Books: Huxleyism

ENDS AND MEANS — Aldous Huxley — Harper ($3.50).

While some of his post-War English contemporaries were turning from disillusionment to Communism, the Roman Catholic Church and suicide, Aldous Huxley, who had fallen under the spell of D. H. Lawrence, was groping his way toward mysticism. In Those Barren Leaves (1925). he announced that it is not the fools of this world who turn mystics. In Point Counter Point (1928), which took a thinly-disguised D. H. Lawrence for its hero. Huxley attacked scientific Utopias, embraced a Lawrentian humanism, with a dash more intellect, a dash less sex. In Brave New World (1932) he knocked Utopia down for another count of ten. The hero of Eyeless in Gaza (TIME, July 13. 1936) turned out to be a thoroughgoing pacifist, with a philosophy combining features of Yogi, Buddhism, other Oriental mysteries. After this last novel, it looked as if Huxley, saved himself, was now ready to save the world.

In Ends and Means, his most ambitious non-fiction work to date. Huxley states his full gospel. For 30 centuries, he says, all men have agreed on man’s ideal goal: liberty, peace, justice, brotherly love. The catch has been that nobody could agree on which road to take. Now “most of the peoples of the world are rapidly moving away from it. . . .At no period of the world’s history has organized lying been practiced so shamelessly. . . . Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” First step in the right direction, says Huxley, is to stop whoring after the false gods of Fascism and Communism, heed those of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity (except in its “extravagant asceticism .. . brutally cynical forms of realpolitik”). Most modern morality and social philosophy will have to go. In their place, men shall substitute such proverbs as: “All that we are … is the result of what we have thought. . . . Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. . . . War and violence are the prime causes of war and violence. . . . The more violence, the less revolution. . . . Non-violence presents the only hope of salvation.”

English Critic Frank Swinnerton has said that Huxley “may yet lead his generation, and the younger generation, into a state of grace out of which great things will come.” However much they admire Huxley’s encyclopedic knowledge and acid wit, followers are likely to balk at the regimen he lays down for those who want to achieve a “scientific-mystical conception of the world.” It includes meditation, love, compassion, intelligence, moderation, physical fitness, chastity, which the ex-idol of sophisticates defines as “one of the major virtues.” The energy created by sexual restraint “is the motive power which makes it possible for us to conceive these desirable ends. …”