If there was one lesson more than any other that we learn from Aldous Huxley masterful book, Brave New World, it is that happiness and human dignity are two fundamentally different goods; and, moreover, it turns out that happiness shorn of dignity is a most pitiful state of affairs. Of course, precisely what made the novel such an extraordinary fantasy when it was written is the very fact that the very idea of severing happiness from human dignity seemed to be just that: a pure fantasy.
To be sure, there were the isolated cases of someone on drugs who had those marvelous temporary highs. But that took place against a seemingly immutable backdrop of two convictions. One was that such a way of being was unacceptable. The other was that only people who were in some way indecent or irresponsible did such a thing. Induced happiness, if you will, was seen to be a sham precisely because it did not flow from the dignity of the person.
John Stuart Mill thought it obvious that it was better to be an unhappy human being than a satisfied pig. And while philosophers have come up with clever ways to challenge Mill’s statement, the truth of the matter is that it still strikes a most responsive chord with us. Why, it is inconceivable that a sane human being would, via a gene transformation machine, choose to be a pig in order to have the pleasure of wallowing in mud all way, whilst giving no thought at all to tomorrow.
We may want a carefree life, but we want it as a human being and not as a pig. And that was Mill’s very simple and ever so immutable point.
Now here is the problem: No one would choose give up dignity for happiness, where this is a matter of going directly, in say 24 hours, from a state of affairs with dignity to a state of affairs that offers happiness without dignity. The same holds for getting old. No sane person would choose today to be elderly tomorrow. Yet, we do become older. Not only that we prefer doing so to the alternative, namely dying.
Here is where Brave New World becomes haunting. Granted that we would never choose an immediate exchange of dignity for happiness. The question, though, is this: Might we increasingly make choices that in effect constitute an exchange of dignity for happiness? That is, might we unwittingly exchange dignity for liberty? Not all at once, but bit by bit by bit.
The answer, I am afraid, is an affirmative one.
Consider this. I find that I have come to accept the reality that when I make a phone call to a large business, I shall begin the matter by first listening to a machine and then either punching in numbers or giving verbal answers to the questions that the machine poses to me. I have learnt that there often maneuvers that make it possible to bypass the machine. Alas, I have also learnt that in some cases I cannot do so.
So there I am having a “conversation” of sorts with a machine. Today, this matter continues to rub me the wrong way. But what particularly bothers me is my speculation regarding the future, namely that increasingly I shall be having “conversations” with a machine in order to get things that I want or need.
Then I consider that the point shall come when I, too, am no longer bothered by the fact that I am having a “conversation” with a machine.
But now add to the above scenarios robots that can provide basic customer service at the grocery story: say, grocery-robot can give me a fresh piece of chicken or a half-pound of the cheese that I want.
My view of this is that the backdrop of human dignity, as I shall say, has been diminished. In one respect, service without a human being is no less service, as one has gotten just what one wanted. The advantage is that one avoids the downside of human contact: the short-temperedness or rudeness or whatever. But the other side, however, is that such service is entirely shorn of any and all potential for human warmth. There is not even the potential for a smile or a pleasant exchange. There is no possibility for anything to happen that would make one’s day a better day.
Person-to-person service can have many drawbacks. After all, it is true enough that there are times when we don’t want to have conversation or to put on a “happy face”. Just so, service that is provided entirely by machines leaves no possibility whatsoever for an unexpected moment of affirmation that lifts one’s very soul. And human dignity is inextricably tied to those moments.
And when we have become so habituated to service by machines, then will pills that give us the “mood” we need or want for the moment seem abhorrent? I think not. Quite the contrary, in a world where service is provided by machines, pills that give us the “mood” we need or want for the moment will very much strike as a very appropriate way of dealing with our reality.
And there you have it. I have without much effort at all described a world in which, bit by bit, dignity has been exchanged for happiness. I maintain that I could not have done that were it not the case that a certain kind of trajectory is already in place. We are already becoming use to efficiency replacing human contact; and mood-altering drugs are already a part of life, as the drugs of ritalin and prozac make so poignantly clear. Where this will end is not clear to anyone.
Increasingly, momentary happiness is easy enough to attain. Yet, the happiness seems to have no meaning to it. Not only that, the happiness seems not to come from within the individual but to be ineliminably tied to some external thing. This, I suggest, is happiness shorn of dignity.
The shadowy monster that made Brave New World so haunting has left the pages of this wonderful classic, and has taken up lodging among us.
No doubt that there are many morals to be drawn from all of this, but one of them is surely the following: It is possible for so many of us to become what just about none of us want to, become because we pay so little attention to the details of the journey we are making called life.
