Brave New Worldview

This seems like the right time to entertain the possibility that Aldous Huxley is more relevant now than he ever was, that Island is as important as Brave New World, and that the two novels should be read together. I am particularly struck by Huxley's vibrant critique of religious literalism and the whole psychology of belief in Island. "In religion all words are dirty words," the Old Raja's little green book declared. Hence the novel's ideal of the "Tantrik agnostic" (Aldous's grandfather returns) and its scorn for that "Old Nobodaddy" in the sky (the expression is pure William Blake). Hence the humorous prayer of Pala: "Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief." The scarecrows in the fields were even made to look like a God the Father, so that the children who manipulated them with strings to scare off the birds could learn that "all gods are homemade, and that it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours."

Huxley in fact had already said much the same thing eight years before, in a foreword to the first book of one of his closest friend's, the Indian philosopher and education reformer Krishnamurti. In that foreword to The First and Last Freedom (1954), Huxley wrote that a man who has resolved his relation to the domains of science and religion — to "the two worlds of data and symbols" — is "a man who has no beliefs." He adopts beliefs merely as tools with which to address practical problems, and he holds them lightly. There are many ways, Huxley taught us, to be religious without being religious: Religious identity, after all, is just another muddy filter through which the clear light of the Void shines.

Of course, writers and thinkers have been discussing the fusion of science and mysticism for years; "neural Buddhism," by other names, was an element of the human-potential movement that began in the early 60s at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., partly inspired by Huxley and his lectures on "human potentialities." I sometimes wonder if the counterculture of the 1960s, which arose in tandem with the human-potential movement, in a much more ecstatic and decidedly less intellectual mode, had the unfortunate effect of delegitimizing the mystically inclined Huxley in the broader culture. Certainly many of the counterculture's shortcomings and casualties arose not from following Huxley through the doors of perception, but from not following him closely enough. In particular, the counterculture lacked Huxley's intellectual discipline and his high regard for the arts of reading and writing.

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