Impact of Scientific Technology: Perspectives from Huxley's Brave New World

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Modern society is filled with ever-growing, ever-changing technology that, for the most part, is not harmful to its users. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Huxley demonstrates the impact scientific technology plays on the lives of Bernard and Lenina.
Aldous Huxley grew up with a grandfather that was a well-known Victorian scientist by the name of Thomas Henry Huxley, who was a popularizer of Darwinism. Despite the expectation of Huxley to be a rationalist and skeptical advocate of empirical science, He was also related to a famous Victorian schoolmaster named Dr. Thomas Arnold, from which he embraced beliefs that he later put into his writing. Huxley first became interested in science, but later turned to the study of Literature due to his failing eyesight. One positive result from his failing eyesight is that he was not able to serve in the …show more content…

Huxley connected his last novel, Island, with one of his most famous novels known as Brave New World. In both novels, Huxley introduces drugs that affect human experiences, one called “soma” and the other “moksha”. The differences between the two drugs are that “soma flattens and attenuates human experience, moksha enhances and enlightens it,” which makes some wonder what it means to be “truly human.” Throughout all of his works, Huxley was aware that “techno science, especially biomedical science, could fundamentally alter these aspects of life”

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