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)