Ends And Means, Aldous Huxley
FIRST PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 8, 1937
Ends And Means
Contents
Chapter I GOALS, ROADS AND CONTEMPORARY STARTING-POINT
Chapter II THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION
Chapter III EFFICACY AND LIMITATIONS OF LARGE-SCALE SOCIAL REFORM
Chapter IV SOCIAL REFORM AND VIOLENCE
Chapter V THE PLANNED SOCIETY
Chapter VI NATURE OF THE MODERN STATE
Chapter VII CENTRALIZATION AND DECENTRALIZATION
Chapter VIII DECENTRALIZATION AND SELF-GOVERNMENT
Chapter IX WAR
Chapter X INDIVIDUAL WORK FOR REFORM
Chapter XI INEQUALITY
Chapter XII EDUCATION
Chapter XIII RELIGIOUS PRACTICES
Chapter XIV BELIEFS
Chapter XV ETHICS
NOTES
INDEX
Chapter I GOALS, ROADS AND CONTEMPORARY STARTING-POINT
About the ideal goal of human effort there exists in our civilization and, for nearly thirty centuries, there has existed a very general agreement. From Isaiah to Karl Marx the prophets have spoken with one voice. In the Golden Age to which they look forward there will be liberty, peace, justice and brotherly love. ‘Nation shall no more lift sword against nation’; ‘the free development of each will lead to the free development of all’; ‘the world shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.’
With regard to the goal, I repeat, there is and for long has been a very general agreement. Not so with regard to the roads which lead to that goal. Here unanimity and certainty give place to utter confusion, to the clash of contradictory opinions, dogmatically held and acted upon with the violence of fanaticism.
There are some who believe—and it is a very popular belief at the present time—that the royal road to a better world is the road of economic reform. For some, the short cut to Utopia is military conquest and the hegemony of one particular nation; for others, it is armed revolution and the dictatorship of a particular class. All these think mainly in terms of social machinery and large-scale organization. There are others, however, who approach the problem from the opposite end, and believe that desirable social changes can be brought about most effectively by changing the individuals who compose society. Of the people who think in this way, some pin their faith to education, some to psycho-analysis, some to applied behaviourism. There are others, on the contrary, who believe that no desirable ‘change of heart’ can be brought about without supernatural aid. There must be, they say, a return to religion. (Unhappily, they cannot agree on the religion to which the return should be made.)
At this point it becomes necessary to say something about that ideal individual into whom the changers of heart desire to transform themselves and others. Every age and class has had its ideal. The ruling classes in Greece idealized the magnanimous man, a sort of scholar-and-gentleman. Kshatriyas in early India and feudal nobles in mediaeval Europe held up the ideal of the chivalrous man. The honnête homme makes his appearance as the ideal of seventeenth-century gentlemen; the philosophe, as the ideal of their descendants in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century idealized the respectable man. The twentieth has already witnessed the rise and fall of the liberal man and the emergence of the sheep-like social man and the god-like Leader. Meanwhile the poor and downtrodden have always dreamed nostalgically of a man ideally well-fed, free, happy and unoppressed.
Among this bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose? The answer is that we shall choose none. For it is clear that each one of these contradictory ideals is the fruit of particular social circumstances. To some extent, of course, this is true of every thought and aspiration that has ever been formulated. Some thoughts and aspirations, however, are manifestly less dependent on particular social circumstances than others. And here a significant fact emerges: all the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place are singularly alike. Liberation from prevailing conventions of thought, feeling and behaviour is accomplished most effectively by the practice of disinterested virtues and through direct insight into the real nature of ultimate reality. (Such insight is a gift, inherent in the individual; but, though inherent, it cannot manifest itself completely except where certain conditions are fulfilled.
The principal pre-condition of insight is, precisely, the practice of disinterested virtues.) To some extent critical intellect is also a liberating force. But the way in which intellect is used depends upon the will. Where the will is not disinterested, the intellect tends to be used (outside the non-human fields of technology, science or pure mathematics) merely as an instrument for the rationalization of passion and prejudice, the justification of self-interest. That is why so few even of the acutest philosophers have succeeded in liberating themselves completely from the narrow prison of their age and country. It is seldom indeed that they achieve as much freedom as the mystics and the founders of religion. The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight.
Now, among these freest of human beings there has been, for the last eighty or ninety generations, substantial agreement in regard to the ideal individual. The enslaved have held up for admiration now this model of a man, now that; but at all times and in all places, the free have spoken with only one voice.
It is difficult to find a single word that will adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the founders of religions. ‘Non-attached’ is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the non-attached man. Non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts. Non-attached to his craving for power and possessions. Non-attached to the objects of these various desires. Non-attached to his anger and hatred; non-attached to his exclusive loves. Non-attached to wealth, fame, social position. Non-attached even to science, art, speculation, philanthropy. Yes, non-attached even to these.
For, like patriotism, in Nurse Cavell’s phrase, ‘they are not enough.’ Non-attachment to self and to what, are called ‘the things of this world’ has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the best things that this world has to offer. Of the nature of this ultimate reality I shall speak in the last chapters of this book. All that I need do in this place is to point out that the ethic of non-attachment has always been correlated with cosmologies that affirm the existence of a spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world and imparting to it whatever value or significance it possesses.
Non-attachment is negative only in name. The practice of non-attachment entails the practice of all the virtues. It entails the practice of charity, for example; for there are no more fatal impediments than anger (even ‘righteous indignation’) and cold-blooded malice to the identification of the self with the immanent and transcendent more-than-self. It entails the practice of courage; for fear is a painful and obsessive identification of the self with its body. (Fear is negative sensuality, just as sloth is negative malice.) It entails the cultivation of intelligence; for insensitive stupidity is a main root of all the other vices. It entails the practice of generosity and disinterestedness; for avarice and the love of possessions constrain their victim to equate themselves with mere things. And so on. It is unnecessary any further to labour the point, sufficiently obvious to anyone who chooses to think about the matter, that non-attachment imposes upon those who would practise it the adoption of an intensely positive attitude towards the world.
The ideal of non-attachment has been formulated and systematically preached again and again in the course of the last three thousand years. We find it (along with everything else!) in Hinduism. It is at the very heart of the teachings of the Buddha. For the Chinese the doctrine is formulated by Lao Tsu. A little later, in Greece, the ideal of non-attachment is proclaimed, albeit with a certain pharisaic priggishness, by the Stoics. The Gospel of Jesus is essentially a gospel of non-attachment to ‘the things of this world,’ and of attachment to God. Whatever may have been the aberrations of organized Christianity—and they range from extravagant asceticism to the most brutally cynical forms of realpolitik—there has been no lack of Christian philosophers to reaffirm the ideal of non-attachment.
Here is John Tauler, for example, telling us that ‘freedom is complete purity and detachment which seeketh the Eternal; an isolated, a withdrawn being, identical with God or entirely attached to God.’ Here is the author of The Imitation, who bids us ‘pass through many cares as though without care; not after the manner of a sluggard, but by a certain prerogative of a free mind, which does not cleave with inordinate affection to any creature.’ One could multiply such citations almost indefinitely. Meanwhile, moralists outside the Christian tradition have affirmed the need for non-attachment no less insistently than the Christians. What Spinoza, for example, calls ‘blessedness’ is simply the state of non-attachment; his ‘human bondage,’ the condition of one who identifies himself with his desires, emotions and thought-processes, or with their objects in the external world.
The non-attached man is one who, in Buddhist phraseology, puts an end to pain; and he puts an end to pain, not only in himself, but also, by refraining from malicious and stupid activity, to such pain as he may inflict on others. He is the happy or ‘blessed’ man as well as the good man.
A few moralists—of whom Nietzsche is the most celebrated and the Marquis de Sade the most uncompromisingly consistent—have denied the value of non-attachment. But these men are manifestly victims of their temperament and their particular social surroundings. Unable to practise
