Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley (100 books to read txt) 📕

“But it’s cowardice to run away,” Chelifer insisted. “One has no right to ignore what for ninety-nine out of every hundred human beings is reality⁠—even though it mayn’t actually be the real thing. One has no right.”

“Why not?” asked Calamy. “One has a right to be six foot nine inches high and to take sixteens in boots. One has a right, even though there are not more than three or four in every million like one. Why hasn’t one the right to be born with an unusual sort of mind, a mind that can’t be content with the surface-life of appearances?”

“But such a mind is irrelevant, a freak,” said Chelifer. “In real life⁠—or if you prefer it, in the life that we treat as if it were real⁠—it’s the other minds that preponderate, that are the rule. The brutish minds. I repeat, you haven’t the right to run away from that. If you want to know what human life is, you must be courageous and live as the majority of human beings actually do live. It’s singularly revolting, I assure you.”

“There you are again with your sentimentality,” complained Calamy. “You’re just the common variety of sentimentalist reversed. The ordinary kind pretends that so-called real life is more rosy than it actually is. The reversed sentimentalist gloats over its horrors. The bad principle is the same in both cases⁠—an excessive preoccupation with what is illusory. The man of sense sees the world of appearances neither too rosily nor too biliously and passes on. There is the ulterior reality to be looked for; it is more interesting.⁠ ⁠…”

“Then you’d condemn out of hand all the countless human beings whose life is passed on the surface?”

“Of course not,” Calamy replied. “Who would be such a fool as to condemn a fact? These people exist; it’s obvious. They have their choice of Mr. Cardan’s eighty-four thousand paths to salvation. The path I choose will probably be different from others. That’s all.”

“Very likely,” said Mr. Cardan, who had been engaged in lighting a cigar, “very likely they’ll find the road to their salvation more easily than you will find the road to yours. Being simpler, they’ll have within them fewer causes for disharmony. Many of them are still practically in the tribal state, blindly obeying the social code that has been suggested into them from childhood. That’s the pre-lapsarian state; they’ve not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil⁠—or rather it’s the whole tribe, not the individual, that has eaten. And the individual is so much a part of the tribe that it doesn’t occur to him to act against its ordinances, any more than it occurs to my teeth to begin violently biting my tongue of their own accord. Those simple souls⁠—and there are still a lot of them left, even among the motor buses⁠—will find their way to salvation very easily. The difficulty begins when the individuals begin to get thoroughly conscious of themselves apart from the tribe. There’s an immense number of people who ought to be tribal savages, but who have been made conscious of their individuality. They can’t obey tribal morality blindly and they’re too feeble to think for themselves. I should say that the majority of people in a modern educated democratic state are at that stage⁠—too conscious of themselves to obey blindly, too inept to be able to behave in a reasonable manner on their own account. Hence that delightful contemporary state of affairs which so rejoices the heart of our friend Chelifer. We fall most horribly between two stools⁠—the tribe and the society of conscious intelligent beings.”

“It’s comforting to think,” said Chelifer, “that modern civilization is doing its best to reestablish the tribal regime, but on an enormous, national and even international scale. Cheap printing, wireless telephones, trains, motor cars, gramophones and all the rest are making it possible to consolidate tribes, not of a few thousands, but of millions. To judge from the Middle Western novelists, the process seems already to have gone a long way in America. In a few generations it may be that the whole planet will be covered by one vast American-speaking tribe, composed of innumerable individuals, all thinking and acting in exactly the same way, like the characters in a novel by Sinclair Lewis. It’s a most pleasing speculation⁠—though, of course,” Chelifer added guardedly, “the future is no concern of ours.”

Mr. Cardan nodded and puffed at his cigar. “That’s certainly a possibility,” he said. “A probability almost; for I don’t see that it’s in the least likely that we shall be able to breed a race of beings, at any rate within the next few thousand years, sufficiently intelligent to be able to form a stable non-tribal society. Education has made the old tribalism impossible and has done nothing⁠—nor ever will do anything⁠—to make the non-tribal society possible. It will be necessary, therefore, if we require social stability, to create a new kind of tribalism, on the basis of universal education for the stupid, using the press, wireless and all the rest as the instruments by which the new order is to be established. In a generation or two of steady conscious work it ought to be possible, as Chelifer says, to turn all but two or three hundred in every million of the inhabitants of the planet into Babbitts.”

“Perhaps a slightly lower standard would be necessary,” suggested Chelifer.

“It’s a remarkable thing,” pursued Mr. Cardan meditatively, “that the greatest and most influential reformer of modern times, Tolstoy, should also have proposed a reversion to tribalism as the sole remedy to civilized restlessness and uncertainty of purpose. But while we propose a tribalism based on the facts⁠—or should I say the appearances?”⁠—Mr. Cardan twinkled amicably at Calamy⁠—“of modern life, Tolstoy proposed a return to the genuine, primordial, uneducated, dirty tribalism of the savage. That won’t do, of course; because it’s hardly probable, once they have tasted it, that men will allow le