[midoridensha]

Yeah, Brave New World is a really interesting work of dystopian fiction IMO, because many people disagree that it's "dystopian", unlike 1984 which it's often compared with. No one thinks living in the world of 1984 sounds appealing, but BNW sounds like a pretty nice place actually, but the anti-BNW crowd tries to tell us it's horrible because it's "unnatural" or "against family values" or something like that. Meanwhile, in the real world today, many families are completely broken (and many were in Huxley's time too, except they didn't get divorced, they just suffered), the marriage rate has gone down, the birthrate is unsustainably low, and young people frequently aren't even having sex any more, leading many to be isolated and depressed. Personally, I fail to see how adopting a BNW-style society could possibly be any worse than what we have now; indeed, it seems like a huge improvement in most ways.

[Spivak]

Well the "we have the ability to alter humans so we're all strong, healthy, and intelligent but we not only choose not to do that but choose to stunt development of some humans to produce a docile compliant workforce for menial labor" is pretty darn dystopian no matter how you swing it.

And if you say "oh that wouldn't be so bad" you can even put your money where you mouth is -- would you be fine with being deprived of oxygen long enough to cause minor brain damage but otherwise not harm you? Done right you wouldn't feel a thing too. You can volunteer to be permanently dumber.

Huxley describes very eloquently how one end by two means are not the same. Human variation that arises naturally but at all times people are trying their best is a fact of life. But humans taking the reins and making that same variation by choice for their own desires is dystopian.

[midoridensha]

>Well the "we have the ability to alter humans so we're all strong, healthy, and intelligent but we not only choose not to do that but choose to stunt development of some humans to produce a docile compliant workforce for menial labor" is pretty darn dystopian no matter how you swing it.

That's not the thing the anti-BNW crowd complains about at all. It's not really even relevant: BNW was written a century ago before computers, automation, and robotics were invented. In a real BNW-type future scenario, you wouldn't need to artificially stunt peoples' intelligence to make menial workers: you'd just make robots to do that stuff, like we're already doing today.

The relevant part of BNW that would actually apply in the future is the idea of eliminating families, and having the state control reproduction and child-rearing. That's the part people find dystopian. No one seriously considering the issue thinks about the stuff you're talking about, because they realize that robots and automation have made that whole point moot.

[aebtebeten]

Huxley was satirising fetal alcohol syndrome as a problem of his age; one might hope that in this more enlightened day and age parents would know not to drink during pregnancy and to keep their kids vaccinations up to date after pregnancy (and keep trace amounts of iodine in their diets) ... but your mileage may vary.