I recently read Aldous Huxley’s Island, often with an irritation that I couldn’t quite understand, but at least with an acceptance that the human world – with its massive disparities of wealth, its exploitation of the needs and ignorance of those ‘left behind’, its violence, its lack of foresight, its over-competitiveness and its sometimes frightening dominance of the biosphere – always needs to concentrate more on how to improve itself and to relax its dominating ways. So writers like Huxley are always valuable in getting us to think about what a better human future would look like.
What I note about Huxley is that, while he seems understandably cynical about capitalist exploitation, he doesn’t much care about what I call capitalising, making a verb of the noun. Every living species capitalises on other species to survive, generally by consuming members of those species, or parts thereof. For example the bacteria (and many other parasites) within and upon the human body, can benefit us as well as themselves, or not as the case may be. In the positive case, we might call it symbiotic capitalism, and myriad examples can be found, not just in the broad sense of living entities, but in the narrow sense of human industrial or post-industrial capitalism, when effected thoughtfully and humanely.
I also like to think of capitalising in the sphere of human knowledge and science. We capitalise on our knowledge of genetics, of bacteria, of viruses, of the Earth’s atmosphere, of the theories of gravity, evolution and so forth, to effect cures, to enable space travel, and to trace our ancestry. And all of this capitalising changes us, both individually and as a species. When we’re born, for example, we have no language – so to speak. The learning of language, which is essentially imposed on us without our consent, enables us to function more effectively in the broader culture, and its lack would constitute a massive disadvantage. Try to imagine a human world without language – it’s the basis of almost all our knowledge, and of its spread around the globe.
So returning to Huxley, he invented a South Sea Island, Pala, which through the leadership of a couple of enlightened folks, has eschewed capitalism in its running dog lackey form, and embraced a chanting but ‘common-sense’ godless spiritualism, a mutual adoption society for its children, and, it seemed to me, a decided lack of individuality. All in all I suspected a top-down system – the ‘top’ being the product of Huxley’s disillusionment with the society of his day, together with his personal drug experiments, in which he presumably imagined a dissolution of the ego and a sense of more or less disembodied enlightenment which he imagined could be dispensed throughout an all-too-willing populace (the more embodied issue of sexuality isn’t really dealt with). It’s a system that hasn’t really caught on in the decades since the book was published (in 1962), but I certainly can understand Huxley’s profound reaction to the European events of the first half of the 20th century, which surely shaped his hopes for a very different and better future. What I can’t understand is the more or less magical, anti-scientific line he sometimes takes. To illustrate, I’ll focus on a key issue – medical treatment.
So the principle character of the novel – through whose eyes and mind the story unfolds – is Will Farnaby, a journalist working for a capitalist mover-and-shaker, Lord Aldehyde (aldehydes being ‘highly reactive molecules that can be cytotoxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic’, according to the USA’s NIH). He lands up on Pala by accident, injuring himself in the process, and is first treated with antibiotics by Dr Robert McPhail, after which he is ‘handed over’ to McPhail’s daughter-in-law, Susila, to apply the vis medicatrix naturae, which roughly means the body’s natural healing response, helped along by a sympathetic medium.
Will, it seems, is quickly won over by the beliefs and practices of the relatively new Palanese system, and makes useful enquiries, for the reader, as to its history, its success, and the threats it faces, not least from Will’s boss Lord Aldehyde. Everybody seems helpful and happy and forthcoming as to his questions, except for some members of the previous elite who hanker for the power they once had. He reads a copy of the new system’s guide book which bears the, to me, not so reassuring title Notes on what’s what, which offers some of Huxley’s own views on the human condition, e.g.
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
I have no idea what to make of this, and no interest in attempting to parse such sentences. But it goes on:
Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact – sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, towards decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two-thirds of all sorrow is home-made and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Island, p86
Hard to imagine this getting up as a foundational politico-social document for any real nation. Pessimism, if that’s what this is, isn’t great for nation-building, nor is too much focus on the individual ‘me’. There’s a lot more of this in Notes to what’s what, including definitions of faith (good) as opposed to belief (bad), the ‘only genuine yoga’, and other spiritual talk that goes way over my chakras. Buddha gets a good run, of course, while Paul of Tarsus gets the Nietzschean treatment, more or less. All of this I took in a spirit of agnosticism (and some of the critiques, or rather dismissals, for example of Freudianism and behaviourism, seem warranted) but what really put me off-side was a description of what might loosely be called a medical treatment.
Dr Robert McPhail’s great-grandfather, Dr Andrew, an outstanding medical physician who was travelling in the South Seas to distance himself from family and cultural-religious traditions back in Scotland, was lured to Pala by its Raja who ‘without radical surgery, it was obvious… would be dead within a couple of months. With surgery, much sooner’. This cynicism might be justified as we’re talking about a time before antibiotics, and effective anaesthesia, and perhaps even before Pasteur and Koch, but what follows makes it clear that Huxley has more than a bit of sympathy for, or allegiance to, what we would call ‘alternative medicine’. Dr Andrew ‘suddenly remembered, while he was still at Edinburgh, there had been an article in The Lancet, an article denouncing the notorious Professor Elliotson for his advocacy of animal magnetism [aka mesmerism]’. This was a bit of an ‘uh-oh’ moment for me, and I’ve since discovered that Elliotson was not only a real person, but one of the most highly regarded medical practitioners and lecturers in 19th century Britain. London-born, he received his primary training at Edinburgh University, and was soon noted for his diagnostic skills as well as his interest in unorthodox treatments, including acupuncture, mesmerism and phrenology – all of which appears to have heightened his reputation, which may be explained by the generally dire state of medical knowledge in Victorian Britain. His impact has merited a fulsome Wikipedia bio:
At his peak, he was the first President of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society (in 1833), a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society, he had one of the largest private practices in London and, at his peak, was one of the pre-eminent physicians in the entire British Empire.
So, returning to Pala and Dr Andrew, this memory of Elliotson and the Lancet article came back to him. At the time of reading the article he had felt ‘a glow of orthodox approval’, but considering the dire state of the Raja’s health…. And he also felt that the man was well worth saving:
Besides being a king, the Raja was a man of intellect and the most exquisite refinement; a man, not only of deep religious convictions (any crude oaf can have deep religious convictions), but also a man of deep religious experience and spiritual insight.
These experiences and insights aren’t elaborated upon, but presumably are contained in the Notes on what’s what. So Dr Andrew performed a number of ‘those famous magnetic passes, about which he had read with so much skeptical amusement in The Lancet’, all the while laughing at the absurdity of it all. Being a novice at this treatment, it took some 200 passes to create the trance, after which he, the doctor, was drenched in sweat. And of course the Raja made a full recovery, and the rest was Palanese history.
I admit to having been intrigued by hypnotism since I was a child – nothing scrambled my nascent skepticism like watching a hypnotist clicking his fingers and having a perfectly rational-seeming subject go down on all fours and bark like a dog before a TV studio audience. However I won’t go into the pros and cons of all that here – maybe I’ll try and tackle it in another post. What Huxley was presenting were the pros of animal magnetism, Franz Mesmer’s 18th century notion that there exists a universal magnetic fluid which has a fundamental impact on our health, a thoroughly debunked theory when he wrote Island. Mesmer’s treatment involved ‘magnetic passes or sweeping movements of the hands to direct magnetic fluid to diseased parts of the patient’s body’. As we’ve seen, animal magnetism remained a popular hypothesis well into the 19th century, going on to influence the early work of Freud and the psychotherapists.
In any case, Dr Andrew’s entirely successful magnetic passes, which he performed to exhaustion while apparently remaining skeptical, proved too much for me. The Palanese world Huxley creates is an odd assortment of mysticism, group-think and stasis, as opposed to diversity and above all to progress, with all its striving and scary unknowns. There are positive elements, in my view: children would surely be better served by exposure to more adults and congeners outside the nuclear family (think bonobos again), and by an education system that is less hierarchical, but that is already happening, with the development of the internet and social media, effectively used….
Always keep on the bright side…
References
Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962 (Vintage Classics, 2005)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Elliotson