264
PARTISAN REVIEW
fused to have anything to do with political or military action. His true
destiny was to be a "theocentric saint," detached from the criminalities of
his time. Huxley proceeds to urge all those who are capable of the mystic
experience to form a caste of saints (Heard calls them neo·Brahmins)
who will 1tave an "antiseptic and antidotal function" in present-day
society.
TL~
saints are to begin their religious teaching in small groups,
finally, as their teaching and good works become accepted, bringing about
the decentralization of government and industry into "federated ... local
and functional" autonomies.
The most curious thing about this book is that it might have been
written, in slightly different terms, by, let us say, a Buddhist who had only
recently become acquainted with the social problems of Western culture
and whose knowledge thereof consisted largely of a few epigrams. Why,
for example, should we believe that even a "well-intentioned" plan of
political action "must be pursued for its own sake, as an end in itself'?
There is no evidence that political planning must degenerate into bureau·
cratic atrophy because it is the nature of political planning to do so.
Huxley's use of his favorite scare-word "political" is highly arbitrary:
"the great paradox of
politics,'~
he says, is "that political action is neces·
sary and at the same time incapable of satisfying the needs which called it
into existence." But surely not many social thinkers are still psychologi·
cally narrow enough to maintain that purely political action, except per·
haps in isolated cases, is capable of satisfying the diversity of human
needs. And are we supposed to believe that the "quality of moral
behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings
in·
volved"? That kind of catch-phrase ought to have expired along with the
dogmatisms of the "crowd psychology" books which came out of the first
World War.
The altruistic morality and the social affection of the mystics are
admirable; but from the time of the Buddhist heresy down to the Quakers,
this altruism has been accompanied by various unsavory anti-speculative
and anti-intellectual tendencies. Huxley follows the pattern, for he rejects
not only power politics but
all
kinds of rationally-conceived social action.
He attacks not only the grosser kinds of pragmatic thought but
all
"ana·
lytic thinking and imagination,'' for these prevent "enlightenment."
Huxley's early satirical novels had a fine strain of biological irony
and a kind of materialist wit in them. We need a novelist of that sort to
deal with some of the current aberrations of the bourgeois mind, such as
religious mysticism, for instance.
RICHARD
V.
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