In 1932, Aldous Huxley published his famous book "Brave New World", a novel in which he tried to draw the features of a future world devoid of virtues, far removed from the utopia that philosophers have long preached since Plato.
I remember how 30 years ago, while we were students studying and analyzing the contents of the book, we felt that Huxley's words were an exaggeration that brought him into the realm of science fiction that has no connection to reality, except that today I, with my students, re-read Brave New World, and I feel that Huxley was seeing With an insight into what was confined to our sight at the time, rather, I feel that the reality before us today is - in some ways - more strange than what we considered 30 years ago as a fantasy.
Wild John could not bear the shock of friction with an ethical system that does not value love and weight;
So he began to beat Lina and call her the worst epithets, before he put an end to his life at the end of the novel, after he became frustrated and despaired of greed to win the heart of a woman in a closed world ruled by technology.
Among the most prominent axes of Huxley's novel related to our reality and the subject of our conversation in this context is the axis of the relationship between the sexes;
The writer was able to predict some of the developments that followed due to the impact of technological media in our world today.
In the novel, we stand at two mindsets, or two different positions regarding this relationship: John's savage position, who remained in his nature, chanting poems, expressing his passion for "Softness" and glorifying her femininity, excluding her from imperfection, as lovers do.
And the position of Linina, who hastened to display her body in front of the savage John, hoping to satisfy a passing desire.
While the savage John remains imprisoned in a Shakespearean culture that honors love and calls for poetry as a language to describe moments of revelation and recognition, and the accompanying feelings of these moments, with which the blood pulse in the veins of the two lovers changes;
Lina remains captive to a system based on a set of axioms inherited from the stage of hypnosis to which children are exposed in centers of upbringing on acceptable behavior in the brave new world, including the axiom that says that every person belongs to every other person;
Therefore, the human body is common, and it should not be for one person.
Savage John could not bear the shock of friction with a moral system that does not value love, so he beat Lina and called her the worst epithets, before he put an end to his life at the end of the novel, after he was frustrated and despaired of greed to win the heart of a woman in a closed world ruled by technology.
Thus, Aldous Huxley alerted nearly a century ago to the relationship between the power of terrible technological development on the one hand, and the phenomena indicating what has come to be called the end of love (The End of Love), as stated in the title of the valuable study conducted by researcher Eva Iluz (Eva Illouz) on the other hand.
Perhaps the contemplator does not miss standing at the many similarities between the conditions of the personalities in the fictional world of Aldous Huxley, and the conditions of the people in the spaces of social communication.
The common denominator between the populations of the two worlds is submission to the authority of a technological culture that removes the relationship between the sexes from the spaciousness of coexistence under the roof of affection and mercy, to reduce it to a fleeting sexual whim.
Is the trend towards emptying the relationship between the sexes of all emotional content before reducing it to the fleeting sexual whim is a real and noticeable trend, or is it an illusion and an exaggeration?
There is enough evidence to indicate the real existence of this trend, and it is enough to indicate that some of the words that have become very common among the interlocutors in the American context, for example.
You do not miss to pick up the word (Ghosting) while you are watching an American movie, or listening with interest - as researcher Eva Elloz did - to the conversation of the people around her in America;
This word descends from "ghost", and the meaning of the verb derived from it has been diverted to a special meaning, which means disappearing like a ghost, especially after spending the sexual orgasm with another person.
The root of the corruption of the sexual system today is a liberal ideology that worked to link freedom and body nudity
What is more terrible than this and more indicative of the realization of Huxley's imagination in reality is the various forms of disgraceful behavior witnessed by some social networking sites, represented in exchanging pictures of members of the bodies of those seeking acquaintance (Sexting), instead of exchanging pictures of faces, for example.
This rampant behavior among the pioneers of some electronic platforms represents a summit of foolishness, with which a person’s interest is limited to knowing the other’s physical characteristics in order to see the extent to which they are compatible with this person’s sexual inclinations.
These types of behavior indicate that we are facing a culture that is concerned with “commodifying” sex and marketing it as a material for consumption, far from the sensations and feelings associated with it in ancient cultural contexts.
When we search for the origin in this new trend towards reducing the relationship between the sexes at the moment of sexual need fulfillment, as in Huxley's world, we find it reverting to an economic system that pleads with a culture that dominates the arts of image in communication, and to a technology that this culture reaches the ultimate in controlling and controlling the human imagination.
We understand by reading Jean-Claude Guillebaud's book on the tyranny of lust or sexual pleasure (La Tyranie du plaisir) that the root of the corruption of the sexual system today is a liberal ideology that worked to link freedom and the nakedness of the body.
It is indisputable that the concept of emancipation in contemporary Western culture has not been linked to anything as much as it is linked to the democratic right to display the body, especially the body of women, in front of the eyes, definitely with a traditional culture that condemns displaying this body and seeing it alike.
But if it is true that breaking with the traditional system that binds the pleasure of the body is what may liberate a person, then it is also true that the new sexual system remains far from achieving a balance between the individual’s demand for liberation and the group’s demand for maintaining a general system with which this individual’s desire is disciplined.
This is what Foucault goes to in his book on the history of sex, where he says that we have not yet emancipated from the missionary tendency entrenched in the history of the West, this tendency that does nothing more than strongly criticize the previous system, condemn hypocrisy, and praise the right to access the present moment and reality, People dream of another utopia.
In other words, we see in Foucault's words, as in Gibo's words, that the prevailing liberal system has aspects that allow it, despite the accompanying sayings that delusional people reach the stage of sexual heroism, where they reach the highest levels of enjoyment of their bodily pleasures.
Upon contemplation, we find that the arts of sexual temptation are not exclusive to contemporary culture, rather they have accompanied all cultures throughout the ages, since man existed, but these arts have never been linked as they are today to the logic of commodification and marketing.
What really happened is that the call for the right to bare the body was the gateway to its objectification before it was used to market sex.
And this objectification and this marketing could not have taken place except through the alliance of two authorities: the authority of art and the authority of the market or capital.
Through a number of ambiguous concepts related to artistic freedom and artistic sense, the naked body has been transformed into an artistic image that asks the viewer to overlook its sexual connotations in order to stand at its artistic beauty.
This is at odds with the natural reality where body nudity is associated with types of sexual temptation and temptation.
Relying on ambiguous artistic concepts that destroy the existing relationship between the signifier and the signified, it enabled capitalism to remove the body from the stage of sexual suggestion directed from the individual to the individual, and to move it to the stage of the body displayed before the eyes, not as a motor for sexual desire whose object is itself, but rather as a model for other bodies. Try to imitate him.
The adoption of ambiguous concepts that mix sexual suggestion with artistic sense made it possible to strip the body and then objectify it, until the displayed body became a model on which forms of dresses and colors were carried that gave it a circumstantial sexual and artistic value, this value that became directed to taste, dictating - to women in particular - the latest methods that It gives the body a sexual-artistic attraction, and it also dictates to the viewers what is desired and what is not desired, sexually and artistically.
After the function of the dress was to cover the charms of the body, it became an artistic function concerned with underlining and highlighting these charms.
Thus, the artistic value, represented in a piece of cloth bearing a trademark, is what controls the images that settle in the subconscious of the beholder, defining for him the meaning of the sexual value.
Upon contemplation, we find that the arts of sexual temptation are not exclusive to contemporary culture, but rather have accompanied all cultures throughout the ages, since man existed.
However, these arts were never linked as they are today to the logic of commodification and marketing.
Sex in contemporary culture, especially in the era of digital culture, has turned into a visual lust in the first place, based on the consumption of the furnished body image by large companies, companies whose primary concern is commodification and marketing.
And with the commodification of sex, by linking the body as the main engine of sexual arousal, and the artistic advantages that are added to it, it was easy to subject it to the logic of marketing, so the demand for it became similar to the demand for consumables with a limited validity in time.
The flow of the presented models proves in the imagination of the beholder and his awareness that the function of the body in the sexual process is more like the function of a single-use machine, which is disposed of as soon as the need passes.
The most dangerous thing is that this influx lays the foundations of a new culture with which the desire for sex turns into a sport governed by the law of competition and standards of performance and effectiveness.
This is accompanied by the emergence of new disturbing phenomena such as the pathological passion for sexual performance and the anxiety resulting from comparing the capabilities of the sexual self with what this culture highlights as a model for the required sexual performance.
Together, these things generate a false feeling that sex is only related to the body, and with this feeling, the spiritual dimensions inherent in the relationship between the sexes disappear.
After the sexual temptation took place face to face in a specific space and time, this temptation now takes place in a virtual space, not between a human being and a human being, but between an image and another image corresponding to it.
Technology has contributed to dwarfing man and reducing him to just a designed image, and this has resulted in communication becoming a connection between two physical images, which narrows the space for spiritual acquaintance with him.
After the traditional cultures used to make meeting between the sexes a societal affair, because it was the gateway to the birth of children, that is, to the building;
Digital culture has come to confine this convergence to the sphere of individual affairs, stripping it of all its hidden, transcendent, spiritual dimensions.
The dominant digital culture promises to strip man of all his hidden spiritual dimensions, as well as to reduce him to his visible dimension.
There is nothing that modifies the need for traditional societies closed in on themselves to reconsider the structures that control the dictation of gender values, except for the fear that technology companies will take over communication between the two sexes and reduce the relationship between them to the values of the body in a way that erodes spiritual acquaintance.
The image has become in the era of digital culture threatening to undermine all the values of society, good and bad, and for this reason it is necessary to think about ways to limit the power of technology and prevent it from persisting in dismantling human relations in the interest of the big technology companies.
Accordingly, it is inevitable to deepen thinking about the nature of the relationship between love and sex, between yesterday and today, in anticipation of a society disciplined in a way that achieves a balance between spiritual and material values alike.