
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