Aldous Huxley on the power of technology

If the BBC had maintained this standard of analysis, who knows where we'd be now? 

Possibly we'd be in much the same place, as there is an impersonal element to the impact of technology on cultural drift, as Aldous Huxley explains so well. Once the seed is sown...

Is UKIP doomed?

It is by means of symbols that men and women have been educated out of tribal patriotism and into nationalistic idolatry. And symbols, no doubt, will be used when the moment comes to educate them out of nationalistic idolatry and into world-patriotism.

As soon as we and our rulers desire it, modern methods of propaganda can be used to effect a change of thought patterns within a single lifetime.

Aldous Huxley – Themes and Variations (1950)

Where is UKIP likely to take the UK politically? Sackerson recently raised the fascinating issue of UKIP’s prospects. Conservative and Labour prospects hold little interest in the wider scheme of things. Lib Dem prospects have only a morbid fascination for the politically ghoulish. That includes me by the way.

So will UKIP win Parliamentary seats next year or is the barrier to entry too high? It’s not a matter of policy, because as a vehicle for disaffection, UKIP doesn’t really need many. That is to say, it doesn’t need radical policies because conventional anti-EU nationalism seems sufficient to harvest disaffected voters. 

There is no point risking policy wrangles by adding other contentious issues for folk to bicker about, especially folk already disaffected and already willing to wrangle.

So what are UKIP’s prospects for 2015?

Firstly, as we all know, our first past the post system is heavily rigged in favour of the established parties. The UK electorate bungled its last chance of improving the situation in 2011. Still - at least the AV experience allows us to factor in an electorate with advanced bungling capabilities. 

Secondly, tribal voting is endemic in the UK, so unless UKIP gains a hugely improbable number of seats in the House of Commons, there seems to be little prospect of genuine constitutional change. Even UKIP holding the balance of power seems improbable unless one of the major parties also aligns itself with anti-EU sentiment. This seems unlikely – it isn’t in their political genes.

Thirdly and rather unfortunately, there is crude self-interest to consider. UKIP has MEPs but no MPs so we have to ask how likely it is that MEPs would willingly alight from the EU gravy train.

So is UKIP doomed? It seems to me that the ebb and flow of events do not favour the brand of nationalist disaffection UKIP represents.

It may be entirely rational for voters to keep hold of what little democratic power they have, but as Huxley said modern methods of propaganda can be used to effect a change of thought patterns within a single lifetime. Not much of the propaganda pot goes on nationalism. Even less on democracy.

As older generations slip away, the importance and even the possibility of holding governments to account may be forgotten, lost in a ruthless tide of propaganda.

To think certain thoughts

Culture is, among other things, a negative force – a something which prevents persons, living in certain places and at certain times, from being able to think certain thoughts or adopt certain styles of expression.

Aldous Huxley - Variations on a Philosopher

If Huxley was right, then we would expect a multicultural society to pile restrictions one on top of the other such that ordinary people have more constraints on their behaviour than was the case with their original culture.

We lose certain terms to multicultural trends, such as un-British or un-Christian. There are no replacements and their continuing loss well illustrates how we have acquired an inability to think certain thoughts.

More significant still is that many people do not want to think certain thoughts. They see as a decidedly retrograde ability. Something to be deplored in lesser people. Something to be castigated, made illegal and punished with shrill severity.

If we accept multicultural trends, then we simply adopt new restrictions as the new social norms and get on with our lives. To a large extent this is inevitable for most of us, partly because life has to go on and partly because it is in our interests to accept what we cannot effectively oppose.

Yet multiculturalism has introduced political policing into the UK. A few decades ago, overt racism and xenophobia were controlled socially. To be racist or xenophobic came to be seen as old fashioned, unsophisticated and a little dim. Hence the Alf Garnett and Rupert Rigsby TV characters.

Social control is still apparent today, but now we have much harsher and more overt control via political policing. The remit is wider and legal sanction increasingly pervasive and severe. Ostensibly, political policing protects minorities and promotes social cohesion, but is more commonly invoked by a priggish and widely deployed right to be offended.

So multicultural trends, at least here in the UK, have become a useful tool of soft totalitarianism. A handy political stick for restricting and directing cultural norms in a way which even seems moral to the politically correct.

Not only that, but there are numerous willing informers in our midst, including children. Police informers who do not even see themselves as such because Huxley was right.

They are unable to think certain thoughts.

Huxley and followership

These extracts are taken from the first chapter of Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means. This early part of his book is one of my favourite philosophical expositions and in my view an interesting contrast with the previous post on followership.

It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. ‘Non-attached’ is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his craving for power and possessions. Non-attached to his anger and hatred; non-attached to his exclusive loves. Non-attached to wealth, fame, social position.

The Gospel of Jesus is essentially a gospel of non-attachment to ‘the things of this world,’ and of attachment to God.

What Spinoza, for example, calls ‘blessedness’ is simply the state of non-attachment; his ‘human bondage,’ the condition of one who identifies himself with his desires, emotions and thought-processes, or with their objects in the external world.

The non-attached man is one who, in Buddhist phraseology, puts an end to pain; and he puts an end to pain, not only in himself, but also, by refraining from malicious and stupid activity, to such pain as he may inflict on others.

Of course Huxley’s ideal of non-attachment runs counter a social reality of leadership and followership. For how can one be both non-attached and a leader or a follower? It’s impossible in the world as it is and I for one can’t imagine a world without leaders and followers. 

Huxley’s view is an ideal though, as he well knew. A yardstick with which to measure our stupidities and wrongheadedness. It's an old yardstick but as sound as a bell and to my mind it applies mostly to followership. We follow too readily and too naively.

Is that a fact?

Facts are crucially important to us, we base aspects of our political and social constructs on them, but what are facts? Aldous Huxley’s view of facts was much the same as Spinoza’s, with whose writings he was familiar. Both men say the only facts we can possibly be aware of are psychological facts – events in our heads.

The only facts of which we have direct knowledge are psychological facts. The Nature of Things presents us with them. There is no getting round them, or behind them, or outside them. They are there, given.

One fact cannot be more of a fact than another. Our psychological experiences are all equally facts. There is nothing to choose between them. No psychological experience is ‘truer’ so far as we are concerned, than any other. For even if one should correspond more closely to things in themselves as perceived by some hypothetical non-human being, it would be impossible for us to discover what it was.

Aldous Huxley – Do What You Will – pub 1929

The human mind perceives no external body as actually existing save through ideas of modifications of its body.

Benedict Spinoza – Ethics – Boyle translation

One consequence of this take on facts is as Huxley states it – one fact cannot be more of a fact than another. Science and common sense are merely ways of organising facts to our best advantage, which is usually the way that leads to a minimum of unexpected events. 

Unfortunately, and this is the tragedy of the human condition, it is possible to claim that unexpected events were either expected or they never happened. Why? Because even an unexpected event is just another fact, or not as the case may be. Such claims are what we call wisdom, politics or delusion, depending on the claimant’s status within the current power structure.

In my view this is why science is falling apart as an intellectual project. Science is strongly associated with democracy, with freedom to explore possibilities other than the official doctrine, freedom to discover new facts. As democracy fails, so does science, because the domain of facts becomes polluted, boundaries become diffuse. Allow me to repeat a sentence here :- 

Science and common sense are merely ways of organising facts to our best advantage.

Once our best advantage refers only to the political elite and their stakeholders, then both science and common sense are fatally compromised. In the end, Huxley and Spinoza were right - the only facts are psychological facts. So facts are as mutable as people and their status as facts crucially depends on the political and social constructs within which they arise and acquire their value.

Climate science organizes its "facts" for the advantage of its stakeholders - the UN, the EU, governments, banks, insurance companies, pressure groups and large corporations heavily invested in climate policies. Ordinary citizens have no power to reorganize climate "facts" towards their own advantage, largely because democracy is falling apart.

Ironically, the partial loss of a culture where facts are organised to minimise the unexpected will have one predictable consequence. The unexpected will occur more frequently and be more damaging. Eventually it will destroy us unless we relearn our science of well-organised facts and even more importantly, our common sense.

Bookworm

My copy of Aldous Huxley's Do What You Will, from which I've quoted and will quote again, is a little tatty as you can see. It has the fattest worm holes I've ever seen in a book - see above.

I bought it recently for £1.50 from a charity shop. I had another copy, but where that went to I don't know. Ironically I may even have dropped it in a charity bag by mistake. 

In spite of its battered appearance and the worm holes, the book is in readable condition. It's a first edition in fact, printed in 1929, a period when even mass-produced books tended to be of good quality and remarkably durable. With cloth covers and stitched pages, it should outlast many millions of paperbacks from later decades. These will fall apart eventually, their brown pages turning brittle, covers coming apart, pages dropping out as the glue hardens and cracks.

Huxley on cogs

Aldous Huxley - from Wikipedia

We are members of a very highly organized society, in which it pays best to be either a man who understands and unremittingly wills, or else a kind of obedient automaton. Inevitably; for the more complicated a social machine, the more inhumanly and mechanically simple becomes the task of the subordinate individual, the more inhumanly difficult that of the commanding organizer.

Those who wish to live a quiet life in our modern world must be like Babbitt – unquestioningly a cog. Those who are ambitious to lead a (by current standards) successful life must be like Ford, determined and very consciously intelligent.

Those who would lead a thoroughly disastrous life have only to model themselves on the pattern, shall we say, of Burns or William Blake. In a society like ours the successful are those who live intensely with the intellectual and voluntary side of their being, and as little as possible with the rest of themselves.

The quietly Good Citizens are those who live as little as possible on any plane of existence. While those who live fully and harmoniously with their whole being are doomed to almost certain social disaster.

Aldous Huxley – Do What You Will – pub 1929.