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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley with Katelyn Walls Shelton | America 250 · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Over the main entrance, the words Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: And, in a shield, the world state's motto, Community, Identity, Stability.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Cold for all the summer, beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh, thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Wintriness responded to wintriness.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-colored rubber.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: The light was frozen, dead, a ghost.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak, in long recession down the work tables.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: And this, said the director, opening the door, is the fertilizing room.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: In some ways, this almost sounds like another New York Times op-ed.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: But this description comes from the first chapter of a novel published in 1932, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to season two of Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Muir Orthodoxy.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: The theme for this second season is Classics American Christians Should Read in Honor of America's 250th.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: I am Nadia Williams, book's editor for Muir Orthodoxy, and the author of the book, Christians Reading Classics, out this past fall from Zondervan Academic.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: And today it is my delight and privilege to talk about Brave New World with Caitlin Waltz-Shelton.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: She is a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Bioethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing Program.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: She is also a 2025 Novak Journalism Fellow.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Her research and writing dwells at the intersection of bioethics, sexuality, and human reproduction.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: All of this makes her the perfect person to talk about this book.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you for coming.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd like to start with a general question.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: What is a classic?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that's a great question.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up not really loving classics because I thought classics were only books that were depressing.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I having read a fair amount of American literature in my classes in middle and high school and even college, a lot of the classics that we read were fairly depressing in nature.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: And Brave New World probably fits that category, that that uh that sense that I had pretty well, although I did really like Brave New World.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: I, since becoming an adult, I've learned to appreciate classics in a way that I didn't previously.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm hoping to instill in my children a love of classics, but hopefully teaching them to love the good, the true, and the beautiful, and to see that in classics.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I do think that there are classics that are good, true, and beautiful, and not just depressing.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: So to define a classic, wow, I mean, I'm sure there are official definitions that are much better than one that I could give, but I think of classics as books that endure over time.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: So it's hard to have a modern classic.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Although I think that there are classics that are books that I could point to in the modern day and say, I bet that one will be a classic, because it has some features that it seems like classics possess.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: One of which is it seems like classics capture something about the human condition in a way that haunts us.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: It stays with us.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I think they expose things that we may not be able to easily capture in words, or something that we'd rather not see but can't look away from.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: And those things tend to outlive the the people who write them and the generations who first read them.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's striking.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I like your point that it's like there's something there that haunts us.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: And Brave New World in particular is is very haunting, not least of which, because it seems to mirror our own society in a lot of ways, which is interesting because Huxley was not American, although I think he did live in America for a fair amount of time.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: So in some ways, we could maybe be maybe claim him.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think he was educated here as well.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, but but yeah, so it it's it's quite haunting to read this novel that was written in the mid-1930s, but which looks quite a bit like our modern Western society today.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: And like you said, reads a lot like a New York Times op-ed, or perhaps like the profile of the company run by Nor Sidiki, which was profiled recently called Orchid, which is about embryo grading and selection.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: The intro to Brave New World reads a lot like that profile on the company Orchid.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking about that.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's like welcome to the hatchery.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: Baby hatchery.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: And and one of one of the quotes that was really striking from that profile was sex is for fun, orchid is for babies, or something, something like that.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm butchering the quote.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's a lot more catchy than that.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: But basically, sex is for fun, and we'll take care of the reproduction.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_02: That's the the less fun, less interesting part.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it it just reads so much like Brave New World, where they're creating these humans in these hatcheries, and each of them is created very specifically for a class, and they're ranked according to their hereditary features, and it it's quite dystopian, and yet it's the world we're living in now.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: And a world we've made.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: So this is Brave New World is a classic.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's not an American classic, as you noted, even though Huxley has spent some time in America.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, what do you think makes this book worth reading for Christians in America in the year of America's 250th?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think I understood when I I read the book for the first time over the summer, this past summer, and I went to a Christian high school and a Christian college, but I think a lot of people tend to read it in high school.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: I understood reading it this summer why my Christian high school opted not to have me read Brave New World, because it's quite graphic in places and and quite gratuitous.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I definitely won't be recommending it to my own children anytime soon.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: But I do think that it's helpful to read a book that that takes us out.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's foreign to us, it's a foreign world, it's a fictional world, but in a lot of ways it mirrors our own.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: And so it can reveal things to us about our own society in a way that perhaps we had never considered before.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's really helpful for for doing that in our society that where IVF and embryo screening and things like maid, uh, assisted dying, physician-assisted death, um, which I I don't even use as a phrase because it's homicide.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but but these are all things that are broached in the book, and it's clear that there it's not something that we should aspire to.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: These things are not technological scientific advancements that we should aspire to, but they're written about as a warning.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so long as people have the reasonable capacity to read them as such, I think it's important and useful to do so.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: I joke a lot about the movie Gattaca, which is kind of similar to Brave New World.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's, I think, written by P.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: D.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: James, the the original story that the movie is based upon.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: I could be wrong about that.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: But P.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: D.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: James also has a lot of really great stuff.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Children of Men very much broaches these three themes.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, which I actually haven't read that yet.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: It's on my list to read this year as I conduct my Novak project, which is on human reproduction and the various technologies that are emerging to hack reproduction and and what that will mean for what it means to be human.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: Gattaca, I joke about it.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's about this man who assumes the identity of this other person who's been genetically engineered uh to be perfect.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: And in order to exist in this society, you have to have been engineered in this way.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it's all about this man's struggle and his deception, and how he ends up overcoming even the perfectly genetically engineered people who he's working with, and and his brother, who is perfectly genetically engineered, just despite the fact that he is not, he was a a child of passion.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um he overcomes this society and his his birth.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think it's funny that it seems like in our world, the tech bros, the Silicon Valley um inventors who are trying to hack reproduction seem to have watched this movie and and viewed it like a playbook.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like, let's let's attempt to do all these things.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Let's use human blood as you know, the entry.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's all these dystopian things about entering buildings by having your thumb pricked and it analyzing your blood to make sure you're the right person.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: So there's surveillance based on your DNA, and and then you know, there's the genetic engineering of the embryos themselves and the ranking of them, and and it's all these things that we see now in our culture that seem to be lauded or or sought after by these companies.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: I actually don't think that the American public is fully on board.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think most people, even some liberals that I have talked to and non-Christians, are not sold on the orchids and the nucleus genomics of the world that are seeking to rank and select embryos based on traits.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think people are still skeptical of eugenics and see it as a bad thing.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's great.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: Hopefully, we can maintain that that good moral sense.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I I think books like Brave New World are helpful for continuing to maintain that sense that something is wrong when we look at the world in this way.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so much of this I think about in terms of theology.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like, if we don't have a view of persons as something special, it's a lot easier to just say, like, well, we can mess with this.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Let's get into the novel proper.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we've kind of hinted, and for uh for listeners who might not have read it before, you're in for a wild ride.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, do you want to set the stage for us a little bit?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what is the basic premise here?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of a world does Huxley drop us into?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: So, as I mentioned, it starts in the hatchery, it starts in the lab, and it's kind of the perfect dystopian setting.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the beginning of this novel.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: So the the plot revolves around Bernard Marks and Lennon a crow.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: And Bernard is an alpha, which means he's the cream of the crop.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: He's he's one of the best embryos, although he's shorter, he's smaller in size, and so he has this sense of insecurity, and some of the plot revolves around that sense of insecurity, and then hit his questioning of the world state.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_02: And Lenina is a beta, she's very sexually active.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: She talks about doing practicing her Malthusian drill.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_02: I thought that was a really interesting tidbit.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so this book was written in the early 1930s.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: Contraception, like the hormonal birth control pill, was not invented until around 1960.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: So it's very interesting to read about the contraceptive drills that the characters practice.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: So she practices her Malthusian drills.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, Malthus is famous for um writing about and worrying about the number of humans populating the earth and writing about the need to reduce the population so that our world, our earth can survive, that resources won't be depleted.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, his ideas are still very popular in places like the UN where the women's health, the UN Population Fund is joined with the climate change group.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: So so the women's health related and the climate initiatives are all intertwined.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's very interesting, but I I think if you went back and looked, it probably would have all started with Malthus.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: So Linina practices her Malthusian drills.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: She's very sexually available.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's an extremely sexual society, and that's part of where the corollary it seems very similar to our own society, which is also quite sexual in nature.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but so Lenina and Bernard have the ability to go on this holiday.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: And the holiday that Bernard chooses, or Bernard, I I listened to the audiobook, and the the reader was had an accent.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: So he said Bernard.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I would read it Bernard in my American Southern accent.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so they have an an opportunity to go on this holiday, and Bernard chooses to go to this reservation.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: And the reservation is a group of people who it's a different culture, and they're not the babies are not created using hatcheries, it's primitive.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: And there happens to be a woman there named Linda who was born in a hatchery, and I guess at some point went on holiday to this reservation and and for some reason was left behind.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: It seems like either she was forgotten.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember if she was forgotten and she winds up pregnant, or if she winds up pregnant and isn't intentionally left on this reservation because she was pregnant.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: Pregnancy and motherhood, parenthood in general, but especially motherhood, is very much frowned upon in Brave New World.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so Linda ends up having this son, and his name is John.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not clear at first that he is her son because she requires him to call her Linda, despite the fact that he really wants to call her mother.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: And he there's this struggle where he wants her to be to mother him and to care for him when he's hurt and sad.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: And and it seems like she struggles as well, where she has this innate sense that she wants to care for him in this mothering way, but she's been conditioned to be disgusted by that and to see it as repugnant.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so she's she's fighting with herself and with him and punishing him for calling her mother or seeking these mothering instincts from her.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: But Lenina and John, I mean, Lynina and Bernard interact with, are introduced to Linda and John on this reservation, and Bernard gets the idea that he wants to bring them back with him because he thought it would make him popular and to to have this spectacle for people to see these very interesting backwards people, and so he brings them back with him to the elite world state where the hatcheries are, and the plot ensues from there.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, John is disgusted.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_02: There's it, John is the foil.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: John is also referred to as the savage.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: He's the foil for this shiny, elite, perfect, pleasurable world where there's no suffering and there's no sadness, and there's no petty rivalries between families or generations where death is sanitized, and you're taught not to fear it because you just take a pill and you don't suffer, and your body is recycled for the good of everyone else.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so John the the plot revolves around John and his interaction in this society and eventually ends with um his estrangement from the society, but he's still never fully able to escape it.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it is a tragedy.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's um it's striking just how much we take from society, how much we're conditioned.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's and that seems to be like this um the sense here that every character is very much conditioned in this world to act in a particular way, and it seems totally normal to them.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um so with this reservation where uh suddenly we're uh we're confronted with normal behavior, and it does not seem acceptable.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: This episode of Christians Reading Classics is brought to you by Beeson Divinity School.
• 21:32
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• 21:47
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• 22:00
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• 22:01
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• 22:09
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• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: The reservation is interesting.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: It they have their own um strange religious practices as well.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but but they are portrayed as being more like normal human beings who have mothers and fathers, and um it's not a perfect world.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: They don't all take soma, the drug that lets you go on a mental holiday.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but that yeah, it it it's a very, it's a very otherworldly book, but also very reminiscent of our own.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about the typical citizen's life in this society.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that kind of gets us into why it why it is so haunting and strange.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, okay, so here you are.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: You start your life, everybody starts their lives in this baby hatchery.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: And we have this whole description of like what happens.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of artificial scientific processes by which babies are, you know, um, the embryos are made as alphas, betas, and so on, and um down to like epsilon, the lowest of the low, who get the intellect of the lowest of the low, because otherwise, how else are you going to do the job of an epsilon if you have the intelligence of somebody about?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: The whole thing is just so like eugenically regulated.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you hatch.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: What's next to what's next for a baby in this society?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: So they have nurseries for the children, and the children don't have mothers, and there's no stand-in mother figure.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: Mothers are seen as being emotional, and that's that's seen as as very repugnant and despicable.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: And nurture.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: There's no nurture at all.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: The there's just Pavlovian conditioning.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: So the children are sent to these nurseries and they're controlled, they're very tightly controlled and conditioned.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: There's something called hypnopedia, where while they're sleeping, these phrases are repeated over and over and over again to condition the children to think in a particular way.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: And depending on the caste of the child, they go through different types of conditioning.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the things that's interesting is they're taught that there's a place for everyone.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone belongs to everyone else is a phrase that's repeated over and over again.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's part of the conditioning.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: And there's no marriage, there's no exclusive love, but but everyone belongs to everyone else.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: And one thing that I actually appreciated about this society was that no matter what type of embryo was created in the hatchery or in the in the labs, all of them were allowed to hatch.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: And all of them had a role in society.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: They might have been in a lower class or caste, but there was a place for each of the embryos in the society.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I found that to be different from our world, where during the process of IVF, embryos are ranked, and a lot of them, I think the numbers are really dicey because there are no reporting standards, but the low estimate of the number of embryos on ice in America right now is over a million.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: It is astonishing.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of those are embryos that have been deemed to be either non-viable, which I I don't fully know what that means, um, or or otherwise unfit for being implanted and and attempted to carry to term.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so so one thing I appreciated about the society was that there's actually a place for everyone.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um backwards as this society is.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um in the book.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Although it's a very instrumentalized view of persons, also.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, you're good for like these really low menial jobs.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's why we need you.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_02: No other reason.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely, definitely.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: So it it is wrong and backwards in its own way.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so uh people go to these nurseries.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: The schooling, I remember when I first read this um actually in high school, in my uh public high school in Virginia.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: We read uh Brave New World in high school, and um, I think it was like 11th grade.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember being shocked by like the sexual nature, even like in schools, yeah.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that kids are taught very early everything like that.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: So it sex is not stigmatized in this society, it's encouraged even from a very young age, also reminiscent of the United Nations in some way.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_02: I I used to do work in pro-life women's health at the department, the U.S.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: Department of Health and Human Services, and we did international women's health and worked alongside at the United Nations.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so part of my job was reading through tons of United Nations documents on women's health and children, and and one of one of the things that they recommend or describe in their documents is the sexual nature of children as young as the age of three.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just really striking to me how how similar it is to Brave New World, where these children, very, very young, are encouraged to um to be very sexual.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then as they get older, it it just continues.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: They're they're trading partners, and um somehow there's no this society is created to be one where there's no rivalries.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm not entirely convinced on that point.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: If you're trading sexual partners and everyone is sleeping with everyone else, there has to be jealousy involved.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's just human nature.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe, maybe the soma goes a long way in anesthetizing that that jealousy, those, those rivalries.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: But regardless, yes, it's it's a very sexual society and it's part of the schooling, and it's very destigmatized.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the the society is about pleasure, it's about experiencing the greatest amount of happiness or perceived happiness that one can.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: And part of that is achieved by taking this pill that makes you happy or that uh anesthetizes your sadness, erases your sadness, at least for as long as the pill is active in your body.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: A dystopian version.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like, here's your good life.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh you have no obligations to family, no uh everyone belongs to everyone else, which really means no one belongs to anyone.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you don't have to worry about, I don't know, it's like the the dink life.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to worry about, although it's not a dink life in the sense that there's no there's no marriage either.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have to worry about responsibilities.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: No one's ever gonna like wake you up at night.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: No one tells you what pleasures you should or should not pursue.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's all good until you get to like, you know, middle age, probably like about my age, at which point, um, how are we handling death, by the way?
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: The society handles death with this kind of cheerful efficiency.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: Death is sterilized.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: People die young, they're medicated, and they're surrounded by these death centers, and they teach children not to fear them.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: The body is recycled for industrial use.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: There's no mourning because there were never any relationships deep enough to be mourned in the first place.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: Death is just another technical process in this society, it's another loss of humanity and it's viewed as progress.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, it it's a very it's to use a term that I see a fair amount, it's it's throwaway culture.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: The bodies are just recycled, they're just thrown away and recycled.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: Once they are old, they're still very young, but they're considered to be, you know, declining, they are sent to these death centers and medicated into oblivion.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that's it.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, okay, you were born, you were hatched, you had a good life of all the sex you could ever need or want, um, and all the happy peels pells you ever want it, and now you're done.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, what's the purpose?
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: What is the purpose of this?
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: The purpose is just purely pleasure.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's a pleasure society.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: And once you are no longer capable of maximizing your own or others' pleasure, you're useless and you're sent to this sterile death center.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: But at least you're really happy.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: You're really happy when you die.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: You're like they give you all the pills.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh one really interesting thing, and this is a tension that I see in the book and the author, is that it seems like Huxley is critical of a drug that would change your mental faculties, that would seem to prioritize pleasure and make you forget about your suffering.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the works that Huxley is most famous for, I think, is called The Doors of Perception.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_02: And it's all about his experience with LSD.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: And he writes this work, I I believe it's after he writes Brave New World, but he becomes a real proponent of LSD.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_02: And even when he dies on the same day as C.S.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis and JFK, actually, when he dies, he is unable to speak and he writes a request to his wife for 100 micrograms of LSD intramuscularly, which she administers.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so he ends up dying in a way that is quite reminiscent of the way his characters die in these sterile death centers in Brave New World.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I find that fascinating.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: I find it fascinating that even an author can write a warning as strong as Brave New World and still succumb to the very thing that he warns against.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is striking.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does he want us to take from this?
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure because given the fact that he he writes The Doors to Perception and is a proponent of LSD just a few years after he writes Brave New World.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not quite sure.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if he had a moment of moral clarity when he wrote Brave New World and then kind of succumbed to worldly vice afterward.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: The book isn't entirely clear itself.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's one thing that classics and and books in general do is that they they take on a life of their own that perhaps goes beyond what the author intended.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_02: And and the author may not even know what they intend when they write the book.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so we can try to interpret it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of classic and good books tend to evade interpretation or have multiple interpretations that are competing at the same time.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: I certainly reading it as a Christian read it in a very particular way as a warning against pleasure seeking and against instrumentalizing people, whether that's at birth or before birth, that fertilization, whether that's at young middle age, where you're having friendships and relationships with people, or whether that's at death when you are no longer useful to people, quote unquote useful.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: It makes me think of um my friend Leah Labresco Sargent has written a book recently called The Dignity of Dependence.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's all about how humans are dependent one upon the other at all stages of life, and that we're more dependent in the early stages when we're babies, when we can do nothing for ourselves, and the latter stages of life when we are also very, if not utterly, dependent on others to take care of all of our needs, much like when we're infants, and how there's dignity in that, and that's part of what it means to be human, to be dependent upon others, and that's not a culturally acceptable idea.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: We are a very independent and individualistic culture that tries its hardest not to require anything of anyone else to assist us, and we take pride in our individualism and the choices we make to create ourselves, but Christians can't view the world in that way.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: I want to pick your brain now as a researcher.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like, this is what you do.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: You study these kinds of situations now in our own society.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: So walk us through like what should we be worried about?
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: What do we what is going on?
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like what are we dealing with?
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: And what should we be what should we be most alarmed at right now?
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I started my Novak project.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a Novak journalism fellow this year for 2025 to 2026, and I'm writing a series of articles on emerging reproductive biotechnologies and what it means to be human.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_02: So, part of my goal is to look at different reproductive biotechnologies that are coming down the pike.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_02: What is Silicon Valley dreaming up for human reproduction?
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_02: And how might that change what it means to be human, what it means to be a parent, how children might think of us as parents.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um and there are there are a number of concerning things that are being proposed, invented.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um there, like I mentioned, is embryo grading and selection these companies that are purporting to be able to guess or rank a potential child's IQ, um, or their height, or these these traits that would be very much elective.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um there there is no research backing up their claims to be able to, you know, to deliver right, to deliver these things.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I want to know.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do you get your money back?
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like I wanted a blue-eyed baby and I didn't get one.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do I get my money back?
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_02: There I I think it's rife for legal battles in the future.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there have already been cases, this new ranking eugenic technology aside, the current tests for ranking and selecting embryos are, as far as I have researched, more accurate in showing these monogenic traits, traits that are based upon or diseases that are based upon one single gene, versus these other companies are doing polygenic risk assessments.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_02: So it's looking at multiple genes and their interaction with another, with each other, and purporting to it gives you a ranking of the possibilities of these things for a polygenic trait.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_02: There's no research showing that that this is possible, but there have even been cases with the the monogenic testing where a woman screens out embryos with a particular genetic anomaly, only to find at her 12-week ultrasound that the baby does have this fatal fetal anomaly and won't even be able to be carried to term because the test was wrong.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's this horrific story.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_02: I've I've interviewed this woman who had a miscarriage because of this disease that she and her husband carry, and paid hundreds of thousands or uh over a hundred thousand dollars for IVF to select an embryo that does not have this disease, only to have a second pregnancy with a child who has this fatal fetal anomaly.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's terrible.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: It is terrible.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um and and so now, and that's with the monogenic testing.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: I I think those stories are fairly rare, but they still happen.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: And what will happen when these companies who are screening for polygenic traits happen to be wrong?
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_02: And people have children that are not the ones that they ordered, quote unquote.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_02: And what would it be like to be a child whose parents are seeking to get their money back for the screening that they did of them?
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_02: And how would that make a child feel to know that they were not what their parents wanted?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_02: I can't, I can only imagine.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that that's one thing, but equally, if not more concerning, is gene editing.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_02: So there is a doctor who has edited the genes of twins in China, and it's it's internationally frowned upon to do this type of gene editing that would be passed on.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's called germline gene editing, and it's a type of gene editing that would be passed on to future generations when the edit.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: Humans reproduce in the future.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a black box.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_02: We don't know what that would do to future generations if we alter the human genome in that way.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_02: But then there are also good uses of gene editing where if not done at the germline level, it's only affecting the person in question.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: And there was a baby recently named Baby KJ, who would have died from this genetic d anomaly, but they were able to target this gene editing formula to the specific gene that was causing this disease, and he's still alive, and he's meeting his milestones, and it's an amazing story.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it all of these technologies are not bad necessarily, but the way we use them may very well be.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then there are also things like um artificial wombs, full ectogenesis is the idea of you know fertilizing an egg in a lab.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's what's actually depicted in Brave New World, where an embryo is created in a lab and then brought to viability and and birthed or hatched in a lab.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think the general scientific consensus is that that's still fiction, but partial ectogenesis, which is taking a baby or the case that has actually happened, is taking a a neonatal um lamb, a gestating lamb, and immersing it in this biobag with synthetic amniotic fluid from a young gestational age and and bringing it to viability in that that biobag.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's seemingly possible and could actually change the face of neonatal intensive care units and how babies are cared for from a very young age.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_02: It could hopefully, I think it would be great if it could push back the age of viability.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: So currently, the age of viability for an infant is around 20 to 21 weeks.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think the earliest babies that have survived are around 21 weeks.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think there might be a case here or there who of at maybe 19 weeks, I think.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: Because only a few years ago it was like 24 weeks.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: But this new partial ectogenesis could potentially push that age of viability even earlier.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_02: So if we're able to submerge a baby in a a bag uh of synthetic amniotic fluid and engineer this womb, it it's never going to be ideal.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_02: A womb is ideal, but I do think that there's hope for helping to save the lives of babies that would otherwise pass away if we didn't have this technology.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_02: So there's good and there's bad.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I'm researching all of it and writing about the people who are living it and experiencing it and creating it, and the scientists uh researching it, and yeah, so it it is it's very dystopian.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's part of the reason why I read Brave New World because um because it's it seems very similar to the things that I'm writing and thinking about these days.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's striking to see fiction and uh reality collide.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, definitely.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to conclude with our usual question.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um to bring us back to books.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: What is a classic book, whether American or any other, that you wish you had written?
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_02: And why?
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's a great question.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_02: I I think that I'm going to answer with a short story, if that's allowed.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_02: And it's written by Ursula Le Guin, and she's another science fiction dystopian writer.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: And The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is very short, it's only a few pages long, so and it's publicly available.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_02: So you can go Google it and read it in like probably 10 minutes.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it's about this perfect society, and I don't want to give away the plot, but the society seems perfect, but but for one small, small thing.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_02: And the ones who everyone in the society is confronted with the one small thing and have to make a decision whether to leave or to stay.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it's titled The Ones Who Walk Away from OMA loss.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_02: So the emphasis is on the ones who are confronted with the evil and decide that they can no longer stay in this perfect, otherwise perfect society.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's very, very good.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_02: And whenever I was studying ethics in graduate school at Yale, I was talking with a mentor and about various things that I needed to read to know about theological ethics.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_02: And he said to me, Oh, don't worry, the only thing you need to read is The Ones Who Walk Away from Oma Loss by Ursula LeGwin.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so I read it and it really has stuck with me all those years, um, all these years, and I still think about it a lot.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_02: And in a very utilitarian world, I think that it's it's quite poignant.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I wish I had written it, but I did not.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: I also wish I could write fiction in general.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe, maybe one day I'll learn to have that skill, but I um I'll just stick with nonfiction for now.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, considering that you're nonfiction, we'll read a lot like Huxley's novel.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's right.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of works out.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Caitlin, thank you so much.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.