Brave new world

UNIT 4 – BRAVE NEW WORLD

1) Odd man out (p.62)

a. The cartoon is of a factory conveyor belt where newly-produced nearly-naked men are appearing one by one. They all have the same forward-facing upright stance and are wearing only 

underwear. Four of them are exact duplicates – tall, muscular / well-built, tan, square-jawed 

men who all have the same wide, tooth-baring grin and wear manly black boxer shorts. The

odd man out is about half their size, pale and thin, with disproportionately large feet and handsand is wearing more effeminate, pink underpants. He is being lifted by his scalp by large metal tongs, presumably to be dropped into the huge skip (UK) / dumpster (US) labeled “CLONES

R US / REJECTS” in the foreground, full of other defective clones who have been thrown out.

b. The reject is an inadequate replicate of the model – he probably has been judged not good enough because he doesn’t correspond exactly to the physical ideals of the prototype. We can only see one of the other discarded clones’ faces – he has three eyes and grey hair and his tongue is hanging out of his mouth, making him look ridiculous. In this human factory, they seek to produce only “perfect” men, who all happen to be indistinguishable because there is only one ideal.

c. The cartoonist is very critical of the idea of “perfecting” human genetics. Each of the “perfect” men taken individually does indeed possess very pleasing physical traits by mainstream

standards. But all of them seen together is dehumanizing because in reality no two people

are alike and an individual’s charm is usually due to their unique and often quirky combination

of features. Just the thought of this kind of factory is quite frightening – who is behind the tongs deciding which traits and therefore which humans are good enough? There would be no reason to think that the man being rejected would be in any way a lesser human being. There are so many other important things that can’t be seen from the outside, like our minds and our personalities.

d. In theory, eugenics aims to “improve” humanity – but who’s to judge which human traits are

better? Screening for serious and debilitating diseases is one thing, but choosing body types,

hair colour and height is superficial. The cartoon pushes the concept to the extreme, where everyone is identical and those who don’t fit the subjective and therefore arbitrary mold are killed. The cartoonist is suggesting that accepting any kind of eugenics is a slippery slope towards unethical human “breeding”.

e. In the past, eugenics was used to justify racist and coercive public health policies including forced sterilization – the history of this “science” raises a red flag about its dangers.It is unethical because the subjective traits that humans could be bred for or the flaws that could be eliminated are not inherently better or worse. Reducing genetic diversity is biologically and evolutionarily dangerous for a species (vulnerability to disease, etc.). It is hard to draw the

...