A Utopia where sex is free and without love or marriage, protected from pregnancy by birth-control pills, where family is outmoded and ceases to exist, replaced by a benevolent parental world government that supplies all necessary for abundance and continual happiness and stability, which includes genetic engineering to control and determine population, conditioning from birth, and drugs of forgetfulness to prevent depression or unhappiness. It is a future world where there is no war or strife, no conflicting ideas and no books or art other than those produced by the beloved State, so as not to provoke discontent by old-fashioned ideas such as religion or romance, both the Bible and Shakespeare eliminated from consciousness. That is the world imagined in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, way back in 1931.
Now we are nearly eighty-five years later in 2016, and swiftly moving forward. Has our world any similitude to that vision of the future? Yes and no. Yes, in that many of the ideas listed above have become actively a part of daily behavior in the Western world, and no, because there are more conservative forces staunchly working to prevent that from happening. Yes, in that leftist “progressive” forces have done all in their power to promote the elimination of sexual restraint, encouraging younger children to indulge in sex through education and the media, and to eliminate all reference to religion or God, the Ten Commandments or prayer in the educational system or in public places, and to discredit the Bible and its values and morality at every opportunity. That values vacuum thus created is now being filled with its antithesis.
Today many of those ‘Progressives’ mock and deem people of faith as retrograde, obsolete and enemies of progress, and in their re-writing of history, claim that was always the case. In their view religion has been happily replaced by science as the arbiter of truth. But they seem to ignore the fact that science, with all its wonders and capabilities, is still mutable, and cannot describe or compete with the Immutable. And they seek for larger and more pervasive government to meet the needs of the people.
The basic claims of Communism include its being based on materialistic science, rather than faith, which was called “the opium of the people”. Communist nations have done all to suppress religion, especially Christianity, including the destruction of churches and the murder of Christian and other religious leaders, and the forbidding of the Bible. Their vision was to create a “new man” where all is owned by everybody, and “everybody belongs to everybody” in the great commune. The latter is one of the recurrent mottos in Brave New World, taught to children from infancy in their ‘sleep teaching’.
Nazi Germany also claimed science as their own, supporting their view of the “master race”, and the inferior races such as Jews and their religion, and gypsies, which would be exterminated from society to create a “pure race”. It was only a devastating war that could stop this philosophy from spreading, though the plague of antisemitism yet thrives.
In Europe and America we are seeing the idea of the natural human family slowly disintegrating, under the powerful ceaseless influence of empty but titillating movies and television entertainment and pornography, where social and sexual norms are being eroded to a point of utter confusion of identity. Homosexual ‘marriage’ and ‘family’ have been promoted and adopted now as a social norm. In this Brave New World we are seeing the increased legalization and use of drugs for ‘happiness’, and a large percentage of people using anti-depressants and other medications for happiness and stability, as we read of Soma in the old novel, the happiness drug. But we are not seeing the increase of happiness, rather an increase in unexplainable mass murders, fatherless homes, gang violence, drug addiction, overflowing prisons, homelessness, hopelessness, and wars.
Perhaps the admonition in that 1931 classic, Brave New World, has been forgotten, and needs to be again popularized in our time for the new generation to gain some much needed perspective.