Ups and Downs: Aldous Huxley, the Doors of Perception and the Watts Gallery

Saturday 30 August 2014

Aldous Huxley, the Doors of Perception and the Watts Gallery

We went for a walk with S & C on the North Downs Way starting at Compton, near the Watts Gallery, so I suggested a visit to the gallery as well, and also, because they are literary types, a visit to Aldous Huxley's grave. I only heard the other day on the radio that his ashes are buried at Compton. (Eric Blair (George Orwell) is buried at another of my favourite churchyards, Sutton Courtenay near the river Thames at Abingdon.)

Recently a radio programme celebrated 60 years since the publication of "The Doors of Perception", one of Huxley's most remarkable books. The title comes from a line of William Blake's: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is: infinite."

Huxley's ambition for his experiment was a personal visionary enlightenment. He had a sense he was missing something. Huxley thought humans would always need "artificial paradises" as their lives are monotonous or painful - and he sensed the "appetite of the soul".

Huxley posited a link between substances like mescaline and the correction of some mental disorders.

He informed himself of primitive man's usage of the natural pharmacopoeia. There is evidence that primitive man explored all kinds of natural stimulant, hallucinogen and stupefacient. When these psychotropic plants were taken early hominids could stay awake longer and forage for longer thus increasing their fitness for survival. Huxley took from other societies and from cave painting [haven't heard of this before] the insight that what is visible is to some extent illusory. The psychotropic substances give access to "the essential" and improve the necessary ability to communicate with others. Huxley wasn't interested in dosing to oblivion – he hoped that drug usage would promote understanding e.g. that with their aid Khrushchev and Kennedy could step out of their world views - that in the political and the personal spheres these drugs would be liberating.

Newly added: For example, scientists have carried out the first controlled trials involving LSD in more than 40 years - and found that the banned hallucinogenic drug could help treat anxiety in people with terminal illnesses. For the small trial in Switzerland, eight terminally ill patients were given a high dose of the drug ... afterwards, patients reported feeling significantly less anxious about dying, an effect that lasted for up to a year, reports The New York Times. One volunteer said: "My LSD experience brought back some lost emotions and ability to trust, lots of psychological insights, and a timeless moments when the universe didn't seem like a trap, but like a revelation of utter beauty." (The week, 22/3/14)

Our ancestors may have used drugs to take the edge off the pain. Opiates, for example, negate the fear that hunting and warfare generate. But it is important for our survival that we can feel fear. Anger is important – to forcefully pursue your goals. Although we aim for happiness, from an evolutionary point of view there is no point in happiness because it doesn't urge us to do anything at all.

The body naturally tries to regulate itself – it’s called homeostasis, and we mirror this in our behaviour; we self-medicate to regulate ourselves. Exercise is something we use as it’s effective for depression and anxiety. Wine. Coffee. The signals emanate from a core area of the brain, a large system called the striatum. The system that translates motivation into action is responsible for desire, attraction, craving, wanting – that system is important to make us go after goals. The problem with people who are addicted to drugs is that the system is overactive with craving for a particular substance. But without the system itself we would not get stuff done.

In a previous time if someone improved their "fitness", they would have greater capacity for survival and the body's response made them feel good. Now we can feel good without improving our capacity for survival. Drugs like cocaine make the user feel good but decrease the fitness.

(1958 on Brains Trust) Huxley was asked about his attitude to taking drugs to relieve anxiety: he said he did not believe this to be morally wrong. Too much tension is a disease and sometimes too little tension is almost a disease. Tension can be valuable biologically. “Drugs can be a political weapon in the hands of a scientific dictator and there’s no doubt this could be done.”

In Brave New World he claimed the right to be unhappy. In this novel "happy pills" were a tyranny and a part of dumbing down the population in line with commercial culture. This is contrasted in the novel with the savage's extremes of emotion : for example, guilt, grief, love, adoration, and shame, which are difficult to deal with but these make us fully human. Do we really want to be less?

In BNW revisited, (1958) Huxley conceded that reality was catching up with his fiction faster than he could have imagined.

As for the future, some philosophers claim that the brain has stopped evolving but we have developed drugs as aspects of our technological extensions to do the evolving for us. These can and will become more subtle and finely tuned in changing the brain's functioning.

We had a good talk about Huxley and searched for his grave, finding it after some time wandering and reading the inscriptions on the many old and new gravestones near the Watts Cemetery Chapel. We were just amazed by the chapel.

The chapel is very beautiful, designed by Watts' wife Mary in a Celtic/Art Nouveau style, and conceived by her as a community project to involve all the villagers in the production of moulded terracotta tiles, some very ornamental and three dimensional.