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brave new world

brave new world

阿道斯·伦纳德·赫胥黎

  • foreign novel

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  • 1970-01-01Published
  • 132478

    Completed
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Chapter 1 foreword

All moralists agree that indulging in remorse is the most undesirable emotion. If you have done something wrong, you should admit it, try to make it up, encourage yourself to do better in the future, and don't always feel sorry for your mistakes.Rolling in mud isn't the best way to cleanse your body. Art has morals too, and many of its tenets are the same, or at least similar, to general moral tenets.Regret because of a bad work is just as inadvisable as regret because of a wrong conduct.You should find out the mistakes, admit the mistakes, and try to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.Going back and chewing on the problems in the literary works of fifteen years ago, I want to repair the things that were not done well at the beginning, and use my middle-aged time to make up for the problems caused and left by another person-the original self- Flaws in art are bound to be futile.So I let this one stay as it is.As a work of art, this book has a lot of flaws, but I am afraid that it will have to be rewritten to correct it.But as another person who is older, it is very likely that the modification will not only correct the shortcomings of the story, but also erase its original strengths.Therefore, in order to resist the temptation to wallow in the regrets of art, I prefer to keep both its good and its bad, and think of other matters.

Yet the story's most serious flaw seems to deserve at least mention.That is, only two choices are given to the savages: living a chaotic life in Utopia or living a primitive life in an Indian village.The latter is more human in some ways, but just as grotesque in others.I had an idea when I was writing this book: Humans were given free will to choose between chaos and madness.I find the idea amusing, and likely true.But for dramatic effect, I let the savage speak more soberly than his religious upbringing would have allowed.He was brought up by cultists who were half fetishistic, half religiously ascetic.Actually, having read Shakespeare is not a reason enough for him to say that.In the end, of course, I took him out of his sane state and brought him back under the control of his native asceticism, which ended in frenzied self-discipline and disappointing suicide. "These people have died so painfully ever since," is a great relief to the author of this fable—he finds it amusing, he admires beauty, he is a skeptic.

Today I do not intend to prove that sobriety is impossible, on the contrary, I am convinced that it is possible, and would like to see more sobriety, although I am as sure as ever that sobriety is a rather rare phenomenon, and feel sorry for it.Because I have talked about sobriety in my recent books, especially an anthology of sober people talking about sobriety and how to achieve sobriety, and a famous academic critic told me that I Represents a sad symptom of the intellectual class in times of crisis.I think Mr. Professor's implication is that what he and his colleagues represent are welcome symptoms of success.Those who have made contributions to mankind deserve due respect and commemoration. Let us build a temple for professors.That temple should be built on the ruins of a looted city in Europe or Japan, and on the door of that ancient bone cave I would carve a few simple words six or seven feet high: Solemn memory of the educator of the world them. SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUM SPICE.

Let's go back to the future... If I were to rewrite this book, I would give the savage a third option: give him another possibility besides his utopian and primitive life dilemma: sobriety—this possibility Sex has been achieved to a certain extent, in a society of certain exiles and exiles from the "brave new world", near the reservation.In this society, the economy is a decentralized economy, politics is a cooperative politics, and science and technology are set for people like the Sabbath, rather than people adapting to it and enslaved by it (which is what we are now, and Especially in "Brave New World").In that society, religion is the conscious and rational pursuit of the ultimate problem of human beings, and the overarching knowledge of the "Tao", "Lidi", the superb "Divinity" or "Brahma" that pervades the universe. pursuit.The overriding philosophy of life should be a high utilitarianism, subordinated to the principle of ultimate ends—the question to be asked and answered before every contingency of life is: "Is this thought or action to me— Or as many people as possible—what contribution can the pursuit of humanity's ultimate goal make? What interference will it cause?"

In the modified version I have conceived, the savage, reared by primitive peoples, has first had the opportunity to learn firsthand a society of free co-operation of sane-seekers; understands its nature, and is then sent to Utopia.Such a change will have artistic and philosophical (if such a big word can be used for works of fiction) integrity.In these two aspects, judging from the current situation of this book, it is obviously insufficient. But it is about the future, and no matter what the artistic or philosophical quality of a book about the future is, the various prophecies it makes must first have a look of possible fulfillment before they can arouse everyone's interest.Now, fifteen years later, from the vantage point of the downhill course of contemporary history, how much of the book's prophecies are plausible?What happened during this painful time to confirm or disprove my 1931 prophecy?

An apparently big hole in my prophecy immediately emerged.There is no mention of nuclear fission.This is actually rather strange, since the possibility of using atomic energy had been a common topic of chatter many years before this book was written.My old friend Robert Niccol even wrote a very successful play on this subject.I remember also mentioning it by accident in a novel published in the late 1920s.So, as I said, it seems odd that rockets and helicopters are not using nuclear fission in 700 years of Lord Ford.This oversight may not be forgiven, but at least it is easily explained.The main theme of this book is not the development of science itself, but the development of science as a force capable of affecting the individual human being.It does not mention the achievements of physics, chemistry and engineering as self-evident.The scientific advances it specifically describes are the future results of biological, physiological, and psychological research that may be applied to humans.To fundamentally change the quality of life can only rely on various life sciences.Some applications of the science of matter can destroy life, or make it unbearably complicated and painful.Unless they are used as tools by physiologists or psychologists, it is difficult to change the natural form of life itself and its manifestations.The release of atomic power marked a remarkable revolution in human history, but not the most far-reaching final revolution, unless we end history by blowing ourselves to ashes.

This truly revolutionary revolution will not take place in the outer world, but in the soul and body of man.Living in a revolutionary age, it is natural to use the theory of this revolution to justify his peculiar madness.A revolution of the most superficial kind was carried out: a political revolution.Digged a little deeper and tried an economic revolution.Sade saw himself as the apostle of a true revolution, a revolution that goes beyond the political and economic revolution, and is a revolution for every man, woman and child: henceforth their bodies shall be the sexual property of all, Their hearts must be washed away from all natural etiquette and all the psychological repression cultivated by traditional civilization.There is of course no necessary or necessary connection between Sadism and a truly revolutionary revolution.Sade was a madman, and the more or less conscious aim of his revolution was general chaos and destruction.The people who rule "brave new world" may not be sober (in the absolute sense of sobriety), but they're not crazy.Their goal is not anarchism but social stability.It was for stability that they made the ultimate, personal, truly revolutionary revolution using scientific means.

At the same time, we are still in the early stages of what may be the final revolution, the next stage of which may be atomic warfare.If so, we would not need to waste our time in making predictions about the future.But it is conceivable that we may have enough brains to act rationally, if not all wars, like our eighteenth-century ancestors did.The unimaginable horror of the movie actually taught people a lesson.In the more than one hundred years since then, European statesmen and generals have consciously resisted the temptation, and in most of the struggles they have not used military power to the limit of destruction, nor have they fought to the point of completely annihilating each other.Of course, they are aggressors, greedy for profit and honor, but they are also conservatives, determined to defend their world at all costs and prevent it from being violated-that is the reality they care about.And in our past thirty years, there have been no conservatives, only right-wing ultra-nationalists and left-wing ultra-nationalists.The last Conservative politician was the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne.He wrote to The Times suggesting that the First War should end in compromise, like most wars of the eighteenth century, and the editor of the once-conservative paper refused to publish his letter.So nationalist radicals do whatever they want, and the results are the ones we all know — fascism, inflation, depression, Hitler, World War II, the destruction of Europe, almost universal famine.

Assuming, then, that we can learn as much from Hiroshima as our predecessors learned from Magdeburg, we might look forward to an era of not truly peaceful, but limited, destructive war.In this era, nuclear energy will be limited to industrial use.Clearly, the result will be a series of sweeping economic and social transformations of unprecedented speed.All existing patterns of human life would be shattered, and new ones would have to be improvised to accommodate the impersonal fact of atomic energy.(Atomic Scientists) in modern clothes will make humans sleep in beds of their own making.If human beings were the wrong size, they'd be wrecked and get stretched or have their legs cut off—the same kind of stretching and amputation that would come after the real strides of practical science, only much worse. .And such far from painless surgeries would be performed by highly centralized, authoritarian governments.This is unavoidable, since the immediate future is likely to resemble the immediate past, where rapid technological progress took place in a mass-production economy and in a largely proletarian population, there was always a sense of economic and social disorder tendencies.In response to chaos, power was concentrated and government controls tightened.It is highly probable that before atomic power was brought under control, there was a more or less total centralization of governments all over the world.And it seems certain to be so during, and after, atomic energy is brought under control.Only a massive mass movement against centralization and in favor of self-government can hold back the present tendency towards nationalism, which shows no signs of happening.

Of course, there is no reason yet that the new totalitarianism will be the same as the old totalitarianism.Governments using clubs and execution squads, artificial starvation, mass incarceration and mass exile are not only inhumane (no one cares about them now), but patently ineffective.And in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is a great sin against the Holy Spirit.A truly efficient totalitarian state would be one in which powerful political tycoons and their armies of managers control the entire slave population; no threats to slaves, because slaves love slavery.Cultivating them to like slavery is the task assigned to propaganda departments, newspaper editors and teachers by the current totalitarian state.But their methods are still rough and unscientific.The older members boasted that if they were put in charge of the education of children they could secure the religious minds of adults.That's just their subjective desire.Modern teachers are probably no better than educated Catholic priests in conditioning their pupils.The greatest triumph of propaganda lies not in what is done, but in what is not done.Truth is great, but greater, from a practical point of view, is the silence of truth.By simply avoiding certain topics, drawing an Iron Curtain (as Churchill put it) before the masses, separating them from events and controversies that local political leaders deem undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have a greater influence on public opinion Far more effective than they could have done with their most eloquent denunciations and fiercest criticisms.But not talking is not enough.Since persecution, liquidation, and other signs of social friction are to be avoided, positive propaganda must be as effective as negative avoidance.The big thing going forward should be a massive government-backed survey of what the politicians and participating scientists call the "happiness question"—in other words, the question of making people love slavery.And if you want people to love slavery, you can't do it without economic guarantees.In short, I envisage that it is possible for powerful officials and managers to solve the problem of long-term economic security.But economic security will soon be taken for granted, and its acquisition only superficial, external revolution.Love of slavery is impossible without a deep revolution in the mind and body of the individual human being.To complete this revolution we need, among other things, the following discoveries and inventions:

1. Greatly improved suggestion techniques - assisted by conditioning of young children and grown-up drugs such as hyoscyamine; Placement within socioeconomic hierarchies (ideas that disproportionate positions and talents are dangerous to the social system may also spread discontent among people); 3. Alcohol and other narcotic substitutes, which are more effective than gin And heroin is less harmful but can bring more joy (no matter how ideal the reality is, people always have the requirement to leave reality and go on vacation); 4. The foolproof eugenics system aims to standardize human production and facilitate various departments Managers go to work. (This is a long-term plan that will require several generations of centralized control to work.) In , this standardization of human production is pushed to fanciful extremes, but it's not necessarily impossible.Technically and ideologically, we're a long way from bottle-feeding and Bokanovskyized half-idiot procreation.But by Ford 600, who knows what won't happen?As for the other features of that happier, more stable society--things like soma, sleep education, and the scientific caste system--were probably three or four generations away.Even the sexual promiscuity here doesn't seem too far off.There are some American cities where the number of divorces has already equaled the number of marriages.There is no doubt that in many years, marriage licenses will be sold like dog licenses, valid for twelve months.There is no law against changing a dog or having several dogs at once.As political and economic freedom diminishes, there is a tendency to compensate for the increase in sexual freedom.And a dictator will try to encourage that freedom - unless he needs cannon fodder or families to colonize no man's land or occupied land.Sexual freedom, together with freedom to daydream under the influence of drugs, movies, and the radio, only helped his subjects resign themselves to their fate of servitude. Taken together, utopia seems much closer to us than anyone could have imagined fifteen years ago.At that time I imagined it to be six hundred years later, but now it seems likely that the horror will fall on us within a century-and that is before we can control it and blow ourselves into flying machines before then. gray case.In fact, unless we choose the path of decentralization, using man not as a means to the pursuit of applied science, but as a means to produce a race of free men, we have only two alternatives: either The emergence of a number of nationalist, militaristic totalitarian regimes, relying on the terror of the atomic bomb, with the ensuing destruction of civilization (or, in the case of limited war, the entrenching of militarism); The totalitarian regime in the world came into being under the call of the social chaos caused by the rapid advancement of science and technology in general and the special atomic revolution. According to the requirements of efficiency and stability, it developed into a utopian welfare dictatorship. Since you paid for it, it's up to you to choose. It seems that utopia is easier to achieve than we used to imagine.In fact we find ourselves confronted with an even more painful question: how to avoid it finally being realized? ... Utopia will come true, life is moving towards Utopia.A new century might begin, in which intellectuals and educated classes would dream of ways to escape utopia and return to non-utopian societies - less "perfect" but freer. ——
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