Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on the Bad and Good Sides of Technology)

“It is only recently, however, that we have, as a nation, begun to see that man’s mind is no more made for technology than is his body, and that, conversely, technology is valuable only in so far as it helps men to cultivate sanity and goodness as well as bodily health. Moreover, we now begin to suspect that many technological advances regarded as wholly beneficial may have their bad as well as good side. For example, technicians have made possible the multiplication of many kinds of novel amusements and distractions, from the modern newspaper to television. People enjoy these distractions. But that does not mean that they are, humanly speaking, altogether good. People also enjoy hashish and opium, when these are made available. It seems possible that we are paying a heavy spiritual price for our new-found amusements.” — English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “If We Survive,” March 16, 1936, in Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

One can only imagine what Huxley’s comments would be today about modern civilization’s increasing reliance on the automobile, social media, robots and AI.

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on a Leader As ‘A Good Public Performer’)

“People do not follow a Leader because he has a demonstrably sound and workable political plan. They follow him because he is a good public performer and because he knows how to provide them with the psychological satisfactions they need. His programme may be self-contradictory and manifestly absurd; but that makes not the slightest difference. Few people are concerned with logic and not many care very much even about their own material interests. They ask for their daily bread, of course; but for very little more than their daily bread. The wealth they covet is not material, but psychological; they crave emotional satisfactions, they want, in the expressive American phrase, ‘to feel good.’” — English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “The Prospects of Fascism in England,” March 3, 1934, in Aldous Huxley, Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Bowen, on Aldous Huxley, ‘Perpetual Clever Nephew’)

“Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks.”—Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), “Mr. Huxley’s Essays” (review of Aldous Huxley’s The Olive Tree and Other Essays), in The Spectator, Dec. 11, 1936

Aldous Huxley—born 130 years ago yesterday in Godalming, England—was certainly during his lifetime, as Elizabeth Bowen grudgingly conceded, “steadily read”—enough so that he would be nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Today? Not so much. Few of his 50 books remain in print, and only one remains widely assigned and read: Brave New World, honored less for its style and characterizations than for a dystopian vision that anticipated reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning.

(He also inspired a bit of rock trivia: his book about mescaline, The Doors of Perception, led Jim Morrison to name the group he fronted “The Doors.”)

But this member of a family of famous literary and scientific luminaries (his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his stout public defense of the theory of evolution) deserves to be more widely read.

Or, as Clive James put it in a dry-eyed but also clear-eyed assessment of Huxley’s life and work in a March 2003 essay in The New Yorker:

“But the time might have arrived for Huxley’s return to the discomfort zone, where we have to deal with what he said as a permanently disturbing intellectual position rather than dismissing it as an obsolete set of fads and quirks. How should we live? Can nothing harmonize the turbulence of our existence? How can we stop development from destroying the human race? The questions that racked his brain are still with us.”

A good place to start—maybe the best—might be with his Complete Essays. I was only able to get my hands on one, covering the 1930s. But these pieces are not only a fascinating glimpse into the history of his time, but also, as James indicated, a prescient warning of what still convulses our world, particularly concerning technology and totalitarianism. (He was one of the few writers of the 1930s who were enamored neither with Fascism nor Communism.)

It is easy to understand why Huxley infuriated Elizabeth Bowen: he was one of those endlessly curious people who want to know about everything, and somehow manage to assimilate a good chunk of it.

I can’t imagine that Ms. Bowen’s attitude towards Huxley softened: Within a year of her scathing takedown, the novelist-essayist had decamped for Southern California, where he became a well-paid screenwriter and center of a group of intellectuals and entertainers that included Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Anita Loos, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, and Igor Stravinsky.

Out on the West Coast, Huxley, an avowed agnostic, also became increasingly fascinated with Eastern spirituality. His death, on November 22, 1963, was overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy.

At six feet four inches tall, Huxley couldn’t help but make others feel small in his presence. His own reputation since his death has achieved a similar diminution, albeit one largely unmerited.

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on Fascism and Political Faith)

“Most people desire certainties, feel the need of a faith. Modern education makes religious faith difficult, but has done nothing to undermine political faith. Masses of men and women think themselves too intelligent and well-informed to believe in miracles or the divinity of Christ, but find not the smallest difficulty in accepting the infallibility of a Leader. The worship of God is an intellectual impossibility for thousands to whom the worship of a divine being, called the Nation, seems the most natural thing in the world. The old tendencies have not been abolished (they never are); they have merely taken new and, on the whole, less desirable channels. Fascism digs these new channels for worship and provides, in its cult of the divine Nation, a kind of lightning-conductor, upon which thousands of reluctant infidels can discharge the accumulations of their will to believe.”— English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “The Prospects of Fascism in England,” March 3, 1934, in Aldous Huxley, Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on Improving)

“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.” — English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Time Must Have a Stop (1944)

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on ‘The Leisured Rich’ and the Poor)

“The leisured rich, who are not paid to do anything, themselves pay for the privilege of filling their vacuum with active occupations or passive diversions. Sport in all its varieties, alcohol and elaborate eating, love-making, theater-going, card-playing—these are some of the activities and diversions with which the rich can afford to fill up the aching void of their leisure. By means of such distractions they contrive to keep boredom and melancholia at bay….To the onlooker, the leisures of the rich may not provide a particularly uplifting spectacle; but for the rich themselves unemployment is not intolerable. A poor man, living at subsistence level, can buy no opiates or stimulants. Foe him, the vacuum of leisure is complete. He is exposed to the full force of boredom and depression. He is never able to forget, as the rich man can forget in the whirl of his distractions, the futility of a life deprived of sense or purpose and contributing nothing to the greater life of society at large. The effects of prolonged and unmitigated leisure are appalling. Slowly and insidiously it tends to reduce its victims to a kind of living death.”  — English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “The Man Without a Job,” December 20, 1936, in Aldous Huxley, Between the Wars: Essays and Letters, edited by David Bradshaw (1994)

These days, addiction rates are twice as high among the jobless as among those with a job, according to the information web guide Addiction Center. So Huxley’s contention about the poor man being unable to buy “opiates or stimulants” does not hold true today, no matter what may have happened when he wrote this during the Great Depression that gripped both side sides of the Atlantic.

Huxley—who, later in life, experimented with mescaline and LSD—recognized, in his 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, that “psychotropic drugs were not just toys for recreational purposes but had the power to fuel political and religious change,” according to this Oxford University Press blogpost by pharmacology professor Richard J. Miller of Northwestern University.

Huxley's other point, about the poor being exposed to “the full force of boredom and depression,” remains true, as does his warning about “prolonged and unmitigated leisure” among what used to be called the “idle rich.” The impact of the current COVID-induced recession will take a long time to sort out, but the psychological effects cannot be discounted.

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on Words and Experiences)

“Words form the thread on which we hang our experiences.” —English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Collected Essays (1959)

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on the ‘Immemorial Sacredness’ of Print)

“Now, print enjoys a strange and almost invincible prestige. A man must be an extremely hardened, cynical, and skeptical reader before he can quite ignore that prestige. The great majority of human beings are simple-hearted, trustful and unsuspecting folk for whom the printed word still has (in spite of newspapers, in spite of hyperbolic advertisements) a certain mystical and almost sacred authority. They start with a predisposition to be impressed by the written word, to believe in it, to obey its suggestions. If they met the author of the printed word and he tried to ‘put it over them’ by word of mouth, their natural instinct would be to resist, to be skeptical, to reject his claims to exercise authority. But then the author is only a man; whereas the printed word still preserves something of that talismanic and supernatural quality which letters and symbols, hieroglyphs and formulas have possessed from the remotest beginnings of civilizations….Universal education has made us all readers. But familiarity with words has not bred contempt. Even for newspaper readers words retain something of their immemorial sacredness.”—British novelist-essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “Print and the Man,” in Complete Essays, Vol. 2: 1926-1929, edited by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (2000)

In this year in which real life has confirmed many of the worst fears of dystopian fiction, Brave New World has found a new rapt readership. It’s been years since I read the 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley, but I have to confess that it never made the kind of impression on me that 1984, by Huxley’s student at Eton, George Orwell, did. 

But I was interested enough in Huxley to take out a book of his essays from a local library. From what I’ve seen in this thick volume from only a short period in his life, I think that the novelist missed his natural genre: essayist. (You could say that the form was practically in his blood: his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a biologist and essayist of such immense rhetorical skill that his defense of evolution earned him the nickname "Darwin's bulldog.")

Several months ago, I was intrigued by Aldous Huxley’s thoughts, in “Political Democracy,” on the dangers of demagogues. Late the other night, I turned to his thoughts on print. The almost anthropological tone noticeable here (see, for instance, his observation about print’s “talismanic and supernatural quality”) goes down far more easily than it should have because of Huxley’s lightly ironic, almost crystalline, prose.

There is another quality on display here: Huxley’s love-hate relationship with his subject. During the 1920s, as he tried to carve out the necessary time to work on the novels he cared about, Huxley couldn’t resist the short-term but certain and lucrative lure of literary journalism presented by British press baron Max Beaverbrook: “I so resent the pressure these swine put on one with their beastly money,” he wrote his lover, Bloomsbury hostess Mary Hutchinson. “At the same time it's almost a duty to milk them of as much of it as one can. So I remain torn between a desire to send him to the devil and a desire to haggle for the highest price.”

“The voice of the linotype is the voice of God,” Huxley wrote sardonically. But, considering the reputation he developed as a 20^th-century Cassandra in Brave New World, Huxley—at least in the quote above—cannot imagine a future without print. Nor does it appear that he anticipated the possibility that the Internet might create the exact opposite of the kind of unquestioning faith in authority that he dreaded—i.e., the discounting of any news that does not comport with the reader’s preconceived notions.

He does present one idea here worth putting into practice, however: that all newspapers "must publish extensive and truthful biographies of their proprietors, editors and writers." It would certainly go a long way toward detailing not only the vested interests of those in the media business, but of making clear the assumptions that underlie any claims to publishing "all the news that's fit to print" or conveying a point of view that proclaims as its motto, "We report, you decide."

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on Demagogues)

“Demagogues succeed for the same reason as confidence tricksters—because they have a gift of the gab, charm, and an intuitive knowledge of human nature, because their personality is magnetic, and their manner open and affable. Men and women are so suggestible, so easily gulled, that a talented swindler can always be sure of making a handsome living. How much more certain of success is a demagogue! For demagogues do not ask their victims to give them a wad of banknotes; they only ask for votes. You can buy things with banknotes; voting papers are worth nothing. Every one is prepared to be generous with his vote.”—British novelist-essayist Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), “Political Democracy,” in Complete Essays, Vol. 2: 1926-1929, edited by Robert S. Baker and  James Sexton  (2000)

Well, we haven’t seen anything like this in the United States recently, have we?

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on Thinking Correctly as a ‘Moral Act’)

"To think correctly is the condition of behaving well. It is also in itself a moral act; those who would think correctly must resist considerable temptations." —English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Collected Essays (1959)