brave new world

brave new world

Spirituality Inspires the Human Experience:
An Examination of Free Choice within Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange


Personal choice and free will have been inextricably link with religion, defining what it means to be an individual living within a world of values thus separating us from animals.Spirituality helps fuels the human soul, enabling the individual to reach a higher plane of consciousness with the understanding of what it means to be human and fully alive. Personal choice is what defines the human experience.

Throughout Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange the authors use spirituality, or the lack there of, to create a framework for defining personal choice, free will, and ultimately the uniqueness of the human experience. Spirituality has always been a part of the human experience as evident by the great earth and stone works at Avebury and Stonehenge. As civilizations and culture evolved so did spirituality, the notion of free will, and freedom of the human spirit. We, as humans, moved away from the deterministic world, where the gods had to be appeased for sustenance, to a world of human agency and the capacity to take responsibility for our own lives and become self-creating persons. Progress within the behavioral, psychological, and neural sciences began to undermine the notion of free will. Specifically, we see during the timeline of both novels, the works of Ivan Pavlov, with his classical conditioning, and B.F. Skinner’s contribution to behaviorism, erode human being’s ability to make conscious personal choices.

The authors, Aldous Huxley and Anthony Burgess, use religion and the inherent free will found within it as a counterweight to controversial ideas which emerged within the behavioral sciences; human thoughts and actions driven by the subconscious mind can be shaped and molded by external forces. However, without personal choices, we are mechanized and not fully human. We are reduced to zero.

To support my thesis I...