Aldous Huxley

The life of Aldous Huxley is a parable of the modern age. Descended from Darwin’s bulldog Thomas Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold, Huxley was part of an elite intellectual class of distinctly Victorian orientation. He was greatly offended by the “mass culture” that he saw developing around him, and wrote of it with prescience: advertising is

the organized effort to extend and intensify craving — to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and the divine ground.

Yet, later in life, he turned East, dabbling in Zen Buddhism, and dropping acid with Timothy Leary. His 1954 book Doors of Perception argued that hallucinogens can “open the door” to the mystical side of life. These doors are necessary, and require the creation of new drugs that will release people from “intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings.” Jim Morrison named his band after Huxley’s book, and he was featured on the album cover to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band .

In short, Huxley’s life is the story of the twentieth century, a story that moves from fairly sensible Victorian restraint to mysticism, promiscuous sex (Huxley and his wife Maria had a sexually “open” marriage), drugs and rock-n-roll. What happened? Surely there are many other factors, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Huxley is a case study in the hollowness of Victorian efforts to restore civilization on the ground of high culture (Arnold’s “the best that is known and thought”). Such a religion of culture is essentially idolatrous, and produces the same frustration of any idolatry.