As I write, I’m about three quarters of the way through Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley is a masterful writer and I’m a bit ashamed to have waited this long to dive in. The story is a bit unnerving at times, with more than a few passages that earned a grimace from me, but that’s the point. Examining the familiar within the outrageous allows us to see around our blind spots. Dystopian texts help us clean off our glasses and ask, “What exactly is going on here?”
Huxley’s novel is often compared to George Orwell’s 1984 as both explore concepts of control. But whereas 1984 concentrates primarily on state totalitarianism, Brave New World makes state control unnecessary by virtue of a self-enslaved people. Fixated on pleasure and distraction, procreation is reduced to productivity-oriented test tube eugenics and terms like “mother” and “father” are considered smutty and crass, which renders sex into a mandated non-monogamous activity (because ‘everyone belongs to everyone’). And should you find yourself bored or unable to cope, you can take a couple of grams of soma - a blissful, sensation-heightening drug that both numbs and exhilarates.
Despite the insistence that ‘everyone is happy,’ existential doubt creeps in nonetheless. Perhaps my favorite passage so far takes place on the New Mexico Reservation, an arid desert-like place outside of civilized society whose settlers practice a blend of pagan religion and remnants of a long-forgotten Christianity. Bernard, an “Alpha-Plus” citizen with a rough case of existential emptiness asks “John the Savage”, a Reservation outcast struggling with a similar sense of loneliness, to tell him about his life. John recounts one particular moment:
‘Once,’ he went on, ‘I did something none of the others did: I stood against a rock in the middle of the day, in summer, with my arms out, like Jesus on the Cross.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘I wanted to know what it was like being crucified. Hanging there in the sun…’
‘But why?’
‘Why? Well…’ he hesitated. ‘Because I felt I ought to. If Jesus could stand it. And then, if one has done something wrong...Besides, I was unhappy; that was another reason.’
‘It seems a funny way of curing your unhappiness,’ said Bernard. But on second thought he decided that there was, after all, some sense in it. Better than taking soma…”
If Bernard were to express this realization on his own turf, he’d be sent to a Reconditioning facility and demoted stat. His demystified opinion of soma, a passive form of escape, allows him to consider other responses to unhappiness. In civilization, a quiet or unhappy moment is immediately met by diversion, whether it be sex or entertainment. But here, the self meets itself in silence and must confront discomfort.
What seems suggested here is that a prescription for unhappiness could be a willingness to suffer. This runs directly contrary to the ‘therapeutic’ in Christian Smith’s coined phrase ‘Moral Therapeutic Deism’, his term for the modern belief that a flourishing life is defined primarily by being a generally moral and happy person. A major idol of our age, comfort is in some form or another viewed with the preciousness we usually reserve for inalienable rights. To be unhappy and to be uncomfortable are one and the same. As an outcast, John the Savage has known little comfort in his life and yet is still unhappy. And yet, his instinct is not to seek out comfort as a cure, but to suffer.
John the Savage’s mimicry of Christ on the Cross is a fourfold attempt:
To experience what it was like to be crucified
To know and share in the strength of Jesus
To cure his unhappiness
To atone
At their core, these four aspects of John’s will to suffer are familiar impulses to those who take these words of Blaise Pascal as a challenge: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." When we confront ourselves in all our finitude, our weakness, and our depravity, we sorrow and long to unite ourselves to greater experience, strength, and salvation. This is suffering. And it hurts. And it’s better than soma.
When we are confronted with the uncomfortable, do we choose distraction? When an atrocity meets our ears, does our rush to categorize outpace our willingness to bear its weight on our heart? What would happen if we responded to our unhappiness by choosing suffering, by choosing the uncomfortable Way?
It might help us look more like Christ.