Aldous Huxley - the political thought of a man of letters

I have been reading Huxley for many years, and readers may recall that I reviewed his last book of lectures, The Human Situation in the summer of 2017. Like George Orwell (Eric Blair), Huxley was a King's Scholar at Eton and related not only to TH Huxley but also Matthew Arnold. Given the prescience of his book Brave New World in terms of totalitarian manipulation through applied science, this scholarly book is most welcome as a way of revisiting Huxley's thought and its relevance for our time. The author explains some of his key influences including Pareto with his emphasis on the role of instincts and feelings (also the psychological factor more generally) and his criticism of ideology. Civilisation is driven by irrational as well as rational impulses; nor should one underestimate the importance of religious sentiment highlighted in the work of Spengler, Sorokin and Toynbee. This gives an undulating rather than purely progressive course of history, as we are indeed observing at present.

Huxley's work culminating in The Perennial Philosophy informed his idea of the dual nature of humanity not solely constituting Machiavellian motives of power, greed and fear, but also love and goodness. He uses this idea as the basis for a pacifist realism and embraced a decentralised communitarian ethos. The debate between pacifist and ordinary realism is highlighted in the appendix describing an encounter with the Italian Giuseppe Prezzolini as an advocate of hard-nosed and cynical political realism who regards Huxley's position as weakness in the face of the basics of human motivation: 'a human society can only be formed and survive on force, oppression, dependence, servitude, compromise, calculation, intrigue…' Hence his condemnation of Huxley's message of hope. These men have a different reality principle, and one can only hope that Huxley is right. In terms of planetary challenges, what is called the desperation principle authorises the call to the responsibility principle and opens up a hope principle, but only conditional on action; so without action with respect to the human impact on the biosphere, hope cannot be responsibly justified. This puts us all on the spot.