Pope Paul VI promulgated the Gaudium et Spes, formally known as the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which was released in the December of 1965. This document, published just after the Vatican II Council, refocused the Catholic Church’s view on the contemporary Christian way of life. From within its culmination, Gaudium et Spes points out, “Only in freedom can man direct himself toward goodness”(Gaudium et Spes 17). It goes on to say, “ Our contemporaries make much of this freedom and pursue it eagerly…often however they foster it perversely as a license for doing what pleases them, even if it is evil”(Gaudium et Spes 17). This aspect spoke volumes concerning man’s human dignity, free will, and enticement of hubris. On the contrary, thirty-four years prior, Aldous Huxley wrote a novel, Brave New World, which contradicted and perverted the future Vatican’s vision of mankind. Overall, Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, vehemently contradicts Catholicism’s teachings concerning society, happiness, and the human condition.
Huxley’s assault originates from the beginning of the novel, setting the stage for the rest of the imaginative yet fictitious novel. The opening chapters contain a glimpse of Huxley’s controversial social structure: Over the main entrance [of the thirty-four story
building] the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY (Huxley). On the contrary, the Gaudium et Spes responds by articulating, “He [man] strives by his knowledge and his labor, to bring the world itself under his control. He renders social life more human both in the family and the civic community through improvement of customs and institutions” (Gaudium et Spes 53)
The term family, mother, father, son, and daughter in Brave New World are looked upon as blasphemy. When Tomakin reunites with Linda and John [the Savage], his ex-girlfriend and bastard child respectively, he is mercilessly ridiculed for having an exclusive wife and especially an illegitimate son (Huxley 152). Overcome with embarrassment as the Director of Human Conditioning, he immediately resigns from his post. The stability structure of a family dynamic is social taboo because a family is deemed too unstable to properly raise a child. By and large, a family violates the stability element of the World State’s motto. It seems fitting that the Catholic Church stands with an inverse perspective:
The family is the original cell of social life. It is the natural society in which a husband and wife are called to give themselves in love and in the gift of life. Authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society. The family is the community in which, from childhood, one can learn moral values, begin to honor God, and make good use of freedom. Family life is an initiation into life in society (Catechism 2207).
From this passage, it is shown that the Catholic Church stands firm on the ideal of a strong familial base for the benefit of both person and society. Both stances on stability and freedom held on the Catholic Church implicitly suggest contradiction between itself and Huxley’s Brave New World. Naturally, Brave New World maliciously assaults the beauty of the Catholic Church’s vision for a supportive, caring, and loving family.
The Catholic Church holds a firm stance on how the human person is to be treated even before birth, including chromosomal specifications. Certain attempts to influence chromosomic or genetic inheritance are not therapeutic but aimed at human beings selected to sex or other predetermined qualities. Such manipulations are contrary to personal dignity of the human being and his integrity and identity, which are unique and unrepeatable (Catechism 2419).
Instead of a family setting, Brave New World’s society originates from the designing of hatcheries and conditioning cells of human beings. A technique called the Bokanovsky’s Process allows for a series of arrests of development, checking normal growth, and egg responds by budding (Huxley 4). Tomakin, the Director of Human Conditioning, considers it to be one of the major instruments of social stability. The mass production of humans stemmed from the assembly line, an idea invented by Henry Ford in the first decade of the 1900s.
Ford’s Model-T car was produced at such a high rate that by it’s peak in production, over half of the new cars in the world were Model-T Fords. Huxley considered Henry Ford an integral part of the creation in Brave New World. Admired for his humility toward his empowerment of thousands of workers during the early 20th century, Ford said, ““I invented nothing new…to teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense”(Collier 9). The introduction of Ford’s model-T was chosen as the opening date of the new era, Anno Ford (The Year of Our Ford). Because of how Henry Ford allowed for the success of so many people working under his new assembly line, he was motivated knowing, “If they weren’t working, they’d be scrounging for a buck here or there, or on relief. Maybe both. Relief carries with it no dignity, no pride. These men can hold their heads up…” (Collier 142). Huxley found Ford to be so empowering for the people of his time that Huxley attributed Ford with a god-like aura within BNW. For everything that has to do with God is forbidden, only Ford is important. “A whole collection of pornographic books. God is in the safe and Ford on the shelves” (Huxley 211).
Once again, Huxley’s parody of Ford’s amazing achievement perverts the true God, the Lord. Huxley cleverly replaces the word of Lord in Christianity with Ford. In Brave New World, the people worship Ford just as God is worshipped by the faithful of a community. For according to the community, “people who have never heard of Ford are uncivilized” (Huxley 98). Huxley’s mockery of Christianity extended as far as making “the sign of the T” instead of making a sign of the cross as well as “all crosses having their tops cut and became T’s” (Huxley 134). The Catholic Church makes a point of expressing Jesus’ divinity and kingship with these simple words: That man is rightly called a king who makes his own body an obedient subject and, by governing himself with suitable rigor, refuses to let his passions breed rebellion in his soul for he exercises a kind of royal power over himself. And because he knows how to rule his own person as king, so too does he sit as its judge. He will not let himself be imprisoned by sin, or thrown headlong into wickedness. By his glorious Cross Christ has won salvation for all men (Catechism 2275).
Cumulatively, the Church states that because Jesus is perfect in every way and has gained us salvation through dying on a cross, He is the ultimate judge, standard, and royalty. As a result, it is Jesus, and only Jesus, who should be hailed as God.
Since God and Christianity were eliminated by this BNW, the community had to look to other ways to satiate their spiritual hunger. By Anno Ford 184, a hallucinogen named soma was being produced commercially. It was said to have “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects” (Huxley 54). Soma practically assured the stability of the society while providing a “holiday” from reality whenever a person desired, and coming back without any side effects. And yet again, on the contrary, the Catholic Church calls to mind temperance and respect of body through drugs, stating: [Drugs] constitute direct co-operation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law (Catechism 2291). Brave New World’s encouragement of drugs as an attempt to rid the emotions and feelings of society sharply conflict with the Church’s teaching.
To prevent humans from experiencing nature or creation, Brave New World conditioned them by associating books with loud noises and flowers with electronic shocks (Huxley 17). The conditioned people went into “conditioning rooms” where they would be shown images, such as a book, and shocked instantly upon the sight of the book. The concept of human conditioning stemmed from the experiment conducted by 1860s Russian scientist Ian Pavlov. Pavlov trained dogs to salivate at the presence of stimuli having nothing to do with a natural cause of salivation. Pavlov had noticed that for salivation to occur, it was not actually necessary for food to enter an animal’s mouth. Ultimately, Pavlov came to the conclusion that animals, even humans, could be trained to respond to unusual stimuli, such as salivating to a bell. After he came to this conclusion, he asked, “Does not the eternal sorrow of life consist in the fact that human beings cannot understand one another, that one person cannot enter into the internal state of another?” (Johnson 121-137).
The Catholic Church disagrees that a human ought to sacrifice his or her free will for the “good” of society. “Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts,” articulates the Catholic Church (Gaudium et Spes 77). Man’s rationality creates his beauty to choose for himself- his rationality implies a freedom. By conditioning human beings, Brave New World’s society manufactures nothing more than slaves to accomplish the will of a select few of the hierarchical society. Implicitly, Brave New World attacks not only the people, but also the Catholic Church and her teachings.
Man’s greatest search has always been the journey towards a perfect, fulfilling happiness. Brave New World offers an intriguing and controversial option pertaining to the attainment of happiness. Certainly, every society’s goal is to be happy, but Brave New World held a controversial corollary, “The secret of happiness and virtue- liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny”(Huxley 244). Brave New World believed conditioning people so that their free will will not interfere with “society’s happiness is also the individual’s happiness. Their argument says that, “People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get,” (Huxley 278) and this is beautifully illustrated throughout Brave New World- for the conditioning they institute direct the people only to desire what society can give them, thus satisfying their needs and a satiating a hunger for happiness. On the contrary, the Catholic Church holds the following stance: Happiness is the attainment of comprehensive human fulfillment.
For Christians, happiness is only attained through union with God, which is the consequence of grace…For Catholic belief, happiness consists in an encounter with the perfect Persons of the Divine Three, and because this understanding of human happiness emphasizes the love, intelligence and personal character of happiness with God, it possesses some distinct advantages to the teachings of other religions and philosophical systems (Gaudium et Spes 34).
The Catholic Church unquestionably supports the beauty of human love, intelligence, and personality in relation to how humans are to be happy. Since Brave New World limits human’s ability of free will- specifically how to love, choose, and think independently, it stifles man’s inner desire to be “free”- attacking not only man, but also the Catholic Church.
Dr. Michael Pennock, former Saint Ignatius High School Theology teacher and nationally renowned theological writer, asserts, “The playboy/ playgirl mentality is irresponsible because it totally ignores one of the aims of sexual activity: the sharing of life,” in his book concerning Catholic morality Your Life In Christ (Pennock 226). It is the position that the Catholic Church stands firm behind, “Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to the spouses, is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such” (Pennock 227).
Sharing life arouses the beauty in the human person’s sexuality. Brave New World contends a different view of sexuality. Lenina, a main character in Brave New World shows her influence of conditioning and a lack of care towards her sexuality by stating, “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today” (Huxley 149). She is insensitive towards her sexuality, using it as an object and way to have “fun” while continually disregarding her irresponsibility to her dignity and person. Interestingly enough, Sigmund Freud, world-renowned psychologist and psychotherapist, wrote that work could provide some of the pleasure that, in a less restrictive culture, would be found in sex (Kramer 144).
Freud’s description of that type of culture, surrounded by constant sexual innuendos throughout work and leisure, seems supported by BNW. For it is stated multiple times throughout the novel, “Everyone belongs to everyone else” (Huxley 77). BNW disrespects the people of its society by encouraging erratic and irresponsible sexual behavior, which harms the dignity and worth of each person. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, along with other writings, hold firm the Catholic Church’s teachings concerning human being’s free will, dignity, social structure, and religion. Because BNW seemingly perfectly contradicts the Catholic Church on numerous issues, BNW unreservedly and explicitly exposes direct contradictions towards the Church and her teachings for the goodness of society. It seems fitting that BNW is a book banned by many schools throughout the country, especially those of Catholic endorsement.
