Aldous Huxley

Alessandro Maurini's book follows in the stream of a series of recent studies that have attempted to reread Aldous Huxley's thought, highlighting the extent to which, especially in his later essays (collected in The Human Situation, 1959) and his novel Island (1962), he expressed ideas and proposals that were to become extremely topical in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. Read from this perspective, Huxley becomes a utopian writer who anticipated not just some of the fundamental principles of ecology but also those of pacifism, as well as forms of ecological and pacifist communitarian thought. In his introduction, Maurini exposes his work hypothesis and his lines of research, which are articulated in seven chapters. Huxley's thought is not systematic, it is sometimes discontinuous, but it has the merit of being a continuing, constant investigation in the attempt to find alternative solutions to dominating ideologies. Maurini rightly foregrounds how his particular family background, a fascinating combination of humanist (his maternal great-grandfather was Matthew Arnold's brother) and scientific (his paternal grandfather was the positivist scientist Thomas Henry Huxley) culture, compelled Huxley not only to support an integrated culture (see the essay “Integrated Culture”) but also to choose the novel form to expose his political ideas, in order for them to have a greater impact on the general public. Unlike his brother, Julian, a biologist and geneticist, Aldous claimed that a civilization's progress is measured not only on the basis of its scientific and technical conquests but also on the presence of values such as compassion (according to etymology, cum-patior, i.e., “suffering with, sharing the suffering of, others”), humility, and, above all, a highly critical level of self-awareness on the part of its citizens. (On this, see the volume R. S. Deese, We Are Amphibians: Julian and Aldous Huxley on the Future of Our Species [Oakland: University of California Press, 2015]).Maurini also intends to identify the possible sources that, at a European and extra-European level, influenced Huxley's political thinking. In this sense the book presents accurate documentation and materials as yet not often examined in the rich bibliography on Huxley. I am referring in particular to the analysis Maurini carries out on the important influence on Huxley that Vilfredo Pareto's Trattato di sociologia generale (1916) had, on his awareness of the experience of Danilo Dolci's community in Sicily, and on the 1958 debate—reported in the volume's appendix—between Huxley and the Italian writer and intellectual Giuseppe Prezzolini, which occurred in Turin. These materials highlight how close Huxley's ties with Italy were.In the first chapter, “Beyond Marxism and Positivism,” Maurini dwells on pivotal moments of Huxley's intellectual training. In his upper middle-class family morality was perceived as a sort of obligation, and education played a fundamental role. In Huxley's opinion, individuals can only emancipate themselves through education and culture: it is the only way in which to assume a critical mind-set, the foundation to exploring a different society from a capitalistic, consumer-driven one. Each individual must make an effort to give his or her existence meaning by making the most of his or her potentialities. From Matthew Arnold Huxley learned the concept of intellectual aristocracy and the importance, for society, of the presence of an elite of intelligent, wise men (sophocracy), knowledgeable in diverse fields. In his youth, Huxley came into contact with Fabian socialism, whence he drew the idea that society needed to be transformed; he certainly did not believe in Marxist class struggle or in a revolution. He joined the intellectuals who would gather at Garsington Manor, among whom were Bertrand Russell, Maynard Keynes, and D. H. Lawrence—the latter was fundamental to his approaching the works of Nietzsche and Freud. Huxley shared their criticism of the hypocrisy and conformity of late Victorian society and their bitter denunciation of the old, degenerate aristocratic class. An intellectual, in society, could not be exempt from the principle of responsibility in denouncing ideologies, trying to build a society based on new values and, especially, free from wars.Alessandro Maurini is not a literary critic but a specialist in political doctrines, and in his second chapter—“Huxley's Political Thought. The Lesson of Vilfredo Pareto”—he investigates Huxley's political thought. This is the book's most original and interesting part. Maurini wants to understand the reasons why Pareto's book appeared so congenial to Huxley that he expressed such a highly positive judgment: “[It] is to my mind, the most realistic, the most truly scientific book about human behaviour ever written” (A. Huxley, “The Interpretation of History,” in Complete Essays, vol. IV, ed. Robert S. Barker and James Sexton [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000–2002], 130). Indeed, Pareto, like Huxley, was exceedingly interested in understanding human behavior, what drove people to act in a certain way, as well as the difference between instincts and rational consciousness. Thus, according to Maurini, it is his attention to psychological inclinations that makes Huxley's political analysis original, and it was Pareto who pushed him toward political philosophy and the scientific study of human nature. Through Pareto's study Huxley searched for a political idea that could improve society and the conditions of individuals. He employed an acute analysis of democracies, trying to understand why such a form of government was undergoing a deep crisis and why it seemed incapable of meeting the real needs of individuals. Ultimately, such democracies are actually oligarchies of rich men, bankers manipulating the masses through propaganda in the news.In his third chapter, “Mass Society and Fordism,” Maurini stresses how important Huxley's travels to and stay in America were for his study of Fordism. In his essays and in Brave New World he concentrates his attention on the various technologies used to manipulate the psychology of the masses; he had read and studied Ivan Pavlov on conditioned reflexes, on the potential the cinema possesses to influence the masses. Huxley drew the expression “the morality of the machine” from Alphonse Séché's book La morale de la Machine, and by it he meant “an ethics of discipline, of regimentation, of the total sacrifice of individual interest to the interest of the mechanized community” (A. Huxley, “Machinery, Psychology, and Politics,” in Complete Essays, vol. II, ed. Robert S. Barker and James Sexton [Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000–2002], 219). In one of the most important essays he wrote in the 1930s, “Science and Civilization,” Huxley highlights how the morality of the machine is profoundly unethical because it subverts the very foundations of the human mind. He also criticizes the use of technology in consumer society, which has, as its only end, success and money, because the former should be considered not an end but a means. He also fought against the excessive power and idolatry of machines, which he deemed dangerous to the psychological and physical integrity of people, inasmuch as it was capable of obfuscating creative and critical faculties. Maurini explains what Fordism, an imperfect form of totalitarianism, meant for Huxley: “an action directed not only at the physical, biological, and mental mechanization within the workplace, but above all the social, cultural, and moral mechanization of the individual through a process of conditioning of the mind” (37).In his fourth chapter, “The Totalitarian Elite,” Maurini resumes one of the central issues of Huxley's discussion on the crises of democracies that are not true democracies, because they are actually totalitarian societies dominated by an elite of financers and bankers controlling politicians and journalists. Propaganda is carried out by specialized technicians whose task is to channel the needs of the elites and hide their dominance over the masses, in order to make the system appear like a democracy, while in fact it is a form of tyranny. Maurini rightly highlights how, for Huxley, the difference between traditionalist totalitarianisms and those of these pseudo-democracies is that, while in the former there is terror and violence, in the latter what prevails is scientific persuasion: “The difference is that in the traditional totalitarian states, all is carried out ruthlessly, whereas in the pseudo-democracies the work is performed secretly” (60). However, even in this new form of totalitarianism human diversity is eliminated, in the name of a military, mechanical identity, which inevitably produces widespread indifference toward the values of human personality and of life. In Brave New World Huxley uses the novel form to present his political theory, where the institutionalization of hedonism and the cult of a leader mark the end of History.In chapters 5 (“Democratic Elitism for Peace and Democracy”) and 6 (“Political Thought Between Utopia and Dystopia”) Maurini discusses what, in my opinion, are the aspects that make Huxley a utopian writer who is still intensely relevant today: his pacifism and his vision of an ecological society. His pacifism is founded on the double awareness that there is love in human nature and that, within a society, violence can only generate violence. His philosophy of peace shows deep traces of the influence of Gandhi's thought and is marked by strong religious and ethical feeling. Huxley's pacifism is very close to the practice of active “passive resistance” developed by Gandhi, which, for the writer, was the only valid form of opposition to the arming of industrial states: a resistance that, before being political and communal, had to be moral and individual. Huxley's forties were marked by a deeply felt search for spirituality, which led him to an interesting syncretism between Western and Eastern mystical experiences. Huxley criticized institutional Catholicism and monotheistic religions, which he deemed violent, while exalting meditation, which brings about the practice of “nonattachment” toward the material things of the world and, moreover, makes its practitioners feel at one with the universe.It was in this same period that Huxley studied the various forms of communitarianism, which, according to him, are the only type of liberal democracy, because they are founded on the principle of solidarity and especially on a strong feeling of critical self-awareness of their members. According to Maurini, Huxley's communitarianism is original because rooted in psychology, which, together with anthropology, Huxley considered essential to understanding human behavior. The communitarianism hoped for by Huxley called for small, self-sufficient communities, not at the national but at the local level, based on cooperation, on the use of renewable resources, and on an ethic of nonviolence and simplicity. Huxley may be considered an ecologist ahead of his time, because he criticized the myth of exponential progress and supported the concept of sustainable development: environmental resources must be considered limited, not renewable, capital.In the period he spent in California, between 1937 and 1963, Huxley came into contact with the first ecological movements and understood the importance of ecology as a systemic science, compelled to interface with several disciplines and advocating for a new alliance between human and biological sciences (see Vita Fortunati, Huxley una società ecologica e pacifista [Milan: Jaca book, 2017], 20). Huxley exposed these ideas in his last novel, Island, which Maurini defines as “a reasonable utopia” (104) and which he synthesizes, in his introduction, this way: “Island is actually a utopia, in the sense of a real possibility, which in the end succumbs to the lesson in realpolitik, the coherent container of Huxley's political thinking between originality and discontinuity” (XVII). This is a work that highlights superbly how Huxley, despite being skeptical and suspicious of utopia as a perfect, impossible society, hardly a feasible dream, tried, all his life, to find alternative solutions. In this sense Island is a highly significant work, not only because it can be considered a sort of testament on his part but also because it offers the reader a vision of an alternative society to the consumer-driven, capitalistic one Huxley perceived, especially in the United States.In the seventh chapter, “Huxley Within Contemporary Political Thought,” Maurini examines Huxley's thought, comparing it with that of Isaiah Berlin, Benedetto Croce, and Francis Fukuyama. In Maurini's opinion, Huxley's thinking is extraordinarily modern, because it points out unsolved dilemmas of liberalism and also anticipates some of the issues that would later on be tackled by bioethics: “the relationship between liberalism and the development of science in its application to human nature” (125). The book ends with a lucid analysis of the debate between Prezzolini and Huxley on the future of society, where Huxley illustrated many of the ideas that would be found in Island. Faced with the heated, pessimistic Prezzolini, who predicted an automated, robotic future where passion, vanity, and egoism would determine human behavior, Huxley calmly took the stance that there was a possible society wherein cooperation could prevail, a society where individuals would possess a highly developed sense of responsibility, a pacific society. Maurini rightly states that Huxley's contribution shows that he had researched several models of cooperation and studied them—“the Tennessee Valley Authority cooperative community, groups of workmen in New Zealand, the Consumers' Cooperative Movement and the Partinico of Danilo Dolci” (141)—and that, in the years between 1932 and 1958, “Huxley was interested in the individual's tendency toward peace, for which he believed in the fundamental role of a religious sentiment, of a religion that might unite rather than divide” (143).I consider Maurini's work to possess two main merits: the first is presenting a rich, precise bibliographic documentation, and the second is displaying original, innovative aspects, because in reading Huxley's work from the point of view of political thought, he foregrounds exactly the aspects literary scholars and critics have sometimes ignored. From this point of view the volume offers future researchers many cues to further studies on Huxley, who as a utopian writer and intellectual has, I am certain, still much to tell us

Sociology · History of Science and Medicine · History of Science and Natural History · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices