Aldous Huxley: Social Philosopher and Critic

by psychedelic sakyamuni

Although Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is widely regarded as a novelist, he was above all, a social philosopher and critic who was far ahead of his time. The role of the social philosopher is to ask and answer the following questions: How does an individual relate to the society, vice versa, and what makes and breaks a free and just society? (Mitchell 378). The role of the social critic is to critique the moral implications and ills of a given society (socialcritic.org). These questions and criticisms are the subjects in which Aldous Huxley struggled to address and find answers to in his lifetime, through his literature containing prophecies of Utopias and Dysotopias, pioneering experiences with chemical and religious Mysticism, and criticizing modern-day and historic societies and governments.

Aldous Huxley constantly criticized what he felt was a failure of past and present governments to properly serve its citizens. In his book Quest for Values (1971), Martin Brimbaum writes that Huxley is essentially a social critic who is fed up with the political course of history and man’s disposition of not being able to learn from the horrors of the past (91). Huxley’s greatest criticism of society is his total disdain of Totalitarianism. In his literature, Huxley takes a strong stand against the tyranny, conformity, corruption, and oppression of man that he feels is the logical result of Totalitarian absolute power. In Huxley’s collection of socially critical essays, Brave New World Revisited (1958), he addressed at length the causes and conditions of past, current, and future totalitarianism states. He claims that Totalitarianism denies the individual the basic concepts of freedom , that is, being physically free from captivity and holds the individual “psychologically captive, compelled to think, feel, and act as the representative of the national state” (89-90). This viewpoint is perfectly illustrated in his dysotopian novel, Brave New World (1931), which Huxley describes as “a nightmare of the future” (“BNWR“ 9). In this novel, Huxley creates a society where every civilian is under the absolute control of ten dictators, who have consolidated the world’s power into their hands using modern science and technology:

“In my fable of Brave New World, the dictators were able to enforce their authority by manipulating the bodies of embryos, the reflexes of infants, and the minds of children and adults….they were able , by means of drugs….to transform mere faith into scientific knowledge.” (97) The citizens in Huxley’s Brave New World are held psychologically captive and deindividualized by the world controllers. Individuals are genetically engineered and conditioned from birth until death to abandon any inherent individuality and perform their assigned industrial duty. Subject to this constant conditioning and manipulation within their society, the Brave New Worlders think and behave completely predictably, as machines do (“BNWR” 31). The pain of being denied psychological freedom is demonstrated in the characters of Bernard, Jon the Savage and Heimholtz in Brave New World. They are so disillusioned because they are not able to be free that Bernard and Heimholtz exile themselves from the Brave New World society to an island (174), and Jon the Savage takes his own life by hanging himself (199).

Huxley expresses deep concerns over many other issues relevent to the social and political climate of his time. He felt if these problems are left unsolved, western society would become the Dysotopia of Brave New World (14). In Brave New World Revisited, he writes that the central social problem confronting mankind is over-population (“BNWR” 6). He makes these observations in a time when the population of mankind was increasing at the fastest rate in history due to social, economic, and health factors including the cheap availability of clean water, Penicillin and other medical breakthroughs, lack of birth control, and the Post-war baby boom. Huxley believed that over-population was a political, economic, and natural problem that was rapidly getting worse and larger every year (“BNWR” 6). He felt that over-population was the biggest threat to freedom and democracy. He observed that it deteriorates the economy of a society which leads to social turmoil, resulting in more control and intervention by the government, which increases government’s power and eventually results in a power abusing dictatorship (BNWR 9). In his last novel, the utopian Island (1962), the character who represents his own social ideals, Dr. Robert, says, “Another ten or fifteen years of uninhibited breeding, and the whole world…. will be crawling with great dictators, all dedicated to the suppression of freedom” (169). This qoutation is clearly referring to the present situation of Huxley’s time. In Brave New World Revisited he also observed that the increasing population was depleting the world’s natural and economic resources. He writes that over-population exhausts the soil and land for the farmers to grow food for the growing world population, the mineral capital to stimulate the world economy, and the fossil fuels to fuel the growing population‘s energy, problems that are increasingly relevant as time passes by (5). Huxley felt that the answers to the problems poised by over-population lies in global promotion of birth control, increased food production, conservation of the environment and natural resources, developing new resources and substitutes, and education of the masses in methods of conservation. He expounded these environmental conservation ideas when the environmentalists of the 1970’s were still in preschool.

Central to Aldous Huxley‘s literature is his antipathy to capitalism, industrialism, and modern technology. He distrusts all of these movements, and feels they are a central threat to freedom for the masses. In the novel Brave New World, he portrays Henry Ford, the father of Modern industrialization, as the spiritual figurehead of a totalitarian state, an apparent insult to Ford‘s movement. Jesus is replaced by Ford as the messiah, and the basis of religion for the society is Ford . The symbol of the cross has been reestablished as “T” (52) for Henry Ford’s first mass produced creation, the Model T car; all expressions previously containing the word “God” have been replaced by “Ford”, and the world is peaceful and happy because “Ford’s in his flivver….All’s well with the world” (51). In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley writes that mass production, mass distribution, and advancing technology, all of which are central to industrialism and capitalism, are imminent threats to democracy (14-15). He rejects large businesses as bureaucratic and oligarchic (94). Huxley speculated that mass distribution and mass production are responsible for the ruin of local and small businesses that directly benefit the people. When Small Business is forced to compete with the Big Business that is owned by the rich and few of society, Small Business is totally destroyed due to Small Business’s lack of capital and the means to produce and distribute to the masses (15). As the small, local businesses start to disappear and all of the economic power of the society is manipulated to fewer and fewer people, the state is run by these elite and powerful few (15). In this situation, Huxley notes that modern technology and capitalism have produced a concentration of political and economic power in the Big Businesses and Big Governments of the world, a non-aggressive form of totalitarianism (15). According to Huxley in Brave New World Revisited, societies are just and virtuous only if they help the individual to reach his potential and live a fulfilling and creative life (15). He believes that western industrialist societies do not live up to these standards, and illustrates this feeling in Brave New World Revisited using the following words of Dr. Erich Fromm:

“our contemporary western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automation who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness…(16).”

Huxley believes that the dehumanizing effects on the individual in modern western society is a result of Industrialism’s tendency to over-organize its individuals so that they no longer feel that they are an indispensable part of society, but rather a standardized machine (BNWR 16) . Huxley thought that over-organization unavoidably leads to totalitarianism. In his words, “Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit, and abolishes the very possibility of freedom” (BNWR 18). Huxley also suspected that the repression of woman in western industrial society is an additional societal symptom of over-organization. He wrote in Brave New World Revisited that the wife in an industrial society might be worse off than the man because she must be:

“highly gregarious, infinitely adaptable, and not merely resigned to the fact that her husbands first loyalty is to the corporation, but actively loyal on her own account…and must not demand too much of her husband’s time and Interest…even sexual activity must be regulated to a secondary place” (20).

This demanding role obviously goes against the biological needs of the individual and may be another factor in the conduciveness of mental illness in contemporary Western Society. These observations were made on the female’s condition in the Industrial world long before the feminists of the 1970’s ever marched on the streets in America. In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley wrote that the answer to the threat of over-organization to democracy, freedom, and man’s mental health lays in the decentralization of Government (94). He also notes that another solution to this destructive social problem is to leave the industrial metropolis and create small autonomous and self sustaining communities in the country . He advocated the “widespread distribution of property….non-hierarchal communities of production of mutual aid and fully human living….coordinating health services with the wider interests of the group“ (“BNWR” 94).

Huxley was also an active pacifist and was ardently anti-nationalist. In his book Eyeless in Gaza (1936) he describes nationalism as fulfilling man’s “worst wishes” to “murder, lie, torture for the sake of the fatherland…with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous” (155). He feels that war is the evil result of nationalism, and there is no attitude that Aldous Huxley held that was as relentless as his opposition towards war. Huxley advocated demilitarization and disarmament, claiming in Ends and Means (1937) that preparing for war always led to war (56). In Themes and Variations (1950) he wrote that war is inhumane, uncivilized, and all men desire peace but reject the means of attaining peace (227). During his lifetime, he was an active member in the London-based political group the Peace Pledge Union and wrote four political pieces reflecting his pacifist views - What Are You Going to Do About It? (1936), An Encyclopedia of Pacifism (1937), Ends and Means (1937), and Grey Eminence (1941).

At the forefront of his social values are his philosophical beliefs tainted with eastern mysticism and Buddhism. Huxley strongly believed that man had potential for spiritual fulfillment, described in his essay The Perrenial Philosophy (1946) on his mystical religious beliefs. However, he found no consolation in western religion, rejecting Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as being narrow, materialistic, oppressive, hypocritical, and pessimistic (Birnbaum 163). This disassociation with western religion caused him to turn to the far east for religious experience, and religious experience is just what he found in Far Eastern Religion. In Buddhism, he discovered what he felt was absent in western organized religion and philosophy-transcendental wisdom, non-attachment and experience (Island 85). He describes his experience with Buddhist mysticism in Grey Eminence(1945) as transcending his personal discriminations and unlocking the divine reality, or finding God within us (p 59). His fascination with Eastern Mysticism is evident in his novels Do What You Will (1929), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and all of his literature from 1936 to 1963, including Island and The Perennial Philosophy.

Huxley pioneered a unique and new approach to mystical experience in the western world, through the use of Hallucinogenic drugs, specifically Mescaline Sulfate and LSD. He documented these experiences in The Doors of Perception (1954) where he discusses at length how this drug temporarily transformed him into a visionary and how he experienced a transcending of his self-consciousness and merging into all of existence when under the influence of Mescaline Sulfate. In Brave New World Revisited, he describes LSD as a vision producer that produces an experience that is “profoundly significant and enlightening” (59). He was experimenting with these spiritual effects of Psychedelic drugs long before the flower children were dropping acid at Woodstock.

His social philosophies saw their fullest expression in his utopian Novel, Island (1962). In this novel, Huxley creates an ideal civilization based on his societal beliefs, located on an island called Pala in the southern seas. All of his social criticisms and ills that he had warned us about in his prior works, including over-population, over-industrialization, militarism, totalitarianism, evils of modern technology, and the destruction of the environment find their solution in this utopian society (Woodcock 18). The official religion in Pala is Buddhism, which is practiced devoutly by all of its citizens (84). They practice Buddhism through spiritual exercises like meditation, yoga (85), and consuming a hallucinogenic drug called “moshka medicine” which produces mystical experiences that allow the citizens to “catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego” (158). In Pala there is no military, wealth is distributed evenly and there is no Big Business to swallow the Little Business, no problem of over-population, the government is decentralized into local self-governing alliances, and no power rests in the hands of one person (169). The “Palanese”, as the citizens of Pala are referred to in the novel, do not over-consume, do not have organized religion, and live in rural and live in village communities where mutual aid and living in harmony with nature is the social and political philosophies (170). In the fable of Island, Huxley is for the last time criticizing the society in which he lives by creating a utopian social order antithetical to his contemporary Western Society of technological progress, Industrialism, and Judeo-Christian religion.

Aldous Huxley left behind a lifetime of literature, from pamphlets to novels, that question and criticize the social philosophies of past and present societies, prophesize the potential ills and outcomes of these societies, and offer cures and solutions to alleviate man of these ill-stricken societies. The social philosophies and themes in his literature, although they were considered radical by many at his time, are now proven to be insightful, useful, and above all, way ahead of his time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Birnbaum, Milton. Aldous Huxley’s Quest for Values. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1971.

Brander, Laurence. Aldous Huxley: A Critical Study. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1970.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. New York: Harper and Row, 1932 and 1958.

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper. 1954.

Huxley, Aldous. Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for Their Realization. New York: Harper Bros, 1937.

Huxley, Aldous. Eyeless In Gaza. London/New York: Chatto & Windus/ Harper & Brothers, 1936.

Huxley, Aldous. Grey Eminence: A Study in Religion and Politics (A Biography of Father Joseph). London/New York: Chatto & Windus/Harper & Brothers, 1941.

Huxley, Aldous. Island. New York: Harper and Row. 1962.

Huxley, Aldous. Themes and Variations. New Tork: Harper Bros, 1950. Mitchell, Helen Buss. Roots of world wisdom : a multicultural reader. Belmont, CA : Wadsworth Pub., 1998.

Talmon, Hans. Social Criticism Review. 23 Nov. 2003. 29 Nov 2003. <http://www.socialcritic.org/ >.

Thody, Philip. Aldous Huxley: A Biographical Introduction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.

Woodcock, George. Dawn and the Darkest Hour: A Study of Aldous Huxley. New York: Viking Press, 1972.