Ethics in the late anthropocene

Abstract

The satirical force of Brave New World-its cartoonish sci-fi anticipation of a controlled society-is greatly diminished for the twenty-first-century reader, who is surrounded by cruel evidence of its realization: narcotic bioregulation, hedonistic consumption, new apartheids, even the resurgence of eugenic protocols. Given the imminent horizon of these realizations, it becomes increasingly difficult to read the novel as a plea for some recuperation of humanist values or practices, even if that were Huxley’s original intent. Rather, the question becomes how to read the novel against the humanist grain, to read it as an instance of what I call an ‘ethics after people’-the form of relation that prevails under conditions of creaturely abjection, or life reduced to its material, protoplasmic essence. Such an ethics, one that did not particularly privilege certain relations (between humans, say) over others, would, on its face, seem very strange indeed and, in a way, not an ethics at all, at least not in the usual sense of rules or norms of behavior. Rather, it would be ‘anti-normative’ in at least two ways. Firstly, such an ethics would be allergic to the articulation of explicit codes of conduct; instead, it would attempt to describe the experience of confronting an other and the subsequent sense or intuition of implication, obligation, or indebtedness, prior to any question of what one ought.1 Such an ethics would also be closer to the discourses of biology and ecology than law or theology. Anthropocentric ethics, for their part, are only as robust as the humanism that supports them. When that humanism is challenged, ethical standards can all too easily become eroded or perverted, and monstrous actions be justified. Writing in the wake of the First World War and during the rise of fascism across Europe, Huxley would have been only too aware of the fragility of ethical systems grounded in humanism. From our perspective, the challenge that Brave New World (1932) confronts is less how we might redeem the abject or reinstate humanism (for example, by treating all of the inhabitants of the Brave New World as humans, citizens, and stakeholders in a polity), than how we can ethically reconceive of life when it is recognized as a massive and merely biological phenomenon, when it is no longer ‘propped up’ by metaphysical fictions and conceits.