False Freedom and Hopeless Happiness

Painful, I think, is the best way to describe my reading of Brave New World...no matter how beautiful the coffee shops where I read it! Painful because what is most essential to the human, what is most correspondent to the human heart is squelched with the aim of false freedom and hopeless happiness. As with most dystopian novels, it’s done for a “better purpose”, a man-made model for generic human fulfillment.

The Savage, the ironically-named character created by Huxley to offer a true form of civilization to a world sterilized against it, reaches a point of brilliant clarity and authentic desire when he exclaims,

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

A world anesthetized by illusion and drug-induced euphoria can’t compete with the great drama of the human person searching for meaning and purpose. Because that drama necessarily entails all that the Savage lists and more. To desire God, to search for what ultimately gives meaning to one’s life is to embrace the sometimes complex beauty of poetry alongside the usually difficult phenomenon of freedom. To seek after what is good also means confronting the ever-present reality of sin. In order to experience surprising and unbridled awe in the face of something unbelievably beautiful, it means we must also face the sadness that creeps in when such beauty eludes us. Because it’s in that struggle that humanity flourishes and falls and is authentically free.

This is why the one who is authentically human is not in search of a utopia, but a Presence that directs our gaze towards what we really desire.

Msgr. Luigi Giussani says this (my italicized emphasis):

Utopia uses as its method of expression speech, projects, and the anxious search for instruments and organizational forms. Presence has as its method of expression an operative friendship, gestures revealing a different way of being a protagonist, one that enters everything, making use of everything (school desks, studies, the attempt at university reform, etc.)–gestures that are, above all, gestures of real humanity, i.e., of charity. (Full text here)

Our brave new world is not one defined by the limits of human ingenuity, but it is one that is generated anew each day by a Presence who calls us by name and exalts every ounce of goodness He has placed within us. This is our reason to get up every morning. This is our invitation to a brave new world!