Why Some People Want God Not to Exist - Aldous Huxley Speaks

On most Sunday mornings I swim up to consciousness while listening to BBC Radio 4. The thing that forces me into full wakefulness is an almost comically correct programme called, with great wit and originality,  ���The Sunday Programme��� . This hour is supposed to be about religion. But whenever I concentrate it always seems to be mainly about sex ��� sexual abuse by priests and leaders of religions of almost all denominations, or the travails of overt homosexuals who insist on adhering to, or seeking to be ministers in, churches which disapprove of overt homosexuality. Yesterday was no exception to this rule, so reliable that is actually comical.

 

But for a few brief moments it actually did discuss religion. An atheist (I forget his name) was pitted against the author of a new book on the 'New Atheism��� from which we suffer so much here on this blog, whether I write about it or not.

 

This was Andy Bannister, of whom I had not heard before. Nor have I read his book ���The Atheist Who Didn���t Exist��� .

 

I was astonished (because these discussions are usually hopelessly narrow)  to hear him referring to Thomas Nagel, the courteous and thoughtful philosopher who gives Atheism a good name and who openly discusses the fact that he and his fellow believers in Nogod *want* God not to exist. This is a point I tirelessly seek to make about the whole argument. It is indeed the only interesting part of it, which Mr Bunker and others decline to discuss.

 

Anyway, he mentioned that Aldous Huxley had also written on this point.  I have always admired Huxley���s bleak clarity and honesty, and made a brief Internet search to see what he might have been referring to.

 

I found a book called ���Ends and Means��� , subtitled ���An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realization���, published in London in 1937 by Chatto and Windus. There���s a 1941 edition online here

 

http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/religion.occult.new_age/occult.conspiracy.and.related/Huxley,%20Aldous%20-%20Ends%20And%20Means.pdf

 

The  interesting bit , for this part of the argument, begins at the bottom of page 269, where Huxley is discussing the reality of the ���meaning��� which we like to give to the world and our actions within it.

 

���This is a question���, says Huxley, ���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������

 

������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*(my emphasis). 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������

 

 

There then follows an interesting reflection the Marquis de Sade (one of whose disciples was Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer), perhaps the ultimate example of the man who wanted to live free of restraint (and ended up being restrained by authority as a result) .

 

���De Sade���s philosophy��� Huxley writes ���was the philosophy of meaninglessness carried to its logical conclusion. Values were illusory and ideals merely the inventions of cunning priests and kings. Sensations and animal pleasures alone possessed reality and were alone worth living for. There was no reason why anyone should have the slightest consideration for anyone else.���

 

Of course almost all of us recoil from such a view of the world, and , even if we wished God and hell out of existence, can construct systems of mutual solidarity, or at least apparent mutual solidarity,  which keep us and our fellow-creatures from raging down De Sade���s path, or Brady���s.

 

Yet like all pure, unashamed and unrestrained versions of any idea,  he is valuable in assessing its essence, just as one must know about Robespierre and Lenin when dealing with any Utopian, however mild and restrained. What if the restraints come off?  As Huxley says ��� Sade is not afraid to be a revolutionary to the bitter end. Not content with denying the particular system of values embodied in the ���ancien regime���,  he proceeds to deny the existence of any values, any idealism, any binding moral imperatives whatever��� De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.���

 

A little further on comes this ���No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behaviour, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community.���

 

And then ���The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves.���

 

And (remember this is 1937) ���The voluntary, as opposed to the intellectual, reasons for holding the doctrines of materialism, for example, may be predominantly erotic���.  As is usual in Huxley this is followed by an example, drawn from his immensely wide reading, typical of a pre-1914 educated person (such as Huxley was ��� his poor eyesight saved him from a muddy grave in Flanders) but rather shaming for those who pose as intellectuals in today���s world.

 

Huxley (after a justified swipe at Christianity���s frequent willingness to endorse things it shouldn���t)  continues ���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* (my emphasis); we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust.'

 

Then ���The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever���.

 

The next section, dealing with man���s later attempt to rediscover meaning in class or nation, should send a shudder down any spine. For once again, it is 1937.  I think I had better read the whole thing when I get the chance, but this passage shone with such startling and honest brilliance (compared with most of the dreary repetitious stuff which passes for debate on the subject) that I thought it worth reproducing here. Thank you, Radio 4.