Aldous Huxley - the Island

I have been reading this book for about 6 weeks. This is because it isn't a novel, more like a long lecture by someone who considers himself incredibly wise, and you are not allowed to argue (of course!), instead you have a proxy whose name is Will who asks constantly for more information.

Will arrives by accident on an idyllic island where the people are  working towards enlightenment pretty much in the Buddhist tradition, but with Hinduism thrown in, and yoga. They aim to be the most developed humans they can be, fully aware of the oneness of spirituality in the world and in themselves. It's Westernised in that the people speak English and have a certain amount of industry, but no desire for any quantity of material possessions, and they have no aggression, (this is educated out of them) so they can't defend themselves. Will is taken on a tour by various wise people, male and female, who tell him all about their values and their way of life.

Unfortunately, Will has boring sexual guilt and Huxley is probably the only person who can bear him droning on about his experiences with his good wife and his "vulgar" but incredibly sexually skillful girlfriend. Huxley was one of the modernists who was unable to adjust to the rise of the masses, and he tends to contrast his imagined world with the constraints of the social world in which he grew up, which dates his attitudes. The other characters are sketches that give voice to Huxley's ideas and opinions - and their reverse, as counterpoint. So they are not characters in the true sense of the word.

Most of Huxley's ideas are terrific. On the island, there is an openness about family life that allows children to access other parents as well as their own, which lessens the possibility of damage done by family neuroses. People are encouraged to attend to the here and now, and enjoy living in the moment. Everyone has to do manual labour for two hours a day, so they don't become "sitting addicts" like Western people. Overproduction of fresh food is kept in a huge communal freezer. Electricity comes from harnessing the rivers.

But Huxley does advocate eugenics - frozen sperm of talented men (and eggs of women?) are used to create a more talented race - this is encouraged and preferred but not compulsory. Huxley is a gene snob. It does mean that many of the population are closely related, but Huxley doesn't acknowledge this problem.

A difficult personality that doesn't fit in? Huxley divides these into "Muscle Men [and women]" (example: Stalin, has a love of power and domination) and "Peter Pans" (common, but Hitler is the example). These can both be treated by special coaching and become useful and happy members of society. All well and good except where Huxley announces that they can check the diagnosis of "Peter pans" by x-raying the bones of the wrist. Uuuuuhhhh??? Huxley is absolutely sure that there are some physical types that are "potential failures and criminals, potential tyrants and sadists, potential misanthropes and revolutionaries for revolution's sake" and that they need to be pinpointed early and given appropriate treatment.

In fact, the island is a lovely idea except for the lack of individualism in the people. I do agree with him that people should not be either educated to serve the state, or educated to become greedy for gewgaws and novelties, and cogs in capitalist enterprise; and I think that his ideal aim of education, which is to develop as fully rounded and spiritually happy an individual as possible, is a model that is crying out to be tried.

Such a society is not sustainable, and the ending is not a happy one, but it is a likely one.

As a novel it's a chore. I am amazed how many people give it an Amazon score of 5 stars!

Brave New World Revisited - Aldous Huxley - Soma the wonderdrug

The Soma of Brave New World had none of the drawbacks of its Indian original.  In small doses it brought a sense of bliss, in larger doses it made you see visions and, if you took three tablets, you would sink in a few minutes into refreshing sleep. And all at no physiological or mental cost. The Brave New Worlders could take holidays from their black moods, or from the familiar annoyances of everyday life, without sacrificing their health or permanently reducing their efficiency.

However, it was one of the main instruments of the dictatorship's armoury.

The systematic drugging of individuals for the benefit of the State (and incidentally, of course, for their own delights) was a main plank in the policy of the World Controllers. .. Marx said that religion was 'the opium of the people'. In Brave New World, opium (soma) was the religion of the people.

Huxley runs through the drugs currently available in the late 1950s, both legal and illegal. Opium makes addicts and ruins health. Alcohol not only 'maketh glad the heart of man; it also, in excessive doses, causes illness and addiction, and has been a main source, for the last eight or ten thousand years, of crime, domestic unhappiness, moral degradation and avoidable accidents. Cocaine is a very powerful and very dangerous drug, leading to 'agonising depressions' and 'paranoid delusions that may lead to crimes of violence.' Amphetamines work at the expense of physical and mental health.  Huxley considered cannabis 'merely a nuisance'.

He also runs through the kinds of drugs used to treat psychotic patients and finds great strides being made in the manufacture of tranquillizers and in hallucinogenics - he was quite enthusiastic about LSD for the spiritual insight it gave, which he felt to be of great value.

But to Huxley the danger is that drugs may be used to limit the freedom of a population. Writing at the time of the Cold War, he could compare the populations of the Soviet Union 'constantly stimulated by threats and promises and directed by one-pointed propaganda' and that of the United States 'no less constantly being distracted by television and tranquillized by Miltown'.

I think antidepressants are rather like Soma in that people may be genuinely unhappy with their society and find that it gives them no emotional fulfillment, but antidepressants lift their spirits enough to enable them to carry on. But I did a quick check for all drug use, to find how widespread it is.

Here are the results.

How many people take Antidepressants?

The number of antidepressants prescribed by the NHS has almost doubled in the last decade, and rose sharply last year as the recession bit, figures reveal.

The health service issued 39.1m prescriptions for drugs to tackle depression in England in 2009, compared with 20.1m in 1999 – a 95% jump. Doctors handed out 3.18m more prescriptions last year than in 2008, almost twice the annual rise seen in preceding years, according to previously unpublished statistics released by the NHS's Business Services Authority.

One in three women have taken anti-depressants at some point in their lives, researchers say.

The study by women's campaign group Platform 51 found that 48 per cent of women currently using the drugs have taken them for at least five years, while 24 per cent have taken them for 10 years or more.

Meanwhile, 24 per cent of women on anti-depressants have waited a year or more for a review, the research found.

How many people take tranquilizers?

An international survey at the beginning of the 1980s showed that tranquilizers and sedatives of any type had been used at some time during the previous year by 12.9 percent of U.S. adults, 11.2 percent in the United Kingdom (U.K.), 7.4 percent in the Netherlands, and 15.9 percent in France. Persistent long-term users comprised 1.8 percent of all U.S. adults, 3.1 percent in the U.K., 1.7 percent in the Netherlands and 5.0 percent in France. The proportion of repeat prescriptions for tranquilizers has increased steadily since about 1970 in many countries, the U.K. in particular. This suggests that fewer people are being newly started on tranquilizers but that a large group of long-term users is accumulating. People starting tranquilizers have at least a 10 percent chance of going on to long-term use, that is for more than 6 months. Some of these chronic users have chronic medical or social problems, and the tranquilizer blunts the unpleasant feelings of tension, anxiety, insomnia and, to a lesser extent, depression.

American children are often prescribed psychiatric medication

Like the diagnoses, the drugs administered to children have mushroomed to involve every class of psychiatric medication, including stimulants, antidepressants, tranquilizers, mood stabilizers and anti psychotic agents. The FDA has increasingly given official approval for giving children especially deadly anti-psychotics such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, Geodon and Seroquel. Meanwhile, anything that can sedate the child’s growing brain from anti-hypertension drugs to anti-seizure drugs are routinely dispensed with callous disregard for their harmful impact.

It’s not uncommon to find children subdued and crushed by multiple psychiatric drugs. Probably 10 to 20 percent of our children will at some time be diagnosed or drugged. This number includes nearly every child in special education classes, foster care or on SSI/SSDI. Any child singled out by child services and educational or psychiatric authorities is likely to fall victim to psychiatric drugs.

How many people take recreational drugs in the UK?

"We have very scant evidence about how many people are using drugs," Mr Linnell says.

"We can't even give accurate figures of how many people are in treatment for heroin and rock cocaine, let alone magic mushrooms, cannabis and ecstasy."

Despite these difficulties, the annual British Crime Survey (BCS) is viewed as the primary source for assessing general drug use.

Over 20,000 respondents are asked, anonymously, which drugs they have taken in the past month, year or in their lifetime.

The latest survey, 2003/04, suggests that 35.6% of people aged 16-59 in England and Wales have used drugs at some point.

Twelve per cent have used drugs in the past year and 7.5 per cent in the past month.

That equates to 11 million people having used drugs in their lifetime, and just under four million using them in the last year. Cannabis, the survey suggests, remains by far the most popular drug.

In a similar survey in Scotland, 27% said they had used drugs in their lifetime and 9% reported using them in the last year.

Commentators agree that although figures from both surveys are likely to be underestimates, they provide a useful benchmark.

"It does give us a broad snapshot of the major trends," says Petra Maxwell. "However... some of the most problematic drug use may not be captured.

"Also it is slow to respond to emerging drugs of choice, focusing mainly on the large ones. For example, as it doesn't ask about ketamine... although we know this is increasing in popularity."

If we say that the population is 62 million, more or less at the moment, and we go with the notion that 1 in 3 women is going to take anti-depressants at some time in their lives. This seems like a huge exaggeration, so let's say that no men take anti-depressants. That would be about 10 million people taking antidepressants.

Then we say that those people taking anti-depressants don't take recreational drugs, although I guess there is likely to be some overlap between the 2 groups. Let's say that the number of people taking recreational drugs stays level at around 12%. that gives us another 7,440,000. Add these two figures together and you get about 17.5 m. This is rather more than a quarter of the population and less than a third. Maybe if we included people on anti psychotic drugs it would approach a third.

See also my entry 12/12/12 which refers to the film Silver Linings Playbook.

Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley, Part 2

This book, as I explained before was written in 1958. However, certain things that Huxley was concerned about at that time are more true than ever. Although he over-estimated the likelihood of people being swayed by propaganda, he was perceptive about the growth of the entertainment industry playing a role in eradicating political dissent.

In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities : the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.

Then Huxley is also interested in Hitler's methods of crowd-manipulation. He notes the size of the rallies, the difference between a huge gathering and a fairly small one, and the enhancing effect of holding them at nighttime. "assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice."

From his point of view and at the level where he had chosen to do his dreadful work, Hitler was perfectly correct in his estimate of human nature. To those of us who look at men and women as individuals rather than as members of crowds, or of regimented collectives, he seems hideously wrong. In an age of accelerating overpopulation, of accelerating over-organisation and every more efficient means of mass communication, how can we preserve the integrity and reassert the value of the human individual?

Many a man, said Speer, "has been haunted by the nightmare that one day nations might be dominated by technical means. That nightmare was almost realised in Hitler's totalitarian system."

Since Hitler's day the armoury of technical devices at the disposal of the would-be dictator has been considerably enlarged. .... Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

Huxley imagined that these devices would be used by the dictator for control rather than by the people to communicate privately. But he was wrong. As we can see from the Arab Spring, social networks allowed by the Internet empower the individual rather than the dictator.

Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley, and Silver Linings Playbook, Part 1

Published in 1958. Rather amazing that it is still in print. In this collection of essays Huxley looks to see whether the society he was living in is more or less like the society he predicted in Brave New World, written in 1931. In this dystopia the people were happy to have no freedom of choice because they had been conditioned to this even before birth, and indeed, had been designed in the test tube to fufil a certain economic function. One question it begs is "Do people need freedom in order to be happy?" because readers argue whether this kind of happiness - the mass of people have lost the ability to ask Why? questions -  is true happiness.

Between the publication of Brave New World and 1958 the world had experienced the rise of the totalitarian state under Stalin and Hitler, and the second world war.

He first identifies the chief problem of the future as overpopulation. He foresees that this problem must lead to worsening economic conditions. These are likely to lead to political unrest, and he foresees that this is likely to be the precursor to anti-democratic forces.

More and more power is thus concentrated in the hands of the executives and their bureaucratic manager. But the nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more. ... A democratic constitution is a device for preventing the local rulers from yielding to those particularly dangerous temptations that arise when too much power is concentrated in too few hands. Such a consitution works pretty well where, as in Britain or the United States, there is a traditional respect for constitutional procedures. Where the republican or limited monarchical tradition is weak, the best of constitutions will not prevent ambitious politicians succumbing with glee and gusto to the temptations of power.

Huxley then points out that technology becomes ever more complex and expensive, so that the small manufacturer can no longer participate in the economy, which becomes completely dominated by big Business. The Power Elite employs the workforce in offices, factories and shops, also in the media, where it can influence the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.

Huxley believes in the value of the individual rather than the value of the mass. This is crucial. He quotes a philosopher -psychiatrist, Dr Erich Fromm:

Our comtemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual, it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.

Fromm rather destroys his own argument by then saying that the sympoms of mental stress are signs of the individual fighting back; and that "normal" people are really the problem.

These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality", but in fact they have been to a great extent de-individualized. but "uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too ..."

Huxley enlarges on this argument.

Industry, as it expands, draws an ever greater proportion of humanity's increasing numbers into large cities. But life in large cities is not conducive to mental health. --- City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiments of economic functions, or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.

Biologically speaking, man is a moderately gregarious, not a completely social animal - a creature more like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee or an ant.

I want to refer to a current film that I saw at the weekend that illustrates this mental health thing.  It was American and mainstream, not arthouse, called "Silver Linings Playbook" (I think) and it was about a guy who was very definitely mentally ill, and needed medication and counselling to live at home with his parents rather than in a mental hospital. He had been diagnosed as bi-polar and that is a condition the cause of which may be nothing to do with the way we have arranged our society. Or..?

However, his father's disorder illustrates Huxley's and Fromm's arguments nicely. The father was a completely obsessive sport fan, whose team had become a religion for him, and because its wins and losses meant so much to him he believed he could influence the outcome of the game -  by having his sons there watching the TV with him, and having the remotes lined up beside him in a certain way, and holding a green handkerchief. He had a legal restraining order which did not allow him to attend the games in person because he would so often get into fights with fans of opposing teams. This is a man in his 60s/70s. So a supposedly rational man who functioned reasonably well in society, at least to the point where he could run a book (gambling) that made enough money to keep his family, had also symptoms of an inability to rationalise, which everyone else recognised as a kind of insanity.

The interesting thing about this film was that everyone in it was familiar with mental symptoms, knew terms like OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and the audience also participated by understanding these terms, and the reason why the best friend had his repeated feeling of being strangled, while his wife, with her cast -iron certainties and acceptance of societal norms, was seen as the least attractive character.

So I think Fromm's ideas about how we externalise all this stress has now become mainstream. Everyone knows that modern life drives them nuts. It is accepted. But how powerlessly and pathetically we accept all this and we do nothing at all to drive social change.

End of Part 1