The tenuous truce between Hamas and Israel is shattered. Without either party clearly recognising the right of the other not only to exist but also to occupy part of the disputed holy land. Are we back in a situation of the never-ending war? I alluded to it in my previous column referring to Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza and to Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Huxley, the author of Brave New World, passed away sixty years back on November 22.
Despite its evocative and timely title, Eyeless in Gaza, Huxley’s ponderous tome tells us little about the fundamental problems that plague our present times. Although Huxley’s most ambitious novel, it seems somewhat disconnected, some might even say incoherent, if not too self-indulgent. Himself going blind like Milton and the Biblical hero Samson, was Huxley also reflecting, like his protagonist, Anthony Beavis, on the futility of human endeavour in an age of great turbulence and uncertainty?
With his most celebrated, futuristic dystopian exploration Brave New World (1932) already behind him, Huxley moved to California in 1937 to escape the impending war in Europe. Having lived through and witnessed the colossal destruction wreaked by the Great War, Huxley had become a conscious pacifist. He veered to the view that the only way the world could be saved is if enough people became enlightened by the practice of self-transformation. How to achieve this? By following what he termed the “perennial philosophy,” already outlined in the wisdom of the ancient Hindus and Buddhists. Perennial philosophy, we might surmise, is actually Huxley’s adaptation of the Hindu idea of Sanatana Dharma.
Huxley, along with many of his friends and fellow intellectuals like Gerald Heard and Christopher Isherwood, became a close associate, if not disciple, of the charismatic Ramakrishna Mission monk, Swami Prabhavananda (1893-1976). Prabhavananda, who moved to the US in 1923, went on to found the Vedanta Society of Southern California, better known as the Hollywood Temple. I have myself had the privilege of giving a talk there on “Swami Vivekananda and Universal Religion.” Huxley was also a lifelong friend to Jiddu Krishnamurti, who also spent the World War II years in the Ojai mountains near Los Angeles.
To return to Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, there is not a single reference to being eyeless, let alone to Gaza. Obviously, the title was meant to be symbolic and evocative, rather than accurate or descriptive. Instead, it is to Huxley’s later novel, Devils in Loudun (1952), more specifically to its Epilogue, that we must turn. Huxley argues that it is “man’s deep-seated urge to self- transcendence” that explains much of our endeavours. Without understanding or acknowledging this drive, “we cannot hope to make sense of our own particular period of history or indeed of history in general, of life as it was lived in the past and as it is lived today.”
But, for most part, we humans are unable to “take the hard, ascending way,” but seek, instead, “bogus liberation” and “grace-substitutes.” These include not only alcohol and other intoxicants, but also “elementary sexuality.” Sadly, these methods of downward self-transcendence are disastrous: “what seems a god is actually a devil, what seems a liberation is in fact an enslavement.”
But possibly even more dangerous than these is the cult of violence that accompanies “crowd-delirium” and “herd-intoxication.” These can easily descend into “maniacal violence” directed against a targeted group, such as “to liquidate an unpopular minority.” We have seen this blood lust throughout history, in the repeated genocides against those branded as “pagans,” “heretics,” “unbelievers,” “kafirs” for whatever reason, groups deemed fit and identified for slaughter. The tragic story of the worldwide persecution of Jews, to which India is a notable exception, reached its frightening and horrifying finale in last century’s Holocaust, which claimed some six million lives.
After the end of World War II and the defeat of Nazi Germany, European anti-Semitism, it would seem, did not end. It was only exported to the Middle East. With the formation of Israel, it was the turn of Arabs and, by extension, of other Muslims, to become the world’s leading Jew haters. Seeking their total extirpation and annihilation, several Arab states fought numerous bloody battles against the fledgling state of Israel. However, Israel has not only survived, but emerged victorious from all these conflicts.
Huxley shows how dangerous “herd-poison” and “crowd-intoxication” can be. No wonder, both church and state are hesitant to encourage it lest the monster thus unleashed slips out of control as we have seen in so-called revolutionary movements, whether Marxist or Islamist, all over the world. Crowd frenzy seems an essential component to induce, exploit, and manipulate masses to commit heinous acts that they would otherwise hesitate to embark upon.
Why? Because chaos and violence are the stock in trade of these manipulators, with ideology and theology serving the fuel the fires of hatred and violence. As Huxley observes. “No such scruples restrain the revolutionary leader, who hates the status quo and has only one wish — to create a chaos on which, when he comes to power, he may impose a new kind of order… he exploits it to the frantic and demoniac limit.”
“In order to escape from the horrors of insulated selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go neither up nor down, but sideways.” Horizontal self-transcendence is the normal “bourgeois” way of romantic love, marriage, procreation, family, career, money-making, hobbies, social service, philanthropy, and so on. Nothing to be laughed or mocked at because human society and well-being depend on it.
Given that only a few will choose the steep and lonely mountain path to self-realisation, it is our compulsive, even fatal attraction, to the downward paths of self-expansion and transgression that are most dangerous. Of these, the cult of violence and fanatical hatred for the Other, whether in the Hamas-Israel fight or elsewhere, is perhaps the most dangerous and destabilising in our times. All the more reason that Sanatana Dharma, as Huxley believed, is the way to go for humankind.
For it is only the pluralism of Sanatana Dharma which not only offers space to the Other but even goes as far as to assert that, ultimately, there are no Others. There is only the Self. And we are all of us various selves of this Self.
The writer is an author, columnist, and professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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