Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and the Sage Tradition

I wrote in my last post on Crome Yellow about how Aldous Huxley´s novels were a large influence on 1920s and 30s literature. Now, however, the only one of his novels that is widely read is Brave New World (1932), a classic text of the dystopian genre which is often included in science fiction collections.

Such categorisations emphasise the forward-looking elements of the novel, and, indeed, it is set in the future – AF 632 (After Ford) to be precise, which equates to some 600 years after the novel´s publication. In several respects, however, Brave New World owes a great deal to the 19th-century sage tradition and many of the preconceptions underpinning it are rooted in sage writers such as Thomas Carlyle.

The job of the sage, of course, was to tell the future by examining the present:

The Past is a dim indubitable fact: the Future too is one, only dimmer; nay properly it is the same fact in new dress and development. For the Present holds it in both the whole Past and the whole Future;—as the Life-tree Igdrasil, wide-waving, many-toned, has its roots down deep in the Death-kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men, and with its boughs reaches always beyond the stars; and in all times and places is one and the same Life-tree!

(Past and Present, 1843, Bk. I, Ch. VI)

The dystopian novelist has a different but closely related task: to use an imagined future to pass judgement on the tendencies and mores of the present. Like the sage, the dystopian novelist devotes his intellectual energies to teasing out the links between past and future and working out the destiny of his society. A sage like Carlyle was constantly preaching disaster for his society, and this pessimism is also, by definition, characteristic of the dystopian novelist.

The first principle of the 19th-century sage stance was a sense that the world was becoming mechanised in the wake of the industrial revolution, and this posed a threat to humanity, body, mind and soul:

[L]et us observe how the mechanical genius of our time has diffused itself into quite other provinces. Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also.

[…]

Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for external combinations and arrangements, for institutions, constitutions, for Mechanism of one sort or other, do they hope and struggle. Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

(Signs of the Times, 1829)

The sage, then, was a specifically post-industrial figure, one who saw the effect the mechanisation and systematisation of society was having on the individual consciousness. Man was not just mechanical in the way he used his hand, that is, the repetitive physical work he undertook in an industrial workplace; he was also growing mechanical in head and in heart.

The correlative of the industrial revolution in philosophical terms was utilitarianism, which Carlyle equated with mechanical modes of thinking. The utilitarian idea of arranging society and collective human existence around the notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number was anathema to Carlyle:

Does not the whole wretchedness […] of
man’s ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in that
unspeakable Life-philosophy of his: The pretension to be what he calls
‘happy’? Every pitifulest whipster that walks within a skin has his
head filled with the notion that he is, shall be, or by all human and
divine laws ought to be ‘happy.’ His wishes, the pitifulest
whipster’s, are to be fulfilled for him; his days, the pitifulest
whipster’s, are to flow on in ever-gentle current of enjoyment,
impossible even for the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be
happy; thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people
clamour, Why have we not found pleasant things?

(Past and Present, Bk. III, Ch. IV)

The concept of happiness, then, central to how we have experienced the world since the 18th century, is, for Carlyle, deeply flawed.

Sagely stances such as the above are similarly central to Brave New World. The most basic element of Huxley´s dystopia is that it is industrialised to the maximum extent. Industrialism has moved on from being an organising and productive principle to being a religion, hence the After Ford annual chronology. The inhabitants of Huxley´s World State are truly mechanical in head and in heart, as well as hand – they do not just perform mechanical work, but they literally worship mechanism. The most popular oaths in the society are Dear Ford/Our Ford, playing on ¨Dear Lord/Our Lord¨. And, equally pointedly, the iconography of the crucifixion has been replaced by the T (as in the pioneering model-T Ford): ¨All crosses had their tops cut and became T´s¨ (loc 1260).

In line with this attitude, all things are under the purview of science. Individuals are carefully constructed through genetic engineering and relentless conditioning. There is a College of Emotional Engineering and there is the administration of drugs, notably soma, to make sure everyone is in a constant state of placid contentment. As Lenina Crowne says, ¨Everybody´s happy nowadays¨ (loc 1720). The brave new world is, paradoxically, dystopic yet happy. People are happy and they have no choice but to be so.

At times, indeed, the descriptions of the happiness of some of the inhabitants is disturbingly convincing:

Hers was the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and nothingness, but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium.

loc 1653

What then, one is tempted to ask, is the problem with all this happiness? The answer given by Bernard Marx relates to the erasure of self that takes place under conditions of chemically induced happiness: ¨I´d rather be myself,¨ he sullenly announces. ¨Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly¨ (loc 1694). Everybody – almost – is happy but individuality and free will are absent, prompting Bernard to ask the question:

¨[W]hat would it be like if I could, if I were free – not enslaved by my conditioning[?]¨

loc 1717

In Bernard Marx, Huxley offers a Carlylean vision of the embattled individual, the last bastion of strength and vision, fighting against an all-encompassing system:

[H]e stood alone embattled against the order of things; elated by the intoxicating consciousness of his individual significance and importance.

loc 1816

It is the possibility for such a self-conception that is lost in the world of soma dreams. Bernard is the last fighter for individual consciousness against the somatic happiness.

In a significant passage that is internally focalised on Mustapha Mond, a high-ranking official in the World State, there is the most precise articulation on what the State works to suppress and exclude, and it is the idea that:

the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.

loc 2802

What that involves is not clear in the novel, but reading later Huxley works like the essay The Doors of Perception gives a clue to the answers he settled on: they involved mind-altering drugs. The ending Brave New World, however, makes it clear that, at this stage, Huxley does not hold out any hope for Bernard Marx and his individualistic ilk. Further, it is not certain that he finds Bernard´s position worth saving.

That is perhaps the most jarring element of Brave New World for a contemporary reader: eugenics and mind-control notwithstanding, it is not always clear that Huxley is really describing a dystopia. Sometimes, he seems to be drifting towards acquiescence in and even celebration of the coming world of drug-induced happiness and ¨achieved consummation¨. He gives space to the sagely tradition of exalting the individual, but it is not where his priorities lie. Huxley, in this novel, is not taking on the mantle of the sage. He does, however, try it on before tentatively casting it aside and hedging his bets. If Huxley saw a possible or even theoretical better world than the hyper-industrialised World State of AF 632, its lineaments or underpinning ideals are not at all clear from this disorienting novel.

The Victorian Sage: When Philosophy meets Literature

Still the fullest analysis of the Victorian Sage comes from John Holloway’s 1953 book The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan), and this book, though dated in some respects, is worth revisiting for its approach to the sage.

Holloway’s subtitle is worthy of note: Studies in Argument. Sage writing, then, is predominantly a form of arguing. Holloway’s opening chapter (“The Victorian Sage: His Message and Methods”), about which I will write in this post, starts with a rather vague description of the activity of his chosen sages (Carlyle, Newman, Arnold, Disraeli, George Eliot, Hardy):

[A]ll of them sought (among other things) to express notions about the world, man’s situation in it, and how he should live. (1)

The interest of the sage is of a “general or speculative kind in what the world is like” (1). The sage then is clearly somewhat akin to a philosopher, but he or she (Holloway neglects the “she” but one of his own examples is George Eliot) is a particularly general or speculative one; another way of saying this is that he or she is not a disciplinary philosopher.

The 1965 Norton Edition

But as well as offering a philosophico-moral outlook on life, the sage does something else. Holloway stresses that reading sage-writing “constitutes an experience for the reader” (11). The sage cannot be judged by the success of his or her doctrines, but by what work he or she does for the individual reader. This is difficult to quantify and communicate, obviously, and Holloway doesn’t get much further than the Victorian Sages themselves in this, using the Carlylean trope of vision: “acquiring wisdom is somehow an opening of the eyes” (9). The sages want the reader to experience an opening of the eyes, a quickening of perceptiveness (10). How do they go about this: by any means possible. “The sage has no standard bag of tools” (11). Thus the sage remains a slippery and elusive figure, moving us without us knowing how.

This brings the sage closer to the novelist: disciplinary philosophy is built on logical systems but novelists work by moving us. And Holloway follows this up: initial sages, Carlyle and Arnold notably, were essayists; but Holloway introduces Eliot, Disraeli and Hardy to illustrate how sage-writing and the work of the novelist were highly compatible. The sages were always attached to the notion of expounding their outlook through character (think of Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resartus, or the many characters – Dryasdust et al. – in Carlyle’s more narrowly sage-like books). For the sage, there is no philosophy without a specific character to expound it. And character and doctrine are never separate, not even for expositional purposes:

Characters, because they can talk, can be authorities, more or less good or bad, for the points of view adopted or rejected by their creator; and more than this, they are not ventriloquist’s mouthpieces only, but people whom we get to know well and whose whole situation we are likely to live through sympathetically. (14)

So, the sage can be seen as half-philosopher, half-novelist. One has the focus on finding out about “man’s place in [the world], and how he should live” alongside the use of character, figurative language/tropes and other literary features. A philosopher without logic, a novelist without plot, the sage is both less and more than either of these more established intellectual figures.

The Sage and the Man of Letters

In Victorian England, the class of person we would probably call a public intellectual went by other names. Two such names were Sage and Man of Letters. Both of these terms are, of course, heavily associated with Thomas Carlyle. John Holloway’s study The Victorian Sage (1953) takes Carlyle as its first case study, contending that Carlyle’s aim is the standard one of the sage, “to state, and to clinch, the basic tenets of a ‘Life-Philosophy'” (excerpted in H. Bloom, ed., Thomas Carlyle [Chelsea House, 1986], p. 17); with the term Man of Letters Carlyle is still more closely associated, for did he not write the classic 19th-century investigation into the concept, “The Hero as Man of Letters” in On Heroes? The titular personage of this  lecture-cum-essay was, said Carlyle, “altogether a product of these new ages.” He was, moreover, “sent hither specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same Divine Idea: in every new generation it will manifest itself in a new dialect; and he is there for the purpose of doing that.” Of course, there is some self-reference here, and Carlyle did himself become associated with the figure of the Man of Letters, see for example John Gross’ The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969). So we can see that there is some quite significant overlap between these two categories, Sage and Man of Letters. What, then, is the distinction?

I’ve been reading Terry Eagleton’s The Function of Criticism (1984), and he attempts a distinction. The Sage, he says,

[R]epresents […] an attempt to rescue criticism and literature from […] squalid political infighting […], constituting them instead as transcendental forms of knowledge […]. Literature will fulfill its ideological functions most effectively only if it sheds all political instrumentality to become the repository of a common human wisdom beyond the sordidly historical. (39-40)

I’m not sure if “ideological” and “common human wisdom” really belong in the same sentence, unless there’s a shift in viewpoint halfway through the sentence. If one accepts the notion of “common human wisdom” one can’t consider it to pertain to anything ideological – which is, by definition, partial and biased. But, certainly, the notion of common human wisdom is one that is central to the Sage and particularly to Carlyle, and it did not pertain to political parties. As early as the French Revolution, this element of Carlyle’s writing was noted and appreciated:

He is not a party historian like Scott, who could not, in his benevolent respect for rank and royalty, see duly the faults of either: he is as impartial as Thiers, but with a far loftier and nobler impartiality.

[…]

It is better to view it loftily from afar, like our mystic poet Mr Carlyle, than too nearly with sharp-sighted and prosaic Thiers. (Thackeray, qtd. in Seigel, ed., Thomas Carlyle The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 71.

Carlyle undoubtedly is a sage in Eagleton’s sense then. But what, then, of the Man of Letters. Eagleton defines this personage thusly:

[T]he bearer and dispenser of a generalized ideological wisdom rather than the exponent of a specialist intellectual skill. one whose synoptic vision, undimmed by any narrowly technical interest, is able to survey the whole cultural and intellectual landscape of his age.

Once again, “ideological” appears out of place here, jarring, for similar reasons to those outlined above, with the notion of the “synoptic vision, undimmed by any narrowly technical interest” – how can such a vision, if it is accepted as such, produce an ideological wisdom? (How, indeed, can wisdom, if one accepts that it is wisdom, be ideological?). Eagleton has written on the concept of ideology as much as almost any living author,so his usage of it is perhaps worth investigating. In the Eagleton passage I happen to have close to hand, he writes thusly:

[Ideology] refers more precisely to the process whereby interests of a certain kind become masked, rationalized, naturalized, universalized, legitimated in the name of certain forms of political power. Ideology, Verso, 2007, p. 202)

If this is representative of his view, then it’s a fairly classic Marxist take on the concept . For my purposes, it’s a little narrow – the idea that political power is behind ideology rules out various other motivations for the masking, rationalizing, etc., of interests. Perhaps social power would be better? Social is almost synonymous with the most extended meaning of political, but it does not  bear the same narrow meanings which give some ambivalence to Eagleton’s formulation. Both seem to contain the key point that ideology is of the collective, rather than of the individual. This, I would suggest is a more useful way to view it: to allow that a worldview, say, may be individual, but an ideology is individual consciousness inflected by the social (to keep it unfeasibly broad for the moment) – then, as you work towards a definition, the notion of falsity has to come in: the masking, naturalizing, the false consciousness (as Engels would have it), something along these lines. But not, at any rate, to be considered compatible with “common human wisdom” (a concept most contemporary academic critics would not accept, would, perhaps, laugh at, or even be embarrassed by), but which I, being partial to the outlook of the Victorian Sage (as the name of the blog suggests), find at least an attractive concept, if not one that is practically attainable or definable in a pure sense – that doesn’t, I frankly admit, exist in a pure sense, but is not therefore to be unceremoniously flung out of window (as Carlyle might say).

Detour over: after defining the MoL, Eagleton goes on to helpfully distinguish him from the aforedefined Sage:

Such comprehensive authority links the man of letters on one side with the sage; but whereas the sage’s synopticism is a function of transcendental detachment, the man of letters sees as widely as he does because material necessity compels him to be a bricoleur, dilettante, jack-of-all-trades, deeply embroiled for survival in the very commercial literary world from which Carlyle beat such a hasty retreat. (45)

This is a neat distinction, and one that fits with the connotations of the terms. An early meaning of sage is, according to the OED:

A man of profound wisdom; esp. one of those persons of ancient history or legend who were traditionally famous as the wisest of mankind

Thus the notion of transcendentalism fits well with a personage with mythic associations, while the more matter-of-fact man of letters has in Eagleton’s analysis, more down-to-earth connotations. Yet it is only at an abstract level that the distinction holds up: in reality, the 19th-century writers to whom those terms were applied (and Eagleton is using it in describing 19th-century criticism) were almost generally both. In historical terms, the categorization is unhelpful, and really speaks to the love of taxonimizing that afflicts many critics. To analyze is, to a large extent, to taxonomize, but history tends to break such distinctions down. Thus, my point simply is that though Eagleton’s analysis is somewhat interesting, it’s not one I will be trying to apply.

Nevertheless, I’m interested in the undisciplinary nature of the learning that the man of letters accrues. From a 21st-century academic point of view, this seems to me the most interesting element. The academic sees narrowly, methodologically, where the man of letters saw synoptically. The academic structures in place do not now allow for such a mode of vision. No, for that we have to close our Foucaults and open our Sartors, the opening chapter of which is one of the great paeans to intellectual freedom. In my humble opinion.

[W]ould Criticism erect not only finger-posts and turnpikes, but spiked gates and impassable barriers, for the mind of man? It is written, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” Surely the plain rule is, Let each considerate person have his way, and see what it will lead to. For not this man and that man, but all men make up mankind, and their united tasks the task of mankind.  (Sartor, Ch. 1)

Sigmund Freud as Sage-writer

If 19th-century England was the home of the Sage-writer, with Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Newman, et al. (see John Holloway, The Victorian Sage), there are various writers from other times and places who seem to be writing in somewhat of the same spirit and towards the same ends.  It is certainly possible to read some of Sigmund Freud’s work as being in the sage tradition. Freud wrote mostly on psychoanalysis, which he considered to be a science, but later in his career he turned to general reflections on the course of civilization, and the relationship between the individual and his society, notably in The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and its Discontents (1930). At the beginning of the former work he gives his subject as “culture”, defined as: “[E]very thing in which human life has risen above its animal circumstances and in which it distinguishes itself from animal life (and I refuse to separate culture and civilization)” (The Future of an Illusion, Penguin (Great Ideas series), 2008, p. 2). A very wide definition, then, basically synonymous with civilization itself, or at least so intertwined with it as to render both terms indefinable without the other – to become civilized is to gain a culture of some sort.

In the early pages of TFOAI, Freud also states some general political principles; that is, in the terms he has set out, his idea on how society becomes civilized or cultured, and may be kept so in an orderly, productive and reasonably pacific way. His answer is bluntly authoritarian:

Only the influence of exemplary individuals whom they accept as their leaders will induce them to perform the labour and suffer the voluntary privations on which the continued existence of culture depends […]. However, there is a risk so far as [the leaders] are concerned that, in order to retain their influence, they will yield to the mass more than the mass yields to them, which is why it seems neccesary for them to have access to instruments of power making them independent of the mass. In short, two very common properties of human beings are to blame for the fact that only through a measure of coercion can cultural institutions be upheld: humans are not, of their own volition, keen on work, and arguments are powerless against their passions. (p. 5)

Clearly, Freud was no great admirer of humanity in general, as is also clear in Civilization and its Discontents. But this passage goes even further than you might expect. When we read the second sentence excerpted, we find it beginning with the acknowledgement that “there is a risk” in investing the power of leadership in these “exemplary individuals”; indeed there is, we say, confidently expecting the good doctor to go down the power corrupts route. In fact, he says the exact opposite! The problem is not power’s corrupting influence, but the possibility that the leader will be acted on by the mass, hence the need for “access to instruments of power” that render the leader independent of the mass. Dr F is heading into Carlyle territory here, though he is perhaps even harder on the human race than Carlyle (though his language is more moderate, of course). His justifications for advocating, basically, tyranny (a “wise despotism”, as Carlyle would say) are that humans are not keen on work, and cannot be swayed by reason, both big generalizations that go unsupported in any way.

Dr Freud with a cigar, but maybe not just a cigar.

But unsupported does not necessarily mean wrong, of course. One could say that the history of homo sapiens provides ample supporting evidence for both positions. It is the job of the sage only to have a position on the nature of humanity, and prescribe a course for society in line with that.  He is not necessarily bound to provide scientific evidence. Freud’s position here is close to Carlylean Hero-worship, revolving around the idea of the accession to power of “exemplary individuals”, and the vesting of said individuals with power without check. But while Freud diagnoses authoritarianism as the remedy for societal ills in mankind’s then state of development, his aim in TFOAI was to suggest that this could change if “the primacy of the intellect over the libidinal life” (p. 65, see also 68) became a reality. This could perhaps be achieved through the final break with the ideology of religion; at least, that was its only chance, though nothing was guaranteed.

Like most of the Sages of the 19th century, Freud believed that religion in its old forms was dead: the Christian era was over, some rough beast perhaps slouched towards Bethlehem to be born. He advocated, however, a purely rationalist response to the new predicament. His approach here was somewhat different to his predecessors: while Arnold presented “culture” (as defined by him) as the great tool of moral and social progression, and Carlyle spoke with equal certainty of the power of work, faith and duty, Freud is, in one sense, less presumptuous: “Should experience reveal (not to me but to others after me who think as I do) that we have made a mistake, we shall drop our expectations.” (p. 67) While Carlyle traded on the power of positive certainty (and, given his tenets on the importance of faith, it behoved him at all times to display faith in his own principles) Freud was positive only in a negative sense: that the lot of mankind in society was not, and showed no signs of ever having been, or ever becoming, a happy one. He toyed with the idea of authoritarianism to suppress discontent, but seems to have concluded in TFOAI that a final break with religion and a seeing of humankind’s place in the universe exactly as it was could, potentially at least, allow for a more rational humanity which had relinquished its infantile desires and would perhaps live in reasonable harmony. Yet a tension remains in Freud’s work, for whenever he gets onto to talking of humans as they are, it is always clear that he has seen (or believes he has) little empirical evidence of man’s potential for harmonious, rational living. Thus an air of uncertainty hangs over the conclusions of both TFOAI and, more explicitly, Civilization and its Discontents, and it is this gap that Freud allows between what he believes and what may be that makes these books palatable over 80 years on.

21st-century Sage: Niall Ferguson and the Western Malaise

Niall Ferguson wrote a book in 2000 entitled The Cash Nexus, the phrase derived from Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843), and it seems the influence of the prototypical Victorian Sage is strong in the right-wing historian/ economist. In his article “Rue Britannia: Debt used to make us Great” in the Sunday Times of last week (17 June 2012), he was in full neo-sage mode as he identified the “malaise” at the heart of western society, and issued dire warnings for the consequences of our current recklessness.

                           

Thomas Carlyle                                                                  Niall Ferguson

The sage approach is characterized by first referencing a current social issue: for example, worker unrest in Chartism; for Ferguson, the issue is, of course, the economic difficulties engulfing various western states. Then, he makes the classic sage move: considering the problem not in itself, but as a symptom of a society rotten to the core. Financial problems are “nothing more than symptoms of an underlying instittutional malaise”. Like Carlyle, Ferguson harks back to a time when society was well-ordered: for Carlyle, it was feudalism; for Ferguson, it seems to be any time between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the dusk of the British Empire. This was a time of “legislating for economic development” and when “even war became an increasingly profitable activity […] There was no default. There was no inflation. And Britannia bestrode the globe”. But now, Ferguson repeats, we have arguments over austerity and stimulus as “a consequence of a more profound malaise”.

But the sage must not only condemn, he must also make clear the dangers of our path. For Carlyle, that lay in class antagonisms, which would end in revolution and anarchy if not appeased by the prophesied “Aristocracy of Talent”. For Ferguson, the fear is that the west is on the way to being overtaken by China. He informs us that the average American was 20 times richer than his Chinese counterpart in 1978, but is now only 5 times richer. Truly a sobering statistic. The dangers of Chinese economic power are not expressly identified, but that it is not desirable is clear (he has been more explicit on this elsewhere).

There is always blame that must be apportioned by the sage. Carlyle lambasted the Idle Aristocracy, characterized as “Sir Jabesh Windbag”. This class had  abdicated its responsibility to lead, and had to be overthrown, for the real aristocracy to take over, or mob-rule and another French Revolution would be the outcome. For Ferguson, the blame also falls on the acting aristocracy of our time, the governments and financial decision-makers who have broken the covenant between the generations and are in the process of leaving the coming generations in financial ruin.

There is one desirable way out for Ferguson: “a heroic effort of leadership”, one that would persuade “not only the young but also a significant proportion of the parents and grandparents to vote for a more responsible fiscal policy”. That word, heroic, how evocative it is in a Carlylean context! (See On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (clue’s in the title), or pretty much anything else he wrote). Who Ferguson is talking about is not quite clear, though he does at one point observe: “If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.” They’re not, though, rather they are still in thrall to the cash nexus, but perhaps, even still, they are only holding out for a hero, and when such a person appears above the political horizon, the western world will bends its collective knee before him and pay due homage. Carlyle would certainly have liked to think so.

In summation, this post has simply tried to pick up on some similar rhetorical devices in use in Ferguson and Carlyle, as part of our ongoing attempts to trace Carlyle’s influence, such as it is, from the 1830s to the present day. In his appeal to national pride and his idealization of the British national past, his appeal to morality (implied in his description of “the present system” as “fraudulent”), his diagnosis of a sickness in our present condition, his apparent nostalgia for warfare and his investment in the idea of heroic leadership, he gives us ample reason to believe that there is at least one neo-Carlylean amongst the celebrated intellects of our time.