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What Huxley said about the actual incentives for thinkers accepting meaninglessness

#1
C C Offline
First, a snapshot of H.G. Wells as a kind of introductory example of what's upcoming...
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The scandalous sex life of HG Wells: 'I have done what I pleased," H G Wells once wrote, "so that every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself. I am a very immoral person. I have preyed on people who loved me."

[...] We learn about his important though not entirely comfortable involvement with the visionary progressives in the Fabian Society [socialism]. In his best-selling work “Anticipations,” he told a friend, his intention was “to undermine and destroy the monarch, monogamy and respectability — and the British Empire, all under the guise of a speculation about motorcars and electrical heating.” It is no little achievement that his 1940 “The Rights of Man” became “one of the sources for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights” proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly.

Wells did, in fact, destroy monogamy and respectability in his own life. Examining at length this unpleasant, sad dimension, Tomalin enables us to see that “he was a bad husband and an unreliable lover,” with the person he hurt the most being his second wife, Jane, who “found herself abandoned for ever longer periods as the years went by, while he carried on his love affairs in blazes of publicity.

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At one time or another, you've probably seen the quote below used by Christian fundamentalists to portray the original motivations of many scholars, scientists, socialists (i.e., Leftists) who became propagandist atheists and sometimes militant nihilists (of one category or another) -- as grounded in the desire to be blazing horndogs (like H.G. Wells), without suffering the moral or religious pangs of the "ignorant proles".

Aldous Huxley: "For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust."


Despite counter assertions of it being a "doctored" quotation, it is actually on page 272 of his book, Ends and Means.

However, Huxley isn't endorsing that as a good reason at this later point of his life. You can explore the greater context in another excerpt at the bottom. Still, that doesn't negate that he revealed this about his earlier self and what he considered to be the majority of his fellows.

Obviously the #MeToo movement was a recent development that made it rough faring for the "guy branch" of these underlying motivations (along with high-profile adulterous and promiscuous religious hypocrites on the right). Though one might argue Me2's impact was primarily in the world of public celebrities, leaders, and the academic elite. (The everyday world proceeded as usual.)

Now, to that grand extent of Huxley's perspective. Which may additionally clarify why I tacked-on the Leftist aspect (emphasized in bold below), not just the overtly political or ideological brands of non-theism and nihilism. As if you didn't already know, anyway: That Fascism, anarchist species thrown in somewhere, and Marxism -- along with the latter's late 20th-century makeover (New Left) and radical crusader expansion (i.e., exploitation of more types of oppression) are just extremist sides of the same coin in terms of attraction for their participants. Which also includes sharing a common historical birth-mother: Jacobin influences on Left-wing politics.

Aldous Huxley: "The success was intoxicating and, with an illogicality which, in the circumstances, was doubtless pardonable, many scientists and philosophers came to imagine that this useful abstraction from reality was reality itself. Reality as actually experienced contains intuitions of value and significance, contains love, beauty, mystical ecstasy, intimations of godhead.

Science did not and still does not possess intellectual instruments with which to deal with these aspects of reality. Consequently it ignored them and concentrated its attention upon such aspects of the world as it could deal with by means of arithmetic, geometry and the various branches of higher mathematics.

Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaninglessness lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of erotic or political passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning and value has been deliberately excluded, with ultimate reality.

It is worth while to quote in this context the words with which Hume closes his Enquiry: 'If we take in our hand any volume of divinity, or school metaphysics, for instance let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

Hume mentions only divinity and school metaphysics; but his argument would apply just as cogently to poetry, music, painting, sculpture and all ethical and religious teaching. Hamlet contains no abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number and no experimental reason concerning evidence; nor does the Hammerklavier Sonata, nor Donatello's David, nor the Too Te Ching y nor The Following of Christ. Commit them therefore to the flames: for they can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends. In this condition of apprehensive sobriety we are able to see that the contents of literature, art, music even in some measure of divinity and school metaphysics are not sophistry and illusion, but simply those elements of experience which scientists chose to leave out of account, for the good reason that they had no intellectual methods for dealing with them.

In the arts, in philosophy, in religion men are trying doubtless, without complete success to describe and explain the non-measurable, purely qualitative aspects of reality. Since the time of Galileo, scientists have admitted, sometimes explicitly, but much more often by implication, that they are incompetent to discuss such matters.

The scientific picture of the world is what it is because men of science combine this incompetence with certain special competences. They have no right to claim that this product of incompetence and specialization is a complete picture of reality. As a matter of historical fact, however, this claim has constantly been made.

The successive steps in the process of identifying an arbitrary abstraction from reality with reality itself have been described, very fully and lucidly, in Bum's excellent Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science; and it is therefore unnecessary for me to develop the theme any further. All that I need add is the fact that, in recent years, many men of science have come to realize that the scientific picture of the world is a partial one the product of their special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal systematically with aesthetic and moral values, religious experiences and intuitions of significance.

Unhappily, novel ideas become acceptable to the less intelligent members of society only with a very considerable time-lag. Sixty or seventy years ago the majority of scientists believed and the belief often caused them considerable distress that the product of their special incompetence was identical with reality as a whole. Today this belief has begun to give way, in scientific circles, to a different and obviously truer conception of the relation between science and total experience.

The masses, on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of today's scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world.

To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as Nationalism, Fascism and revolutionary Communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.

These last considerations raise an important question, which must now be considered in some detail. Does the world as a whole possess the value and meaning that we constantly attribute to certain parts of it (such as human beings and their works) ; and, if so, what is the nature of that value and meaning?

This is a question which, a few years ago, I should not even have posed. For, like so many of my contemporaries, I took it for granted that there was no meaning. This was partly due to the feet that I shared the common belief that the scientific picture of an abstraction from reality was a true picture of reality as a whole; partly also to other, non-intellectual reasons. I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless.

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