How Highbrows Killed Culture

How Highbrows Killed Culture [commentarymagazine.com]

by Fred Siegel

Huxley, writing in a 1927 issue of Harper’s, called for an aristocracy of intellect, and in a slim volume entitled Proper Studies, published the same year, he called for culling the masses through negative eugenics. “The active and intelligent oligarchies of the ideal state do not yet exist,” he told Harper’s readers, “but the Fascist party in Italy, the Communist party in Russia, the Kuomintang in China are still their inadequate precursors.” In the future, he insisted, “political democracy as now practiced, will be unknown; our descendants will want a more efficient and rational form of government.” He warned America that while it was wedded to “the old-fashioned democratic and humanitarian ideas of the eighteenth century…the force of circumstances will be too powerful for them” and they, too, would come to be governed by a new aristocracy of spirituality and intellect.

In 1931, as Huxley was composing Brave New World, he wrote newspaper articles arguing that “we must abandon democracy and allow ourselves to be ruled dictatorially by men who will compel us to do and suffer what a rational foresight demands.” It was Huxley’s view that “dictatorship and scientific propaganda may provide the only means of saving humanity from the misery of anarchy.” Many of the elements in the “brave new world” that contemporary readers find jarring actually appealed to Huxley. The sorting of individuals by type, eugenic breeding, and hierarchic leadership were policies for which he had proselytized. The problem with the world he created is the lack of spiritual insight, spiritual greatness, on the part of its leader.

The problem with the world he created is the lack of spiritual insight, spiritual greatness, on the part of its leader.

“dictatorship and scientific propaganda may provide the only means of saving humanity from the misery of anarchy.”