I'd never noticed how appropriate Mr. Foster's name is. In the book, children aren't really born; rather, they're "decanted." As such, they don't really have parents, so Mr. Foster, in working in the Hatchery, is sort of like a foster parent.
Around the same time that Mr. Foster is introduced in the book (chapter one), social predestination is mentioned. While the caste element of this predestination is encountered throughout the book, I think this early section is the only time that other physical conditioning is mentioned (at least at any length):
On Rack 10 rows of next generation's chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine. The first batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundred metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. "To improve their sense of balance," Mr. Foster explained, "Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job, We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing in their heads."About a page earlier, heat conditioning is also mentioned, for those "predestined to emigrate to the tropics." As the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explains, "All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."
Reading the book this time, I realized more fully how disastrous this is. Not only is it messing around with biology and free will with (at best) questionable ethics, but it also totally disregards the possibility of new job positions or old jobs' becoming obsolete. If a new position requiring specific skills is spontaneously created, there won't be anyone with those skills, and there will be a period of about two decades before a group can be decanted and conditioned to qualify for that position. And if rockets are no longer being built, what are those two hundred and fifty rocket-plane engineers - already endowed with those specific skills and only those specific skills - going to do? In the one case, there's a deficit (or maybe even an impediment), and in the other, there's a surplus. Either would significantly affect the technological progress that's so important in the book.
I also noticed to a new degree how much religion has been eradicated. As the Director explains in chapter three, "All crosses had their tops cut and became T's," but this is also seen just in the word cross itself. Instead of Charing Cross Station, there's Charing-T Tower, which encapsulates not only the book's view of technological progress (what was a station has become a tower) but also this eradication of religion and some specific religious elements. Yet - interestingly - as an adjective (a synonym for angry), cross still exists. In chapter four, Lenina says, "Henry gets cross if I keep him waiting."
There's also a fair amount about delayed gratification that I hadn't noticed before. In chapter six, Bernard says, "I didn't want it to end with our going to bed... not at once, not the first day," and he says he wants "to try the effect of arresting my impulses." When John is introduced, he's shown to "arrest his impulses" without even thinking about it. In chapter seven when he sees Lenina, he "was so much overcome that he had to turn away and pretend to be looking very hard at something on the other side of the square." When John sees Lenina sleeping in the rest-house in the reservation, he even denounces his impulses:
He found himself reflecting that he had only to take hold of the zipper at her neck and give one long, strong pull... He shut his eyes, he shook his head. ... Detestable thought! He was ashamed of himself.Bernard seems helpless to "arrest his impulses," but John has no problem in doing so, not even daring to look at Lenina.
Finally, I understood to a better degree John's inhabiting the lighthouse in the last chapter of the book. Not only is he trying to give himself some direction ("Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good!"), but he also wants to be an example to the rest of society. It's not explicitly mentioned in the book, but he does think "vindictively" that throwing away the enhanced food he's purchased will "teach them." In a way, the purer life that he endeavors to lead will be a beacon for everyone else, so it's fitting that he lives in a lighthouse.
