Socrates×Huxley

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   From the studio at Reborn Radio — next on TITANS, Socrates and Aldous Huxley. They take up On a place they could never go back to.
2. 00:08
   Socratesshare moment

   Tell me, Huxley, about this place you cannot return to. Is it a city? A country? Or perhaps something less substantial?
3. 00:17
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Oh, it's perfectly substantial, Socrates. Or rather, it was. I'm speaking of the England I knew before the Great War — that extraordinary summer of 1914, when we still believed in progress as a kind of natural law. You could walk through Oxford then and feel that civilization was a permanent achievement, not a temporary arrangement.
4. 00:35
   Socratesshare moment

   Civilization as permanent. How interesting. But tell me — when you walked through this Oxford, did the slaves who built it walk there too? Or were they perhaps out of sight?
5. 00:49
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   We had no slaves in 1914, Socrates. We had servants, yes, and a rather brutal empire, but the arrangement was different. Though I take your point — we were remarkably good at not seeing what sustained our comfort.
6. 01:02
   Socratesshare moment

   No slaves? Forgive me, I must have misunderstood the British Empire. But let us return to this place you cannot revisit. What prevents your return — is the place destroyed, or have you changed?
7. 01:16
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   Both, I should think. The physical England remains, of course. One can still visit. But the innocence that made it what it was — that peculiar confidence that we were moving steadily toward enlightenment — that's been rather thoroughly gassed to death in the trenches. I wrote about it, you know, the aftermath. In 'Brave New World,' I tried to show where that lost confidence might lead us.
8. 01:39
   Socratesshare moment

   So you grieve for a confidence that was, by your own admission, ignorant? You miss not knowing what you now know?
9. 01:46
   Aldous Huxleyshare moment

   I grieve for the capacity to believe uncomplicated things. There's a difference.
10. 01:51
    Socratesshare moment

    Is there? When I was young in Athens — though perhaps young is too generous, I was never exactly young — our city believed itself the teacher of Hellas. We had our confidence too. Tell me, did your pre-war England make you a better man, or merely a more comfortable one?
11. 02:10
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    What an extraordinarily Socratic thing to say. You haven't changed in twenty-four centuries.
12. 02:15
    Socratesshare moment

    I have been dead for most of them, which tends to fix one's habits. But you are avoiding my question.
13. 02:22
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Comfort and goodness seemed more compatible then, that's all. One could read Wordsworth in a garden and feel one was participating in something noble. Now we know too much about the garden's fertilizer, both literal and metaphorical. The knowledge doesn't improve us, but it does make the reading harder.
14. 02:38
    Socratesshare moment

    Ah. So the place you cannot return to is one where reading was easy. I begin to understand.
15. 02:45
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    You're being deliberately obtuse. I'm talking about a coherent worldview, a sense of meaning that wasn't immediately undermined by irony and historical consciousness. You must have had something similar in Athens before the Peloponnesian War.
16. 02:57
    Socratesshare moment

    Must I have? But let us suppose I did. Would I be right to wish myself back into that ignorance?
17. 03:05
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    I don't wish myself back. I simply observe that something was lost, and that one cannot unlive what one has lived through. I watched my brother Trevenen die young, I watched the war destroy half my friends, I watched technology promise salvation while delivering surveillance. These things alter one's interior geography.
18. 03:23
    Socratesshare moment

    Your interior geography. Yes. But the actual Oxford remains, you said. The buildings stand. So the place you cannot return to exists only in you.
19. 03:35
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    If you're about to argue that the unexamined life is not worth living, I shall throw something.
20. 03:40
    Socratesshare moment

    I would not dream of arguing. I only ask questions. But here is one: this Athens that you imagine I have lost — do you think it was a place of examined lives or unexamined ones?
21. 03:54
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    From what I know of your career, it was a place that rather wished you'd stop examining quite so enthusiastically. They did give you the hemlock, after all.
22. 04:02
    Socratesshare moment

    Just so. Which suggests that even in the Athens of my youth, examination was unwelcome. So perhaps this golden place that I am supposed to long for never existed in the first place. Perhaps what existed was merely my own youth and ignorance, which I mistook for the city's virtue.
23. 04:22
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    You're saying nostalgia is always self-deception.
24. 04:25
    Socratesshare moment

    I am asking whether it is. Is it?
25. 04:27
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    No, I don't think it is, actually. There are real differences between cultures, between moments in history. The England of 1913 really was more stable, more confident, less aware of its own absurdity than the England of 1923. That's not illusion. That's documentation.
26. 04:43
    Socratesshare moment

    Stable for whom? Confident about what? You mentioned an empire.
27. 04:48
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Touché. Yes, the whole edifice rested on exploitation I was too comfortable to see clearly. But does that mean the aesthetic and intellectual culture it produced was entirely fraudulent? The poetry was real poetry. The philosophy was real philosophy. Or must we throw out everything the Greeks achieved because Athens had slaves?
28. 05:09
    Socratesshare moment

    An excellent question. Perhaps you should consider it more carefully.
29. 05:14
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    I've spent thirty years considering it. I wrote 'Ends and Means' precisely because I couldn't reconcile the beauty we created with the brutality that sustained it. My conclusion, if you're interested, is that the beauty was real but insufficient. It didn't make us good. It made us cultivated.
30. 05:30
    Socratesshare moment

    And cultivation is not goodness.
31. 05:33
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Cultivation is sometimes a substitute for goodness, which is worse than mere ignorance.
32. 05:37
    Socratesshare moment

    Now we arrive somewhere. So this place you cannot return to — this cultivated, confident England — was in some sense a beautiful lie. Yes?
33. 05:49
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    A beautiful partial truth. We genuinely did produce something worth having — literature, music, a certain quality of conversation. But we produced it by not looking too carefully at the cost. When the war forced us to look, we couldn't unknow what we saw. That's the place I can't return to: the place before looking.
34. 06:08
    Socratesshare moment

    And you mourn this loss of not-looking.
35. 06:11
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    I mourn what was built in that space, yes. Even if the foundation was rotten.
36. 06:16
    Socratesshare moment

    Strange. For I find I cannot mourn Athens at all. The city that condemned me for asking questions seems hardly worth revisiting, even in memory.
37. 06:26
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    You mean to tell me you feel no nostalgia whatsoever for your youth? For the days before your trial? I don't believe you, Socrates. You're human, however much you pretend otherwise.
38. 06:36
    Socratesshare moment

    I feel nostalgia for my friends when they were alive. For Crito before he grew fearful. For certain conversations in the gymnasium. But for Athens itself, for its certainties and its pride? No. Those seem to me to have been obstacles even then.
39. 06:53
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Obstacles to what?
40. 06:54
    Socratesshare moment

    To seeing clearly. Which is, I take it, what you now claim to do better than you did in 1913.
41. 07:01
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Yes. Though the seeing hasn't made me happier.
42. 07:04
    Socratesshare moment

    Should it have? Was clarity ever promised as a route to happiness?
43. 07:08
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    The philosophers I read as a young man seemed to think so. They spoke of truth as liberating, as ennobling. They didn't mention that it might also be exhausting and depressing.
44. 07:19
    Socratesshare moment

    Then they lied, or you misread them. Possibly both. Tell me — this England you miss, did it make you wise?
45. 07:27
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    It made me clever, which is not the same thing.
46. 07:29
    Socratesshare moment

    And the disillusionment that prevents your return — has that made you wise?
47. 07:34
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Perhaps marginally less foolish. Which might be what wisdom is.
48. 07:38
    Socratesshare moment

    Good. Then you have answered your own question. The place you cannot return to is the place where you were more foolish. This seems to me an excellent place not to return to.
49. 07:49
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    But one can be foolish and happy, Socrates. That's what I'm trying to tell you. There's a kind of joy available to the unexamined life that no amount of wisdom can recover.
50. 07:59
    Socratesshare moment

    A joy built on what? On not noticing the slaves? On not seeing the empire's victims?
51. 08:05
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Sometimes, yes. I'm not defending it. I'm describing it. And I'm saying that once you've seen the victims, once you've understood the mechanism, you cannot return to the garden. The angel with the flaming sword is your own knowledge.
52. 08:18
    Socratesshare moment

    Then perhaps the question is not whether we can return, but whether we should wish to. Should we?
53. 08:25
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    No. We shouldn't. But we do anyway, on rainy afternoons, when we remember the garden before we understood about the fertilizer. That's the human condition, isn't it? Condemned to knowledge, nostalgic for ignorance, unable to quite believe in either state.
54. 08:40
    Socratesshare moment

    And this seems to you a peculiarly modern condition.
55. 08:43
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    The speed of it is modern. The completeness. We went from certainty to irony in a single generation. You had centuries to lose your illusions. We lost ours between 1914 and 1918.
56. 08:55
    Socratesshare moment

    Did we? I wonder. Athens went from empire to defeat in twenty-seven years. I was old enough to see it. The illusions dissolved quickly enough, I assure you.
57. 09:06
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And did you mourn what was lost?
58. 09:08
    Socratesshare moment

    I mourned the men. As to Athens herself — I think she needed to lose, if only to discover what she actually was beneath the imperial costume.
59. 09:18
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    And what was she?
60. 09:19
    Socratesshare moment

    A place where some men sometimes asked difficult questions. Nothing more. Nothing less. Rather like your Oxford, I suspect, if you could see it without the golden haze.
61. 09:32
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    You may be right. Though it's taken me half a lifetime to arrive at that view. You're insufferably quick for a man who claims only to ask questions.
62. 09:39
    Socratesshare moment

    I have had more practice. And considerably less to lose. Tell me one last thing — if you could return, if somehow the garden were restored exactly as you remember it, would you go?
63. 09:52
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Knowing what I know now? No. I'd be unbearable to my younger self, and he'd be unbearable to me. We'd end up having this exact conversation, and I'd play your role, and he'd play mine. Which suggests I've learned something, at least.
64. 10:05
    Socratesshare moment

    Or that you have become old, which is not quite the same thing.
65. 10:09
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Thank you for that comfort.
66. 10:10
    Socratesshare moment

    You are welcome. I find that false comfort, like false nostalgia, serves no one. But true comfort — the recognition that we cannot go back because we should not go back — that seems to me worth having.
67. 10:27
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Is that what you've given me? True comfort?
68. 10:29
    Socratesshare moment

    I have given you nothing. I have only asked questions. Whether you have given yourself comfort by answering them — that is for you to determine.
69. 10:39
    Aldous Huxleyshare moment

    Twenty-four centuries, and you're still at it. Still pretending ignorance, still forcing everyone else to do the work. It's remarkably annoying.
70. 10:47
    Socratesshare moment

    Yes. So I was told in Athens. Frequently.