Aldous Huxley
Brave New World
Mr.
Foster was left in the Decanting Room. The D.H.C. and his students stepped into
the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor.
INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS,
announced the notice board.
The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare
room, very bright and sunny; for the whole of the southern wall was a single
window. Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white
viscose-linen uniform, their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were
engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Big
bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily
smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that
bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also
Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale
as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.
The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. came
in.
"Set out the books," he said curtly.
In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the
rose bowls the books were duly set out–a row of nursery quartos opened
invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.
"Now bring in the children."
They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute
or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four
wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a
Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed
in khaki.
"Put them down on the floor."
The infants were unloaded.
"Now turn them so that they can see the flowers
and books."
Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to
crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and
brilliant on the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of a
momentary eclipse behind a cloud. The roses flamed up as though with a sudden
passion from within; a new and profound significance seemed to suffuse the
shining pages of the books. From the ranks of the crawling babies came little
squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.
The Director rubbed his hands. "Excellent!"
he said. "It might almost have been done on purpose."
The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal.
Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the
transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The Director
waited until all were happily busy. Then, "Watch carefully," he said.
And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal.
The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at
the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.
There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever
shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.
The children started, screamed; their faces were
distorted with terror.
"And now," the Director shouted (for the
noise was deafening), "now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild
electric shock."
He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a
second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was
something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which
they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their
limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
"We can electrify that whole strip of
floor," bawled the Director in explanation. "But that's enough,"
he signalled to the nurse.
The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the
shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly
twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant
maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror.
"Offer them the flowers and the books
again."
The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses,
at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo
and baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their
howling suddenly increased.
"Observe," said the Director triumphantly,
"observe."
Books and loud noises, flowers and electric
shocks–already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and
after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded
indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
"They'll grow up with what the psychologists used
to call an 'instinctive' hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably
conditioned. They'll be safe from books and botany all their lives." The
Director turned to his nurses. "Take them away again."
Still yelling, the khaki babies were loaded on to
their dumb-waiters and wheeled out, leaving behind them the smell of sour milk
and a most welcome silence.
One of the students held up his hand; and though he
could see quite well why you couldn't have lower-cast people wasting the
Community's time over books, and that there was always the risk of their
reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes,
yet … well, he couldn't understand about the flowers. Why go to the trouble of
making it psychologically impossible for Deltas to like flowers?
Patiently the D.H.C. explained. If the children were
made to scream at the sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic
policy. Not so very long ago (a century or thereabouts), Gammas, Deltas, even
Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers–flowers in particular and wild
nature in general. The idea was to make them want to be going out into the
country at every available opportunity, and so compel them to consume
transport.
"And didn't they consume transport?" asked
the student.
"Quite a lot," the D.H.C. replied. "But
nothing else."
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave
defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was
decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to
abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume
transport. For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the
country, even though they hated it. The problem was to find an economically
sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and
landscapes. It was duly found.
"We condition the masses to hate the
country," concluded the Director. "But simultaneously we condition
them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all
country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they
consume manufactured articles as well as transport. Hence those electric
shocks."
"I see," said the student, and was silent,
lost in admiration.
Aldous Huxley
(2005). Brave New World. New York:
HarperTorch. pp. 19-23.
