A Glance at Aldous Huxley

Frank W. Garrison

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, January-February 1938]

Something has happened to make the world appear more bearable to Aldous Huxley, in spite of the deepening chaos. An escape from frustration signalizes his new book of essays, Ends and Means, where an attempt is made to survey present-day problems and formulate an approach to a solution.

The contention that the means employed always determine the end arrived at, that a good end cannot be won by bad means, is as easy to accept in theory as it is hard to put into practice. In Huxley's case his conviction has led to an uncompromising pacifist stand, and a partial detachment from the tenets of Fabian Socialism, accepted by so many of his contemporaries. Yet he does not seem to have been influenced by the writers of the individualistic school who explored the science of political economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. There are no references to Quesnay or Turgot, to Cobden, Herbert Spencer or Henry George.

Huxley makes the common mistake of assuming an opposition of hostility between competition and co-operation. Cooperation consists in an exchange of goods and services, by individuals or companies. It includes trade and business relationships of all kinds, and it is clear that these relationships will increase as economic barriers are removed, i.e., as competition is promoted. If cooperation is to be enjoyed in its fullest extent, competition must be unrestricted. This is the goal of laissez-faire. It would put an end to prohibitions and partial laws, just as it would restore the natural flow of population and transform the present system of land tenure, bringing it into harmony with the ideal of equality of opportunity.

That access to land is the basis of independence is indicated by the history of the common lands in England, and is being illustrated afresh in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania where public opinion makes it possible for discharged miners to help themselves to coal seams on land that belong by statute to the owners of the mines. A revised land system might provide an alternative to factory work and thus, at a single stroke, modify the problems of low wages, long hours, and many phases of exploitation that seem to compel government interference. The ending of trade monopoly and land monopoly would, it is safe to predict, lessen the accumulation of wealth and power at one end of the scale while tending to remove the causes of poverty (with its concomitants of degeneration and crime) at the other end.

If Franz Oppenheimer is correct in his theory of the origin of the State, the real purpose of government is not to increase human happiness but to accumulate in the hands of those who control the political machinery as large a proportion as possible of the wealth produced. Military prowess and a swollen bureaucracy, essential parts of the system, are incompatible with self-government in industry and the extension of individual rights. Nothing would have a greater decentralizing effect than the repeal of privileges and the consequent opening of the field of economic opportunity to all manner of talents.

Huxley moves but hesitatingly in this direction. He sees equality best served by "a society where the means of production are owned cooperatively, where power is decentralized, and where the community is organized in a multiplicity of small, interrelated but, as far as may be, self-governing groups of mutually responsible men and women." It may be said in passing that there can be no monopoly of the means of production in the absence of land monopoly.

"If we want," he continues, "to realize the good ends proposed by the prophets, we shall do well to talk less about the claims of 'society' (which has always, as a matter of brute fact, been identified with the claims of a ruling oligarchy) and more about the rights and duties of small cooperating groups." Better still, to consider the rights of men and women, whose true interests are threatened at the threshold of life by State education, the logical end of which is now apparent in the countries ruled by dictators. Huxley calls attention to the fact that the decline of democracy coincides with the rise to political power of the second generation of the compulsorily educated proletariat.

As in the case of the long list of troubles associated with the industrial revolution and the factory system, the seeming need of State interference in education is but a symptom of the disease of poverty. The remedy is an enlargement of economic opportunity, by removing the man-made obstacles to self-employment and co-operation. Private education would help to sap the foundations of militarism, and would substitute diversity for standardization.

Equal freedom in the production and exchange of wealth would not only tend to establish harmony in industry, but would diminish international friction, by allowing people and goods to move freely, and by providing access to raw materials on even terms for all nations. To arrive at the millenium, something more than economic justice may be needed, but it is the first requisite, and each instalment will liberate a portion of the moral and intellectual forces by which the advance may be hastened.