Brave New World Mass Culture Analysis

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More Machine Now than Man:
Huxley’s Critique of Mass Culture in Brave New World

Laura Frost, in her essay “Huxley 's Feelies: The Cinema of Sensation in Brave New World,” states that “Brave New World has typically been read as "the classic denunciation of mass culture in the interwar years"” (Frost 448). This is true to an extent, as Frost points out. The novel explores the effects of mass culture and the implementation of eugenics and mass education to serve an industrialized society of consumption. Aspects of culture, such as the arts, have been reduced to pleasure seeking, and the population as a whole is kept within the machine of culture by means of pharmaceuticals. Much of this vision is drawn
The future is the present projected” (“The Outlook for American Culture” 187). This sentiment must be taken to heart if one is then to read a prophetic book by the author of the quote. Aldous Huxley was living and writing during the so-called “Jazz Age,” an age of increasing commercialism, consumerism and mechanization. The age saw a massive boost in the production of consumer goods and technologies, idealized in the streamlined assembly lines of Henry Ford, which provided goods for consumption, but demanded a larger worker class to fuel the boom. The further development of mass culture, thanks to the growth of music and film industries, was spurned by this growth in the working classes. Aldous Huxley’s novel is, at least to a degree, a product of this
As Mustafa Mond puts it, “The optimum population… is modelled [sic] on the iceberg – eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above” (BNW 223). The population, as mentioned earlier, is conditioned to consume and to produce, and the eugenics policy helps create the society can perform the necessary tasks. Taken that way, the novel seems to be a satire and condemnation not of eugenics, but of eugenics run by the industrialist to create masses of dumber humans to buy and consume stuff. This then returns the mind to Huxley’s 1927 prediction of eugenics and those instincts that have to be expressed in “socially harmless ways” (“The Future of the Past” 93). Realizing the necessity for emotion, they employ “Violent Passion Surrogates” to “flood the whole system with adrenin” in order to satisfy what Mustapha Mond calls “one of the conditions of perfect health” (Brave New World 239). In short they are simulating the dangers of life in a safe and systematic way. Freedom of sex covers the sexual instincts and has the benefit also of providing pleasure during free-time. One of the greatest forces of keeping the workers producing is through the drug