← The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Totalitarian Novels: Drugs and Genetics in Brave New World
00:32:23
Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:14]
Jeremiah Regan
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
- [00:18]
Juan Davalos
And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with totalitarian novels, Lecture 4, Brave New World, Drugs and Genetics. And we are back to a discussion between Dr. Arne and the students. And one of the questions that struck me the most, and I like to think about this is actually the last question when the students asked, can someone be virtuous if he subdues his desires with drugs? And we talked a little bit about dopamine in the earlier discussion, last week's episode. But when you think about drugs, don't think about just illicit drugs or things like that, but all the things that sort of put this filter on life in front of you. So social media, entertainment things, things like that in general. So this book touches on the subject of can you actually be a virtuous human being without any form of struggle?
- [01:13]
Jeremiah Regan
We can look to a couple different sources to answer that question. First, in Hillsdale, we love Aristotle. So we'll start with Aristotle, who says that virtue is a habit. It means you have to do something over and over and over again to develop the character necessary to face the challenges of life. If you're obscuring that or avoiding it with, with drugs or distractions, you can't. You're impairing your ability to develop virtue.
- [01:34]
Juan Davalos
And it's a habit that's formed by choosing. You have to actively choose that thing, not just because you're doing it, but you have to choose that thing in order to form that habit.
- [01:43]
Jeremiah Regan
It's not because you're in a drug filled stupor. It's not because you're letting the algorithm direct you. You have to employ your mind and your spirit in these things. A more modern philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, talks about how, how struggle is often a good thing for human beings. That often humans best accomplishments come from a period of adversity when they have to overcome. And if Nietzsche is not your flavor, we could look to the Bible for a reiteration of at least this point, that the Bible is filled with invocations or exhortations to courage and to faith, to taking things to the Lord in prayer. When Jesus is afflicted prior to his trial and crucifixion, he goes and prays all night. He would often go into lonely places and pray. This is the opposite of taking drugs or looking at your phone. It is intentional. It's the type of thing Aristotle is talking about. It's making a choice. It's a choice towards faith. And if all of your discomfort, if Your entire life is designed around ease and pleasure. And you never face a situation in which you think you need to pray, you need to meditate, you need to strive and overcome. You're not living a complete life. And one of the undertones in this book, whether Huxley intended it or not, is that the drugs and the distractions, the supposed happiness that comes from pleasure is not fulfilling. It's not actually happiness. It's a facsimile of it, and it will never leave you satisfied.
- [03:05]
Juan Davalos
I always think of C.S. lewis as, quote, I can't remember where he wrote this, but he says pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. And you can see that everywhere, right? Not just even in physical activity, right. When you go to the gym, it is through suffering that your body becomes stronger in business, right? If it's in failure that you learn more than in. Than in success. In every aspect of life, struggle to a certain degree. Pain, as uncomfortable as it is, has a role in growing the human being.
- [03:40]
Jeremiah Regan
So we've given you a preview of one of the questions that the students bring up. There's several more. You'll enjoy listening to them. If you enjoy learning with Hillsdale and you want to learn a little bit more about struggle and overcoming, I'd encourage you to take our course on the American Left, taught by politics professor Kevin Slack. He details some of the struggles our regime has faced. The principles of the Declaration of Independence, such as equality and the right to life, liberty and property, the idea that men are created by God and accountable to him. These have all been under attack since the 1960s. I think in some ways we're making some pretty encouraging progress against these things. So it's a good time to learn about the enemy so we can capitalize on the advances that we're making in restoring our regime to the principles of the founding towards Christianity. To take the American Left, go to Hillsdale Edu course. That's Hillsdale Edu course. Now let's turn to Dr. Arne and his students with totalitarian novels. Lecture 4 Brave New World Drugs and Genetics.
- [04:45]
Larry Arne
We're going to talk about Brave New World. Now, I'm told that these students have divided themselves into two armed camps, and so they're going to fight and you're going to enjoy it, and maybe we'll all learn something.
- [04:59]
Jack
Jack, my question concerns the regime that we deal with in Brave New World. It's really unlike anything that we encounter in the other in the other books for a few reasons. One, it's based on pleasure, and two, it's been in power for hundreds of years, whereas in 1984, the party's been in power for a couple of decades. In Darkness at Noon, the Party has also not been in power all that long. And in that hideous strength, it's a small faction that is trying to amass power, eventually to get authority. So, Brave New World, we're dealing with a regime that has been in practice for hundreds of years. So how does this. How does our reading of this book change our approach to looking at totalitarian regimes when we see one that has been in practice for centuries?
- [05:51]
Larry Arne
Hmm, that's an interesting question. There's that argument between Huxley and Orwell about who's right. And Huxley is obviously putting the proposition that this works eternally or indefinitely. O' Brien claims in 1984 that they have established a perpetual motion machine. It'll never go away. But you're right, he hadn't proved it yet. In Brave New World, Mustapha Mond is the equivalent of o', Brien, but he's a very different kind of guy. And he doesn't claim to be God. He even pines for time to think about things like that, but has given it up. I think in the end, he's not a very serious man. You know, if Huxley really believed, which he apparently did, that this thing could, may come to be and would last, then that's a view of human beings that he has. I get the sense that he was somebody who looked down on people a fair amount. He thought that they could be demeaned is the word I've been using into an unserious life. And that's a shame. What do you think?
- [07:22]
Luke
So I'll sort of present our two sides. And it goes based off of that Huxley Orwell debate, because I think Jack and I fall in the camp that Huxley is more compelling and that pleasure seems to be a more effective means where Luke and Katie tend to fall on the other side. So the quote that I want to draw out for that is Mustapha Mond is talking to John the Savage, and he says, the Savage is complaining because he says this world doesn't seem realistic. You don't have beauty, you don't have art, you don't have, like, true happiness. The Savage shook his head. It all seems to me quite horrible. Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of A good fight against misfortune. None of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand. Now, I think that they misconstrue what happiness is completely. I think that they mistake it for pleasure. I think Aristotle talks about how the life of pleasure is the life of fatted cattle. And I think we see that in Huxley. But I do think that it is very compelling because I think even if you look at our own world today with things like social media and narcotics and things like that, it is very easy to sedate people into doing whatever you want them to do and to get people to be okay with instant gratification. And I think that it's a self cleansing world. I think that even though you see a lot of people in this novel who are very discontent, all of them in different ways seek to realign themselves through regime. Whether it's through taking drugs, whether it's through sacrificing the things that they think, whether it's Mustapha Mond giving up his desire to think. All of the people in the novel want that instant gratification.
- [09:04]
Larry Arne
So your position is pleasure. Do you agree with, do you adopt that view because you, you think that people are given to the life of fatted cattle?
- [09:22]
Luke
I don't think naturally they are, but I think within 1984 it talks about how within that system they want people to challenge that. The oppression is. It costs forth something in the human spirit. While I do think that mankind has something that calls them to something beyond the life of fatted cattle, I think it's very easy to fall into complacency and to slip into it. And very easy to make yourself believe that that is happiness, that instant gratification is enough. And I think it leaves you feeling empty. And I think that there are people who would push back on that. But I do think that it is very easy to slip into that and it's very easy to remain in that state.
- [10:02]
Larry Arne
Is the state of America today self satisfied and easy. So if it's ever been that, it hasn't lasted, right? I mean, right now America is contentious and denunciatory and in a great struggle for the future of the country. And it's intense. It, when I read the paper sometimes I say it reminds me of 1858. People are marching, people got, they're on a side or against a side. People are getting prosecuted for things they say. I was talking to our honcho of the online courses, Jeremiah. Jeremiah's a hunter and a mighty man. He's a PhD and we were talking about conservation. There's people who like to hunt and shoot, and here we have a center for that. They take great pride in conserving things. They like nature. They don't want to tear it up. So that's a conservation movement. That seems good. And I grew up with that in Arkansas. Take care of the land, Take care of the game in the land. Want them to thrive. Plant your crops so that they can thrive among them. It was a big focus, right? And it was heartfelt. That becomes what that becomes. There's too many people and we're using up too much stuff, and we gotta decrease the population, and people can't be using stuff. Right. And so that's. We didn't settle into a bucolic age where we were one with nature. We can only be one with. The radical movement thinks we can only be one with nature if we get out of it. We are the cancer in nature, we humans. So I don't know if we have any experience in the west to suggest that we're settling down into an age of pleasure and consumption.
- [12:31]
Katie
I happen to agree with that, in part because pleasure.
- [12:36]
Larry Arne
So these want to pleasure people and these want to hurt people.
- [12:40]
Katie
Well, in terms of the effectiveness of a detective totalitarian society, which perhaps maybe we shouldn't be discussing or trying to arrive at a conclusion about, I do think that pleasure is fundamentally unsatisfactory. And while I should clarify my statement by saying pleasure in the form of drugs and sex won't be enough for a nation or a society to quell uprising with people, I don't think that's a compelling reward for humanity. I think they desire something more within themselves than just sex and drugs.
- [13:12]
Larry Arne
I think that's right. Churchill. He writes a very beautiful paragraph. It's one of his best. He says he's imagining what the future is going to be like. And he makes some predictions, and they're pretty good. And then he makes a big one. He says, think of a generation long time in the future, and people have conquered nature. They can live as long as they want, and they enjoy wider pleasures than we can know. They can travel anywhere they want, interplanetary. And he says, what would be the good of all that to them? What would they know? More than we know about the simple questions, why are we here and what are we for? It is the persistence of those questions that gives us the best assurance that all will be well. The novel specifically takes into account what about people who want higher things? In rare cases, we send them to an island, right? That means that they can't provide for that. And that means that they can't provide for what Churchill calls the heart of the matter amongst human beings. Why are we reading these novels? We want to know, right? Why do we fear tyranny? Is it because we fear pain? Yes, in part. Is it because we fear things to be taken from us that are precious to us, especially when they're things we have to earn, you see, because we want to grow and we want to do well, and we are made to be responsible for that and for not doing well, too. What do you think?
- [15:17]
Unnamed Student
I guess my question, so I fall on the side more that I think 1984 is more compelling, but I think it's because it presents human beings as creatures that still have these nobler impulses that I think we see in Brave New World have been somehow taken, not beaten out of the people, but drugged out of the people. And I think you see that when John comes into the hospital and his mother's died, and he's angry and he has all these deltas around him, and he starts talking about how he's gonna show them that the life that they're living isn't satisfactory, and he says, very well, then, I'll teach you. I'll make you be free whether you want it or not. And pushing open a window that looked on to the inner court of the hospital, he began to throw the little pill boxes of soma tablets in handfuls out into the area. For a moment, the khaki mob was silent, petrified at the spectacle of this wanton sacrilege. With amazement and horror, a great shout suddenly went up from the mob. A wave of movement drove it menacingly towards the savage. And so I just wonder if there's ever a way you can actually take those out of human beings. Or would there always be people, like, when you're starting this regime, are there always going to be people that are going to rise up against that?
- [16:36]
Jack
Well, keep in mind, when Mustafa Mond is giving the history of their state, he lists many wars and mass deaths that occurred with either people who weren't on board with the program, or war was used as sort of a means to force ultimate submission. So I think there might be a way to reconcile these two things where it seems, even with this regime that is based on pleasure and instant gratification, it still came about through very horrific mass murder and horrible things, the extinctions of human lives. And so there definitely seems to be a play in that there. And it's not as though they just gave Soma out to everybody. Everybody took it, then everybody was sedated. There was a little more to it, at least according to the chronology that we're given.
- [17:36]
Larry Arne
Yeah, the claim of both the Bolsheviks and 1984 doesn't actually make this claim. But the claim of the Bolsheviks and the claim of Mustafa Monde in this thing is that the old way didn't work. We were killing each other. We had to do something different. What that means is we can't be human anymore. And, you know, maybe that's true. We get so much power, we can hurt each other so much. That it'll be the domination of everybody by a few or extinction. But here's the difficulty. First of all, you have to figure out where is freedom in the human being, right? So, like, it's for certain that the Epsilons, the bottom of the order. But all of the lower castes, to some extent, they have been impaired. And if you give somebody a lobotomy, I guess I don't know what part of the brain. But you can limit somebody, you can deprive them of their capacities, then he's not a human anymore. That's going on with some of these castes. And then if you can do that with surgery or alcohol in the test tube, you can do that with Soma, too. In other words, you're changing them into something else. And that's crippling. And that's why the interesting problems are concentrated in the ones who haven't been impaired. We are material beings, right? We die. Things can happen to us that impair or compromise us. So we don't function the same way anymore. But when we are fully functioning, you're stuck with a philosophic problem, which if you claim that the material parts of you control the thinking of you, you could not have objective knowledge of that fact. And that means the statement that it's true and the statement that it's false are both condition statements, right? So Aristotle solves that problem. Deonima on the soul. Parisucheus, the Greek in there. He claims that the intellect that perceives is immaterial. In fact, it's even nothing except what it thinks and isn't anything when it's not thinking. This is a cup. I've been looking at these cups. They're all pretty cool, and I like it. We got our nice logo on there. But I think I prefer this cup to these. Because this one tapers in a little bit. Keep it hotter. You know, I'm interested in cups. And how do I know it's a Cup. It's made of porcelain, ceramic. If you crush it, it wouldn't be a cup anymore. It means it's not just the matter, the matter would all still be there. And so something he says is holding it together as a cup. It's an activity. Everything's active in Aristotle, and it's holding it together. And how do we see it's a cup? Because you could get a ceramic thing similarly shaped, and it could be a bowl, or it could be a variety of things, right? And he says that the active intellect in here, here, your soul is the whole of you. It participates in the activity of this. It becomes part of it, sort of. And if there were matter in the soul, it wouldn't be able to do that any. And certainly not for the wide variety of things. Oh, these are identical. Not too good. But for the wide variety of things that you can see what kind they are, right? And the soul is nothing before it thinks or accept what it thinks. That's the argument. Now, first of all, if that were so, if that's what the soul were really like, you couldn't measure it, you couldn't even see it. There's nothing to see. So what is the basis for the argument? It is. This gives an account of the soul being able to do what it seems to be able to do, right? And if it can't do that, all argument is vain. You see, that's contradiction, Ted. No, you proceeding on that basis. Imagine, assume that argument is not vain. We make them, made to make them must be like this. You see, I don't know if you could produce subservient beings by compromising the brains or souls of babies. I don't know if that would work or not, but in principle it looks like it could work because it's certainly true. If you get brain damage, you can lose part of your capacity. But if you compromise the ability of the human being to reason, you have an impaired human being, which is not the measure of what a human being is like. So now all of a sudden, it's just a question. Are you prepared to do that? Because it does something to you. If you do that, it means that, you know, we may be manufacturing babies. Before you know it, the technology's coming. Well, if we start doing that, then babies will become manufactured items and we will look at them differently than the gifts we see them to be. Now, you know, my grandchildren are awesome. I pity other grandparents, but we didn't design them. See, they're beings of their own, right? And I love to tell the joke to your parents, especially if your grandparents are standing there. I'll say, did you know that brain skips generations? And your grandparents always like that? Now my children are smart. What does that mean for me? So each is his own thing, right? An entity, a being with a divine spark in it. If you look at babies like that, then they're a thing to be cared for. Especially so this. This changes our attitude. Like, I can't think of any good reason why Mustafa Monde doesn't just slaughter Helmholtz and Bernard Marx and all of the recalcitrant Henry Foster and anybody who's outstanding. Why didn't he just kill him? Because he made them according to specifications. So that's another problem, right? I mean, introduce somebody with the temper of o' Brien into the society and he would chew Mustafa Mah into pieces in a heartbeat. This show is a part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to your favorite. You'll get brand new episodes of all your favorite shows sent right to your.
- [25:36]
Jack
Device and you'll help let us know.
- [25:38]
Larry Arne
That you're out there listening. Never miss another episode by going to podcast hillsdale.edu subscribe.
- [25:49]
Jack
That's podcast Hillsdale.
- [25:51]
Larry Arne
Edu subscribe or click the Follow or.
- [25:56]
Jack
Subscribe button on Apple podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.
- [26:03]
Luke
Great books, great people, great, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being. And we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hills hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale Edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you find your audio.
- [26:50]
Katie
One of my questions concerns something Mustafa man said, and he talked in your lecture about how Hypnopedia, right, sleep learning wouldn't really work because there's no activity involved in the person themselves. And he talks about how SOMA kind of evens out one's passions and that removes the ability, like you can have morality through soma rather than morality through choice, he says. Mustafa man says this to the savage. There's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making A great effort. And after years of hard moral training, now you swallow two or three half gram tablets and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous. Now can you state what precisely is wrong with that and why that is such a bad way of looking at growth?
- [27:40]
Larry Arne
Churchill had an expression he liked too easy to be good. No, this moral training he talks about, who does that? It's an important phenomenon that we have excellent teachers here. You do the vast majority of your learning by your efforts and you grow by that. And a bunch of fancy pants sitting in front of the room talking up to and including especially I, that doesn't do any good at all unless the student, you know, I can tell you what the College was like 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, was that there was a percentage of the student body who wished they hadn't come. And if they stayed, they were going through the motions. And I had some of them in class and they had the wrong motives and it was obvious, right? Sometimes they'd come in my class because they thought I could do something for them. Looked interesting. He's busy, probably he'll be easy, you know. And you know, and the classes were affected by that, right? And not just everybody in the class was affected by that. I rebelled against that. I thought it's got to get, gotta be valued. We think when we admit students that willingness and ability are the two criteria. I emphasize willingness when I get involved and I get involved if I meet em, and you know, and then they, you know, people want to get in here more than do. And I always try to measure their willingness. How can I get in? They'll say, and I'll say, well if it were I, I'd try to fight my way in. They say how do I do that? And I'd say erect a tent in front of central hall and I'm not leaving till you admit me. In other words, be determined because you'll need to be determined in the work, as you know. And the other thing is you get smarter if you prosecute your work with determination and if you fritter your life away, you'll be an idiot by the end of it. And so I'm a big believer in the effort of the individual that comes out of the individual. And so that means that if you don't do that then you'll be lesser, right? And you're not made that way, right? You're not the tablet SOMA tablet cannot be courageous. Can't really make you courageous. You have to learn that. You have to practice it, you know, in your mind, people are always saying, how do you build character? You know, because you guys seem to have good characters. Contrary. And a sign of good character, by the way. And the answer is, help them see what it is, and then they will want it. And if they don't want it, they'll never get it. And so that's the point. The point is, if you take out the freedom in the human being, you are not left with a human being. Right. In the very great novel Pride and Prejudice, I think it's one of Bingley's sisters says to Bingley, I think it would be better at a ball if we just stood around and had discussions. And Bingley said, that would be grand, but it wouldn't be very much like a ball, and this wouldn't be very much like a human being. I'm working up a theory, which I'm not going to state it because I'm tempted to think I'll say it this way, that Aldous Huxley was given to looking down on people. And I don't think that's a virtue. And I don't think Winston Churchill did that. Okay, that's Brave New World. These are the Cyberites who hang their hat on pleasure, and these are the sadists who think pain is the deal. But I think we've reached a better conclusion and we've examined another form of totalitarian rule, and I don't think we're attracted to it. Hope you all learned something. Thank you.
- [32:56]
Juan Davalos
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. If you want to continue learning, please visit Hillsdale. Edu Course. There you will find over 40 free online courses, including Ancient Christianity, the Genesis story, classic children's literature, and many more. The courses include additional readings, study guides, fully produced videos, and you can chat with your fellow students on a dedicated forum. Upon completing a course, you will also get a certificate. All our courses are free because we believe that what you'll learn will enrich your life and that a virtuous citizen is the best defense for liberty. So pursue the education necessary for freedom and happiness at Hillsdale Eduardo course today. That's Hillsdale. Edu Course. Thanks for listening.