Published in: „Kultura i Polityka” [Culture and Politics - Tischner Euroepan University Papers], Issue 2/3 (2008), pp. 210-233.
DOSTOYEVSKY EXTENDED: ALDOUS HUXLEY ON THE GRAND INQUISITOR, SPECIALISATION AND THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE “Knowledge alone will teach us (…), that man in fact does not have and never had neither will, nor wants, but is in fact something like a piano key, or an organ pin; that there are laws of nature beyond the world; and everything that man does is not happening in accordance with his will, but just happens, in accordance with the laws of nature. It is sufficient to discover these laws of nature and man will cease to be responsible for his deeds, and will lead his life with ease”. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Notes from the Underground”
1. INTRODUCTION Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (BNW) remains one of the most important books of the twentieth century. The phrase “brave new world” is rooted deeply in our culture: if one searches for it in academic databases or the Internet, thousands of results will appear, which are connected not necessarily to Huxley’s work itself, but to spheres ranging from the on-line cataloguing systems, entomology, economic innovations, development of genetics, information sciences, medical technologies or social sciences.1 The secret of this popularity stems most likely from the conviction among readers that the course of history tends towards the reality presented in BNW, making the novel an adequate point of reference. The readers seem to believe that even if one cannot be sure whether the biological alteration of the human race will be stimulated by state or by private actors, one thing is clear at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the technological shift has already started and is likely to continue rapidly (see: Fukuyama, 2004; Kurzweil, 2000, 2005; Naisbitt 1990, 2003; also: section 6 of this paper). Throughout his lifetime Huxley wrote three futuristic novels, of which BNW was the first. After the publication of BNW in 1932 came Ape and Essence (1948) with his final novel Island being published in 1962 (see: Huxley 1992, 2004, 2004b). As R.T. Sion puts it: “Brave New World shows how mental conditioning and drugs can produce a mindless society devoid of human values. In Ape and Essence a nuclear war causes mankind to degenerate into ruthless animals. Only in Island, the most idyllic of these utopian novels, has humanity learned to accept those technologies that promote human advancement and to discard all others” (Sion, 1999, p.iii).2 1
See the resemblance of BNW to an anthill community system from an entomological perspective (Sleigh, 2002). The anthill analogy is suggested in BNW itself (“the social body persists although the component cells may change”, Huxley, 2004, p.84); in Brave New World Revisited Huxley explicitly compares the physiologically conditioned BNW citizen to a termite, saying e.g. “For the individual termite, service to the termitary is perfect freedom” (see: Huxley, 1958). 2 The evolution of thought is clearly visible: (1) from the merely dystopian novel (BNW), with its passive vision of state-controlled society, Huxley went on in Ape and Essence (AaE) to reflect on the situation of humanity devastated by the atomic bomb, where only some refugees have the willingness and courage to establish society anew, to his final novel, in which the complete image of an isolated, happy society is presented (Island). Respectively, other ideas also evolved: (2) from the pure pessimism of BNW, via a mix of pessimism and optimism in AaE (Sion, 1999, p.159) to the final set of clues for humanity, allowing it to live in peace in Island; (3) from the satire of the drug-happy culture in BNW to the acknowledgement of the wise use of drugs as the