This coming Friday marks the 50th anniversary of the day when a bullet pierced the skull of the 35th president of the United States.
What with the Camelot mythology and the mystery surrounding both his health and his affairs, the shadow of John F. Kennedy has all but covered the 22nd of Nov.
But on that very day in 1963, two other giants of the 20th century passed on. They were C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don and Christian apologist, and Aldous Huxley, the agnostic turned mystic, famous for his dystopian novel, “Brave New World.”
Huxley holds a special prominence in my life. Unlike most of my conservative friends, who reminisce about their first time reading Edmund Burkey or Alexis de Tocqueville, I owe much of my worldview to a man whose last request was for an injection of LSD.
What impressed me about Huxley was his keen sense of the future. “Brave New World” begins at a hatchery and conditioning center for human beings. Where Orwell’s “1984” depicts a world in which sex is forbidden (there is a memorable scene where Winston Smith fantasizes about simply touching the knee of a woman), Huxley’s dystopian vision has sex placed at the center of everyone’s lives.
Mind you, in his novel, sex is totally divorced from procreation. Because everyone has been rendered infertile, there is no fear of pregnancy. Rather, the members of each caste copulate with each other almost constantly. This allows them to maintain a satisfactory happiness; a contentment with their lives, but never a moment of joy or despair. This apathy allows for the world-state to function as it sees fit, controlling the lives of the human race for the sake of law and order.
Beyond his famous novel, two quotations from Huxley have stayed with me over the years. It is quite popular these days to encourage the “expression of personality” and praise the virtue of “having a good time” (YOLO). Huxley’s rejoinder: “They get their good times but also and inevitably they get wars and syphilis and revolution and alcoholism…” The cult of “me and my desires” leads to dire consequences.
What then is Huxley’s proposed solution? It is to be found at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer: The petition, “Thy Kingdom come,” has a necessary and unavoidable corollary, which is, “Our kingdom go.”
Huxley was no Christian, nor was he a political activist. What he recognized however, was the link between entertaining our lowest desires, defying them and the resulting collapse of society.
That may all sound very melodramatic, but it is the argument found across “Brave New World,” “Brave New World Revisited” and his essays on religious experience.
No doubt some of you reading would agree with Adam Kirsch and his article on Huxley in the New York Times. He readily admits that our society has moved toward a few key features of Huxley’s brave, new world.
Sex is becoming separated from procreation, the prominence of contraception and abortion inevitably lead to that conclusion, even if you don’t share my negative view of them. Kirsch argues that Huxley’s world is indeed becoming our reality, but he argues that this is a good thing. Kirsch states, “The challenge the book sets us today is to prove (Huxley) wrong.”
That then, is what separates me from Kirsch, or perhaps from you, dear reader. It is the height of intellectual arrogance to read a dystopian novel without taking the author’s claims seriously. If Mr. Kirsch doubts Huxley’s moral conclusions, he would do well to read “Brave New World Revisited,” a series of essays covering the themes of “Brave New World” in a more straightforward way.
It was in reading these two works that the seeds of my conservatism were planted. I owe who I am and what I think to a decision I made as a 17-year-old boy. I decided to take Aldous Huxley seriously.
BY JOHN GOERKE
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