Sunday, February 7, 2010

Who Wants A New World Anyway?

I am going to extend the question of whether people should have a right to their own bodies, to also encompass their personality and behavior. In A Brave New World, this question/debate arises between The Savage and Mustapha Mond. The whole debate, to me, was built upon the fact that Mustapha Mond's society is purely based on the happiness of the individual. That happiness is the sole reason for their "stability" of society. While The Savage wants to feel pain. Where he wants to be able to make his own choices, and be able to live with there outcomes. This debate is a clear example of the ethics and morality of biopolitics, and the effects that it can have on society.
Mustapha Mond's society is a stable society which he attributes to the happiness of its people. Mustapha says, "Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any happier for that? No they wouldn't..." He then goes on to say, " We dont want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. Thats another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Ever discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science... It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; its also science." If this doesn't show a society that is controlled by bio-politics, i dont know what one would look like.
From what I know about science, the main reason that we are on earth is due to the fact that we want to reproduce and pass on our genes. It isn't that we need to be happy all of the time, and that we attain a perfectly stable soceity. Of course those are things that we strive for everyday, but that is not, atleast to me, the purpose of human life. We are supposed to try and understand things that we dont understand. The unknown IS innately frightening to people, and we try to understand as much as possible. However, i believe that happiness is a secondary goal to human behavior. It might seem that the reason why people behave the way they do is to attain the most happiness as possible, but the only way to do this is to understand the world around us. And as we better understand the world around us, we are better able to cope with things that do not help advance our goals, thus making the individual able to be happier. So this long rant about happiness and biopolitics is meant to show that people and society do not need to be happy all of the time to live. Just because we have the technology to cut a limb off without killing the person, does not mean that we should put it into practice because it will make the person happier.
But what about happiness. Isn't it a human right for everyone to be happy? No, i do not believe this. I believe that all people have the ability and chance to be happy. This is my main concern with Mustapha's society. I think that he treats everyone the same, but if every person is different, shouldnt we all be treated on a case by case basis. I know that I am rising a lot of question, and in not a very straightforward approach, but this was how my brain was working while reading A Brave New World.
As I was reading these two chapters I was reminded of a philosophy class that a took in high school. I forget who we were reading, maybe Socrates or Aristotle, but we came across the issue of dichotomies. That everything has an opposite in the world, and because of this we are able to define and know the difference between things. Hot has cold, high has low, east has west, but while i was reading these two chapters i was wondering if people never experienced sadness and only experienced happiness, as in Mustapha's society, would there even be happiness. I know that i am making the assumption that sadness is the opposite of happiness, but just go along with me on this one. How would someone know that they are experiencing happiness, if there was no opposite that was ever experience.
I have said a lot of things in this post, and hopefully you were able to follow my arguments and the side that i took. There will definitely be more posts about A Brave new World, cause it seems very interesting to me.

3 comments:

  1. I thought it was very interesting that you said happiness is a secondary function for humans. I do agree with that, in a very strict biological sense. However, I was curious as to how you would respond to the argument that happiness is necessary for humans to reproduce, in terms of our modern society.
    I was also interested by your statement that happiness is not a human right. Also, in Brave New World, people are 'forced' to be happy, since they receive brainwashing from birth and are given supplements to make them happy, as well as other stimulants.

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  3. Matt, I wonder if you would agree that happiness (as a secondary function for humans) is just something our brain came up with to help us fulfill our purpose, which may be to pass on our genes to healthy children and to live long enough to take care of them. It makes sense that if our genes are to propagate, in the control center of the body there must be a method of sticks-and-carrots to control our bad behavior and encourage good behavior, "good" being anything that increases the probability that we will pass on our genes.

    Let's say happiness and pleasure in general is the carrot, and the stick is unhappiness and pain in general. We have figured out how to exploit the pleasure centers of our brain with drugs, but our genes didn't think about that as they were evolving. So with that in mind, your claim that happiness is a secondary function is completely correct: the primary function is to reproduce, the secondary function is to control behavior so that the primary function may be achieved.

    Also I agree with you 100% that neither happiness nor contentedness are human rights. It might feel really unfair to be unhappy, but it's not a god- or natural-given right that you be a happy creature. Human rights that everyone can agree upon are very few and far between, but one is that everyone has ownership of his or her own body. (If I don't own my body, who does?) If we have the right to maintain our bodies, then what Taylor mentioned in regards to Brave New Worldians being forcefully medicated for perpetual contentedness is not at all fulfilling some imagined "right" we have to be happy; we DO have the right to decide what goes into our bodies, and to be forced to take a pill violates that right. For that matter we also have the right to make our own children if we want -- their primary function in life had been taken away from them, and they were kept content all the time so they wouldn't think about it and freak out!!

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