In Class: Brave New World

In class we decided to show that we had read Brave New World by posting about it:
The biggest thing that I got from this book was how society and human nature do not change.  This morning, I talked to my father for about two hours about the world, and how we view it, and I wish that I had this conversation to put up on this blog, as it was very enlightening for a variety of reasons.
 One thing that we did talk about through was this fact about human nature not changing, and how society too does not really change.  In this discussion, 5 works - The Gods Must Be Crazy, The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984 and Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - were brought up to display this fact that for the almost 100,000 years our species has existed, there has not really been much change and that we are the same people as our ancestors from a tenth of an epoch ago.  What we mentioned about this novel, is that on the surface, it shows the "savages," to be just that - savages.  Huxley was truly using them to juxtapose the world state, and just show that the true savages where the people in the society, and that these so called "savages" were the only true humans, as they were the ones who had pain, desires, ethics, and religion.  They were not the brainwashed machines of the society.  In this, Huxley also showed us that people do not change.  As a culture, if you let us, we will go back to our roots as a hunter gatherer society.  This same sentiment was explored in the late nineteenth century by the authors of the Naturalist movement, who said that if we were taken from cities, we would fend for our selves, and once again become one with nature.  A good example of this is when Buck in Call of the Wild by Jack London essentially becomes a wolf, because he has been completely set apart from his life as a pet in California.  It was also stated by Locke and the other enlightenment thinkers, as they came up with the idea of god-given or natural rights.  These rights, all though seemingly very radical, were not new views, but the old views of pre-societal humans, who lived without a government over them.  With the advent of government, this idea was washed out of our society, and we were stretched, like a rubber band, so far from this original idea, that we completely forgot about it, but during the enlightenment, human nature allowed us to remember this past idea, and the "rubber band" of society snapped back into place.  This is exactly what Huxley shows with his "savages."  While the rest of society has betrayed human nature, they have become machines, while the humans who were not de-personified snapped back into their position as a hunter gatherer society that ran of simple religion.