'Cleanliness in next to fordliness'
Posted by Kelly Mitchell on Tuesday, September 18, 2012
‘Cleanliness is next to fordliness’ – is one of my favourite quotes from Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World.’ I find myself frequently using it when somebody makes a mess or is dirty. It is the second hypnopжdic lesson in elementary hygiene. In ‘Brave New World,’ everything is built on Ford’s assembly line principles – we have mass production (humans aren’t born, they’re produced and hypnopжdia is the way they are educated or programmed, if you will, in their sleep as children), similarity, predictability and also the consumption of many exposable goods. This is the reason why, due to the lack of a super-natural being to worship that would be the basis of a formal religion, in the World State Ford, himself is revered as a deity. That’s why many of the phrases we know and constantly use today are cleverly changed by Aldous Huxley. They say, ‘By Ford!’ for example and the years in their calendar are measured in the ‘AF’(Annum Ford) era, year being 1908 (the year the Model T rolled off the assembly line) so the novel is set in 632 AF (2540 AD). Big Ben is called Big Henry in the book and instead of a cross the religious symbol used is the letter T. But why is Ford so important in the novel?
I believe it is because Henry Ford is the father of some of the most basic capitalist principles we know today. Whereas George Orwell thought that we would be deprived of freedom and information and a totalitarian government will keep us ignorant and censored and rule by force, Huxley, on other hand, feared the opposite – that people will have all too much freedom, too much information and that they wouldn’t know what to do with it all so they would willingly keep themselves ignorant and happy, not thinking about anything real. The fears of both authors are mirrored in their works. Huxley, almost thirty years after ‘Brave New World,’ wrote ‘Brave New World Revisited.’ In it, he considers if the world is moving towards or away from his idea from the 1930s and concluded that it was happening and it was happening faster than he could have ever imagined.
I believe it is because Henry Ford is the father of some of the most basic capitalist principles we know today. Whereas George Orwell thought that we would be deprived of freedom and information and a totalitarian government will keep us ignorant and censored and rule by force, Huxley, on other hand, feared the opposite – that people will have all too much freedom, too much information and that they wouldn’t know what to do with it all so they would willingly keep themselves ignorant and happy, not thinking about anything real. The fears of both authors are mirrored in their works. Huxley, almost thirty years after ‘Brave New World,’ wrote ‘Brave New World Revisited.’ In it, he considers if the world is moving towards or away from his idea from the 1930s and concluded that it was happening and it was happening faster than he could have ever imagined.