Progress Is Lovely

Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne,
characters in "Brave New World."

‘Progress is lovely.’ So declares Lenina Crowne, one of the characters in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World.

Brave New World, published in 1932, imagines a world set well into the future where citizens are controlled, not by an authoritarian “Big Brother” (as in George Orwell’s 1984), but by being fed a constant supply of a happiness drug (soma) and having been programmed from the time of artificially engineered birth via sleep-learning and conditioning. Each engineered person is assigned to one of five classes (from Alphas to Epsilons) and remain in that class throughout life.

Lenina is a Beta and enjoys this situation; she cannot do otherwise due to her conditioning. Her partner at the time of her statement about progress being lovely is Bernard Marx, an Alpha Plus and a sleep-learning specialist. Bernard is somewhat of a misfit; he is short and does not enjoy many of the pursuits and experiences that other residents of this brave new world do. Crucially, he does not enjoy the drug soma, completely at odds with his contemporaries. Bernard missed out on something in his conditioning. This makes him a non-conformist yet is tolerated because of his Alpha status.

Bernard’s non-conformism though, does mean he is sceptical of Lenina’s assertion.

He replies to her, ‘Five hundred repetitions once a week from thirteen to seventeen.’ Huxley has Bernard saying this ‘…wearily, as though to himself.’

Lenina does not hear him clearly and asks him what he said. Bernard restates Lenina’s own declaration, ‘I said that progress was lovely.’

In this short exchange we hear the majority habituated view, expressed by Lenina, that progress is to be desired. Bernard, on the other hand, alludes to this idea being a conditioned one; a thought that one is indoctrinated into throughout the teenage years.

Reading Brave New World today we might ask ourselves if the notion that progress is lovely has indeed been a conditioned one since our own childhood.

The idea that we, individually and collectively, must progress is deeply ingrained. Individually we attempt to keep up with the Jones’ and collectively we keep searching for the next great technological breakthrough.

Progress is a seductive notion promising that if we keep increasing our income and wealth, obtain more material things, grow the GDP, invest in new technologies, then the future will be better. Progress vows to help us live longer, happier lives.

If there are unwanted harmful by-products of all this, then progress claims that more progress will fix them.

But, all that is a sham, and Bernard Marx knew it. Sadly, he can only voice his reservation ‘…as though to himself.’

What is the goal of progress? What is our destination? When will we get there? Crucially, what will be the signposts to indicate that we have reached our journey’s end?

The creed of progress does not answer these questions. Progress simply offers more progress as if there is no destination. Significantly, as we are finding out to our detriment, the progress myth does not recognise any limits to the journey. According to the progress mantra we never reach a stage in the journey where we can say, this is it, this is where we have enough.

No, progress promises that the future is always better. The corollary of this is that there can never be enough.

Yet, Bernard Marx (and his creator, Aldous Huxley) saw through the conditioning and indoctrination that we are constantly fed through the media, advertising, and political campaigns.

In the early 1930s when Aldous Huxley was writing Brave New World, he imagined that such a world, if it was to come at all, would arrive well into the future. However, a little less than thirty years after Brave New World was published, Huxley wrote the non-fiction book Brave New World Revisited. Therein Huxley noted that the world of Brave New World was arriving much quicker than he had imagined.

In the time since Brave New World Revisited was published (in 1959) we would have to conclude that Huxley’s imaginative world has truly become more firmly established.

Is there a better future than that portrayed in Brave New World? Is it possible that we might progress (excuse the pun) toward a healthier world? Is it possible that we might dispense altogether with the endless desire for progress?

Aldous Huxley published his final novel, Island in 1962, a year before his death. Island is the utopian counterpoint to Brave New World.

In the years to come, can we divert ourselves from the dangerous mantra of progress, progress, more, more and direct ourselves towards something more akin to Island?

 

Note:

1. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Longman, Harlow, Essex, England, Second impression 1983 (text originally published 1932)

Let Goats Escape

In Leviticus 16:8 and 16:10 we read that Aaron (the brother of Moses) was tasked with separating, by lot, two goats. One goat was to be offered as a sacrifice for the sin of the people. The other was to be an atonement for the sin of the people and it was to be let free into the wilderness. This second goat effectively escaped being a sacrificial offering.

When William Tyndale (1494 to 1536) undertook the first translation of the Bible from Greek, Hebrew, and German into the English language he coined the word (e)scapegoat as a translation of the Hebrew words that referred to the second goat.

So today, in the English language Bible we read that ‘…the scapegoat shall be presented live before the Lord…’ and that Aaron was to ‘…let it go as the scapegoat into the wilderness.’¹

The scapegoat that Arron let go took with it the sins of the people. Leviticus 16:22 tells us that this goat ‘…shall bear on itself all their iniquities to an uninhabited land: and (Aaron) shall release the goat in the wilderness.’

The word scapegoat has now been part of the English language for almost 400 years. We are still making use of it, and doing so increasingly. In the early 1800s the word was used approximately 0.04 times in every one million words uttered. By 2019 it was being used 0.83 times in every one million words. That is a staggering twenty-fold increase in just 200 years.

Why? we might ask.

Does the increase in the number of times we use the word scapegoat mean that we are more willing to atone for our sins? Does it indicate an increase in the number of scapegoats?

Or, through a subtle shift in the sense of the word scapegoat, does it suggest a keenness to shift the blame for our sins, and iniquities, onto someone else, and treat them as a scapegoat?

Today, the meaning has shifted subtly. A scapegoat is someone who is blamed for the sins and iniquities of another. Furthermore, in today’s world a scapegoat is not only blamed, but often punished. We see it often, don’t we; not only at an individual level, but also at a societal and even global level. Something bad happens and immediately we (individually and/or collectively) look around for a scapegoat – someone to blame.

That someone (the scapegoat) is then threatened in all sorts of ways. It could be a threat of personal violence. It could be the threat of exile. It could, as we have seen many times throughout the past century, be the threat of bombing and invasion of one country by another.

The scapegoat nowadays is no longer the means by which our sins, iniquities, and harms are let go into the wilderness. The scapegoat is the reason for those sins, iniquities, and harms.

When will we rediscover the courage to admit that we can be the authors of our own misfortune and not seek out a scapegoat to blame, accuse, and threaten?

If the world is ever to find some peacefulness and harmony then we will have to learn what Aaron was taught.

We will have to let the goats escape.

Notes

1. Holy Bible, New King James Version, copyright 1990 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.