Brave New World: If John the Savage Were Alive Today, He Would Be Wearing a Fedora

While waiting for the events of the Boston Book Fest to commence, I thought I'd write a little something about the book I just finished: Brave New World.  I never read it in high school, and I was sick of it being one of the few "classics" I had not read on the Most Banned/Challenged lists.  So, in a belated attempted to celebrate Banned Books Week, I gave it a shot.

I’m sure reams of paper have been used to discuss and analyze the “civilization” in Brave New World, and I doubt that you’ll find many proponents of dousing fetuses in alcohol, so I’m going to skip that part and cut to the chase: I freaking hated John. So much effort is spent looking at the obvious dystopian future of “civilization” that people assume that the opposite (John and his ilk) must be the “right” future. I disagree. There is no “right” future in this world. Also, John sucks.

For me, it comes down to this: A hero is someone who encourages you to read Shakespeare instead of Fifty Shades of Grey. A villain is someone who bans Fifty Shades of Grey and makes you read Shakespeare at gunpoint. Brave New World is a world of battling villains.

For example: John wants freedom? Well, that seems admirable. But the freedom to do what, exactly? It’s certainly not the freedom to have sex, since he brutally beats a woman for coming on to him (twice), and he stabs a man for having consensual sex with his mother. It’s not even the freedom to think about sex, seeing that he whips himself for that. It’s not the freedom to make your own choices, since he tells all the workers that he’ll make them free, “whether [they] want to or not.” It’s not the freedom of expression because “feelies” are horrible things that need to be banned. He doesn’t really want freedom at all; he just wants everyone to think and act exactly like him, which is hardly comparable. In the world according to John, everyone would be as restrained as they are in civilization, just in the opposite direction.

And what about equality? There’s the awful caste system in the civilized world, but the savages have good old fashioned racism and sexism. It’s made quite clear that Linda and John are ostracized because of their light skin color and forbidden from taking part in even the most important rituals. It’s also a society in which, should your husbands continuously cheat on you, the correct answer is to whip their mistress and her child. It’s a world where women can’t like sex and will be punished viciously if they do, and John certainly picked up on that. John doesn’t represent some “purified” man, untainted by civilization; he just proves that, if science isn’t there to make us hateful and prejudiced, if no outside force forces us to look down on others, we’ll just do it ourselves.

This isn’t to say that civilization is the way to go here. Not at all. It’s just that the civilized and savage seem to be two sides of the same coin (even if the civilized side gets more press). No matter which you choose, there’s no real freedom, there’s no real happiness, and there’s no real equality. In short, when the world is split between two extremes, there’s no correct path forward. And that’s the point. “Civilization” isn’t the dystopia; the whole world is. That’s our future.