9.06.2008

Brave New World

Can the Brave New World Community can still be called a community? Since all sense of faith, truth, is somewhat removed (except for those who had too much alcohol in their blood surrogates) because people don't act the way they would normally do since they have been conditioned, any sense of solidarity, or social community may be somewhat removed also at the same time. The communal concept seems just to evaporate when everyone has his rights too clearly defined.

Chapter 1
COMMUNITY IDENTITY STABILITY
What is happening so far in this first two chapters is only half a joke. We are already starting to head this way, I mean, it's all relative, but the idea is there when our scientists are using male and female gametes for parents who cant have children : sperm banks. Indeed the basic medical idea was not bad, but the thing is that it is turning into a scary business, my mother just met two week ago a sperm banker, saying that his point was to classify and order the gametes, male and female, by the phenotype they have, that way the parents, like in a store, can choose the child they want to see growing up in they family, they'll choose a boy or a girl that resemble them, blond, black, yellow, green, tall, short, big feet, short nose...And then the distance towards what is happening in the Brave new World is short : in a few years maybe these parents who are only choosing a child looking like them (and what about back parents who choose a white child instead of putting bleach cream all over his face for years...) are going to pick the intelligence of their child, or a child who is going to be an artist, a business man, or a baby supposed to have rock star genes...and people would pay for it. Millions. How much for a Bill Gates spermatozoan? so little by little people would control natural evolution and we would have only certain type of people....like if there were not enough orphans on Earth...
but actually what is happening is the book is that a few guys are controlling all births, the "parents" thing is over..(oops we learn that later in the second chapter actually but ..oh well..) so they are the one who are going to choose not their child but the planet population..they are going to create all the communities they want to be on Earth and erase the others, making clones and monsters...a super-superficial society...not humans any more but machines,

"What is beneath is void, no soul, no thought, nothing.
A non being in a body whose contours only remains - the human scaffolding becomes rigid and hard, immobilized." (Martin Puryear)

In a certain way it reminds me of Descates' Evil Demon controlling our minds. The difference is that in the Brave New World everything is conditioned before the "human-like-thing" (?) starts to work and live by its/his "own" (if we can say "its/his own"), the scientists can stop playing on their minds, the humans would continue as they were conditioned to be..with Descartes we are who we are, but some crazy evil demon is putting input in our brains to make us feel one way or another depending on the stimulus we have (fire burn...cold water..) ...
so the result is the same, huxley's babies cant stand flowers, descartes humans cant stand chocolate, because the first were trained to react that way and the second ones have this input giving them a cardboard taste when they put chocolate in their mouths..

confusing..i must say that i might be hard to follow..

well about the human idea i put a question mark on...can we still talk about humanity in this case ?? not really since as we know humanity is defined as their ability to think, their reason and understanding...and in this case they cannot think by their own. they are then not real humans..."A non being in a body whose contours only remains "

Chapter 2

I kind of laughed reading the "you know what Polish is, I supposed".. I really didn't think the answer would be "a dead language" I really wasn't that far in the future, like two or three decades ahead...or I don't know but I was not thinking about any other change in the way we are living besides the reproduction process used in the hatchery. I bet only english remains..then "parents" and baby were "born"....

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