Chapter II
Mr
Foster was left in the Decanting Room.
The D.H.C. and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were
carried up to the fifth floor.
INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS,
announced the notice board.
The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare room, very bright
and sunny; for the whole of the southern wall was a single window. Half a dozen nurses, trousered
and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair asceptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in
setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Big bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily
smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that
bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also
Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale
as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.
The nurses stiffened to attention as the
D.H.C. came in.
"Set out the books," he said
curtly.
In silence the nurses obeyed his
command. Between the rose bowls the
books were duly set out - a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at
some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.
"Now bring in the children."
They hurried out of the room and returned
in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its
four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (A Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their
caste was Delta) dressed in khaki.
"Put them down on the floor."
The infants were unloaded.
"Now turn them so that they can see
the flowers and books."
Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours,
those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of a
momentary eclipse behind a cloud. The
roses flamed up as though with a sudden passion from within; a new and profound
significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books. From the ranks of the crawling babies came
little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings
of pleasure.
The Director rubbed his hands. "Excellent!" he said. "It might almost have been done on
purpose."
The swiftest crawlers were already at
their goal. Small hands reached out
uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetalling the
transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The Director waited until all were happily
busy. Then, "Watch carefully,"
he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave
the signal.
The Head Nurse, who was standing by a
switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.
There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren
shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly
sounded.
The children started, screamed; their
faces were distorted with terror.
"And now," the Director shouted
(for the noise was deafening), "now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a
milk electric shock."
He waved his hand again, and the Head
Nurse pressed a second lever. The
screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane,
about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened;
their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
"We can electrify that whole strip
of floor," bawled the Director in explanation. "But that's enough," he signalled
to the nurse.
The explosions ceased, the bells stopped
ringing, the shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and
what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into
a normal howl of ordinary terror.
"Offer them the flowers and the
books again."
The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of
the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and
cock-a-doodle-doo and baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror;
the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
"Observe," said the Director
triumphantly, "observe."
Books and loud noises, flowers and
electric shocks - already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly
linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would
be wedded indissolubly. What man has
joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
"They'll grow up with what the
psychologists used to call an 'instinctive' hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They'll be safe from books and botany all
their lives." The Director turned
to his nurses. "Take them away
again."
Still yelling,
the khaki babies were loaded on to their dumb-waiters and wheeled out, leaving
behind them the smell of sour milk and a most welcome silence.
One of the students held up his hand; and
though he could see quite well why you couldn't have lower-caste people wasting
the Community's time over books, and that there was always the risk of their
reading something which might undesirably decondition
one of their reflexes, yet ... well, he couldn't understand about the
flowers. Why go to the trouble of making
it psychologically impossible for Deltas to like flowers?
Patiently the D.H.C. explained. If the children were made to scream at the
sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic policy. Not so very long ago (a century or thereabouts),
Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers - flowers
in particular and wild nature in general.
The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every
available opportunity, and so compel them to consume transport.
"And didn't they consume
transport?" asked the student.
"Quite a lot," the D.H.C.
replied. "But
nothing else."
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out,
have one grave defect: they are gratuitous.
A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature,
at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not
the tendency to consume transport. For
of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even
though they hated it. The problem was to
find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere
affection for primroses and landscapes.
It was duly found.
"We condition the masses to hate the
country," concluded the Director.
"But simultaneously we condition them to love all country
sports. At the same time, we see to it
that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume
manufactured articles as well as transport. Hence those electric
shocks."
"I see," said the student, and
was silent, lost in admiration.
There was a silence; then, clearing his
throat, "Once upon a time," the Director began, "while Our Ford
was still on earth, there was a little boy called Reuben Rabinovitch. Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking
parents." The Director interrupted
himself. "You know what Polish is,
I suppose?"
"A dead
language."
"Like French and German," added
another student, officiously showing off his learning.
"And 'parent'?" questioned the
D.H.C.
There was an uneasy silence. Several of the boys blushed. They had not yet learned to draw the
significant but often very fine distinction between smut and pure science. One, at last, had the courage to raise a
hand.
"Human beings used to be ..."
he hesitated; the blood rushed to his cheeks.
"Well, they used to be viviparous."
"Quite
right." The Director nodded
approvingly.
"And when the babies were decanted
..."
"'Born',"
came the correction.
"Well, then they were the parents -
I mean, not the babies, of course; the other ones." The poor boy was overwhelmed with confusion.
"In brief," the Director summed
up, "the parents were the father and the mother." The smut that was really science fell with a
crash into the boys; eye-avoiding silence.
"Mother," he repeated loudly, rubbing in the science; and,
leaning back in his chair, "These," he said gravely, "are
unpleasant facts; I know it. But, then,
most historical facts are unpleasant."
He returned to Little Reuben - to Little Reuben,
in whose room, one evening, by an oversight, his father and mother (crash,
crash!) happened to leave the radio turned on.
("For you must remember that in
those days of gross viviparous reproduction, children were always brought up by
their parents and not in State Conditioning Centres.")
While the child was asleep, a broadcast
programme from London suddenly started to come through; and the next morning,
to the astonishment of his crash and crash (the more daring of the boys
ventured to grin at one another), Little Reuben woke up repeating word for word
a long lecture by that curious old writer ("one of the very few whose
works have been permitted to come down to us"), George Bernard Shaw, who
was speaking, according to a well-authenticated tradition, about his own
genius. To Little Reuben's wink and
snigger, this lecture was, of course, perfectly incomprehensible and, imagining
that their child had suddenly gone mad, they sent for a doctor. He, fortunately, understood English,
recognized the discourse as that which Shaw had broadcasted the previous
evening, realized the significance of what had happened, and sent a letter to
the medical press about it.
"The principle of sleep-teaching, or
hypnopaedia, had been discovered."
The D.H.C. made an impressive pause.
The principle had been discovered; but
many, many years were to elapse before that principle was usefully applied.
"The case of Little Reuben occurred
only twenty-three years after Our Ford's first T-Model was put on the
market." (Here the Director made a
sign of the T on his stomach and all the students reverently followed
suit.) "And yet ..."
Furiously the students scribbled. "Hypnopaedia, first used officially in A.F. 2144. Why not before? Two reasons. (a) ..."
"These early experimenters,"
the D.H.C. was saying, "were on the wrong track. They thought that hypnopaedia could be made
an instrument of intellectual education ..."
(A small boy asleep on his right side,
the right arm stuck out, the right hand hanging limply over the edge of the
bed. Through a round grating in the side
of a box a voice speaks softly.
"The
At breakfast the next morning,
"Tommy," someone says, "do you know which is
the longest river in
"The-Nile-is-the-longest-river-in-Africa-and-the-second-in-length-of-all-the-rivers-of-the-globe
...” The words come rushing out.
"Although-falling-short-of ..."
"Well now, which is the longest river
in
The eyes are blank. "I don't know."
"But the
"The-Nile-is-the-longest-river-in-Africa-and-second
..."
Then which river is the longest,
Tommy?"
Tommy bursts into tears. "I don't know," he howls.)
That howl, the director made it plain,
discouraged the earliest investigators.
The experiments were abandoned.
No further attempt was made to teach children the length of the
"Whereas, if they'd only started on moral
education," said the Director, leading the way towards the door. The students followed him, desperately
scribbling as they walked and all the way up in the lift. "Moral education, which ought never, in
any circumstances, to be rational"
"Silence, silence," whispered a
loudspeaker as they stepped out at the fourteenth floor, and "Silence,
silence," the trumpet mouths indefatigably repeated at intervals down
every corridor. The students and even
the Director himself rose automatically to the tips of their toes. They were Alphas, of course; but even Alphas
have been well conditioned. "Silence, silence." All the air of the fourteenth floor was
sibilant with the categorical imperative.
Fifty yards of tiptoeing brought them to
a door which the Director cautiously opened.
They stepped over the threshold into the twilight of a shuttered
dormitory. Eighty cots stood in a row
against the wall. There was a sound of
light regular breathing and a continuous murmur, as of very faint voices
remotely whispering.
A nurse rose as they entered and came to
attention before the Director.
"What's the lesson this
afternoon?" he asked.
"We had Elementary Sex for the first
forty minutes," she answered.
"But now it's switched over to Elementary Class
Consciousness."
The Director walked slowly down the long
line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with
sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of
the little beds, listened attentively.
"Elementary Class Consciousness, did
you say? Let's have it repeated a little
louder by the trumpet."
At the end of the room a loudspeaker
projected from the wall. The director
walked up to it and pressed
a switch.
“... all wear green," said a soft
but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta
children weak khaki. Oh no, I don't want
to play with Delta children. And
Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid
to be able to read or write. Besides,
they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
There was a pause; then the voice began
again.
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because
they're so frightfully clever. I'm
really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas
and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear
khaki. Oh no, I don't want to
play with Delta children. And Epsilons
are still worse. They're too stupid to
be able ..."
The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from
beneath the eighty pillows.
"They'll have that repeated forty or
fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on
Saturday. A hundred
and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced
lesson."
Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of
Deltas and a whiff of asafoetida - wedded indissolubly before the child can
speak. But wordless conditioning is
crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate
the more complex courses of behaviour.
For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopaedia.
"The greatest
moralizing and socializing force of all time."
The students took it down in their little
books. Straight from
the horse's mouth.
Once more the Director touched the
switch.
" ... so
frightfully clever," the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was
saying. "I'm really awfully glad
I'm a Beta, because ..."
Not so much like drops of water, though
water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of
liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with
what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.
"Till at last the child's mind is
these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's
mind. And not the
child's mind only. The adult's mind
too - all his life long. The mind that
judges and desires and decides - made up of these suggestions. but all these
suggestions are our suggestions!"
The Director almost shouted in his triumph. "Suggestions from the
State." He banged the
nearest table. "It therefore
follows ..."
A noise made him turn round.
"Oh, Ford!" he said in another
tone, "I've gone and woken the children."