But Huxley recognized the link between entertaining our lowest desires, deifying them, and the resulting collapse of society. Chesterton and his perennially sharp pen. Huxley was no Christian, nor was he a political activist. This apathy allows for the world-state to function as it sees fit, controlling the lives of the human race for the sake of law and order. This allows them to maintain a satisfactory happiness a contentment with their lives, but never a moment of joy or despair. Rather, the members of each caste copulate with each other almost constantly. Because everyone has been rendered infertile, there is no fear of pregnancy. Mind you, in his novel, sex is totally divorced from procreation. Where Orwell’s 1984 depicts a world in which sex is forbidden (there is a memorable scene where Winston Smith fantasizes about simply touching the knee of a woman), Huxley’s dystopian vision has sex placed at the center of everyone’s lives. The book begins at a hatchery and conditioning center for human beings. What first impressed me about the author of Brave New World was his keen sense of the future. This is the Huxley I have met an account of the conversations we have had. What follows is not Huxley in and of himself. This is rather an account of how Huxley shaped my mind.
Huxley was not a conservative, nor was he a Christian. I will not here attempt to present the whole Huxley. That request came fifty years ago today, when Huxley died, along with C.S. Unlike most of my conservative friends, who reminisce about their first time reading Edmund Burke, or Alexis de Tocqueville, I owe much of my worldview to a man whose last request was for an injection of LSD. Huxley holds a special prominence in my life. But, at least they aren’t hypnotized by the allure of sexual pleasure. Simply being brainy does not make someone into a good person. In the case of being an intellectual, Huxley doesn’t clarify that thinking, purely for its own sake, is not a good to be sought. The vice is less obvious: he doesn’t have a cogent alternative to propose. The virtue is plain: he punctures a potent modern myth. Like the rest of his canon, the above quote from Aldous Huxley has an inherent virtue and an inherent vice. “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” -Aldous Huxley
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