Chapter Summaries for Brave New World (from Sparknotes) – Flashcards

The novel opens in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The year is a.f. 632 (632 years "after Ford"). The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is giving a group of students a tour of a factory that produces human beings and conditions them for their predestined roles in the World State. He explains to the boys that human beings no longer produce living offspring. Instead, surgically removed ovaries produce ova that are fertilized in artificial receptacles and incubated in specially designed bottles. The Hatchery destines each fetus for a particular caste in the World State. The five castes are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon undergo the Bokanovsky Process, which involves shocking an egg so that it divides to form up to ninety-six identical embryos, which then develop into ninety-six identical human beings. The Alpha and Beta embryos never undergo this dividing process, which can weaken the embryos. The Director explains that the Bokanovsky Process facilitates social stability because the clones it produces are predestined to perform identical tasks at identical machines. The cloning process is one of the tools the World State uses to implement its guiding motto: "Community, Identity, Stability." The Director goes on to describe Podsnap's Technique, which speeds up the ripening process of eggs within a single ovary. With this method, hundreds of related individuals can be produced from the ova and sperm of the same man and woman within two years. The average production rate using Podsnap's Technique is 11,000 brothers and sisters in 150 batches of identical twins. Called over by the Director, Mr. Henry Foster, an employee at the plant, tells the attentive students that the record for this particular factory is over 16,000 siblings. The Director and Henry Foster continue to explain the processes of the plant to the boys. After fertilization, the embryos travel on a conveyor belt in their bottles for 267 days, the gestation time period for a human fetus. On the last day, they are "decanted," or born. The entire process is designed to mimic the conditions within a human womb, including shaking every few meters to familiarize the fetuses with movement. Seventy percent of the female fetuses are sterilized; they are known as "freemartins." The fetuses undergo different treatments depending on their castes. Oxygen deprivation and alcohol treatment ensure the lower intelligence and smaller size of members of the three lower castes. Fetuses destined for work in the tropical climate are heat conditioned as embryos; during childhood, they undergo further conditioning to produce adults that are emotionally and physically suited to hot climates. The artificial process, says the Director, aims to make individuals accept and even like "their inescapable social destiny." The Director and Henry Foster then introduce Lenina Crowne to the students. She explains that her job is to immunize the fetuses destined for the tropics with vaccinations for typhoid and sleeping sickness. In front of the boys, Henry reminds Lenina of their date for that afternoon, which the Director finds "charming." Henry goes on to explain that future rocket-plane engineers are conditioned to live in constant motion, and future chemical workers are conditioned to tolerate toxic chemicals. Henry wants to show the students the conditioning of Alpha Plus Intellectual fetuses, but the Director, looking at his watch, announces that the time is ten to three. He decides there is not enough time to see the Alpha Plus conditioning; he wants to make sure the students get to the Nurseries before the children there have awakened from their naps.

The Director leads the group of students to the Nurseries. Posted on a notice board are the phrases, "Infant Nurseries. Neo-Pavlovian Conditioning Rooms." The students observe a Bokanovsky group of eight-month-old babies wearing the Delta caste's khaki-colored clothes. Some nurses present the babies with books and flowers. As the babies crawl toward the books and the flowers, cooing with pleasure, alarms ring shrilly. Then, the babies suffer a mild electric shock. Afterward, when the nurses offer the flowers and books to the babies, they shrink away and wail with terror. The Director explains that after 200 repetitions of the same process, the children will have an instinctive hatred of books and flowers. A hatred for books is ingrained in the lower castes to prevent them from wasting the community's time reading books that might "decondition" them. The motivation for instilling a hatred for flowers is more complicated. The Director explains that Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons were once conditioned to like flowers and nature in general. The idea was to compel them to visit the country often and "consume transport" in the process. But since nature is free, they consumed nothing other than transportation. In order to increase the consumption of goods, The World State decided to abolish the love of nature while preserving the desire to use transportation. The lower castes are now conditioned to hate the countryside but to love country sports. All country sports in the World State require the use of elaborate apparatus. As a result, the lower castes now pay for both transportation and manufactured goods when they travel to the country for sporting events. The Director begins to tell a story about a child named Reuben who has Polish-speaking parents. The students blush at the mere mention of the word parent. References to sexual reproduction, including words like mother and father, are now considered pornographic. In the World State, people only use such words in clinical discussions. The Director continues with his story. One night, Reuben's parents left the radio on while he slept. The child woke up reciting a broadcast of a George Bernard Shaw speech verbatim. The parents did not understand English, so they thought something was wrong. Their doctor understood English and notified the medical press of the event. Reuben's overnight learning led to the discovery of sleep teaching, or hypnopaedia. The Director informs the students that the discovery of hypnopaedia came only twenty-three years after the first Ford Model T was sold. He makes the sign of the T on his stomach (as an observant Catholic might make the sign of the cross) and the students follow suit. He explains that researchers of hypnopaedia soon discovered that it was useless for intellectual training. Reuben could repeat the speech word for word, but had no idea what it meant. The place where hypnopaedia can be used, however, is moral training. The Director leads the tour to a dormitory where some Beta children are sleeping. The Nurse informs them that the Elementary Sex lesson is over and the Elementary Class Consciousness lesson has just begun. A recorded voice whispers to each sleeping child. It states that Alpha children have to work harder than the other classes and it disparages the lower intelligence and inferiority of the lower castes. The voice teaches pride and happiness in the Beta caste: Betas do not have to work as hard as the cleverer Alphas, it explains, but they are still smarter than the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. The Director explains that the lesson will be repeated one hundred and twenty times, three times a week, for thirty months. Hypnopaedia instills the fine distinctions and prejudices for which electric shocks and alarms are too crude. Hypnopaedia, the Director concludes, is "the greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time."

The Director leads the students to the garden, where several hundred naked children are playing. The Director remarks that "in Our Ford's day," games involved no more than a ball or two, a few sticks, and maybe a net. Such simple apparatus did nothing to increase consumption. In the current World State, all games, like "Centrifugal Bumble-puppy," involve complicated machines. The Director is interrupted by the cries of a little boy sitting in the bushes. It soon becomes clear that the little boy, for some reason, is uncomfortable with the erotic play in which the children are encouraged to participate. After the boy is whisked off to see the psychologist, the Director astounds the students by explaining that sexual play during childhood and adolescence used to be considered abnormal and immoral. When he begins to explain the deleterious effects of sexual repression, a man interrupts him. The Director reverently introduces the man as "his fordship" Mustapha Mond. At the complex, four thousand electric clocks simultaneously strike four, marking the shift change. Henry Foster and Lenina each head up to the changing rooms in preparation for their date. While heading to the rooms, Henry snubs Bernard Marx who is said to have an unsavory reputation. The narrative suddenly begins to shift back and forth between three different scenes, splicing in Mustapha Mond's speech to the boys with scenes of Henry's conversation in the male changing room and Lenina's conversation in the female training room. This SparkNote will describe Mond's speech first, and then the two changing room conversations. The students are overwhelmed by meeting Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, and one of only ten World Controllers. Mond quotes Ford, saying, "History is bunk" (an actual quote from the real-life Henry Ford) in order to explain why the students have not learned any of the history that the Director explains to them. The Director glances at him nervously. He has heard rumors that Mond keeps forbidden books, such as Bibles and poetry collections, locked in a safe. Mond, aware of the Director's unease, condescendingly reassures him that he does not plan to corrupt the students. Mond begins to describe life in the time before the World State began its policy of tight control over reproduction, child-rearing, and social relations. He likens the narrow channeling of emotion and desire to water under pressure in a pipe. One hole produces a strong jet. However, many small holes produce calm streams of water. Strong emotion, inspired by family relationships, sexual repression, and delayed satisfaction of desire, goes directly against stability. Without stability, civilization cannot exist. Before the existence of the World State, the instability caused by strong emotions led to disease, war, and social unrest that resulted in millions of deaths and untold suffering and misery. Mond describes the initial resistance to the World State's use of hypnopaedia, the caste system, and artificial gestation. But after the Nine Years' War, which involved horrible chemical and biological warfare, an intense propaganda campaign, including the suppression of all books published before a.f. 150, began to weaken the resistance. Religion, Shakespeare, museums, and families all passed into obscurity. The date of the introduction of the Model T was chosen as the start of the new era, and all crosses had their tops cut off to make them into Ts. Six years of pharmaceutical research yielded soma, the perfect drug. The problem of old age was solved, and people could now retain the mental and physical character of youth throughout life. No one was allowed to sit alone and think. No one was allowed "leisure from pleasure." In the changing room at the end of the workday, Bernard overhears Henry talking with the Assistant Predestinator about Lenina. The Predestinator suggests a "feely" (a movie involving senses of touch and smell) that Henry might want to attend. While discussing Lenina admiringly, Henry tells the Assistant that he should "have her" some time. The conversation disgusts Bernard. The Assistant notices his glum expression and he and Henry decide to bait him. Henry offers Bernard some soma, infuriating him. They laugh as Bernard curses them. The scene shifts to a public bathroom and showering room, where Lenina is chatting with Fanny Crowne. At age nineteen, Fanny is starting to take a temporary Pregnancy Substitute because she feels "out of sorts." The Pregnancy Substitute mimics the hormonal effects of pregnancy. Fanny expresses surprise that Lenina is still dating Henry exclusively after four months. She advises Lenina to be more promiscuous, as a virtuous member of World State should. Lenina mentions that Bernard Marx, an Alpha Plus hypnopaedia specialist, invited her to the Savage Reservation. Fanny warns that Bernard has a bad reputation for spending time alone and is smaller and less confident than other Alphas. Fanny mentions the rumors that someone might have accidentally injected alcohol into his blood surrogate when he was in the bottle. Lenina decides to accept Bernard's invitation because she thinks Bernard is sweet and wants to see the Reservation. Fanny admires Lenina's Malthusian belt, a contraceptive holder that was a gift from Henry.

When Lenina tells Bernard in front of a big group of coworkers that she accepts his invitation to see the Savage Reservation, Bernard reacts with embarrassment. His suggestion that they discuss it privately confuses Lenina. She saunters off to meet Henry. Bernard feels terrible because Lenina behaved like a "healthy and virtuous English girl"—that is, someone unafraid of discussing her sexual life in public. When the genial Benito Hoover strikes up a conversation, Bernard rushes away. Lenina and Henry fly off on their date in Henry's helicopter, and look down upon their world in perfect contentment. Ordering a pair of Delta-Minus attendants to get his helicopter ready for flight, Bernard betrays his insecurity about his size. The lower castes associate larger size with higher status, so he has trouble getting them to follow his orders. Bernard contemplates his feelings of alienation and becomes irritable. He visits his friend, Helmholtz Watson, a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering. Helmholtz is an extremely intelligent, attractive, and properly sized Alpha Plus who works in propaganda. Some of Helmholtz's superiors think he is a little too smart for his own good. The narrator agrees with them, noting that "a mental excess had produced in Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those which, in Bernard Marx, were the result of a physical defect." The friendship between Bernard and Helmholtz springs from their mutual dissatisfaction with the status quo and their shared inclination to view themselves as individuals. Once together, Bernard boasts that Lenina has accepted his invitation, but Helmholtz shows little interest. Helmholtz is preoccupied with the thought that his writing talent could be better used than simply for writing hypnopaedic phrases. His work leaves him feeling empty and unfulfilled. Bernard becomes nervous, jumping up at one point because he thinks, wrongly, that someone is listening at the door.

After a game of Obstacle Golf, Henry and Lenina fly in a helicopter over a crematorium where phosphorous is collected from burning bodies for fertilizer. They drink coffee with soma before heading off to the Westminster Abbey Cabaret. They take another soma dose before they return to Henry's apartment. Although the repeated doses of soma have made them almost completely oblivious to the world around them, Lenina remembers to use her contraceptives. Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, Kiss the girls and make them One. Boys at one with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release. Every other Thursday, Bernard has to take part in Solidarity Service at the Fordson Community Singery. The participants sit twelve to a table, alternating men and women. While a rousing hymn plays, the participants pass a cup of strawberry ice cream soma and take a soma tablet with it. They work themselves into a frenzy of exultation and the ceremony ends in a sex orgy that leaves Bernard feeling more isolated than ever.

Lenina convinces Bernard to attend a wrestling match. He behaves gloomily the entire afternoon and, despite Lenina's urging, refuses to take soma. During the return trip, he stops his helicopter and hovers over the Channel. She begs him to take her away from the rushing emptiness of the water after he tells her that the silence makes him feel like an individual. Eventually he takes a large dose of soma, and has sex with her. The next day, Bernard tells Lenina that he did not really want to have sex with her the first night; he would have preferred to act like an adult instead. Then he goes to get the Director's permission to visit the Reservation. He braces himself for the Director's disapproval of his unusual behavior. When the Director presents the permit, he mentions that he took a trip there with a woman twenty years before. She was lost during a storm and has not been seen since. When Bernard says that he must have suffered a terrible shock, the Director immediately realizes that he has been revealing too much of his personal life. He criticizes Bernard for his antisocial behavior and threatens to exile him to Iceland if his impropriety persists. Bernard leaves the office feeling proud of being considered a rebel. A gramme in time saves nine . . . One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments . . . Everybody's happy nowadays . . . Lenina and Bernard travel to the Reservation. When they present themselves to the Warden to get his signature on the permit, he launches into a long series of facts about the place. Bernard suddenly remembers that he left the scent tap on at his apartment, an oversight that could end up being extremely expensive. He endures the Warden's seemingly endless speech and then hurries to phone Helmholtz to ask him to turn off the tap for him. Helmholtz has bad news: he tells Bernard that the Director is planning to carry out his threat of exiling him to Iceland. Bernard is no longer proud and rebellious now that the Director's threat has become a reality. Instead, the news crushes and frightens him. Lenina persuades him to take soma.

At the Reservation, Lenina watches a community celebration. The pounding of the drums reminds her of Solidarity Services and Ford's Day celebrations. The images of an eagle and a man on a cross are raised, and a youth walks into the center of a pile of writhing snakes. A man whips him, drawing blood until the youth collapses. Lenina is horrified. John, a handsome blond youth in Indian dress, surprises Lenina and Bernard by speaking perfect English. He says that he wanted to be the sacrifice, but the town would not let him. He explains that his mother, Linda, came from the Other Place outside the Reservation. During a visit to the Reservation, she fell and suffered an injury, but was rescued by some Indians who found her and brought her to the village, where she has lived ever since. His father, also from the Other Place, was named Tomakin. Bernard realizes that "Tomakin" is actually Thomas, the Director, but says nothing for the moment. John introduces Lenina and Bernard to his mother, Linda. Wrinkled, overweight, and missing teeth, she disgusts Lenina. Linda explains that John was born because something went wrong with her contraceptives. She could not get an abortion on the Reservation and felt too ashamed to go back to the World State with a baby. Linda explains that, after starting her new life in the Indian village, she followed all her conditioning and slept with any man she pleased, but some women beat her for taking their men to bed.

John tells Bernard that he grew up listening to Linda's fabulous stories about the Other Place. But he also felt isolated and rejected, partly because his mother slept with so many men and partly because the people of the village never accepted him. Linda took a lover, Popé, who brought her an alcoholic drink called mescal. She began drinking heavily. Meanwhile, despite being forbidden from taking part in the Indian's rituals, John absorbed the culture around him. Linda taught him to read, at first by drawing on the wall and later using a guide for Beta Embryo-Store Workers that she had happened to bring with her. He asked her questions about the World State, but she could tell him very little about how it worked. One day, Popé brought The Complete Works of Shakespeare to Linda's house. John read it avidly until he could quote passages by heart. The plays gave voice to all of his repressed emotions. Bernard asks John if he would like to go to London with him. He has an ulterior motive that he keeps to himself: he wants to embarrass the Director by exposing him as John's father. John accepts the proposal, but insists that Linda be allowed to go with him. Bernard promises to seek permission to take both of them. John quotes a line from The Tempest to express his feelings of joy at finally getting to see the Other World that he had heard about as a child: "O brave new world that has such people in it." Blushing, he asks if Bernard is married to Lenina. Bernard laughs and tells him that he certainly is not. He also cautions John to wait until he sees the World State before he becomes enraptured with it.

Lenina, disgusted by the Reservation, takes enough soma to incapacitate herself for eighteen hours. Bernard flies to Santa Fé to call Mustapha Mond. He repeats his story to a succession of secretaries before finally reaching the World Controller. Mond agrees that John and Linda are a matter of scientific interest to the World State. He instructs Bernard to visit the Warden of the Reservation to pick up the orders that will release John and Linda into his care. Meanwhile, fearful that Bernard and Lenina have left without him, John breaks into the cabin where Lenina is still on soma-holiday. He rifles through her things before he finds her passed out on the bed. He gazes at her, quietly quoting passages from Romeo and Juliet. He wants to touch her but fears that it would defile her. As he gazes at her, Bernard's helicopter approaches, and John is able to run from the house and hide his trespass.

Back at the Hatchery, the Director tells Henry that he plans to dismiss Bernard in front of dozens of high-caste workers as a public example. He explains that Bernard's unorthodox behavior threatens stability. Sacrificing one individual for the greater good of the society is no great loss since the Hatchery can churn out dozens of new babies. When Bernard arrives, the Director declares Bernard "heretical" because he refuses to behave like an infant and does not immediately seek to gratify his own desires. He tells Bernard that he is being transferred to Iceland. But then Bernard presents Linda and John. Linda accuses the Director of making her have a baby and the room suddenly falls silent. John falls at the Director's feet and cries, "My father!" The workers break out into peals of hysterical laughter as the Director rushes from the room.

The Director resigns in disgrace, and Bernard is able to keep his job. John, known as "the Savage," becomes an instant society hit. Linda takes soma continually and falls into a half-awake, half-asleep state of intoxication. Bernard experiences unprecedented popularity as John's appointed guardian. He boasts about his thriving sex life to Helmholtz, but Helmholtz responds only with a gloomy silence that offends Bernard. Bernard decides to stop speaking to him. He shamelessly parades his unorthodox behavior, thinking that his popularity as the Savage's discoverer and guardian will protect him. He writes Mond to tell him that John finds "civilized infantility" too easy. Bernard says he agrees with John's verdict. Mond, reading the heretical letter, thinks he might have to teach Bernard a lesson. The sight of dozens of identical twins in a factory sickens John. With bitter irony, he echoes Shakespeare's line, "O brave new world that has such people in it." He refuses to take soma and visits his mother often. He visits Eton where Alpha children laugh at a film of "savages" beating themselves with whips on a Reservation. Lenina likes John but cannot tell if he likes her. She takes him to a feely, entitled Three Weeks in a Helicopter, that tells the story of a black man who kidnaps a blond Beta-Plus woman for his own enjoyment. John hates the movie, but it reinvigorates his passion for Lenina. His shame at his physical desire overwhelms him. To Lenina's bewilderment, John refuses to have sex with her. He locks himself in his room and reads Shakespeare's Othello. Lenina returns to her room and takes soma.

Bernard arranges a large party of important people, promising them a chance to meet the Savage. But when they arrive, John refuses to leave his room. Bernard is humiliated and embarrassed as all of his guests, including the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury, leave in contempt. Lenina is disappointed that she cannot see John again to find out why he behaved so strangely after the feely. The Arch-Community-Songster warns Bernard that he should be more careful in his criticisms of the World State. Bernard sinks back into his former melancholia now that his newfound success has evaporated. He makes John his scapegoat. Bernard is simultaneously grateful and resentful that Helmholtz gives him the friendship he needs without criticizing him for his earlier unfriendliness. Helmholtz has gotten himself into trouble for reading some unorthodox rhymes to his students at the college. But he is excited to have finally found a voice of his own. John and Helmholtz meet, and take to one another right away. Bernard is jealous of their affection for one another and wishes he had never brought them together. He takes soma to escape his feelings. John reads passages from Shakespeare to Helmholtz. The poetry enraptures Helmholtz, but when John reads a passage from Romeo and Juliet about Juliet's parents trying to persuade her to marry Paris, Helmholtz bursts into laughter. The absurdity of having a mother and father is not the only thing that he finds funny; the fact that anyone would make a fuss over which man a girl should have is even funnier. John locks his book away because Helmholtz's laughter insults and wounds him.

Henry invites Lenina to a feely, but she declines. He notices that she is upset and suggests that she might need a "Violent Passion Surrogate," or V.P.S. Later she complains to Fanny that she still does not know what it is like to sleep with a savage. Fanny warns her that it is unseemly to become obsessed over one man, and that she should find someone else to take her mind off of him. Lenina replies that she wants only John. Other men simply cannot distract her. Lenina takes soma and visits John, intending to seduce him. She remarks that he does not seem pleased to see her. John falls to his knees and begins quoting Shakespeare to express his adoration. He speaks about marriage and declares his love for her. She asks why he had not said anything if he had wanted her all along. However, his talk about lifelong commitments and growing old together horrifies her. Lenina presses her body against his and begins to remove her clothes. John becomes furious and terrified. He calls her a wh**e and slaps her. She locks herself in the bathroom while John reenacts King Lear's disgusted tirade against womankind and biological generation (King Lear, IV.vi.120-127). The phone rings and he answers it. Lenina hears him leave the apartment.

John hurries to the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying. He whispers impatiently to a nurse that he wants to see his mother. Blushing furiously at his use of the word mother, she leads him to Linda's bed. John sits next to her in tears, trying to remember the good times they had together. A troop of eight-year-old Bokanovsky boys gathers around Linda, asking why she is so fat and ugly. John angers the nurse when he strikes one particularly offensive child. She criticizes him for interfering with the children's death conditioning and leads them away. Linda mistakes John for Popé. He shakes her angrily, demanding that she recognize him as her son. She says his name, starts to recite a hypnopaedic phrase from her childhood, and then begins to choke. He rushes to the nurse in a fit of grief to ask for help, but Linda is dead by the time they get to her ward. John sobs uncontrollably while the nurse worries about the damage done to the children's death-conditioning. She hands out chocolate éclairs to the Bokanovsky twins. One twin points to Linda's body and asks John, "Is she dead?" John pushes him to the floor and rushes out of the ward.

In the hospital vestibule, John encounters two Bokanovsky groups of Delta twins picking up their soma rations after their shift. With bitter irony he recalls the lines, "How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world." With "O brave new world" echoing in his head, John cries out for them to stop taking the soma rations. He tells them that it is a poison meant to enslave them and asks them to choose freedom. The man distributing the soma calls Bernard at home. Helmholtz answers the phone and relays the news about John's statements to Bernard. They rush to the hospital together. The uncomprehending faces of the Delta workers infuriate John. He throws the soma rations out a window. The Deltas rush at him in fury. Helmholtz, who has just arrived, jumps into the fray to help defend John. Bernard hesitates. He knows John and Helmholtz might be killed if he doesn't help, but he is afraid of being killed while trying to help them. He feels shame at his indecision. The police arrive, spraying soma vapor and a powerful anesthetic. Meanwhile, a recorded voice asks why the rioters are not happy together. Before long, the Deltas are crying, kissing one another, and apologizing. Their soma rations are quickly restored. The police ask Helmholtz and John to come quietly. Bernard tries to slip out the door unobserved, but is caught before he can escape.

The police leave Bernard, Helmholtz, and John in Mond's office. Mond arrives and says to John, "So you don't much like civilization, Mr. Savage." John concedes, but admits that he does like some things, such as the constant sound of music. Mond responds with a quote from Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and sometimes voices." John is pleasantly surprised to find that Mond has read Shakespeare. Mond points out that Shakespeare is a forbidden text. In response to John's questioning, he explains that such literature is banned for a number of reasons. In the first place, beautiful things, such as great literature, tend to last. People continue to like them even when they become quite old. A society based on consumerism, such as the World State, needs citizens who want new things. Newness is thus more important than intrinsic value, and high art must be suppressed to make room for the new. In the second place, the citizens of the World State would not be able to understand Shakespeare, because the stories he writes are based on experiences and passions that do not exist in the World State. Grand struggles and overpowering emotions have been sacrificed in favor of social stability. They have been replaced by what Mond calls "happiness," by which he means the infantile gratification of appetites. John is inclined to think that this brand of happiness creates monstrous and repulsive human beings. He challenges the Director, asking whether the citizens couldn't at least all be created as Alphas. Mond replies that the World State has to have citizens who will be happy performing the functions that they have been assigned, and since Alphas are only happy doing Alpha (i.e., intellectual) work, the vast majority of the population actually has to be degraded and made stupid so that they will be happy with their place in life. He points to an experiment in which an entire island was populated with Alphas, and wholesale civil war quickly ensued, because none of the citizens were ever happy with the distribution of tasks. Although the World State is a technotopia, meaning that it is made possible by technologies vastly more advanced than our own, Mond explains that even technology has to be kept under rigorous controls for the happy and stable society to be possible. Past a certain point, even labor-saving technologies have had to be suppressed to maintain a balance between labor and leisure. Keeping citizens happy requires keeping them at work for a certain amount of time. Science has also had to be suppressed to create the happy and stable society. This is particularly ironic because World State citizens are taught to revere science as one of their most fundamental values. However, none of them—not even Alphas such as Helmholtz and Bernard—actually possess any scientific training, so they really don't even know what science is. Mond doesn't explain what it is, although he alludes to his own career as a young scientist who got himself into trouble by challenging conventional wisdom. One can infer that by "science," Mond means the search for knowledge by means of the experimental method. Science cannot exist in the World State because the search for "truth" conflicts with happiness. This is very suggestive, because it implies that the entire society is somehow built upon lies, but he is tantalizingly unclear about what truths and what lies he is talking about. Mond tells Helmholtz and Bernard that they will be exiled. Bernard begins to beg and plead for Mond to change his sentence. Three men drag him away to sedate him with soma. Mond says that Bernard does not know that exile is actually a reward. The islands are full of the most interesting people in the world, individuals who did not fit in the World State community. Mond tells Helmholtz that he almost envies him. Helmholtz asks why, if he is so envious, he did not choose exile when he was offered the choice. Mond explains that he prefers the work he does in managing the happiness of others. Mond believes that the islands are a good thing to have around since dissidents like Helmholtz and Bernard would probably have to be killed if they could not be exiled. He asks Helmholtz if he would like to go to a tropical island. Helmholtz says that he would prefer an island with a bad climate since it might help him write. He accepts Mond's suggestion that he go to the Falkland Islands.

As Helmholtz leaves to check on Bernard, John and Mustapha Mond continue their philosophical argument. Whereas their conversation in Chapter 16 covered human experiences and institutions that the World State has abolished, in Chapter 17 they discuss religion and religious experience, which have also been expunged from World State society. Mond shows John his collection of banned religious writings, and reads aloud long passages from the nineteenth-century Catholic theologian, Cardinal Newman, and from the eighteenth-century French philosopher, Maine de Biran, to the effect that religious sentiment is essentially a response to the threat of loss, old age, and death. Mond argues that in a prosperous, youthful society, there are no losses and therefore no need for religion. John asks Mond if it is natural to feel the existence of God. Mond responds that people believe what they have been conditioned to believe. "Providence takes its cue from men," he says. John protests that if the people of the World State believed in God, they would not be degraded by their pleasant vices. They would have a reason for self-denial and chastity. God, John claims, is the reason for "everything noble and fine and heroic." Mond says that no one in the World State is degraded; they just live by a different set of values than John does. World State civilization does not require anyone to bear unpleasant things. If, by accident something negative occurs, soma is there to take away the sting. Soma, he says, is "Christianity without tears." Christianity without tears—that's what soma is. John declares that he wants God, poetry, real danger, freedom, goodness, and sin. Mond tells him that his wishes will lead to unhappiness. John agrees but does not relinquish his wishes.

Bernard and Helmholtz say good-bye to John. Bernard apologizes for the scene in Mond's office. John asks Mond if he can go with them to the islands, but Mond refuses because he wants to continue "the experiment." Later, John chooses to seclude himself in an abandoned lighthouse in the wilderness. He plants his own garden and performs rituals of self-punishment to purge himself of the contamination of civilization. One day, some Delta-Minus workers see John whipping himself. The next day, reporters come to interview him. John kicks one reporter and angrily demands they respect his solitude. The newspapers publish the incident and more reporters flock to John's home. He reacts to them with increasing violence. One day he thinks longingly of Lenina and rushes to whip himself. A man films the scene and releases a sensationally popular feely. Fans of the feely soon visit John and chant, "We want the whip." As the crowd chants, Lenina steps out of a helicopter and walks toward him, arms open. John calls her a strumpet and proceeds to whip her, saying, "Oh, the flesh! . . . Kill it, kill it!" Fascinated by the spectacle, the crowd mimes his gestures, dances, and sings the hymn, "Orgy-porgy, Orgy . . ." After midnight, the helicopters leave and John collapses, "stupefied by soma" and the extended "frenzy of sensuality." When he awakes the next day, he remembers everything with horror. Having read about the "orgy of atonement" in the papers, a swarm of visitors descends on John's lighthouse, discovering that he has hanged himself.