This is simply to note that Huxley's vision is, of course, a vision of the world that we can now imagine. We can still trace the legacy of the brave new world's freedom from the burden of participatory government, from Locke's freedom from tyranny to the American founders' freedom to self-rule, even if brave new worlders cannot. This perhaps highlights the difficulty to instantiate the radical discontinuity Huxley speaks of. Indeed, Rorty can be read as suggesting a trivial expectation of difference-that mores and customs evolve and change over time. In the spirit of Brave New World, Richard Rorty claims, 'Some day we may have ways of talking about life that we cannot now imagine.' While this does not necessitate the discontinuity Huxley hoped to achieve in the brave new world, it does not preclude such a possibility either. This discontinuity is expressed in no better way than through Brave New World's apparent negative freedoms, or what Theodor Adorno describes as Huxley's attempt 'to derive the idea of human dignity from the comprehension of inhumanity.' This kind of revolution signifies the emergence of a future where, to borrow one of the conditioning, hypnopedic slogans of Huxley's dystopia, 'history is bunk' (BNW, p. xi), which is characterized by the radical discontinuity of thoughts and beliefs from one era to the next. Huxley insists that we take seriously the possibility that human institutions might actually acquire the technological means to usher in what he calls the 'really revolutionary revolution' (BNW, p. This cursory assessment, however, obscures another possibility, one that touches on the satirical poignancy and relevance of Huxley's dystopic vision. Brave new worlders are ignorant and conspicuously not free they ' what got to do' because they have been decanted and conditioned by the corporate government, the World State (an ironical reversal of government by the people to a people by the government). The state of civilization the brave new world is in seems to speak directly to this point.

it expects what never was and never will be'-there is something, on the face, humorously explicit to it. When Huxley quotes the famous Jefferson line in Brave New World Revisited-'If a nation expects to be ignorant and free.

The brave new world pdf