Tag: brave new world

Old Age and the Obstacle Course

I have been reading a book of essays by Aldous Huxley, Music at Night.  It contains several fine essays, including the title piece.  But there is one, “Obstacle Race,” which contemplates the possible benefits of obstacles in life and reflects on how few obstacles there are in modern life.  In addition to running water meaning no more trips to the well and central heating meaning no more chopping wood, Huxley thinks we have also removed the obstacles that religion used to provide.  Huxley posits that these theological hurdles were often insurmountable for mere mortals, but they made life interesting:

 …having to climb over obstacles is in the last resort more pleasurable than trotting along on the flat. . . . Absurdly enough, men like obstacles, cannot be spiritually healthy without them, feel bored and ill when they take to flat racing.

  And, suggests Huxley, if religion is no longer going to do this for us, maybe science must:

It will be the business of science to discover a set of obstacles at least as exciting and sportingly difficult as those which Octave and Armance [from a novel by Stendhal] had to surmount, but less dangerous to sanity and life, and in spite of their absurdity, somehow compatible with an existence rationally organized for happiness and social progress.  It remains to be seen how far, without the aid of a mythology, it will be successful.

Well, I would not say that our science has been very good at this.  We have not developed a “mythology” (can science develop a mythology?),  so people have stepped back haphazardly into old mythologies or just plowed along in furrows of sheer selfishness.  The results have been climate change, overpopulation, and increasing peril for the planet.  We could certainly use the “aid of a mythology.” 

Interestingly, many years after Huxley wrote this essay, he completed Brave New World,  the most well-known of his works.  In that book, the workers play “Obstacle Golf,” a game intended to give the bland life of the proletariat a false sense of overcoming obstacles.  In the same book, a character notes that science has gotten rid of all the “physiological stigmata of old age… along with all the old man’s mental peculiarities.  Characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime.”  How boring.  And yet, is this not the magic formula that modern medicine is looking for?

But what does this need for obstacles have to say to us “retired” people, especially those of us who are not battling major health obstacles (yet) and have enough money to meet our needs (assuming those needs don’t keep expanding)? Are we just amusing ourselves with forms of Obstacle Golf rather than the satisfaction of overcoming real obstacles?  Some of us set up our own obstacles – through volunteer work, learning a new skill, tackling a project that might just be a little beyond us. But most of the advertising for retirement villas, cruises, and financial plans for the elderly promise the elimination of all stress, the removal of all obstacles.  Sounds wonderful, but Huxley would question what kind of life that would be.

Other people provide the most challenging obstacles, of course.  Remember what Sartre said about them.  But all the data says that social isolation can kill us.  So it might be worth thinking about obstacles in our lives, and perhaps welcoming a few more.  Life will not be so easy, but maybe it will also not be so flat.

Of course, some of us are all too attracted to challenges.  Yeats complained poetically about his “fascination with what is difficult.”  He said it “ dried the sap out of my veins, and rent /Spontaneous joy and natural content /Out of my heart.”  Sometimes we overchallenge ourselves with difficulties, other times with over-scheduling, over-commitment.  The best advice, as always, is probably Aristotle’s Golden Mean.

I have put up a new story this week, “Why My Aunt Josie Has a Limited Vocabulary,” which is, in its way, about a woman who finds a way to minimize obstacles in her life.  Sometimes minimizing obstacles can be a challenge in itself.

Huxley’s Last Utopia – Island

Sometimes, the books of an author’s old age comment on or continue the work of their younger years.   Almost everyone knows how Aldous Huxley thought the world might go wrong from his 1932 Brave New World; less often read is his description of a (doomed) utopian society in Island, published thirty years later and not long before he died.  Huxley describes for us a peaceable kingdom on the island of Pala, which is about to be upended by contact with and exploitation by the outside world.  Unlike Hesse, Huxley is not writing an individual’s life, but, rather, the life of a culture from its beginning to its apparent imminent demise.  And we get Huxley’s vision of how life might be lived in a society which was supportive rather than exploitive.

Huxley was heavily influenced by Buddhism, and his island culture spun out of Buddhist beginnings to a place where mynah birds are trained to call out “Attention” to get listeners to pay heed to the present moment.  Sex is open even to children; this makes for uncomfortable reading today as adults on Pala sometimes “teach” young people the finer points of physical love.  There is a large extended family structure, allowing children to move between households.  Huxley was obviously influenced by Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa on both these traits.  But the main emphasis in Pala is on cultivating mental health.  My favorite scenes involve teaching children the tricks of mind control.  They are, for instance, told to imagine different animals or people, to multiply them in their mind, and then wipe them away in an exercise to show the youngsters how they can control their own minds and not be victim to random and hurtful thoughts.  We could all use that lesson.

Drugs are presumably bad in Brave New World (soma makes you feel good, but it also controls you).  By the time we get to Island, drugs are put to better use, with all young people going to through a rite of passage that includes the use of a mescaline-type substance (called moksha) that makes them cognizant of their place in the universe.   Long passages relating drug experiences could and should have been edited out of this otherwise interesting book.  Other people’s drunken or drugged adventures are seldom interesting.

The thinking process that got Huxley to Island can be traced through his non-fiction.  Thirteen years after Brave New World, he wrote the brilliant Perennial Philosophy, where he tried to pull together the convergent ideas of many of the world’s religions (called the “ultimate anthology” by the New York Times).  It might have served as a Bible to the residents of Pala.  In 1954, he wrote the less brilliant Doors of Perception, which encouraged the use of mescaline for enlightenment.  Huxley himself asked his wife to inject him with LSD on his deathbed  in 1963.  (Sidenote: President Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis all died on the same day, meaning the latter two got very little press upon their demise.)  Huxley apparently never gave up the idea that chemical assistance was a part of the life well lived.

Huxley’s Pala is doomed, however.  There is oil on the island and the capitalists are at the door.  The people are peaceable and have no weapons, no standing army.  They are going to lose control.  So, while this is the picture of a utopia it clearly reminds us that the real world is anything but.

Here’s the thing though – the people know it is coming and they are rational enough to know they probably can’t stop it.  Their training, however, makes them sure that they will cope (“even in the worst society an individual retains a little freedom”), and, as the tanks roll in, the last thing we hear is a mynah bird telling us to pay attention.   At this point, the reader is at once deeply sad for the lost utopian vision, but heartened by the realization that, perhaps, all utopias are in the heart and the way in which we relate to the world. 

And Huxley gives us other words of truth here.  “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.”  As I read this, I could not help but think that “planned obsolescence” applied not just to appliances and cars, but to the planet that nurtures us.

Novels of old age do not usually offer happy endings, nor do they conclude that the human race is perfectible – or even good (think of Melville’s The Confidence Man).  Old people know these things.  I would not trust an old person who hadn’t realized that the Eden of childhood was not recoverable.  The question is how to live within the world as we find it.  Not to say we shouldn’t try to improve it, but denial is the worst kind of soma.