Living In Our Brave New World

Perhaps it was only my increasing feelings of unease concerning the direction of our nation and world that I chose to pack an old copy of Brave New World to re-read during a recent beach trip. More time than I care to admit has passed since the days of my high school required summer reading lists, and many of the details of this book had become a distant memory.

Given some of the news headlines during the week of my trip, that book choice seemed eerily appropriate, and I have since been contemplating just have far we’ve already ventured into that dystopian statist future first described by Aldous Huxley some 80-plus years ago.

For those unfamiliar with the book, Huxley transports the reader to London in 2540 AD (or 632 AF referring to “After Ford”, the new world deity) to a World State managed by World Controllers. The family structure no longer exists except for the New Mexico Savage Reservation where monogamy, religious faith, and morals are still of value. Babies are “decanted” and genetically engineered by a caste system rather than birthed, children are reared by the state, and education is an indoctrination process which assures that each person is content within their station in life. Individuality is deemed abnormal and unacceptable. By virtue of the caste system, each person fulfills a pre-determined job/employment function, and entertainment, sexual promiscuity, and government-sanctioned inebriation are hailed as the means for constant happiness.

Let’s reflect…Outcome-Based Education…Goals 2000…No Child Left Behind…Common Core…are you seeing the pattern as it relates to education in our brave new world?

As I’m reading and remembering this disturbing vision of a totalitarian and scientifically-controlled future, I learn of the disturbing undercover video reporting of aborted baby organs being procured and transferred via Planned Parenthood to third party companies for medical research. After watching the video, I fail to see how this can possibly be anything other than the harvesting of body parts of innocent victims as we continue on our slippery slope of moral decline. Have we really become so desensitized as a nation that we can possibly consider this ethical by any standard?

I’m well aware of the arguments from the left regarding this video: the portion released to the media was edited and taken out of context; there is no profiting by Planned Parenthood, only reimbursement of expenses (although that argument is now challenged by a former Planned Parenthood employee familiar with the available loopholes); and they are only providing a service for their clients who chose to donate the organs.

But none of those excuses address the nonchalant attitude of the doctor as she discusses the manner in which babies are carefully aborted intact in order to salvage their body parts without damage. Further, her comfort level in discussion with the actors portraying a potential business affiliation indicates that this is not uncharted territory for Planned Parenthood.

Have we now reduced the value of life to little more than a commodity for medical research? Conservatives are repeatedly told to leave social issues on the sidelines during elections while our tax dollars continue to fund Planned Parenthood and all its atrocities. The left side of the spectrum certainly brings social issues front and center and by ceding the narrative, we are reaping the consequences of a lost value system and in turn enter into our own Brave New World.

In the forward to my copy of the novel, Aldous Huxley returned years later to address the rapid changes in the world just fifteen years beyond publication. While he initially projected “Utopia” to exist some six hundred years into the future, he then (in 1946) feared that the totalitarianism could be upon us within a single century, “that is, if we refrain from blowing ourselves to smithereens in the interval.”

Are you following the Iran nuclear deal? The Obama administration just allowed the United Nations to approve the deal prior to review by Congress. American sovereignty? That’s now history as far as this president is concerned.

Huxley’s conclusion is ominous. Unless we decentralize and promote freedom, we will have a choice of two horrors – several “national, militarized totalitarianisms” all with the capability and threat of the nuclear bomb and the destruction of civilization, or “one supranational totalitarianism” created by the “social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.”*

Elections and social issues matter – always.

*Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. Forward. Perennial Classics ed. 1998.

Marcia Chambliss serves on the leadership team of Smart Girl Politics, www.smartgirlpolitics.com, an online community for conservative women. She can be reached at: Marcia@sgpaction.com. Her views do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Smart Girl Politics.