This is the second half of my reflections upon the novel, Brave New World. I see significant trends on our present society leading us to the world Huxley describes in that novel. By reflecting upon this, we can gain perspective to evaluate the way things are going today. I reached the point of discussing the method of making babies in the brave new world. They conceive babies in petri dishes and nurture them on assembly lines. The issue of cloning came up.

Cloning refers to the ability to create multiple organisms with exactly the same genetic identity. Huxley included this in the brave new world. The lower classes, deltas, epsilons and gammas, are produced in batches of as many as 72 exact duplicates. Thus society eliminates the problem of individuality. In the brave new world, conformity is highly prized. What better way to run a factory, or a bureaucracy, or an aircraft carrier or farm, than with a regiment of humans with the exact same skills, interests, desires, appetites, hopes, opinions and expectations? Not to mention that they wear the exact same clothes of the same size, have the same birthday and agree with each other about everything? It is such a well-behaved community. And do they ever love to carry boxes, or assemble transmissions, or sew dresses, or serve up your cappuccino!

The behavioral conditioning we find in the brave new world is the province of advertising and media in general. In general we have not yet crossed the line into behavioral control, such as using electric shocks. But in brave new world we have the sleep education, the incessant repetition of the message while we are sleeping. Advertisers do the same thing to us. Popular entertainment puts us to sleep, mentally, and then the message hits us, again and again and again. "Just Do It" "You Deserve a Break Today" "Guess?" "Come to Marlboro Country" "Think Different"

I won’t get into a discussion of advertising, but there is no question that advertising shapes our thinking, very effectively. And the direction in which advertising shapes our thinking is toward the brave new world. Advertising tells us to follow our impulses, to consume, to be young and free, to have a beautiful body or else, to be normal, to fit in by wearing the same unique and strange clothes that everyone else is wearing, to have sex early and often.

Media in general is just as powerful. The New York Times, our nation’s newspaper of record, offers powerful legitimization to homosexuality. It is filled with articles about nice, responsible, interesting homosexuals, male and female. It is filled with articles about unkind, intolerant Christians and Republicans. The message is that homosexuals are nice and responsible, while Christians and Republicans are unkind and intolerant. Day after day, the upscale New Yorkers read this and it absolutely has an effect. It has an effect on me, too.

The religion of the brave new world is a psycho-therapy based fertility cult. To understand it, we have to understand comprehensive sex education, as produced by SIECUS and associates. Comprehensive sex ed teaches that humans are sexual from day one. Little children naturally enjoy playing with sexual organs, their own and each other’s. This is the brave new world, in which all children are encouraged to engage in sex play continually.

This leads to the brave new culture in which "everyone belongs to everyone," especially everyone’s body belongs to everyone. Having an exclusive relationship is bad, bad, bad! Having any feelings for one person is anti-social. Sexual promiscuity with hundreds of partners is good. It is unethical to resist anyone’s sexual advances. Of course, most women have their ovaries removed, and those who don’t are conditioned to use contraception. The purses (they sound like fanny-packs) in which they carry the contraceptives are an object of fashion.

Now we can understand the brave new religion. Young adults gather in small groups, in a special room. Ten sit around a table, five men, five women. They share their feelings, what they are going through. They sing "Solidarity Hymns." They pass a cup of soma and music begins. Huxley, by the way, had a perfect intuition of the technological development of synthesized music and its use to control emotions. In any case, the music begins:

"Tirelessly the music played. The drums beat. The crying and clashing of the harmonies were an obsession in the melted bowels. … By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles." Gradually the light turns into deeper shades of red, the humans begin dancing in circles, singing several more Solidarity Hymns, reaching the last: "Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, Kiss the girls and make then One. Boys at one with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release." The crimson light by now is the same light as in the Embryo Store in which they all were conceived. The encounter group, the religious revival, is engineered into an orgy. This is pagan religion, the fertility cult. This is what God told the Israelites to destroy without mercy in Canaan.

The drug, yes, we’ve all heard of soma. It makes you happy, at peace with yourself, other people and the world. It calms the irritated and stimulates the passive. It has the effects of mescalin (of which Huxley was aware) with no side effects. Our scientists are hot at work bringing soma to market. It is called ecstacy, it is called ritalin, it is called provax. According to Insight magazine, Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore think such drugs are wonderful for our children. After all, day care can’t solve everything. And what are our gifted career-women supposed to do?

A local youth service officer here in Dutchess County told us last week, referring to these psychotropic drugs, prescribed for millions of our school children, that "they can’t make enough of it." The purpose of these drugs? Make us happy, peaceful, affectionate, benevolent, normal. As a hippie poster that came out in the Haight-Asbury back in the 60s put it, "Better Living Through Chemistry." The poster, all hippies knew, co-opted the motto from a Dupont advertising campaign.

I could go on and on, relating the brave new world to our current trends. There are Huxley’s "feelies," which we are engineering through "virtual reality." There is no aging in the brave new world, thanks to advances in diet and medication. We’re making progress in that area as well, aren’t we? Dying is pleasant, natural, and, Huxley implies, artificially timed in the brave new world. One lives a healthy, sexually-active life until, well, it is time to have a pleasant, painless death. Doctor-assisted suicide, anyone?

In effect, because of the elimination of parents, there is no birth and no death in the brave new world. There of course is no marriage. There is no husband-wife love and no children’s love. There is no reason to have religion, having no marriage, birth or death, except for the sake of liberating people from inhibitions about free sex and making sure that no one falls in love with anyone. Hence, there is no brother-sister love. There is no need for the mind to control the body. Read Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty, to grasp the progress our university communities are making at disengaging sex from personal affection or commitment. (We’ve surpassed Huxley’s vision here; he had men and women in separate shower rooms. Few of our universities do.)

Need I remind the reader of the statistical projections that within five years, 50% of American children will have no referent for the word "father"?

Love Creates Life,
Technology Creates Motion,
Life without Love is Just
Going Through the Motions

What the brave new world is, is the world that has destroyed the four realms of heart and the value of grandparents and lineage. And here is the bottom line: it does this by depersonalizing love. To depersonalize love means to separate love (and sex) from personhood.

In fact, love is what makes us persons. We are conceived through our parent’s husband-wife love. We are nurtured by love. We become persons through the give and take action of love. In Christianity, we are reborn through the love of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Life is infused into us through that love. Love begets life, which means personhood.

How do we depersonalize love? First, make the human body, and finally, sex and sexuality, the object of science. Depersonalize the sex organs. Put them on charts for children to study. I’m sorry, but this is dead wrong. Children should see the sex organs of their parents. Then they identify the male sex organ with their father, who they love and trust. They identify the female sex organ with their mother, who they honor and respect. I’m speaking of the ideal toward which we are striving.

The sex organ on a chart can belong to anyone, because everybody’s works the same. So any little boy and demand that any little girl perform oral sex, because there’s nothing personal involved. If you have personal feelings about it, if you feel guilty, or put upon, or angry—well, you need some counseling. This is happening in our schools today, folks. In a rural school bus, a fourth grade boy sexually molested a second grade girl, and the principal of the school wanted to just write it off.

The other arena in which love is depersonalized is pornography. In sex education, love is depersonalized by science. In pornography, it is depersonalized by consumerism, by market capitalism. Sexual love is the product. Women are the owners of the product. Pornography is the responsibility of women, in my view. It is a sin originating in women, not men. That’s a side point. In the brave new world, by the way, there is no pornography, because every woman is an object of male voyeurism. All love is pornographic.

The root of the word pornography, by the way, is "porn," from the Greek meaning prostitute or harlot. My dictionary tells me there is another word, pornocracy! Pornocracy is a society under the dominating influence of harlots. The Oxford Universal Dictionary states that Rome of the first half of the tenth century (900-950 AD) was a pornocracy. Just an aside. (One of the benefits of my coming to UTS is the inheritance of a large and noble dictionary.)

The answer is the family, the ONLY place in which the four realms of heart are fulfilled. They are fulfilled because it is only in the family that love is personalized. Therefore, only the family can create persons. When we detach love from personhood, we destroy personhood.

We also detach love from parenthood. This is the effect of birth control and abortion. Without birth control, the man and woman bring deeply different motives and responsibilities to the love relationship, centering on the future. If there is birth control, then the man and woman have the same motive—sexual pleasure. This ultimately destroys true sexual pleasure, making it purely physical. But we are not simple physical beings, therefore we don’t enjoy it very much until later in life, when nature removes the reproductive dimension of sex. That’s when sexual play without the possibility of creating children is proper.

Love in an emotion that drives us forward, that gets us up in the morning. Love is a spiritual energy. When you love someone, you cry when they are leaving, you are elated when they return, you are happy when they succeed and sorrowful when they struggle. Love means that you identify with another person so much that your lives become one. This oneness is prefigured in friendship and fulfilled in marriage.

By connecting love with personhood and responsibility for the future, we the soul can live, forever. Our primary responsibility today is to protect the family, uplift marriage, preserve parenting and do everything we can to enshrine these objectives in state and society. This is a goal that all religions, all people of conscience, all nations and races can agree upon. It is the path to the truly brave new world.

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