The Huxley-H·eard Paradise
Richard V. Chase
"Serene and pure and radiant
is
your look, brother Sariputta!
In.
wlwt
mood lws Sariputta been. today?" "] lwve been. alone in.
Jhana,
brother, and to me came never the thought-/ am attain.·
in.g it! I lwve got it! I lwve emerged from it!"
-ANGUTTARA-NIKAYA
THE
READER
of
Crome Yell&w, Antic Hay, Tlwse Barren Leav"'
and
Point Counterpoint
will know that Aldous Huxley in the 1920's
was darkly pessimistic about the future of the world. The prophecy
of Mark Rampion {the Lawrence-like hero of
Point Counterpoint)
that ten years would see "the most appalling and sanguinary bust–
up ever" shows, at least, that Huxley perceived the illusory nature
of the armistice. But his diagnosis was not so perceptive as it
seemed; for he was never able to state it in social terms. What
Rampion predicted was a "psychological impasse." Huxley, in
the midst of the war he predicted, is as much at sea as if he had
never suspected that anything was wrong. He still believes that the
crisis and its cure are purely psychological.
Huxley announced his disillusion in democracy
in
his now
all but forgotten book called
Proper Studies
(1927). His thinking
at this time was strongly conditioned by the social irrationalism
of Pareto, Sorel and Trotter, "the psychological types" of Jung
and, perhaps oddly enough, the Catholicism of Cardinal Newman.
Democracy, he believed, was a dogma of an inadequate eighteenth–
century psychology.
Proper Studies
was an attempt to set up a
naturalistic hierarchy of psychological types. Its political senti–
ments, though they were not worked out concretely, were those of
a learned Catholic.
But Huxley, the elegant psychologist, had little talent for
social thought, and under the influence of
D.
H. Lawrence, whose
understanding of the irrational so overwhelmed him, Huxley dis–
missed
all
kinds of social theory as the evil products of a mechan–
ized civilization. -He decided to lead the pan-experiential life of
the Noble Savage, and to that end, proclaimed his allegiance to
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