Huxley and Lewis did not share a worldview — one was a seeker drawn to spiritualism, Eastern religion and psychedelics; the other was (and remains) the most famous Christian apologist in the modern English-speaking world. But they shared a critique of contemporary civilization, and offered a similar warning about where its logic might end up taking us.For Huxley, this critique took full shape in “Brave New World,” his famous portrait of a dystopia in which the goals of pleasure and stability have crowded out every other human good, burying discontent under antidepressants, genetic engineering and virtual-reality escapes.For Lewis, the critique was distilled in “The Abolition of Man,” which imagined a society of “men without chests,” purged of any motivation higher than appetite, with no “chatter of truth and mercy and beauty” to disturb or destabilize.In effect, both Huxley and Lewis looked at a utilitarian’s paradise — a world where all material needs are met, pleasure is maximized and pain eliminated — and pointed out what we might be giving up to get there: the entire vertical dimension in human life, the quest for the sublime and the transcendent, for romance and honor, beauty and truth.
Douthat discusses . . .
. . . the end of “Brave New World,” when a so-called “Savage” raised outside the dystopia confronts its presiding “Controller,” Mustapha Mond. The Savage lists everything that’s been purged in the name of pleasure and order — historical memory, art and literature, religion and philosophy, the tragic sense. And Mond responds that “these things are symptoms of political inefficiency,” and that the comforts of modern civilization depend on excluding them.
“But I don’t want comfort,” the Savage says. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”Which brings us back to that notorious sinner John F. Kennedy. What exhausts skeptics of the Kennedy cult, both its elegiac and paranoid forms, is the way it makes a saint out of a reckless adulterer, a Camelot out of a sordid political operation, a world-historical figure out of a president whose fate was tragic but whose record was not terribly impressive.But in many ways the impulses driving the Kennedy nostalgists are the same ones animating Lewis’s Puddleglum and Huxley’s Savage — the desire for grace and beauty, for icons and heroes, for a high-stakes dimension to human affairs that a consumerist, materialist civilization can flatten and exclude.
And one can believe J.F.K. is a poor vessel for these desires, and presidential politics the wrong place to satisfy them, without wishing they would disappear.
A major reason FHers desire to confer hero status on JFK is that he was the last Dem president that would remotely qualify for it. One thing that his death marked was the transformation of the Dems into the Freedom-Haters, single-mindedly bent on carrying out the Great Leveling Project and leaving us a world where cheap gratification is good enough for the cattle-like masses.
Douthat can intellectualize the Kennedy assassination all he wants but the young lad was not even there so what else can he do but intellectualize such a sad and tragic collective global event we who were there shared in real time and grieved in real time. I suppose that when barely 3 short months later that seemed so long when we collectively "met the Beatles" here on these shores, old man grief left us for something else entirely. Move over Sinatra and roll over Beethoven. Probably a bad bad thing, gee, time moves on, chain chain chain, chain of fools....
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ReplyDeleteThe global population, many of whom grieved the untimely loss of a youthful freely elected world leader in 1963, was 2.5 Billion. It's 7.1 Billion today, half a century later. Isn't that mind boggling?
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ReplyDeleteSeriously, please help me understand the relevance of comments 2, 3, 4 and 7 to the subject at hand. I really have no feedback since they seem to be untethered to a discussion of the world views of Lewis and Huxley and the accomplishments, such as they were, of JFK.
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ReplyDeleteI guess it would be that you are citing examples of how our culture emphasizes stress relief and fitness more than it used to or something? If so, what kind of point are you trying to make about that?
We are a long way from somatized cattle still, the population boom is still quite the unknown quantiy, we are still in the early morning hours of the Century of the Woman. Our next Huxley should bnring in the coming water wars and the effect of robotics. And CS Lewis' obserations still hold true for Christians. Men will continue to try to get away with tyhinking with their dicks though. It is not at all so very late in the day for many here among us. There is still something happening here. Stay tuned.
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ReplyDeleteWe're not so very far at all. But the failures of leftism are becoming so obvious that I do see signs of reawakening. We shall see if it's not too late.
ReplyDeleteKennedy's death ushered in your alleged freedom haters, but, correct me if I am wrong, at that time niggers were still drinking out of separate public drinking fountains. Of course this was before bottled water became all the rage.
ReplyDeleteThe civil rights movement was obviously a laudable phenomenon, but let us not forget that it was a multifarious movement filled with diverse human beings and viewpoints - all the way from Hunter Pitts O'Dell to Bayard Rustin.
ReplyDeleteAnd let us not forget that as early as 1965, warning was happening, in the form of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's white paper, that black America was going to have to face the issue of its family breakdown.