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PARTISAN REVIEW
It is significant that the institutional arrangement of Zufii
society, as Dr. .Benedict says, "militates against the possibility of
the child's suffering from an Oedipus complex." The individual
mystic or seer is regarded with suspicion by the
Zufii,
but here
nevertheless, is a society which has the pacific homogeneous emo·
tional tone admired by the religious mystics.
The dangers, however, of trying to establish such a totali·
tarianism in our industrialized culture are legion. The greatest is
that, though the Huxley·Heard Utopia is allegedly psycho-thera–
peutical, it would probably create a mass psychosis. For while its
constitutionally passive citizens, its introspectives, and those sub·
ject to the trances of nervous disorder might be able to survive,
even a mildly active, self-assertive or creative man would be con–
sidered a megalomaniac, and what is worse would become one
in
fact. This is not to deny the possibility of social eclecticism-of
"humanizing" society by broadening its acceptable range of expe·
rience. That is the hope offered to us by modern anthropology and
it is to the credit of Huxley and Heard that they have at least raised
the question of inter-societal diffusion. But their one-sided ide..
that "revolution begins at the top" and that cultural diffusion con–
sists of an exchange of the bare bones of thought without reference
to institutional context or biological history spoils their project
before it gets fairly started.
4.
Curiously enough a striking general criticism of Aldous Hux–
ley was made in the year of his birth by his own grandfather.
In
1894 the aged T. H. Huxley gave his dramatic Romanes Lecture,
in which he warned that no humane ethic was to be found either
within the cosmos or in fleeing from it. He had learned too much
of the harshness of animal evolution to doubt that the future prog·
ress of man would sometimes be shattered and con£used. And he
was clearly aware of the extreme aberrations of the mind in Times
of Trouble. But he had faith in his intellectual tradition, and he
implored his contemporaries never to forget the duty of empirical
thought. His dichotomy between the cosmic and the human was
perhaps not quite valid, but his words accurately forecast the fail–
ures of his grandson: "Let us understand," he said, " ••• that the
