My round of books that I should have read already has brought me to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and even just an hour’s worth of reading or so has paid off with a frame for things I see in the news.

In the opening chapters, the reader gets a tour of the factory in which the futuristic society cultivates and “decants” new human beings.  After initial testing, the embryos are sorted by aptitude and then cloned.  The clones are then subjected to what a modern author would describe as genetic treatment to increase each person’s similarity to his or her character-type model.

The children created are thus set firmly in their castes, from the Alphas to the Epsilons, each category with its role to fill in the central plan of the society.  (Anything lower than Epsilon-level aptitude would leave a person pretty much useless.)  Then begin various socialization manipulations to further prepare the children for their “predestined” lives, with everything from suggestive messages while they sleep to electro-shock conditioning.

A group of Betas hear the following message repeated over and over again in their sleep by way of an Elementary Class Consciousness lesson:

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 the 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 to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.

A few pages earlier, the reader had witnessed a group of eight-month-old baby Deltas, in their khaki suits, zapped with electricity so that they might associate the pain with books and flowers.  “They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives,” explains the director to his Alpha students.

The serendipity of having read these passages last night comes with my morning current-events perusals.  Mentioned in passing, during a Byron York article recalling some of the disrespectful and downright threatening representations of President Bush, which received notably less censure than an Obama-masked rodeo clown, is this line from the 2008 election season, by Bill Maher:

Barack Obama, an actual college professor, replaced George Bush, an actual chimp.

That was a dumb comic’s rephrasing of a common thought.  The more-intellectual, classic image of the genre is New York Times columnist David Brooks’s fawning over Senator Obama’s creased pant leg.  (One wonders whether perhaps his maid should have been the candidate.)  For a little low-information levity, throw in Kris Jenner’s defense of the house size of Kim Kardashian (her daughter), as compared with Obama’s:

Kim Kardashian is the hardest-working young lady in the world. She never sleeps, she never stops, she never slows down, and works so hard for what she’s got.  I started thinking about her 10,000 square foot house, and I thought ‘Wow, her job affords her to live in a 10,000-square-foot house’. And I think, if I’m not mistaken, Mr President’s job affords him to live in a 55,000-square-foot house.

Per Mr. Huxley: “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever.”

Now shift lanes over to two posts in the Corner (here and here), in which Stanley Kurtz points out an instructional video telling teachers that, under Common Core standards, it’s alright for a child to answer 3 x 4 as 11:

Critics have said for some time that the Common Core dumbs down math standards. It does so by gutting basic math requirements, but also, in many cases, by accommodating “fuzzy math,” in which conceptual explanations are considered more important than correct answers. Popular opposition to the Common Core was kicked off by a couple of Indiana mothers who noticed their children’s peculiar math problems.

At my table during a RhodeMapRI event, last week, one woman addressed the state’s workforce-training challenges by noting that children in her town’s public school were not being taught the basics, like long division.  I’d venture to say that more people than would admit it know in their bones that we should not be replacing the evolved methods by which we were taught in school with theoretical paradigms from frightfully clever academics and bureaucrats.

The most important part of Kurtz’s commentary, however, gets to the heart of the Huxley analogy.  Children are absorbing the lesson that a reasonable thought process is more important than the correct answer.  Personally, I think that’s inverted.  I might not care if my children explained their math homework with reference to the magical properties of fairy dust, provided their answers were always correct; the answers would be proof that the reasoning was sound, perhaps in a way that I’m incapable of fathoming.

In recent years, I’ve been confronted with a strange notion among people under thirty years old (older people, too, if they’re progressive):  Whereas I was raised and educated to think that being incorrect does not mean that one is a bad person, I get the distinct impression that increasing numbers of young people hold quite the opposite view.  It’s fine, they think, to insinuate bad motives in other people’s actions and arguments, but to behave as if somebody else is objectively incorrect in their conclusions is a personal affront too far.

Perhaps Huxley will touch on that in subsequent chapters, building on the director’s line in chapter 1: “that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”  Such a goal requires more than a dose of relativism, I would imagine.

But then again, what do I know?  I’m fond not only of books and flowers, but of black and khaki, too. Moreover, I found a decade and more of Gamma/Delta-level work to be very fulfilling, and I hardly ever bother ironing my pants.