While reading Brave New World Revisited, I found some of Aldous Huxley’s ideas to be intriguing. There is no doubt that Huxley had an interesting viewpoint on the world. This passage particularly perturbed me, “Today, thanks to sanitation, modern pharmacology and the social conscience, most of the children born with hereditary defects reach maturity and multiply their kind”(Huxley 14). I think that this line comes off as slightly offensive when it describes the offspring of disabled people as "their kind"; it seems to have a negative connotation to it. However, it was meant to be a negative statement because it is a direct link to overpopulation, which Huxley fears greatly.
I think that Huxley brings up a good point, though. Before modern technology and medicine, people with severe medical problems could not be helped and simply passed away. It was very simple: the weak died and the strong lived. Today, we complicate this process by bringing modern medicine into the equation. Modern medicine has the ability to lengthen the lives of the disabled and even rehabilitate the dying. Now the strong are not the only ones who are allowed to prevail and prosper. The weak humans are given a chance now that they were not given in the past. Huxley realizes this and sees that it is one of the direct links to the overpopulation of the world. Huxley also finds that, “…along with a decline of average healthiness there may well go a decline in the average intelligence”(Huxley 15). He quotes a doctor who explains this idea further, “‘Under conditions that are both soft and unregulated,’ writes Dr. W. H. Sheldon, ‘our best stock tends to be outbred by stock that is inferior to it in every respect…’”(Huxley 15). It seems inhumane to refer to human beings as stock, as if we are animals or wooden crates, but when it comes down to statistics that is all each one of us are. Each one of us is just one statistic. Each one of us is just one of the billions of people on this rapidly growing Earth.
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