Huxley and Orwell

Aldous Huxley, the novelist of Brave New World (1932), came from the most distinguished sceptical family in England. He was the grandson of T. H. Huxley and brother to Julian Huxley — the biologist who became the first Director-General of UNESCO, a founder of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and in 1963 the first President of the British Humanist Association (today’s Humanists UK).

Brave New World is sometimes misread as an attack on science. In the story, a dictatorial World State has abolished religion, but also free inquiry, deep relationships, art, and even truth, and replaced them all with engineered contentment in the form of mood-altering euphoric drugs. Aldous’s own later path led away from his family’s strong humanist leanings and towards mysticism, as seen in The Perennial Philosophy and his psychedelic experiments recorded in The Doors of Perception. His final novel, Island (1962), nevertheless sketched a humane, this-worldly utopia of his own.

George Orwell was clear about what he was: a humanist. In his 1947 essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’ he framed the deepest division in human thought as the one between religious and humanist attitudes to life — irreconcilable, he argued, because in the end one must choose between this world and the next — and left no doubt which side he stood on. The humanist attitude, he wrote, held that ‘the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life’. In ‘Reflections on Gandhi’ he made the same point, observing that the choice lies between gods and humanity, and that his fellow activists for a better world had, knowingly or not, in effect chosen the latter.

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) put his humanist convictions into a work of political speculative fiction, drawing consciously on Zamyatin and satirising Communism. The novel imagined a future regime whose ultimate target was the idea of objective truth itself. If the Party could make two and two equal five, everything else follows. His protagonist Winston Smith’s doomed resistance rests on the conviction that reality exists outside the mind, and that no authority — party, priesthood, or Big Brother — can decree it otherwise.