Humanae Vitae and the Brave New World

 From Church Life Journal:

I am going to start talking about the future, ironically, by going back to the past, namely, to 1932, the year of publication of Aldous Huxley’s provocative, deeply disturbing, and by now, classic novel, Brave New World. I know that many of us have not necessarily just finished our second or third reading of Brave New World, so I will refresh our collective memories, meanwhile recommending you read the book for yourself if you have never been able to pick it up. The book is in the genre of utopian writing; that is, writing about the ideal, though still imaginary, society.

Only Huxley inverts the genre, so that what he depicts, though it is a society that has eliminated war, hunger, disease, and old age, is intended to appear to the reader as the opposite of an ideal society, an anti-utopia, because it has also eliminated history, literature, art, religion, and scientific inquiry for its own sake, and yet it has not eliminated death. It eliminates old age by retarding the aging process until age 60, when one undergoes mandatory euthanasia. Therefore, society must still reproduce itself if it is to have a future. But, this future has nothing to do with sex. Because, while there is an abundance of sexual activity in this self-avowedly promiscuous society, it does not include procreation.

In fact, the most conspicuous feature of Huxley’s imaginary utopia, or better, anti-utopia, is the complete severing of the relationship between sex and procreation, two things that are, of course, intimately linked in Catholic thinking. This severing of the relationship between sex and procreation is the most fundamental feature of Huxley’s anti-utopia, and therefore of his vision of a possible future. We are introduced, on the very first page of the very first chapter, to the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and for the next 56 pages, about 20% of the book, we follow the Director as he leads his new students, and us with them, on a general tour of the facility with all its departments. We begin our tour “at the beginning,” as the Director says (5), in the Fertilizing Room, where the “week’s supply of ova” are kept in incubators, and the week’s supply of male gametes are kept in a separate, cooler incubator, all in test-tubes. Most women in this society are sterilized at a young age, but some have to be left intact in order to be a source of egg cells (for each egg donated they are paid a bonus of six months’ salary). At a certain point in the tour, we watch as an army of 300 employees called Fertilizers allows the eggs to be immersed in a bath of swimming sperm cells until they are all fertilized. Then they are developed in vitro, in technology that mimics the womb (currently in development), until they are not “born,” but “decanted.” Most people do not know what the word “born” actually means apart from a vague idea of an outdated and distasteful process, which is never mentioned in polite company.

In this society, people are not procreated, they are produced on a production line, in fact, they are mass-produced. We learn about “Bokanovsky’s Process.” Anyone who has taken Organic Chemistry will appreciate the dark humor here, since it sounds just as innocent as “Markolnikov’s Rule” and the like, until we discover that it is a technique for forcing one egg to produce identical twins by the hundreds. And it is enhanced by “Podsnap’s Technique,” which is a way of forcing eggs to mature more quickly than normal. The Director brags that so far, the record from one individual is from an 18-month-old toddler whose eggs have already produced over 12,700 children, “and still going strong,” he adds (9), all “bokanivskified” so that from each egg there are hundreds of identical twins. When one of the hapless students asks where the advantage lay in this, the Director “wheeled sharply round on him. ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see? … Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!’” (7). The reason is that the millions of identical twins produced are put on production lines that deprive them of oxygen, in varying amounts, so that they are “decanted”—I almost said “born”—with substandard intelligence and creativity. These are the lower three groups of society, the “Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons,” the latter of whom are, in the book’s description, “semi-morons.”

All of this happens in what is, not without irony, called the “Social Predestination Room,” where the “Assistant Director of Predestination” (more dark Calvinist humor) decides which embryos will be malnourished and deprived of oxygen, and which will flourish into the two upper classes, the Alphas (managerial class) and the Betas (technician class). After birth, I mean decantation, in the “Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms,” all these classes are subjected to subliminal sleep conditioning, a kind of pedagogical hypnotism, so that no one, when they grow up, wants to be in a different class. The Epsilons are happy doing all the most menial work of society, and they are conditioned to hate books and flowers through the application of electric shocks. The Alphas feel only disgust, rather than compassion, for the lower classes, who all wear distinctive uniforms for easy recognition, so there is no pity to cause social instability or social reform. Anyway, the Alphas know the Epsilons are happy doing all the heavy dangerous work and cleaning toilets. They hate the idea of reading. (Read more.)

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