Posts Tagged ‘Aldous Huxley’
“The rule of thumb is the more profound the experience, the longer you should wait before doing it again”*…
Beyond their visual qualities, mescaline’s hallucinations posed profound philosophical questions. During the mid-1930s three prominent writers and thinkers left records of their experiments with it. In 1934 and 1935 respectively, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre participated in the now-familiar modus operandi of private session between psychiatrist and artist, with the scientific gaze and the philosopher’s insights informing—or, more often, pitted against—one another…
Sartre wrote little directly about his experience, describing it briefly in notes that later found a place in L’imaginaire, his 1940 study of the phenomenology of the imagination. He found its effects elusive and sinister. “It could only exist by stealth,” he wrote; it distorted every sensation, yet whenever he attempted to perceive it directly it withdrew into the background or shifted shape. Its action on the mind “inconsistent and mysterious,” offering no solid vantage point from which to observe it. In contrast to previous descriptions of the “double consciousness” or état mixte, in which the normal self was able to observe its hallucinations dispassionately, Sartre found it impossible to be a spectator of his own experience. On the contrary, he felt submerged against his will in a miasma of sensations that assailed him viscerally at every turn, a world of grotesque extreme close-ups in which everything disgusted him.
The best-known detail of Sartre’s bad trip is Simone de Beauvoir’s anecdote of him being haunted for weeks after by lobster-like creatures scuttling just beyond his field of vision. Sartre, like Aldous Huxley, was partially sighted—a curious coincidence linking two of the most celebrated intellectuals to have taken the vision-producing drug—and his poor vision may have exacerbated his anxieties about shapes lurking just beyond its reach. Later in life he claimed that it had driven him to a nervous breakdown. “After I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time,” he recalled in 1971; “I mean they followed me into the street, into class.” Even though he knew they were imaginary he spoke to them, requesting them to be quiet during his lectures. Eventually he sought psychotherapeutic help from a young Jacques Lacan, which generated “nothing that he or I valued very much,” though “with the crabs, we sort of concluded that it was fear of becoming alone.”…
Caveat comedenti: “Sartre’s bad trip.”
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As we contemplate crustacea, we might spare a thought for Jerome Phillip Horwitz; he died on this date in 2012. A chemist active in cancer research, Horowitz was the first to synthesized AZT (azidothymidine), in 1964, in the hope that it might retard the growth of malignant cells. It failed at that task, and lay dormant for two decades… until Burroughs Wellcome tested– and patented– Horowitz’s development as a treatment for HIV-AIDS. The drug company got FDA approval in 1986, and went on to reap enormous financial returns, of which Horowitz saw none.
After AZT, Horowitz went on to create many successful treatments for cancer and other diseases.
(While some believe that Horwitz was referenced in the Captain Underpants books, the Jerome Horwitz Elementary School in the children’s book series was in fact named after Curly Howard (Jerome Lester Horowitz) of The Three Stooges.
“Not every business cycle has a financial crisis. Frequently they do.”*…
Your correspondent is headed away on his annual pilgrimage to the land of banked dunes and deep-fried delights. Regular service will resume on or around August 27. Vacations can be a time for retrospection. In that spirit, an invitation to think about the last ten years…
2008 was a big year: Senator Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, “Satoshi Nakamoto” published “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” SpaceX became the first private, commercial company to put an object into earth orbit, China wowed the world with its host ceremonies for the Summer Olympic Games… But of course, 2008 was also the start of the Great Recession… which was bad. Really bad:
Total U.S. household net worth dropped by $11.1 trillion in 2008.
The median income for 25-to-34-year-olds in America, $34,000, hasn’t budged since 1977, adjusted for inflation.
Median household wealth collapsed.
2007: $126k
2016: $97kThe number of Americans worried about the economy multiplied nearly sixfold.
2007: 16 percent
2008: 86 percentIn 2016, the median wealth of a family headed by someone born in the 1980s was 34 percent below the level of earlier generations at the same 2007: age.
Mutual funds lost a third of their value: -38 percent.
The market value of all publicly traded companies was cut in half.
October 2007: $63 trillion
March 2009: $28.6 trillionFrom 2005 to 2009, the median value of stocks and mutual funds owned by whites dropped by 9 percent.
The median value of holdings for African-Americans dropped by 71 percent (probably because of pressure to sell when prices were low).
Between 2007 and 2013, wages declined for the bottom 70 percent of all workers.
The retirement savings of black families fell by 35 percent from 2007 to 2010.
In a 2016 survey by the Fed, 28 percentof working-age adults said they had no retirement savings whatsoever.
The racial wealth gap, already large, ballooned.
Whites: $171k
Hispanics: $20.7k
African-Americans: $17.6kIn terms of household wealth, every group suffered — but some more than others.
Hispanics: -66 percent
Asian-Americans: -54 percent
African-Americans: -53 percent
Whites: -16 percentConsumer credit-card debt at the end of 2017 was over $1 trillion (about 30% higher than in 2008).
Millennials have taken on at least 300 percent more student-loan debt than their parents’ generation.
The unemployed took many more weeks to find work.
May 2008: 7.9
June 2010: 25.2In a December 2017 poll by YouGov, 38 percent of those surveyed said they didn’t know when they’d be debt-free. 30 percent of respondents thought they’d never be out of debt.
63 percent of Americans say they don’t have enough money in savings to cover a $500 health-care expense.
In 2017, women had nearly 500,000 fewer babies than in 2007, although there were 7 percent more women of prime childbearing age.
The suicide rate rose 4 percent from 1999 to 2010: 4,750 additional deaths.
24 million adult millennials, or 32 percent, still live at home.
79 million Americans live in a “shared household” with at least one extra, nonfamily resident.
More college grads moved in with their parents.
2005: 19 percent
2016: 28 percentAs of 2017, only 34.2 percent of homes have recovered their value from before the recession. (Still below 2008 value.)
From 2000 to 2015, homeownership declined in 90% of all U.S. metropolitan areas.
[source]
Frank Rich explores the lasting impact of that crash:
…the collapse of Lehman Brothers kicked off the Great Recession that proved to be a more lasting existential threat to America than the terrorist attack of seven Septembers earlier. The shadow it would cast is so dark that a decade later, even our current run of ostensible prosperity and peace does not mitigate the one conviction that still unites all Americans: Everything in the country is broken. Not just Washington, which failed to prevent the financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community. Nearly everything has turned to crap, it seems, except Peak TV (for those who can afford it)…
Read the full essay: “In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream.”
Then consider Steve Bannon’s take on the same event:
The legacy of the financial crisis: Donald Trump. The legacy of the financial crisis is Donald J. Trump. And I can give you the specific moment: When they put Lehman in bankruptcy, and the geniuses didn’t understand that it was inextricably linked to the commercial paper market. Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, they went to see Bush three days later. They told him, ‘We need a trillion dollars in cash, and we need it by five o’clock.’”
And in a profile of courage, President Bush says, “Not my problem. You gotta go to Capitol Hill.” They go up to Capitol Hill, they put everybody in a room. They make them all put their BlackBerrys outside, and they walk in, and Bernanke, who’s not an alarmist, says, “If we don’t have a trillion dollars by today, the American financial system will melt down in 72 hours. The world financial system will melt down in two weeks, and there will be global anarchy.”
And by the way, this was completely brought on by the elites of the country and Wall Street. When I got to Harvard Business School in 1983, a bunch of professors were coming up with a radical idea that’s had a horrible negative consequence on this country and to the fabric of our society: the maximization of shareholder value; this was preached as High Church theology. The whole thing of the financialization of Wall Street, of looking at people as pure commodities and of outsourcing and globalization, came from the business schools and the financial community that had these radical ideas, and nobody kept them in check…
I think you’re starting to see the deindustrialization of the country. We stopped investing in the country. Domestic investment’s all going over to China. We deindustrialized Western Europe. Brexit and 2016 are inextricably linked, okay?
Workers know this. It’s the labor vote in the midland counties that drove Brexit. This is what’s so obvious the Democratic Party misses. Donald Trump’s president because of working-class Democrats. The Trump movement is made up of people like my father, the Marty Bannons. My whole household was working-class Democrats. These are adamant Trump supporters because they understand Trump supports working-class people…
While the prescribed remedies may be wildly different as between the progressive writer and the Nativist provocateur, the diagnosis is eerily similar. Read Bannon’s interview in full at “Steve Bannon on How 2008 Planted the Seed for the Trump Presidency.”
More perspectives on 2008 at “Ten Years After the Crash, We Are Still Living in the World It Brutally Remade.”
And lest we think too parochially, consider this argument that the Georgian War (Russia’s engagement in Georgia) in 2008 was (another) product of the same currents that yielded the financial crisis: “The Turning Point of 2008“… which, in turn, helped spur the growth of Russia’s use of criminal hackers: “It’s our time to serve the Motherland.”
* Kenneth Arrow
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As we make our way down memory lane, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that George Orwell’s allegory, Animal Farm– A Fairy Story, was published. (The U.S. edition, published in 1946, dropped the sub-title.) While it has never disappeared from conversation about politics and governance, Animal Farm is enjoying a renaissance in these increasingly Nativist times. But while Orwell rings only too relevant these days, we might do well to keep in mind his friendly competitor (and one-time school master), Aldous Huxley, and Huxley’s Brave New World:
In his classic 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote of the difference between George Orwell’s and Aldous Huxley’s visions of fascism.
“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information,” wrote Postman. “Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
More at “Amusing Ourselves to Trump.”
For a nifty cartoon version of the Orwell-Huxley distinction, see here.
And for a further exploration of this modern day Scylla and Charybdis, see “Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.”
First edition cover
“The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience”*…
In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher.
Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel.
Huxley starts off the letter praising the book, describing it as “profoundly important.” He continues, “The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it.”
Then Huxley switches gears and criticizes the book, writing, “Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.”…
Read the letter in full at “Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours.”
See also Neil Postman’s and Alan Moore’s agreement.
* Aldous Huxley, in his letter to George Orwell
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As we question authority, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966, the date that LSD was declared illegal, that The Love Pageant Rally was held in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The first big free concert of it’s sort in the park, it was organized by Allen Cohen and artist Michael Bowen, the creators of the San Francisco Oracle, which first hit the streets in September 1966, to mark the banning of the drug– which effectively created a neighborhood of outlaws in the Haight, where acid was a staple of community culture. Music was provided by the Grateful Dead and by Big Brother and the Holding Company; Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were on hand.
“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition”*…
The idea that American life is increasingly transient and uprooted is a myth: people are moving less, but worrying more.
In 1971, the great Carole King sang: ‘So far away/ Doesn’t anyone stay in one place anymore?’ Thirty years later, the editors of The New York Times explained that families in the United States are changing because of ‘the ever-growing mobility of Americans’. And in 2010, a psychologist argued that ‘an increased rate of residential mobility played a role in the historical shift’ toward individualism. It’s a common US lament that human bonds are fraying because people are moving around more and more. Americans fear the fracturing of communities that constant moving seems to bring.
Yet when King sang, Americans had been moving around less and less for generations. That decline was even more obvious when the Times editorial appeared in 2001, and it has continued to decline through the 2010s. The increasingly mobile US is a myth that refuses to move on…
More on this widespread misapprehension– and what it means– in “The great settling down.”
* James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
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As we tend the roots we’ve put down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1963 that we lost two greats of imaginative literature:
C.S. Lewis, the novelist The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and others), poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, and Christian apologist (Mere Christianity).
And Aldous Huxley, the writer, novelist, philosopher best remembered for Brave New World.
Neither passing was much remarked at the time, as they happened on the same day as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“I confess, I do not believe in time”*…
The automatic analysis of sentiment in text is fast changing the way we interpret and interact with words. On Twitter, for example, researchers have begun to gauge the mood of entire nations by analysing the emotional content of the tweets people generate.
In the same way, other researchers have started to measure the “emotional temperature” of novels by counting the density of words associated with the eight basic emotions of anticipation, anger, joy, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise and trust.
All this automation is possible thanks to new databases that rate words according to their emotional value.
Now Hannah Davis at New York University and Saif Mohammad at the National Research Council Canada have gone a step further. These guys have used the same kind of analysis to measure the way the emotional temperature changes throughout a novels and then automatically generated music that reflects these moods and how they evolve throughout the book.
They say their new algorithm, TransProse, will change the way we interact with information. “The work has applications in information visualization, in creating audio-visual e-books, and in developing music apps,” they say…
Judge for yourself: read on at “The Music Composed By An Algorithm Analysing The World’s Best Novels“; check out the research at arXiv.org; and then listen to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Lord of the Flies, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and A Clockwork Orange.
* Vladimir Nabokov, novelist and noted “sufferer” of synaesthesia
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As we hum along, we might recall that it was on this date in 1928 that D.H. Lawrence, writing to Aldous Huxley, judged prolific non-fiction author and novelist Arnold Bennett “a pig in clover.” Exactly three years later, on this date in 1931, Bennett died of typhoid at age 64, after drinking water in a Paris hotel to demonstrate to companions that it was safe.
The next night Virginia Woolf noted in her diary, “Queer how one regrets the dispersal of anybody…who had direct contact with life — for he abused me; & yet I rather wished him to go on abusing me; & me abusing him.”
Arnold Bennett
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