A “Brave New World”

Call them what you will: goodies, epiphanies, illuminations, what follows are three pieces of news concerning the “new world” towards which we are moving with rapid steps and we sail happily under full sail.

That “New World”, or rather that “Brave New World” of which the English writer Aldous Huxley speaks in his futuristic book, published in 1932, in which he describes a world of the future (around 2540).

The whole Earth is under the power of ten “controllers”. The whole society is rigidly controlled through scientific practices ranging from birth control to psychological indoctrination, up to the selection, via eugenics, of the human race.

It is not the first time that I speak of this book. It was also part of my English literature studies. My father had it in his little library in the thirties. A book that I invite to read, those who still wants to read. It can be found for free online. Those that follow are “gems” of news that really happened and that I transcribe without adding or removing anything.

Two men decide to get married and have a child. They mix their semen and rent a uterus. A baby is born and for a while everything runs smoothly. Then suddenly they decide to separate and appear before the judge asking to have assigned the son. Who do you think he will give it to?

Two women decide to get married and have a child. One of them is fertile, the other is not. They go to a sperm bank and the fertile one gets inseminated. A little girl is born, and they raise her with affection until they decide to separate. They present themselves before the judge to whom they ask for the assignment. Who do you think the child will be assigned to?

A Catholic priest, who has accepted the vow of chastity by his own decision, decides to “come out”, that is, he declares his sexual orientation, presents his partner in public with whom he decides to live together and also says he wants to have a child. Do you think this is possible? They can do it in a “surrogate” way.

This is the scenario of the “brave” — “brave” — “new world” on which everyone plays the subject. The title that Aldous Huxley chose for his book sounds ironic and sarcastic, as it is taken from a passage from William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. In this tragedy Miranda, son of the magician Prospero, marvels at the beauty and extraordinary nature of the world she is discovering for the first time:

“Oh wonder! How many godly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in’t”.

Continuing at this pace, can we continue to be ironic and sarcastic in the face of reality like this? But before finishing this post I want to offer you one last gem in the form of a dialogue. Paolo del Debbio wrote it in his article on the “rental” of women to have a child. A dialogue between two teenagers who were told how they were born, that is, in a “surrogate” way.

One asks the other: “Who are your parents?” The other replies: “I have two dads, but I don’t know my mom because she is a woman who was made pregnant just to give birth to me”. The other boy says: “I, on the other hand, have two mothers and one of them is the one who conceived me using an institution called a “sperm bank”, but whose sperm it is I will never know”. So my dad I’ll never get to know him.”

We are well ahead of the date described by Aldous Huxley. For him, it was about 2540. We are in 2023, for sure.