Transportation And Privacy In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Huxley accurately depicts how the later industrial revolution left many questioning the rules of modesty and privacy in a newly interconnected world. He portrays how an expansion of transportation and communication, a new sense of openness regarding sexualty, and an onset of socialism led to this moral revolution.
The expansion of transportation and communication in the early 20th Century, made affordable through mass production, brought revolutionary changes as distances grew shorter and privacy rarer. Huxley narrates, “God isn’t compatible with machines and science and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness” (Huxley 234). He explains how the civilization has advanced

‘Orgy-porgy…’ In their blood-coloured and foetal darkness the dancers continued for a while to circulate, to beat and beat out the indefatigable rhythm. ‘Orgy-porgy…’ Then the circle wavered, broke, fell in partial disintegration on the ring of couches which surrounded—circle enclosing circle—the table and its planetary chairs. ‘Orgy-porgy…’ Tenderly the deep Voice crooned and cooed; in the red twilight it was as though some enormous negro dove were hovering benevolently over the now prone or supine dancers” (Huxley 84). This scene quite obviously shows the increase in openness in sexualty, however, it also brings up an interesting connection to one of the very first scenes, in which the Director of the hatchery gives a tour of the room where human embryos are grown and conditioned, where the entire room is soaked in red light as it’s the only light the embryos can tolerate. The copulating adults here are compared to the little embryos inside their bottles. The adults who are bathed in red light and trapped inside metaphorical bottles are made infantile. When babies want something, they cry. When they're hungry, they eat. They basically have

Huxley explains “‘For of course,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘in the vast majority of cases, fertility is merely a nuisance. One fertile ovary in twelve hundred— that would really be quite sufficient for our purposes. But we want to have a good choice. And of course one must always have an enormous margin of safety. So we allow as many as thirty per cent of the female embryos to develop normally. The others get a dose of male sex-hormone every twenty-four metres for the rest of the course. Result: they're decanted as freemartins—structurally quite normal... but sterile. Guaranteed sterile. Which brings us at last,’ continued Mr. Foster, ‘out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention” (Huxley 4). This is a perfect illustration of how the World State controls its citizens by controlling their fertility, but to have this kind of power over an individual is to strip that individual of their humanity. Having children, after all, is one of the most fundamentally natural processes of human life. During this time there was a delusional fear in western nations over the onset of socialism, which perhaps even Huxley experienced. This is reflected in this illustration of the World State, which is a government so predominate it