Aldous Huxley’s Doorway to Orthodoxy

on November 22, 2013

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” -Aldous Huxley

Like the rest of his canon, the above quote from Aldous Huxley has an inherent virtue and an inherent vice. The virtue is plain: he punctures a potent modern myth. The vice is less obvious: he doesn’t have a cogent alternative to propose. In the case of being an intellectual, Huxley doesn’t clarify that thinking, purely for its own sake, is not a good to be sought. Simply being brainy does not make someone into a good person. But, at least they aren’t hypnotized by the allure of sexual pleasure.

Huxley holds a special prominence in my life. Unlike most of my conservative friends, who reminisce about their first time reading Edmund Burke, or Alexis de Tocqueville, I owe much of my worldview to a man whose last request was for an injection of LSD. That request came fifty years ago today, when Huxley died, along with C.S. Lewis and JFK. Huxley was not a conservative, nor was he a Christian. I will not here attempt to present the whole Huxley. This is rather an account of how Huxley shaped my mind. What follows is not Huxley in and of himself. This is the Huxley I have met; an account of the conversations we have had.

What first impressed me about the author of Brave New World was his keen sense of the future. The book begins at a hatchery and conditioning center for human beings. Where Orwell’s 1984 depicts a world in which sex is forbidden (there is a memorable scene where Winston Smith fantasizes about simply touching the knee of a woman), Huxley’s dystopian vision has sex placed at the center of everyone’s lives. Mind you, in his novel, sex is totally divorced from procreation. Because everyone has been rendered infertile, there is no fear of pregnancy. Rather, the members of each caste copulate with each other almost constantly. This allows them to maintain a satisfactory happiness; a contentment with their lives, but never a moment of joy or despair. This apathy allows for the world-state to function as it sees fit, controlling the lives of the human race for the sake of law and order.

Huxley was no Christian, nor was he a political activist. He even earned the criticism of G.K. Chesterton and his perennially sharp pen. But Huxley recognized the link between entertaining our lowest desires, deifying them, and the resulting collapse of society. That may all sound very melodramatic, but it is the argument found across Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited and his essays on religious experience.

When faced with the controlled lives in Brave New World, kept reasonably contented through constant sex and soma (Huxley’s imaginary ‘happy drug’) the reader is treated to this remark, pointing out the beauty in suffering:

“All right then,” said the savage defiantly, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”
There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.

Brave New World Revisited contains some of my favorite thoughts from Huxley. Paging through my book, I see the reminders of my eighteen year old self’s fondness for highlighter. He sharply criticizes the false euphoria of certain contemporary forms of worship:

Christ promised to be present where two or three are gathered together. He did not say anything about being present where thousands are intoxicating one another with herd-poison.

He inspired what would become the focus of my undergraduate studies:

Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seem to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgement or to feel doubt.

The question; “Philosophy or propaganda?” is one I have posed to numerous “arguments” on both sides of the hottest issues in our modern discourse. “Does God exist?” “Is it a fetus or a child?” “What is marriage?” I have settled where I have settled because Huxley first suggested to me that philosophy and thinking is to be preferred over acceptance of a popular belief.

As a boy I was tempted to think that achievement in thinking was all that was to be pursued in life. If I was able to fully understand what it meant for Pope Francis to identify himself as a “sinner”, it was only because the ground had been softened by Huxley:

There seems to be a touching belief among certain Ph.D.’s in sociology that Ph.D.’s in sociology will never be corrupted by power. Like Sir Galahad’s, their strength is as the strength of ten because their heart is pure- and their heart is pure because they are scientists and have taken six thousand hours of social studies.

A small anthology of Huxley’s religious writings titled Huxley and God has sat on my self for three years. During my years of uncertainty, rocking back and forth between agnosticism and atheism, and reading books on all sides of the debate. It was Huxley’s supreme confidence in the divine that first began to shake me out of my skeptical spiral.

The minimum working hypothesis would seem to run to about this: That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations. That the Ground is at once transcendent and immanent. That it is possible for human beings to love, know, and, from virtually, to become actually identical with the divine Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.

Huxley does not lay out a Christian metaphysics, but his is not necessarily opposed to Christianity either. When the option is between a vague deism or out-right atheism (my apparent choices at the start of my collegiate years), Huxley’s “minimum working hypothesis” breaks into that destructive circle of thought. To think that knowledge of God was “the final end and purpose of human existence” gave an object to the desires that burned in my chest as I would lay awake staring at the ceiling.

It was Huxley who first taught me how to really pray the ‘Our Father.’ While there are Saints who recommend praying the prayer very slowly, such that you only have time for one, I still didn’t understand what the significance of the words were. Huxley wrote:

The petition “Thy Kingdom come” has a necessary and unavoidable corollary, which is, “Our Kingdom go.” The condition of complete illumination is complete purgation.

This only compounded the problem which he had already issued against my temptations toward hedonism.

People like their egos and do not wish to mortify them, get a bigger kick out of bullying and self-adulation than out of humility and compassion, are determined not to see why they shouldn’t “do what they like” and “have a good time.” They get their good time; but also and inevitably they get wars and syphilis…

Huxley’s argument are not all agreeable. He begins Brave New World Revisited, with an entire chapter about the danger of over-population, a myth which has become the bread and butter of more than a few misanthropes. He published The Perennial Philosophy, a book which attempts, as many have, to find common philosophical and theological ground between all the major world religions. As you might expect, he glosses over more than a few important differences. He doesn’t think very highly of Catholics or even Christians:

At the other end of the scale are the Catholics, the Jews, the Moslems, all with historical, 100-percent revealed religions…what they believe is a hotch-potch of good, less good and even bad.

Finally, though he satirized the modern love of pharmaceuticals to alleviate every ailment, actual or not, in Brave New World, he died while high on LSD. Perhaps like the sociologists he ridiculed in his little collection of essays, he forgot that being clever wasn’t sufficient for being good. He forgot the power of the warning he had given all those years before…

Some may agree with Adam Kirsch and his article on Huxley in the New York Times. He readily admits that our society has moved toward a few key features of Huxley’s brave, new world. Sex is becoming separated from procreation, the prominence of contraception and abortion inevitably lead to that conclusion. Kirsch argues that Huxley’s world is indeed becoming our reality, but he argues that this is a good thing. “The challenge the book sets us today is to prove (Huxley) wrong.”

That then is what separates me from Kirsch. It is the height of intellectual arrogance to read a dystopian novel without taking the authors claims seriously. If Mr. Kirsch doubts Huxley’s moral conclusions, he would do well to read Brave New World Revisited. He would also do well to read Huxley and God. In these works I first found the arguments to puncture the veneer of many modern myths. Because Huxley showed me I could see through them, I actually began to try. It was in reading his works that the seeds of my conservatism were planted. I owe who I am and what I think to a decision I made as a 17-year-old boy. I decided to take Aldous Huxley seriously.

  1. Comment by Bart Gingerich on November 22, 2013 at 10:06 pm

    John, this is a lovely piece of writing. It expresses great gratitude that is truly due someone. Thanks.

  2. Comment by Duncan MacLaurin on November 25, 2013 at 10:35 am

    Huxley does not lay out – i.e. not “ought” – a Christian metaphysics, but his is not necessarily opposed to Christianity either.

  3. Comment by John Goerke on November 25, 2013 at 1:35 pm

    Thanks for the catch. Copy editing has never been my strong suit, especially when typing quickly.

  4. Comment by Stephen “Steve” Sponsler on December 26, 2016 at 10:10 pm

    Define what is meant in saying he was not a ‘Christian’..does that mean as some think of a what a Christian’ ‘ought’ to be? He who is not against us is for us. ..and he who does not sow, scatters. However, if what I’m reading in this web page is true, then he was profoundly ignorant when it comes to The Christ (or was of the wrong spirit). and had no Knowledge of the Truth. It almost sounds antichrist in this reading and is frightening. https://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2014/10/aldous-huxley-quotations-on-bible.html

  5. Comment by Stephen “Steve” Sponsler on December 26, 2016 at 10:16 pm

    What a coincidence..see previous post..search on the evil of huxley..this is just one link of many http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1994/eirv21n41-19941014/eirv21n41-19941014_044-aldous_huxley_in_the_1930s_the_f.pdf

  6. Comment by Stephen “Steve” Sponsler on December 26, 2016 at 10:23 pm

    What a putz Huxley is. This is damning evidence of an evil man, who knowingly and with malice aforethought denies the existence of God, not based on any evidence or reasoning, but to ensure that he can justify in his own mind doing evil things. It is damning and self-destructive. His idiocy does nothing at all to get rid of God, only to ensure that God will be unable find any way to save his soul.

    “I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”

  7. Comment by Tim Baca on February 1, 2021 at 9:23 am

    Hi John

    Loved this piece.

    I mean, who really knows anything about Huxley, except to try and hang BNW quotes,
    contextually correct or not, doesn’t matter,
    around the necks of political opponents or to criticize the modern world.

    Anyway, thanks for writing 😉

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