Conditioning

[rabid reader]

I have just finished reading A Brave New World I book that I have always wanted to read but never found the opportunity to until recently. I enjoyed the book immensely and particularly enjoyed the end of the book where there was discussion of God and the nature of man. I loved when the Controller finally pointed to the supreme fallacy that John held, that despite the fact he was not conditioned in the same way as the "civilized" man had been, he had in fact been conditioned. He feels he acts naturally and the beliefs he holds are in fact "right" in the objection to the "other" but his God, his believe he suffering to appreciate beauty is also a cultural construction. Marriage, love, poetry is all simply the process of conditioning.

The reason I enjoyed this part of the discussion some much was that I was afraid before hand that what I was reading was a piece of culturally relativist literature, as in: it is unnatural their way of life because it is not in the way we see society operate today.

First problem that arises in John's mind is the lack of Marriage, which has been seen in many cultures across our history, but not all. In the Na tribes in southern China there is no nuclear family, there is no marriage there is simply random fornication similar to the relationships developed in A Brave New World the simple existence of such a tribe contradicts our concept of inter-gender relations to such a degree that one has to submit that marriage, though not wrong, is not necessarily natural. It is our raising that allows us to feel that marriage is natural, the nuclear family is natural. This conditioning that spreads not only to our family life but the way we act towards members of community, and the reason we shame those that do not follow or brake our conditions.

In A Brave New World we see a mass of people executing life in a way we do not and we say that this is wrong. The lack of Liberty is wrong. The infidelity is wrong. The drug use is wrong. We think this just as John thought it, and near the end of the book, the Controller shows John as he is, a hypocrite. The arguments that John poses are relevant only in implications of his own raising, he sees the other is is disgusted as the other is when they hear him talk longingly for his mother, or of his unwillingness to fornicate. This really seems more like Huxley isn't depicting a Dystopian society as opposed to an alternative society. The character of John really being the character of the reader, who will reject this culture immediately under a grand presumption of their knowledge of nature.

Truly I would have been interested even more if this same story was told with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra being brought in as the "Savage." To hear the man who said we have to destroy our conditioning to know our true nature. Though I would believe that the result would be the same. He would cry "I belong to Me" and would go live among the rabbits in the lavender covered hills.