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Some drugs dull, stupefy and sedate. Others sharpen, animate and intensify. After taking soma, one can apparently drift pleasantly off to sleep. Bernard Marx, for instance, takes four tablets of soma to pass away a long plane journey to the Reservation in New Mexico. When they arrive at the Reservation, Bernard's companion, Lenin, swallows half a gramme of soma when she begins to tire of the Warden's lecture, "with the result that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all." Such a response suggests the user's sensibilities are numbed rather than heightened.
In BNW, people resort to soma when they feel depressed, angry or have intrusive negative thoughts. They take it because their lives, like society itself, are empty of spirituality or higher meaning. Soma keeps the population comfortable with their lot. Soma also shows physiological tolerance. Linda, the Savage's mother, takes too much: up to twenty grammes a day. Taken in excess, soma acts as a respiratory depressant.
Linda eventually dies of an overdose. This again suggests that Huxley models soma more on opiates than the sort of clinically valuable mood-brightener which subverts the hedonic treadmill of negative feedback mechanisms in the CNS. The parallel to be drawn with opiates is admittedly far from exact. Unlike soma, good old-fashioned heroin is bad news for your sex life. But like soma, it won't sharpen your wits. Even today, the idea that chemically-driven happiness must dull and pacify is demonstrably false.
Mood-boosting psycho stimulants are likely to heighten awareness. They increase self-assertiveness. On some indices, and in low doses, stimulants can improve intellectual performance. Combat-troops on both sides in World War Two, for instance, were regularly given amphetamines. This didn't make them nicer or gentler or dumber. Dopaminergic power-drugs tend to increase willpower, wakefulness and action. "Serenics", by contrast, have been researched by the military and the pharmaceutical industry.
They may indeed exert a quiescent effect - ideally on the enemy. But variants could also be used on, or by, one's own troops to induce fearlessness. A second and less warlike corrective to the dumb-and-docile stereotype is provided by so-called manic-depressives. One reason that many victims of bipolar disorder, notably those who experience the euphoric sub-type of (hypo-) mania, skip out on their lithium is that when "eu thymic" they can still partially recall just how wonderfully intense and euphoric life can be in its manic phase. Life on lithium is flatter.
For it's the havoc wrought on the lives of others which makes the uncontrolled exuberance of frank mania so disastrous. Depressed or nominally eu thymic people are easier for the authorities to control than exuberant life-lovers. Thus one of the tasks facing a mature fusion of biological psychiatry and psychogenic medicine will be to deliver enriched well-being and lucid intelligence to anyone who wants it without running the risk of triggering ungovernable mania. MDMA (ecstasy) briefly offers a glimpse of what full-blooded mental health might be like.
Like soma, it induces both happiness and serenity. Unlike soma, it is neurotoxic. But used sparingly, it can also be profound, empathetic and soulfully intense. Drugs which commonly induce dysphoria, on the other hand, are truly sinister instruments of social control. They are far more likely to induce the "infantile decorum" demanded of BNW utopians than euphoriants. The major tranquilizers, including the archetypal "chemical cosh" chlorpromazine (Largactil), subdue their victims by acting as dopamine antagonists.
At high dosages, willpower is blunted, affect is flattened, and mood is typically depressed. The subject becomes sedated. Intellectual acuity is dulled. They are a widely-used tool in some penal systems. Soma doesn't merely stupefy. At face value, the happiness it offers is amoral; it's "hedonistic" in the baser sense.
Soma-fuelled highs aren't a function of the well-being of others. A synthetic high doesn't force you to be happy for a reason: unlike people, a good drug will never let you down. True, soma-consumption doesn't actively promote anti-social behaviour. Yet the drug is all about instant gratification. Drug-naive John the Savage, by contrast, has a firm code of conduct. His happiness - and sorrow - don't derive from taking a soul-corrupting chemical.
It is based on reasons - though these reasons themselves presumably have a neuro chemical basis. Justified or unjustified, his happiness, like our own today, will always be vulnerable to disappointment. Huxley clearly feels that if a loved one dies, for instance, then one will not merely grieve: it is appropriate that one grieves, and there is good reason to do so. It would be wrong not to go into mourning. A friend who said he might be sad if you died, but he wouldn't let it spoil his whole day - for instance - might strike us as quite unfeeling, if rather droll: not much of a friend at all.
By our lights, the utopians equally show poor taste. They don't ever grieve or treat each others' existence as special. They are conditioned to treat death as natural and even pleasant. As children, they are given sweets to eat when they go to watch the process of dying in hospital. Their greatest kick comes from taking a drug. Life on soma, together with early behavioural conditioning, leaves them oblivious to the true welfare of others.
The utopians are blind to the tragedy of death; and to its pathos. Surely this is a powerful indictment of all synthetic pleasures? Shouldn't we echo the Savage's denunciation of soma to the Deltas: "Don't take that horrible stuff. It's poison, it's poison... Poison to the soul as well as the body... Throw it all away, that horrible poison." Don't all chemical euphoriants rob us of our humanity?
Not really; or only on the most malaise-sodden conception of what it means to be human. Media stereotypes of today's crude psycho pharmacy are not a reliable guide to the next few million years. It is sometimes supposed that all psychoactive drug-taking must inherently be egotistical. This egotism is exemplified in the contemporary world by the effects of power-drugs such as cocaine and the amphetamines, or by the warm cocoon of emotional self-sufficiency afforded by opium and its more potent analogues and derivatives.
Yet drugs - not least the em pathogens such as ecstasy - and genetic engineering can in principle be customised to let us be nicer; to reinforce our idealized codes of conduct. The complex role of the "civilizing neurotransmitter" serotonin, and its multiple receptor sub-types, is hugely instructive - if still poorly understood. If we genetically re-regulate its receptors, we can make ourselves kinder as well as happier. The crucial point is that, potentially, long-acting designer-drugs needn't supplant our moral codes, but chemically predispose us to act them out in the very way we would wish. "Personality pills" permit us to become the kind of people we'd most like to be - to fulfil our second-order desires.
Such self-reinvention is an option that our genetic constitution today frequently precludes. Altruism and self-sacrifice for the benefit of anonymous strangers - including starving Third World orphans whom we acknowledge need resources desperately more than we do - is extraordinarily hard to practise consistently. Sometimes it's impossible, even for the most benevolent-minded of the affluent planetary elite. Self-referential altruism is easier; but it's also different - narrow and small-scale.
Unfortunately, the true altruists among our (non-) ancestors got eaten or outbreak. Their genes perished with them. More specifically; in chemical terms, very crudely, dopaminergic's fortify one's will-power, while certain serotonergic's can deepen one's empathy and social conscience. Safe, long-lasting site-specific hybrids will do both.
Richer designer cocktails spiced with added ingredients will be far better still. It is tempting to conceptualize such cocktails in terms of our current knowledge of, say, oxytocin, phenylethylamine, substance P antagonists, selective mu-opioid agonists and enkephalinase-inhibitors etc. But this is probably naive. Post-synaptic receptor antagonists block their psychoactive effects, suggesting it's the post-synaptic intra-cellular cascades they trigger which form the heartlands of the soul. Our inner depths haven't yet been properly explored, let alone genetically re-regulated.
As perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma underwhelms. It's not really a utopian wonder drug at all. It does make you high. Yet it's more akin to a hangover less tranquillize or an opiate - or a psychic anesthetizing SSRI like Prozac - than a truly life-transforming elixir.
Third-millennium neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a vastly richer product-range of designer-drugs to order. For a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It gives rise to only a shallow, un empathetic and intellectually uninteresting well-being. Apparently, taking soma doesn't give Bernard Marx, the disaffected sleep-learning specialist, more than a cheap thrill. Nor does it make him happy with his station in life. John the Savage commits suicide soon after taking soma [guilt and despair born of serotonin depletion! ? ].
The drug is said to be better than (promiscuous) sex - the only sex the brave new workers practise. But a regimen of soma doesn't deliver anything sublime or life-enriching. It doesn't catalyst any mystical epiphanies, intellectual breakthroughs or life-defining insights. It doesn't in any way promote personal growth.
Instead, it provides a mindless, inauthentic "imbecile happiness" - a vacuous escapism which makes people comfortable with their lack of freedom. Huxley, however, has an altogether different agenda in mind. He is seeking to warn us against scientific utopianism. He succeeds all too well.
Although we tend to see other people, not least the notional brave new workers, as the hapless victims of propaganda and disinformation, we may find it is we ourselves who have been the manipulated dupes. Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on John The Savage Bernard Marx
