Research paper written for HON 304: Censorship in America
“For books are not absolutely dead things but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” ― John Milton.
Censorship is as old as antiquity, such as when Socrates was infamously condemned to drink the poisonous hemlock due to charges of “corrupting the youth.” Restricting access to ideas, philosophies, and critiques of society is seemingly a favorite pastime of regimes, as the practice is still flourishing in the modern day. Even the United States of America, the nation of democracy and liberty, has consistently fallen prey to the censorship bug, though these acts have not been met without opposition, as contrasting interpretations of the First Amendment persistently clash heads. Notably, attempts of censorships against literature is a prominent practice, revealing a dangerous disdain for the importance of intellectual freedom in contemporary American society.
As defined by the American Library Association (ALA), there is a critical distinction between challenging a book and fully banning it. A challenge is specifically, “an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group,” whereas banning is the actual “removal of those materials.”[1] It’s important to note that a book can be challenged but not banned, but a banned book has naturally always been challenged first. Attempts to challenge literature are still considered censorship attempts, as the end goal of these attempts is to have the book removed from access, whether that be in library circulation, school curriculums, or general purchase.[2] The ALA tracks challenged and banned books through its Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), which receives reports from libraries, schools, and the media, on attempts to ban books across the country.[3] The ALA then complies the list of challenged books in order to “inform the public about censorship efforts that affect libraries and schools,” and emphasize the necessity for free access to information.[4]
The ALA has been at the forefront of the fight against censorship for over 145 years and is known as the oldest and largest library association in the world, after being founded in October 1876.[5] The mission of the ALA is “to provide leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.”[6] One of the books that has consistently appeared on the ALA’s “Top 100 Most Banned and Challenged Books” list year after year is Brave New World by English author Aldous Huxley. Reading the science fiction novel was an eye-opening, and occasionally, frightening experience, and though the attempts of censorship are understandable, they are not entirely well-founded.
Published in 1932, Brave New World features a futuristic dystopian setting with a totalitarian dictatorship, in which society has developed to become orientated around “science, technology, and efficiency.”[7] Written during the interwar period and at the height of “technological optimism” in the west, Huxley drew from the culture around him to create a dystopian future that’s aimed at critiquing the elements of capitalism and technology that the world at the time was largely considering to be a save-all crutch for humanity’s problems. Huxley largely shies away from utilizing subtlety, as Brave New World showcases a firm caricature and critique of an “ideal” society where happiness and efficiency prevail, but at the hefty cost of humanity’s greatest values, as the novel underlines, “universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.”[8]
The novel is set in 2450 A.D. London, where a totalitarian government controls every aspect of society through technology and science, such as: implementing a rigid caste system to facilitate the grouping of society’s jobs and roles, using factories to grow humans with specific genetic codes, conditioning and brainwashing the populace from birth to limit free thought, disavowing relationships and emotions, rejecting concepts of democracy and religion, advocating for widespread drug usage, and much more.[9] Huxley also implemented Sigmund Freud’s “pleasure principle” theory in the novel, as the central foundations of the society are based on the Freudian belief of humanity’s “instinctive” need to “seek out pleasure” and “avoid pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs.”[10]
Thus, in Brave New World, natural reproduction and procreation are outlawed and citizens abide by the social code “everyone belongs to everyone else,” in which monogamous relationships are ridiculed and the true “purpose of sexuality is pleasure.”[11] Casual sex is so dominant in this society, that even children are encouraged and coerced into engaging in sexual activity from an extremely early age, as viewed in the following passage, “In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the focused attention of scientists intent on a labor of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.”[12]
The novel was immediately banned in Ireland when it was first published in 1932 and has continuously faced censorships attempts around the world ever since.[13] In 1980 the book was removed from classrooms in Missouri for “making promiscuous sex look like fun,” and in 1988 the book was challenged as required reading at Yukon High School in Oklahoma due to complaints regarding “the book's language and moral content.”[14]
Passages such as, “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is,”[15] have also incited parents to vocalize concern over the novel’s explicit descriptions of drug abuse, fearing repetition amongst their children.[16]
The book was also challenged in Maryland, as a group of parents in Glen Burnie created a petition to remove the book due to sexual content, and in 2011 the book was challenged but retained after a parent in Washington state complained about the “high volume” of racially offensive derogatory language, misinformation, and inaccurate portrayal of Native Americans.[17] The irony of these censorships challenges are not lost on readers of the novel, as literature is banned in Brave New World to limit free thought amongst the population, prompting an unsettling parallel between reality and the dystopian setting.
Brave New World is not a comfortable read, but that was exactly Huxley’s intent. The context of when the novel was written is central to the critiques Huxley utilizes regarding society and science, as he attempted to “exploit the anxieties of his bourgeois audience about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism,” in an effort to unveil the sham that is “universal happiness” as defined by the world powers during the interwar period.[18]Brave New World is Huxley’s warning against “scientific utopianism,” and the clinical, matter-of-fact language he employs to describe a world state in which propaganda and disinformation is mass-spread and enables “Pavlovian-style” behavioral conditioning, eugenics, and an immorally constructed caste system is immensely unsettling, exactly what he wanted to achieve.[19] While Huxley did not publish his work to serve as a prophecy, the opposite in fact, as he hoped society would heed the warnings of excessive reliance on technology and science to achieve utopia, modern-day society has unfortunately come to echo certain aspects of the Brave New World dystopian landscape.
For example, while the mass factory production of human life isn’t a reality for the real world just yet, the basic concepts surrounding the phenomenon are present in the world today, as “people make choices to influence the genetic makeup of their children regularly,” through measures such as “pre-natal screening,” which has allowed expecting parents the ability to “decide if they wish to carry a disabled fetus to term or not,” or even mandate elements of their fetus’ genetic makeup, such as eye and hair color.[20] Couples can even choose the gender of their child through sperm sorting during the in-vitro fertilization process, showcasing how society is already participating in “soft eugenics” already.[21] Additionally, Huxley’s concerns regarding the simultaneous increase of complex technology and global problems leading to a higher concentration of power both in business and government are largely visible today, “as we have a higher concentration of wealth and power than ever before.”[22]
Despite Huxley’s warnings that this concentration has allowed people to grow comfortable with the idea of “being subjugated” and made dictatorships “easier to enact,” the superpowers of the world have not been careful to avoid the slippery slope, as visible in the United States where “the top 1% are richer than ever, six corporations control 90% of the media, and the power of undemocratic institutions such as corporations or byzantine bureaucracies are greater than ever before.”[23] Furthermore, as stated in the book, the stability of the dystopian world is largely based on consumerism and “total employment,” as the novel showcases how society contains the technology and science to utilize automation, but has “purposely stalled” it to create a caste system in which “everybody can work,” thereby limiting their free time and sense of identity, which would allow them opportunity to “think about their condition.”[24] Consumerism and the model of necessary employment has deeply penetrated all major economies in the world today, as the “free market” of capitalism both constantly churns out “innovative” product to keep us entranced while also reinforcing a system in which money equals class, ensuring that the act of earning money dominates every aspect of life, providing distractions and lack of time for members of society to critically review and think about what their governments and industries are doing.[25]
Understanding comprehensively then that Huxley’s Brave New World is fundamentally a piece of satire intended to critique society, rather than actively promote the construction of a totalitarian regime in which vulgarity, immoral scripture, and substance abuse reign supreme, it must be pondered why exactly the reaction to the novel was so immediate and wrathful. The censorship challenges against Brave New World show a large disconnect between mainstream society’s review of the novel’s intent versus its impact, a test through which all literature should be critically reviewed when attempting to censor it. Knowing Huxley’s intentions regarding the novel and witnessing the impact of the text, which was par to none seeing how the world order did not evolve to Huxley’s dystopian vision nor heed his warnings, it is confounding why scores of parents have protested so hotly for the book’s erasure.
Preservation of a democratic society requires equipping its citizens with the knowledge to recognize undemocratic behaviors and patterns, something Brave New World determinedly does, as the novel starts off showcasing just how the populace is so easily controlled by the totalitarian state, “Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions…Suggestions from the State!”[26] Attempts to censor Huxley’s text ironically and disturbingly parallel the controlling patterns utilized by the regime in Brave New World, as parents and institutions attempts to limit the novel to incoming generations follow the very guidelines of the fictional society they are deeming immorally unfit to be consumed.
How does society repeat the same patterns, over and over and over again? Why do we fall willingly, headfirst, into the cracks that threaten to undermine our democratic ambitions and freedoms? Even Ancient Greece suffered from the same ailments, and yet we maintain that we grow and progress with each generation, mending the stumbles of the giants before us. Argentine artist Marta Minujín attempted to address these very concerns with her 2017 installation of the “The Parthenon of Books,” which is a full-scale replica of the famous Athens Parthenon, made entirely out of banned books.[27]
Minujín’s decision to replicate the Parthenon is instrumental to the message of literature censorship, as the monument is “more than a building, a ruin, and architectural inspiration—it’s one of the most powerful symbols of democracy and free thought.”[28] Minujín received over 100,000 censored books in donations from thousands of people around the world, all who had personal claims and stories for why the challenged novels were important to them. Additionally, Minujín’s powerful decision to erect the installation in the Friedrichsplatz Park in Kassel, Germany elevates the meaning behind the art, as it is on the same ground where Nazi party members had burned an estimated 2,000 books during WWII.[29]
Are we, as a society, doomed to the constant push and pull cycle of expression and censorship? Parents challenge literature, artists respond with installments, and authors continue writing, all with different intentions and visions. How do we balance all of the different actors in our democracies, ensuring that all voices have an equal say in representation? Perhaps Huxley himself sums it up best in the closing of Brave New World:
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”[30]
It is our individual wants that center us as humans, remind us of our humanity, that we fight so hard to preserve through our democratic institutions and values. Attempts at censoring the realities of our individual needs for the favor of emboldening unrepresentative conformity is disappointing to witness. So, the struggle continues, and will likely remain to; as perhaps it is a trait inherent to democracy that it must be full of cracks, as conflicting voices naturally combat, each determined their interpretations carry the most weight.
Works Cited
“About ALA,” American Library Association, 2021, https://www.ala.org/aboutala/.
“About Banned & Challenged Books,” American Library Association, 2012, http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/aboutbannedbooks.
Blakemore, Erin. “An Artist Is Building a Parthenon of Banned Books.” Smithsonian Magazine, 2016, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/artist-building-parthenon-banned-books-180960923/.
Eldredge, Barbara. “Parthenon replica built out of 100,000 banned books in Germany,” Curbed Vox Media, 2017, https://archive.curbed.com/2017/7/12/15957952/parthenon-replica-banned-books-marta-minuji.
Flood, Alison. “Brave New World among top 10 books Americans most want banned,” The Guardian, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/12/brave-new-world-challenged-books.
Hendricks, Scotty “Brave New World Predicted Today's World Better Than Any Other Novel,”. Big Think, 2018, https://bigthink.com/high-culture/brave-new-world-prediction-novel/.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Brothers, 1932. PDF Version.
Lohnes, K. “Brave New World.” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 2, 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Brave-New-World.
Oliver, Maddie and Dixie Rich. “Brave New World,” The Censorship Files, 2016, https://thecensorshipfiles.wordpress.com/volume-1/issue-2/brave-new-world/.
Pearce, David. “Brave New World?” BLTC Research, 2021, https://www.huxley.net/.
Works Cited
[1] “About Banned & Challenged Books,” American Library Association, 2012. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid. [5] “About ALA,” American Library Association, 2021. [6] Ibid. [7] Lohnes, K. “Brave New World.” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 2, 2018. [8] Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Brothers, 1932, p98. [9] Oliver, Maddie and Dixie Rich. “Brave New World,” The Censorship Files, 2016. [10] Ibid. [11] Ibid. [12] Huxley. Brave New World, p13. [13] Flood, Alison. “Brave New World among top 10 books Americans most want banned,” The Guardian, 2011. [14] Ibid. [15] Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper Brothers, 1932, p102. [16] Flood. “Brave New World among top 10 books Americans want banned,”, 2011. [17] Ibid. [18] Pearce, David. “Brave New World?” BLTC Research, 2021. [19] Pearce, David. “Brave New World?” BLTC Research, 2021. [20] Hendricks, Scotty “Brave New World Predicted Today's World Better Than Any Other Novel,”. Big Think, 2018. [21] Ibid. [22] Ibid. [23] Ibid. [24] Ibid. [25] Ibid. [26] Huxley. Brave New World, p13. [27] Eldredge, Barbara. “Parthenon replica built out of 100,000 banned books in Germany,” Curbed Vox Media, 2017. [28] Ibid. [29] Blakemore, Erin. “An Artist Is Building a Parthenon of Banned Books.” Smithsonian Magazine, 2016. [30] Huxley. Brave New World, p103.
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