Abstract
This article inserts Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) into a bioethical conversation about the value of old age and old people. Exploring literary treatments of bioethical questions can supplement conversations within bioethics proper, helping to reveal our existing assumptions and clear the way for more considered views; indeed, as Peter Swirski has argued, literary texts can serve as thought experiments that illuminate the ramifications of philosophical ideas. This essay examines the novel's representation of a society without old people in conjunction with ideas about aging and life narratives put forward by philosophers and bioethicists such as Ezekiel Emanuel, Gilbert Meilaender, and Alasdair MacIntyre. While critics, and Huxley himself, view the Brave New World as dystopian primarily because of its depiction of a totalitarian society where art, truth, and meaning are sacrificed to pleasure and distraction and where the ruled are programmed not to question the values of their rulers, the novel also makes clear that the excision of old age has significant political, moral, and emotional costs.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Patrick Kain and Teresa Blankmeyer Burke for their excellent advice about philosophical sources relevant to this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Medical Humanities for their very helpful suggestions.
Endnotes
1 It is important to keep in mind that some kinds of abilities may improve in old age, that the narrative of decline is not the single narrative of aging—nor does decline in some areas necessarily coincide with decline in others. As Margaret Gullette persuasively argues, “Decline is a metaphor as hard to contain as dye. Once it has tinged our expectations of the future (sensations, rewards, status, power, voice) with peril, it tends to stain our experiences, our views of others, our explanatory systems, and then our retrospective judgments” (2004, 11).
2 A forum in the online journal AgeCultureHumanities, edited by Erin Lamb and entitled Age and/as Disability, brings age studies and disability studies together in exciting ways. Particularly promising is Jane Gallop’s suggestion that old people take up Lee Edelman’s “resistant logic” in No Future and refuse “to subordinate our present lives to the worship of the future” (2015).
3 However, the important character of Crasweller, a hearty and strong man approaching the “fixed period” of sixty-seven years, demonstrates that Trollope was at least aware that this is not true of all older people.
4 A response to the article by a Brown University philosophy professor similarly zeroes in on Emanuel’s attitude toward people who are not productive: “Dr. Emanuel’s suggestion that it would be good for ‘each of us to ask whether our consumption is worth our contribution’ will hardly attract those who think that even the unproductive have an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Ackerman 2014).
5 Emanuel exposes how deep his ableism goes when he claims that our children and grandchildren remembering us “with memories framed not by our vivacity but by our frailty is the ultimate tragedy.” This misguided view of human frailty is highlighted by the contrast offered in the epilogue to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. In the epilogue, Paul’s wife Lucy Kalanithi describes how much she gained from loving her husband in his final year of life. She writes, “Indeed, the version of Paul I miss most, more even than the robust, dazzling version with whom I first fell in love, is the beautiful, focused man he was in his last year, the Paul who wrote this book—frail but never weak” (2016, 220).
6 As Harriet McBryde Johnson (2003) writes in the conclusion to her wonderful article, “Unspeakable Conversations,” she insists upon the “undeniable reality of disabled lives well lived.”
7 As Rebecca West describes it in a contemporaneous review, “promiscuity is a social duty, since it discourages far more than puritanism the growth of that disintegrating factor, love” (1932, 199).
8 Discussing Evgeny Zamiatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984, George Woodcock describes “falsification or destruction of history and the sense of the past” as common to anti-Utopias (1956, 90).
9 Thomas Cole reads Oedipus at Colonus differently, as a story that affirms the motif of life as a journey, and in Oedipus’s case, a triumphant one. Quoting Christine Downing, he describes the ending of Oedipus’s life this way: “His blessed death, Sophocles seems to be saying, is appropriate to one ‘who has lived long enough to understand the meaning of his own story’” (1992, xxxiv).
10 As Laura Frost points out, “As much as it is a nightmare of a totalitarian, genetically engineered future…Brave New World is also a cautionary tale about a world in which artifacts of high culture are held under lock and key while the populace is supplied with ‘imbecile’ entertainment” (2006, 447).
11 Huxley borrowed this phrasing from his earlier novel, Crome Yellow (1921), where Mr. Wimbush comments on farming techniques: “‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I rather like seeing fourteen pigs grow where only one grew before. The spectacle of so much crude life is refreshing’” (21).
12 In Julian Huxley’s story “The Tissue-Culture King” (1927), the Moreau-like scientist cultures tissue from the king of an African tribe, telling the people that this increases and spreads the protective power of the king’s body. Like Aldous’s Director, the scientist calls this process “mass production” (157).
13 Evelyn Cobley describes the society as “an efficient system from which all wasteful residues have been eliminated” (2009, 285).
14 Nancee Reeves points out that a wide variety of late nineteenth-century speculative fiction included explicit or suggested euthanasia schemes, where euthanasia marks “areas of social progression and rais[es] questions about what we owe to society and to our fellow man.” And she notes that “in the majority of late-Victorian future fiction, euthanasia is merely implied” (2017, 103).
15 In a brief article about the influence of James Fries, Aimee Swartz writes, “Today, with data strongly confirming the hypothesis, compression of morbidity has become widely recognized as the dominant paradigm for healthy aging, at both individual and policy levels, and is thought to have laid the foundation for successful health promotion and programs” (2008, 1163).
16 For Huxley, such managed deaths at prescribed times are a crucial means of population control. In the novel he has the Director refer to population control in the first chapter, saying that “our business is to stabilize the population at this moment” (4). In Brave New World Revisited (1958), he gives great importance to the issue, writing that “[t]he problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals—this is now the central problem of mankind” (2004, 242).
17 In his later utopia Island (1962), Huxley shows the importance of deaths with meaning by having Susila explain the “art of dying” to Will, and then depicting her mother-in-law Lakshmi’s death as solemn and meaningful (280ff). As Lakshmi is dying, Susila reminds her to be present: “You’ve got to know you’re here. All the time” (298). This mindful dying is diametrically opposed to the deaths in Brave New World.
18 One philosopher who objects to the idea that it is useful to view life as a narrative is Galen Strawson, who doesn’t dismiss the importance of viewing life in this way for many, but objects to it as a universal necessity for a good life, because “[m]any of us are not Narrative in this sense” (2015, 285).
19 Small (2007) questions the value of life narratives as they pertain to old age, especially in chapter 3; but what she really seems to be objecting to is not narrative in general, but a narrative of relentless questing or progress. Small points out that we cannot fit old age into a continual progress narrative; but she thereby overlooks the winding-down stage of narrative: the denouement.
20 Within the study of narrative it is also common to parallel the dynamics of plot with those of human lives. As Peter Brooks writes in Reading for the Plot, “We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed” (1985, 3).
21 As Jackie Leach Scully points out, this does not mean we identify ourselves or our life narratives in narrow, wholly consistent terms. She writes: “Narrative identity indeed may be more tolerant of indeterminacy, disjunction, and ongoing reinterpretation…than we generally assume” (2008, 130).
22 In Huxley’s Island, the problems described here are solved differently: families are broadened by including twenty other sets of biological families in each child’s life. The resulting family-networks are described as “inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary” (1962, 103).
23 In Trollope’s The Fixed Period (1882), the plan to euthanize everyone at age sixty-seven fails largely because a daughter intercedes to extend the life of her father, and even the son of the zealous narrator says he would not like to “deposit” his own father (1990, 150). Huxley sees that the absence of family bonds is a necessary precondition of the Brave New World’s excision of old age.
24 The Yeats phrase from which I take my title seems appropriate to me because the novel focuses almost exclusively on the struggles of its male characters, and when it refers to older people becoming reflective, it is always to old men. But certainly the Brave New World, like our own, is even more intolerant of old women. As Cole writes about his grandmothers’ shame and revulsion about aging, “These feelings reflect our culture’s intractable hostility to physical decline and mental decay, imposed with particular vengeance on older women” (1992, xxiv).
25 In Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921), killing nonhuman animals when they are no longer productive is labeled as sensible by the eugenicist Mr. Scogan but as cruel by Anne Wimbush: “‘But how practical, how eminently realistic!’ said Mr. Scogan. ‘In this farm we have a model of sound paternal government. Make them breed, make them work, and when they’re past working or breeding or begetting, slaughter them.’ ‘Farming seems to be mostly indecency and cruelty,’ said Anne” (19).
26 Similar ideas animate the euthanasia plan in Trollope’s The Fixed Period: “A judge shall be deaf on the bench when younger men below him can hear with accuracy. His voice shall have descended to a poor treble, or his eyesight shall be dim and failing. At any rate, his limbs will have lost all that robust agility which is needed for the adequate performance of the work of the world. It is self-evident that at sixty-five a man has done all that he is fit to do” (1990, 8-9).
27 For a discussion of the difficulties of “putting oneself in another’s shoes” see Scully 2008, 52-75.
28 Holstein, Waymack, and Parks (2010) argue similarly that “human beings should be viewed as beings-in-relationship—as being necessarily and not only contingently ensconced in relationships of care” (xiv).
29 Firchow describes this state of events by saying that “In the Fordian society, the individual is no longer free to endanger himself or his group by refusing to indulge his impulses” (1975, 314).
30 Adorno disagrees with Huxley, however, about the possibilities of collectivist societies, and critiques the novel for its unwitting nostalgia and reactionary politics (1983, 106, 112). He contends that “[u]nreflective individualism asserts itself as though the horror which transfixes the novel were not itself the monstrous offspring of individualist society” (115).
31 In his review Bertrand Russell stressed that open futures are illusionary, because we are all indoctrinated (badly in our culture, well in the Brave New World), but that we rely on our belief in them: “We have a notion that we can choose what we will be, and that we should not wish to be robbed of this choice by scientific manipulators…. What we cling to so desperately is the illusion of freedom, an illusion which is tacitly negated by all moral instruction and all propaganda. To us human life would be intolerable without this illusion” (1932, 211-12).
32 James Fries, one of the foremost proponents of “healthy aging” has said, “We cannot compress morbidity indefinitely, but the paradigm of a long, healthy life with a relatively rapid terminal decline is most certainly an attainable ideal at both a population level and individual level” (Swartz 2008, 1166). In an article about metaphorics of containers/containment and old age, Andrea Charise cites warnings across popular culture of a “silver tsunami” and Martin Amis’s suggestion, quoted in an Economist editorial, that aging artists be voluntarily euthanized (2012, 1). While Amis’s is an extreme reaction, Charise cites a study finding that the Economist, a representative and influential mainstream publication, consistently uses apocalyptic language to talk about the aging of the population (3n9).
33 Meckier (2007), points out that Newman’s and Biran’s views are diametrically opposed to those expressed by D.H. Lawrence in Apocalypse, arguing that many of the views Huxley is grappling with in Brave New World are in dialogue with Lawrence.
34 John’s objections likely owe something to H. G. Wells’s Mr. Catskill in the utopian novel Men Like Gods and/or to Charlotte Haldane’s Christopher in Man’s World. Mr. Catskill protests to the Utopians, “‘You have been getting away from conflicts and distresses. Have you not also been getting away from the living and quivering realities of life?’” (Wells 1923, 99). Haldane’s Christopher similarly worries that “[t]he individual has been gradually pushed out” and proclaims, “Perverse, reactionary, I am. But my emotions are myself. I refuse to purge myself of them as of waste matter. I will keep them!” (Haldane 1927, 181, 101). Huxley set out to satirize Wells’s utopia, though Brave New World subsequently grew into a much more complex project (Bradshaw 1995, 161).
35 Huxley apparently agreed to a great extent with this belief, writing that “Abolishing obstacles, [“man”] abolishes half his pleasures. And at the same time he abolishes most of his dignity as a human being” (qtd in Firchow 1975, 315). In Island, he has his character say that “[i]t wouldn’t be right if you could take away the pain of a bereavement; you’d be less than human” (1962, 112).
36 Harris also discusses circumstances in which older people’s lives might be considered worth less than younger people’s lives, especially in his section on “the fair innings” argument (1985, 90-94). Silvers offers a brief critique of the “fair innings” argument (2000, 217).
37 Trollope’s character Crasweller names this aspect of the “fixed period” as one of its worst: “The fixed day, coming at a certain known hour, the feeling that it must come…” (1990, 157).
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Linett, M. “No Country for Old Men”: Huxley’s Brave New World and the Value of Old Age. J Med Humanit 40, 395–415 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9469-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-017-9469-x