Utopia vs. Distopia/Ignorance vs. Bliss

This coming fall, I will be a teacher's assistant for an undergraduate lecture entitled BRAVE NEW WORLDS at the University of Massachusetts. This is one of my teaching obligations performed contemporaneously while working toward the completion of a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. In preparation for my role, I have spent the last month or so reading or rereading the assigned texts to be a bit more prepared to facilitate discussions in September. Thus far, the texts that I studied have included:

(the eponymous) Brave New World
The Handmaid's Tale
We
Keep Your Head Down
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep

The only one of these texts that I had previously read was Brave New World, a work that I had only really skimmed in high school. Although profoundly moved by Atwood's sensual prose, tone, and the narrative themes addressed in The Handmaid's Tale, I must admit that I viewed the idea behind her imaginative depiction of a fundamentalist, misogynistic and racist society as riddled with liberal cliché and perhaps betraying a exaggerated wariness vis-à–vis the values and practices of all religious practice.

On a second read, Huxley's work seemed dramatically prescient, creating a world wholly based around productivity and pleasure. The economy is perpetuated by the consumption of resources to such an extent that even sports require expensive "equipment." Great artistic works are unheard of, with the exception of the elite controllers of society and the savages exiled to its fringes.

I cannot help but think about the parallel with the old adage "ignorance is bliss." There is an old saying used in Buddhism that builds upon the previous saying. To paraphrase "best not to begin on the path; once begun, it's best to finish." The nomian characters of Brave New World have not begun on the path, however they seem contented by their synthetic drug, soma , and their superficial, purely physical liaisons. The ones who are less so, such Bernard Marx and John the Savage, are ultimately undone by their questioning and loss of ignorance. Within their society it is impossible to finish the path thus they begin but are condemned to never finish. Perhaps they would have found solace in the Camus' reading of the myth of Sisyphus in his eponymous book. Sisyphus learns to identify with his eternal punishment of forcing a rock to the summit of a hill for all of eternity just to watch it roll back down to the base of the hill.

Even in our real, imperfect world that all of these fictional dystopian societies satirize, a man's fate is to work, perhaps without any set goal in mind. However, perhaps it is that labor itself with the proper mindfulness that leads to eudaemonia our ultimate happiness. Perhaps it is this striving towards an unknown, and a broken contentment faced with lack of progress, that actually leads to fulfillment.