EUGENICS

Eugenics is the theoretical (at this point in time) practice of genetically improving the human population by increasing desirable traits and decreasing those that are undesirable. Most people have a negative connotation of eugenics because of how the technology has been misused in the past, namely with the eugenic procedures carried out in Nazi Germany. However, “the principle difference is that whereas eugenics, as conceived in the early part of the 20th century, was a public project, modern genetic screening is a private matter” mostly intended to reduce genetic diseases rather than create so-called "designer babies" (Ridley qtd. in Rachels 360).

Huxley must have had a much more pessimistic view of genetic engineering’s future, as eugenics in Brave New World is used to scientifically engineer humans to be cogs in a machine. “All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny,” where their social destiny is the jobs assigned to them at birth based on their class status. Conditioning the citizens before birth to accept the positions they must later fill is done to make society as efficient as possible, as each person does exactly what they were genetically engineered to do. But it also strips citizens of their humanity and free will. The scientists in the World State can control nearly every aspect of their future citizens’ makeup at the embryotic level, such as intelligence. And every alteration they perform has a societal purpose. When asked why a scientist would deprive an embryo of oxygen to keep it “below par,” he responds that “in Epsilons,” the lowest caste in the World State, “we don’t need human intelligence” (Huxley 12). In this projection of the future, the government purposefully stunts its citizens in order to keep them in line with the class structure.

While the extent of genetic engineering in Brave New World will surely never come to pass, it is the fear that something like that will happen that keeps eugenics from progressing in our society today.