Who are you?

“That is the secret of happiness and virtue- liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.” (pg. 12)

Brave New World was one of the first dystopian novels ever written. However, it is not as harsh as many other dystopias, such as 1984. Everyone in the society in Brave New World is happy, but without any choice in their lives. If they are perfectly content and want to do what they are supposed to do, it begs the question: does freedom exist? The society seems to believe that they have a certain amount of choice, but their minds are manipulated so that things that appear as choices were decided a long time before in their conditioning. It forces us to question how different anyone- even in our society- would be if they had been raised differently or had a different combination of DNA. How much are we formed by how we are brought up- is there a certain amount of our personalities that is dictated by our own “conditioning”?

The Balance

“But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.” (194)- Brave New World

I disagree with the statement made in this quote. This entire book is about the sacrifices that a perfect society would have to make for everyone to be happy. However, I still strongly believe that society can exist with happiness without losing emotions, art, or beauty. Though emotions can make people less stable, learning to control your own emotions is not the same as having them forcefully eliminated. This society not only eliminated most emotions, art, beauty, and literature, but it eliminated free will as well. I believe teaching people to make good decisions that are right for them is quite different than making decisions for them, which happens to people from the time they are an embryo. Each person’s intelligence, job, and even appearance is decided for them and then they are continuously conditioned to believe in certain ideals throughout their life through “hypnopaedia”. I firmly believe that there is some sort of balance- though I doubt we will ever truly reach a completely stable society where everyone is happy yet also has complete freedom. For us, there will always be a balance- but we must choose the type of society we want.

The Pursuit of Something More than Happiness

“Being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” (pg.195)

Brave New World I found this quote surprisingly truthful. There is no good story or song without strong emotions behind it. Simply being content is a very passive emotion that has little depth. It can be caused by much stronger emotions, such as love, but happiness itself is normal and unremarkable compared to pain and elation. Without other emotions, both good and bad, there is no excitement to life, and some people cannot bear to live life without that. Brave New World is about this choice- if people are perfectly content, most of society will be fine with that. However, some people need more to their lives than just surviving on the mediocre. In Brave New World, the “World State” has conditioned and controlled most of the human race so that they never do anything hard, they never have to make any difficult choices, and they are actually told to consume as much as possible. Suffering and pain is almost unthinkable. John, a “Savage” from a small, uncivilized reserve feels like an outsider because his mother was from the “World State”. He educated himself with Shakespeare and learned a lot about the human experience and the power of emotions. When he attempts to revolt against the Society, he claims “the right to be unhappy” as well as many horrible experiences and emotions. He realizes how important all of these are to the human experience and how they define us.

Summer Vacation

"The wealthiest kids come back in September and their reading score have jumped more than 15 points. The poorest kids come back from the holidays and their reading score have dropped almost 4 points. Poor kids may out-learn rich kids during the school year. But during the summer, they fall far behind." (pg. 258) -Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

I was at first surprised to find out that poorer kids forget more than richer kids. I was also surprised that poorer kids learn more over the school year. This means that it is not truly the education that richer kids tend to receive, but the attitude of the environment that they live in. The richer families can afford to send the kids to summer camps and continue activities throughout the summer, which can maintain and increase their education. The families also tend to encourage reading more at home and doing educational activities. The poorer schools have not encouraged their students to love reading and learning enough for them to continue over the summer.

Gladwell pointed out that a shorter summer break would be incredibly beneficial to our education system. Though I feel like our summer breaks fly by, when I heard about how short some other nation's breaks were I felt that ours was very leisurely. The United States has a school year approximately 180 days long, while South Korea has 220 days and Japan has 243 days long. A shorter vacation time (or smaller vacations dispersed throughout the year) may be the "solution" to our education system's problems.

(Lack of ) Communication Caused the Crash

"Klotz sees himself as a subordinate. It's not his job to solve the crisis. It's the captain's- and the captain is exhausted and isn't saying anything. Then there's the domineering Kennedy Airport air traffic controllers ordering the planes around. Klotz is trying to tell them he's in trouble. But he's using his own cultural language, speaking as a subordinate would to a superior. The controllers, though, aren't Colombian. They're low-power distance New yorkers. They don't see any hierarchical gap between themselves and the pilots in the air, and to them, mitigated speech from a pilot doesn't mean the speaker is being appropriately deferential to a superior. It means the pilot doesn't have a problem." (207)

In Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" he examines the pathways to success (and, in doing so, failure). In one chapter, "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes" he details the cultural impact on the likelihood of plane crashes. One specific example was Avianca flight 052, which crashed 16 kilometres away from Kennedy Airport, New York, in January 1990. There hadn't been any mechanical failures; the aircraft had run out of fuel. Also, this wasn't because they hadn't had enough to make it from Colombia to New York; they had, in fact, circled around Kennedy Airport several times.

Gladwell's explanations for a horrible crash that killed 78 people are astounding. The pilots made no flying errors but all their mistakes were in communication with the air traffic controllers. One pilot mentioned that they were "running out of fuel" but because airplanes are always losing fuel, this has little meaning. They didn't state that they were in a state of emergency, or that they couldn't make a fly-around. They also didn't request to go to a close, but less busy airport such as Philadelphia. The pilots simply took directions from the air traffic controllers and tried to subtlely hint that they were not going to make it unless they landed immediately.

In reading the flight log, I was astonished that anyone would put so many lives at risk because they were trying to be polite and because they felt inferior to the air traffic controllers. As an American pilot said to Gladwell, "no American would put up with that... They would say 'Listen, buddy. I have to land.' " (202)

The fact that the pilots were Colombian actually had a serious consequence- they didn't believe that they had the authority to tell the controllers what to do, nor did they truly let them know that there was a problem. Different societies, as Gladwell explains, have different levels of response to hierarchy, and comfort making their opinions known to their superiors. Colombians have a "high power-distance" culture, which means they feel that they can't talk back to their superiors. In another example, a pre-reformed Korean Air is examined. Korean Air used to have an incredibly high number of plane crashes, which was due to a similar issue of communication between superiors and subordinates.

I was amazed in reading this book how much our culture truly defines who we are and how we succeed in different things. Even our ability to make others aware of life-threatening situations is due, in part at least, to the kind of society that we are accustomed to.

The Inequalities of Birth Month

"We do ability groupings early on in childhood. We have advanced reading groups and advanced math gorups. So, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability. And they put the older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year the same thing happens, and they do even better again."

In "Outlier", Malcolm Gladwell explains how our culture, opportunities, and the people around us contribute to success. In the chapter entitled "The Matthew Effect" he examines hockey players, soccer players, and schoolchildren and demonstrates some extraordinary parallels between the month of birth and success in both soports and academics. At a young age, the difference between being born near the beginning of the year and the end of the year is significantly large in terms of maturity and size. In both sports and academics, there are groupas at an early age depending on "skill". However, at such a young age, skill and maturity are indistinguishable. The older kids get special treatment on select teams and advanced school groups, while the younger kids get less training in house league and less advanced groupings.

I was amazed when I saw the statistics that Gladwell reels off; I hadn't realized that our culture makes such arbitrary decisions on who will have a greater opportunity to succeed. If someone is a true "genius" (though Gladwell later redefines what genius means) or if they have an inordinate amount of natural skill, they can succeed, but the fact that such a huge percentage of our population is at a disadvantage due to their month of birth is disheartening. Gladwell does give alternative options, however; he explains that Denmark does not have the same difference in academic success throughout the months as the rest of the world because they do not do advanced academic groups until the age of ten.

The discrepancy of success in cohorts of different birth months continues even through university. Gladwell mentions that in universities, the "students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are under-represented by 11.6%" (29). The repurcussions extend beyond mere marks, however. With the stress of having a harder time in university and poorer school performance, students born during the later months tend to have higher suicide rates.

Our entire education system as well as many sports systems is rife with inequalities for its youth. Gladwell demonstrates this precisely and illustrates how we could change this to give a fair advantage to all children. In the rest of his book, Gladwell expounds upon the successes of household names from the Beatles and Bill Gates, to wealthy lawyers, and entire races. From the first chapter he made me realize that there is a lot more to success than hard work- there is a lot of luck involved with where, when, to whom, and into what culture you are born. Though we consider our country to be very equal for everyone, the opportunities given to each individual are completely unequal.

New, Yet Still Familiar

Northrop Frye stated that though literature may be new, yet is "recognizably the same thing as the old". I found his comparison to a human child profound- though each is an individual, it is still very similar to those that have come before it. Each piece of literature may bring something new into the world, but they are building on what has come before them. I find it interesting to analyse how similar themes or structures are between very different pieces of literature. Yet despite the similarities, the plot, characters, emotions, and many other factors can make it unique and interesting. We can read many books with the same theme yet find each one new and refreshing. Even though we may think a book or play is dissimilar from anything else we have read, does not mean that the general structures and themes have not been written about before. The way literature is presented is what changes it and allows us to see things in a new light.

Literature or Language?

"Literature doesn’t evolve or improve or progress." (p. 9)

I think that Frye is explaining that modern literature and classical literature can be just as good as each other. Though in the sciences there are new innovations, literature will always talk about the human experience, which will never change, though settings, technology, and the actual words will change. This is why Shakespeare, for example, is a great playwright, and his greatness is not diminished or increased by time. We can read a great novel written recently, or one written hundreds of years ago, and they can be comparable. The English language may evolve, but the themes and soul of the book do not.

I completely agree with Frye's analysis of literature. I have favourite books that are classics as well as favourites written only a few years ago. I also agree that language in itself is not nearly as useful as literature- a way to communicate the emotions or ideas of the author using language as a tool.

McCullough's speech "The Love of Learning" talks about the information age. The value of knowledge over information is comparable to the value of literature over language. Language is just the words, but they mean nothing without judgement and the knowledge of how to use them to communicate an idea.