In The Nature Of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment

5. Brave New World in the Discourses of Reproductive and Genetic Technologies

Chapter 5 Brave New World in the Discourses of Reproductive and Genetic Technologies Valerie Hartouni "The final and most searching revolution . . . the really revolutionary revolution , is to be achieved not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings"—so wrote Aldous Huxley in a foreword to his novel Brave New World1 This foreword Huxley attached to his work some fifteen years after its initial publication in 1931. While it contains passing gestures in the direction of acknowledging some of the novel's artistic and prophetic shortcomings, its primary purpose appears to have been to reintroduce the tale to a world whose immediate past and present circumstance lent it a reality and plausibility7 well beyond what Huxley himself could originally have anticipated. Of more pressing concern to the author than the novel's many failures of form or foresight was the vulnerability of an only recently liberated postwar world and the treacherous new beginnings to which this world seemed irreversibly committed with the rise of the totalitarian state, the unchallenged construction of death centers for the "unfit," the completion of the Manhattan Project, and the entrenchment of Cold War relations. When situated against this background and the many staggering questions that had begun to emerge with the war's end about what had happened and how and why, the story Brave New World told was fundamentally transformed. Regarded initially by some as a "mildly pornographic 85 86 ValerieHartouni fantasy," 2 and by others as a somewhat reactionary diatribe concerned more with the democratizing potential of technology than with its potential for dehumanization,3 the work became somber political commentary on dangers postponed but not canceled. "Out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature, into the . . . world of human mastery and control," the penultimate revolution or that revolution about which men had only dreamed at least since Bacon had, in Huxley's estimation,begun. Through the development and application of ever more sophisticated therapies and technologies, the body and the body politic together would be normalized , stabilized, modified,and "cured" of their manydisorders; humansuffering in all its various forms would be alleviated finally and forever. "All things considered," wrote Huxley, "it looks as though Utopia were far closer to us today than anyone, only fifteen years ago, could have imagined . . . . If we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval . . . , it is quite possible that the full horror will be upon us within a single century."5 If Brave New World seemed at one time to shed critical light upon a world poised at some kind of crossroads, a world that was not only recovering from but beginning as well to revel in the realizationthat "all things were possible," that light has since dimmed considerably Indeed, today, one could say that it has been all but extinguished, so "old world" does Huxley's "new world" now appear. Its inhabitants, its technology, its organization of knowledge, social relations, and desire direct our attention not toward the future but to an age now long past—to the world of our parents and their parents as well. Its nightmares are not those of one living in the late twentieth century,nor precisely are the fears, terrors, and variousfantasies the work conjures and parodies. We are not free of political nightmares , and much about the present configuration of life in the late twentieth century is quite terrifying, but the tale itself hardly sounds the depths of either. It is rather curious, then, thatBraveNew World should be positioned so prominently in an emerging, ever-expanding discourse on the new technologies of human genetics and reproduction. In an otherwise diverse and contesting set of literatures spanning medicine, law,ethics, feminism, and public policy, as well as in popular discourse and debate over the proper use and potential abuse of these new technologies, Brave New World is a persistent and authoritative presence. Routinely rehearsed to frame multiple , competing sets of claims regarding the implications of genetic and reproductive manipulations, the work is as frequently invoked only in passing or by title. In either case, the authorityand centrality of the text are simply assumed, as is its relevance. Within the context of these literatures and popular culture more generally, it is as if Huxley had become a master Brave New World and Reproductive Technologies 87 cartographer and his novel, a base map from which contemporary thought and imagination confidentlytook its...