Huxley vs. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

Chilling. I haven't read BNW since high school, and I probably didn't understand it then. While reading through this excerpt, I found myself thinking of the pleasant, deadened, futuristic space world in the Pixar film WALL-E....

Rod,

I agree with MargaretE that this has been a great discussion. You should do it again. Utopian and dystopian fictions are great conversation-starters for a blog like yours that tries to approach things at a more fundamental level of analysis than party politics. It would also be great to see you do more of the kind of reading in figures like Stanley Hauerwas or E. F. Schumacher or Charles Taylor or Christopher Lasch that you've done in Alasdair MacIntyre and Philip Rieff. Also, I know you've said you were influenced by Richard Weaver and it would be fun to hear what you thought on rereading *Ideas Have Consequences.*

I always felt Kurt Cobain was like the Savage, with his "I miss the comfort of being sad" lament and self-flagellation, and the way society found his purity of heart so trivially fascinating.

"Some of these themes are addressed in a book I just finished called "Tell No Man," by Adela Rogers St. Johns. It's about a high-powered young stock broker in 1960s Chicago who has an encounter with the divine and feels called to become a minister. ... It's a fascinating book, beautifully written, that no one seems to have read. Apparently, it was a best seller when it came out in '67, but it's been out of print for years."

It's a favorite of mine, but you're right, few people today have heard of it.
It's well worth tracking down, from your local library or used book dealer.

St. Johns was a very interesting woman, a journalist who covered the Lindbergh kidnapping for the Hearst newspapers, and who knew everyone in Golden Age
Hollywood. Her daughter Elaine was at one time affiliated with Guideposts magazine.

Huxley is not making the point only for the Savage. There is an aspect to the other argument also, and it is in some middle ground or perhaps out of the tension between these antithetical views that a better "solution" is found.

The Savage certainly has his points, and they are essential if what one wants is vitality, struggle, death, redemption and all those potent archetypes. But then so does the Controller. If a person can experience all of the drives and changes of state in a "safe" form, the unpleasant consequences of the states of (neurochemical) mind are negated. I can kill a thousand men in my dreams and experience all the red-faced rage of it without having harmed a soul.

Huxley brings to us a necessity of recognition, and a deep questioning of what is necessary not only for "happiness" but growth of the person and society. Is the Controller's society necessarily corrupt, or is it merely deficient in conveying a sufficiently convincing simulcra? Ask yourself, if a Star Trek holodeck actually existed or a perfect drug existed which would enable you to experience powerful states without addiction or harm: Would you use it? Would using it necessarily be bad in itself, or is it a matter of degree. We almost all use anesthetic in the dentist chair, and most probably use nitrous oxide in such scenarios, at least occasionally. (Nitrous oxide is a mild entheogen/hallucinogen with no significant residual after-affects when administered with a 30% oxygen mix.)

Huxley provides an answer to the questions he raises in two later books. One is "The Perennial Philosophy", (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy), and the other is the novel "Island". For anyone who has read Brave New World, I can only suggest reading "Island" (see http://island.org/huxley/whatswhat.html) for Notes on What's What.

"We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it."

TR: Hmm. This is a concern/disconnection I have with Crunchy-Con/Communitarianism as I understood it.

Isn't it also a bit about hating solitude? About finding a rooted community and pretty much never being alone? Can a Crunchy Con be the kind of person who has no wife, child, and lives alone?

Utopian and dystopian fictions are great conversation-starters for a blog like yours that tries to approach things at a more fundamental level of analysis than party politics.

I agree that they are conversation starters but I'm not sure that they are particularly helpful from an analytical perspective. They are essentially slippery slope arguments where the author gets to describe in gruesome detail how bad things are at the bottom of the slope without being specific about how things got that way. ("But why does everyone here live in a hovel and eat dirt, Professor?" "Timmy, I suspect we have slipped into an alternate universe where the Obama administration was successful in their fiendish plot to limit tax loss carryforwards after the fifth tax year subsequent to the year in which the loss was incurred.")

LOL, Alkali! You're right--the reader should always remember that most fiction presents a view of reality that is very heavily edited to present just that narrow slice toward which the writer wants to direct our attention. And utopias/dystopias are even more heavily edited, so the writer can put certain ideas under the microscope. A utopian novel should be considered as an extended thought-experiment, and it requires the same strenuous suspension of disbelief as a thought-experiment. The success of a utopia/dystopia requires controlling all the variables rather tightly, but reality is much more unexpected than that.

I don't see how you could have zealousness unaccompanied by religious conflict.

Johm E., I don't either -- and to me, that's the problem with these laments over Moralistic Therapeutic Deism: They presume that there's some good alternative whose downsides aren't even worse.

@PM No doubt zealots are in every facet of life when people take things to the extreme.

"I don't see how you could have zealousness unaccompanied by religious conflict." JEA

TR: We all become zealous Mennonites, Quakers, or Jains. There'll still be religious conflict, those groups fought and schismed, but it'll all be non-violent conflict. Lots of "I'm not inviting you to my church picnic unless you take off that stupid-looking hat"/"Oh yeah well I'm not inviting you to my church picnic unless you start wearing this kind-of, which are good hats and not stupid."

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion... Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."

– Marc quoting Huxley

Actually, I don't know any Christians – or humans, frankly – who ritually urinate for rain or abstain from cannibalism to the glory of God. Huxley, of course, is correct in pointing out that animals are not possessed of the religious impulse. It's not part of their nature. But this idea that man's religious impulse, which IS part of his, makes him, somehow, "not quite intelligent enough"... well, I just don't buy it. In fact, I believe man's unique intelligence goes hand in hand with his religious impulse – the impulse which causes him to seek truth and understanding, to recognize cosmos in the chaos, to control his "animal" instincts for the greater good, to yearn for God, even to praise Him for his gifts... This is who we are. We are not cats, nor are we asses. Though we certainly act like asses much of the time :)

I would just like to add that i think this blog should use the following quote in future discussions:

"You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy."

for some reason it stuck out like a sore thumb to me. and "bumble-puppy" should be used more.

John E. writes: I don't see how you could have zealousness unaccompanied by religious conflict.

Well, past waves of religious zealousness in the US (in the 1700s and 1800s) mostly didn't lead to conflict, or at least not violent conflict. Europe in the 1500s-1600s was a different story.

PM writes: Is zealousness only a religious thing? I think everyone from the Khmer Rouge to Star Trek fanatics would disagree.

I don't think anyone suggested that zealousness is only a religious thing. Some people were speculating about how to (deliberately) ignite a wave of religious zealousness. Nobody (in this thread) was trying to reinvigorate Star Trek fans or genocidal Cambodian marxism.

Thomas R writes: We all become zealous Mennonites, Quakers, or Jains. There'll still be religious conflict, those groups fought and schismed, but it'll all be non-violent conflict."

Ha. Friends General Conference actually publishes a (beautiful) wall chart showing all the schisms and reunifications of various Quaker Meetings in the US over the past two centuries. It's fascinating .... Actually, on second thought, it reminds me of (biological) evolution -- a new organism (denomination) appears, then divides into more and more branches through mutation (schism) until every available ecological niche is filled.

"'bumble-puppy' should be used more."
There's a psychedelic band from the '60s called Bumble Puppy.

Regarding Huxley's theme of a life of struggle and suffering vs. a life of blissed out comfort, it's instructive to look back at Homer's Odyssey and the episode of the Lotus Eaters. You can be happy and content and avoid suffering but you don't make it back home and you lose your true identity. You're a pilgrim who has bailed out of the pilgrimage.