Brian Smith

(Boston University)

ELEMENTS AND CAUSES: DEDUCING THE PRESENT FROM THE PAST IN ALDOUS HUXLEY’S GREY EMINENCE

n a 1942 BBC broadcast, E. M. Forster described Grey Eminence as “a humane book and a very wise one. It reminds us that history is a single process, and that the men who lived hundreds of years ago in

India, or three hundred years ago in France, or who live to-day are all in the same storm-tossed boat.”1 Being in the same “storm-tossed boat,” however, says nothing of causality or moral responsibility. We are certainly not all in the boat at the same time; and some of us may have played a greater role in the reconstruction or destruction of the boat than others. What do we do then when we observe that the boat has been made fatally unstable, damaged beyond repair? How do we talk about the responsibility or culpability of those who have gone before us? And what are we to make of this “single process” of history? Does this suggest a logical and plainly deducible sequence of causes and effects? Huxley raises these questions in part due to the suspicion that the atrocities of the early twentieth century might find their origin in the ruin brought about by the Thirty Years’ War. Huxley writes, that “[i]n the long chain of crime and madness which binds the present world to its past, one of the most fatally important links was the Thirty Years’ War.”2

Grey Eminence, then, is not only a study of the origins of this long chain of violence and madness, it is primarily a study of one man’s role in this calamity. And while “many there were who worked to forge this link,” Huxley pays special attention to the fact that the present is bound to the life of an obscure and easily overlooked political conspirator; in fact “none worked harder” to forge this link than Father Joseph, the chief political advisor and confidant of Cardinal Richelieu, the Chief Minister to Louis XIII (GE, 18).3 Father Joseph is interesting to Huxley for two primary reasons (both of which are noteworthy in that they see the present in the past): first, he is one of the earliest and clearest advocates of totalitarian power politics; he embodies the totalitarian spirit. Huxley explains that “Richelieu’s policy was not judicious and, when continued after his death, resulted in the totalitarianism of Louis XIV” (GE, 309). If, say, communication or transportation in the seventeenth century was as efficient as it was in the twentieth century, Father Joseph would be known

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for initiating a full-fledged totalitarian regime. And second, Father Jo-seph’s life represents a striking paradox, Huxley argues:

Doubly instructive in the fields of politics and religion, [Father Joseph’s] life is further interesting as the strangest of psychologi-cal riddles—the riddle of a man passionately concerned to know God, acquainted with the highest forms of Christian gnosis, having experienced at least the preliminary states of mystical union, and at the same time involved in court intrigue and international diplomacy, busy with political propaganda, and committed whole-heartedly to a policy whose immediate result in death, in misery, in moral degradation were plainly to be seen in every part of seventeenth-century Europe, and from whose remoter consequences the world is still suffering today. (GE, 19)

The way in which Huxley resolves this paradox points to the two-horned nature of Father Joseph’s role in European history. Not only did Father Joseph offer a kind of crude precedence to twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, but the brand of mysticism he practised and propagated—that which could accommodate both vivid and authentic mystical experiences and brutal politics—served to undermine the only genuine antidote to the push to totalitarianism. Huxley writes:

A world made unsafe for mysticism and theocentric religion is a world where the only proved method of transforming persona-lity will be less and less practised, and where fewer and fewer people will possess any direct, experimental knowledge of reality to set up against the false doctrine of totalitarian anthropo-centrism and the pernicious ideas and practices of nationalistic pseudo-mysticism. (GE, 311)

Huxley’s initial project of deducing the present from the past is tantalizing in that he hints at bypassing the very thing that most historical narratives suffer from: over-simplification, which is the temptation to reduce men to “convenient abstractions” (GE, 17). Those historians who focus on immediate ‘causes,’ like treaty entanglements and the rise of nationalism, to explain World War I are not casting a wide-enough histo-rical net. Huxley suggests that to really understand the twentieth century, we must appreciate and understand some of the causes and conditions which gave rise to the twentieth century itself. But this kind of pattern-seeking is problematic due to its very success; there are altogether too many neglected historical threads with some relevance to the world as we currently know it. Emphasizing the causal relevance of any one historical player in particular (in a morally relevant way), such as Father Joseph, comes across as arbitrary. This, at least, seems to be E. M. Forster’s reading of Huxley’s work. In another BBC broadcast, he said:

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Although the two books are different [West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Huxley’s Grey Eminence] […] they have one feature in common: they both seek for a pattern in European politics and for an explanation of our current present disasters. Mr. Huxley finds the explanation 300 years ago in the policy of Richelieu, who entered the Thirty Years’ War and created misery and revengefulness in Germany. Mrs. West finds it 500 years ago, when the Serbs went down before the Turks. They cannot both be right. And I am tempted to think they are both wrong. (BBC, 192)

Forster does not explain why he thinks Huxley is wrong for seeking out such patterns. He seems to allude to the embarrassment of riches causal narratives like this offer when he suggests: “They cannot both be right.” There are altogether too many plausible and yet contradictory historical narratives that can be intelligently and convincingly spun. He goes on to quote H.A.L. Fisher who questions the value of such pattern-seeking in his preface to History of Europe (1939):

“Men wiser and more learned than I discern in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are con-cealed from me. I can only see one emergency falling on another, as wave follows wave, only one great fact with respect of which, since it is unique, there can be no generalisation, only our safe rule for the historian: that he should recognise in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unseen.” (BBC, 192)

Expounding on Fisher, Forster says: “I don’t think we can ever explain the present by the past, for the simple reason that we don’t know enough about the past” (BBC, 192). This is strikingly close to a claim made by the German political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who explains:

Causality, however, is an altogether alien and falsifying category in the historical sciences. Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number of ‘causes’ which we may assign to it (one only has to think of the grotesque disparity between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ in an event like the First World War), but this past itself comes into being only with the event itself. Only when something irrevocable has happened can we even try to trace its history backward. The event illuminates its own past; it can never be deduced from it.4

Perhaps Forster and Arendt’s observations point to some of the con-fusion as to just what Huxley is trying to accomplish in painting this retrolinear account of a world at war, placing the locus of significant causal determination in the seventeenth century: there are times when Huxley speaks as though the present merely illuminates the past, and

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other times he seems to be deducing his contemporary crises from a reductive set of historical facts.

The distinction that Forster and Arendt make is important because seeing the present as deduced from the past leads to rather odd moral claims, for instance, that Father Joseph bears some kind of remote individual responsibility for the Thirty Years’ War, which, to Huxley, causally ties him to World War I and twentieth-century totalitarianism. Inasmuch as the notion of responsibility rides on the plausibility and strength of causal connections—the definitive linking a certain action or intention to a crime or injustice—one would be required to attribute responsibility to those historical players who bear a causally significant relationship with the present. Indeed, just what is the nature and significance of Father Joseph’s ‘remote’ responsibility? One doubts whether this is a useful moral category, if for no other reason than it attenuates less remote categories of moral responsibility which are perhaps more pressing or urgent. But it also fails to take seriously the complications associated with the problem of “moral luck,” which is, as Thomas Nagel explains, “where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control.”5 Indeed, the number of strikingly arbitrary historical contingencies one can identify makes it so much more difficult to speak of a hard and fast causal historical thread, much less a causal thread that traces moral weight deep into the past. Take, for instance, the following reflection made by the historian Barbara Tuchman:

Suppose Woodrow Wilson had not been president of the United States in 1914 but instead Theodore Roosevelt, who had been his opponent in the election of 1912. Had that been the case, America might have entered the war much earlier […] with possible shortening of the war and incalculable effects on history. Well, it happens that among the anarchists in my book The Proud Tower is an obscure Italian named Migueal Angiolillo whom nobody remembers but who shot dead Premier Canavos of Spain in 1897. Canavos was a strong man who was just about to succeed in quelling the rebels in Cuba when he was assassin-ated. Had he lived, there might have been no extended Cuban insurrection for Americans to get excited about, no Spanish-American War, no San Juan Hill, no Rough Riders, no Vice Presidency for Theodore Roosevelt to enable him to succeed when another accident, another anarchist, another unpredictable human being, killed McKinley. If Theodore had never been president, there would have been no third party in 1912 to split the Republicans, and Woodrow Wilson would not have been elected. The speculations from that point on are limitless.6

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Whatever Father Joseph’s relationship is with the present, there clearly have been too many unlucky turns in history, too many peculiar twists and unfortunate accidents to talk about his causal significance and responsi-bility in any realistic way. Seeing the past as merely illuminated by the present, on the other hand, calls upon us to reject the idea that we can displace any of the moral weight of our current failings onto those who have gone before us. This point of view also suggests that there is no process or lesson of history to be grasped. There is, in fact, only a seemingly endless supply of lessons; and each of these lessons appeals to a seemingly endless variety of antecedent elements to which our now contingent present pays tribute. The difference between these two ways of looking at the past and present is the difference between pinpointing hard and fast ‘causes’ that reduce the past to a teleological history of mankind (that if we knew enough about how causality works, if we could quantify enough of the relevant historical pieces, then we could see where history is leading us) and the rejection of this teleological mindset—that we are better off thinking of history not as “a story with many ends and no beginnings” but rather a story with many beginnings and no definitive ends (“UP,” 320). In Huxley’s own work this manifests itself as the attempt to tell a convincing narrative—digging up those precise causal pivots that adequately explain the starkly reified scope of human ignorance and darkness that consumed Europe and the rest of the world around the time of Grey Eminence’s publication in 1941—and the impulse to cultivate space for human potentialities. The former commits us to unappealing notions of remote responsibility; the latter leaves us open to the ever present possibility of unprecedented new beginnings and that we might, in Huxley’s words, “escape from history.”7

The ability to tease out a simple linear thread, tying the policies of Father Joseph to, say, the German invasion of Belgium in August 1914, or the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, is, in some respects, a reassuring proposition—anything to anchor or contextualize the brutal nihilism of war to a discernible sequence of events, that there might be some impetus of history at work and not meaningless cruelty. In a letter to his brother, Julian, Huxley explains that Father Joseph’s “frightful power policies […] resulted in the destruction of a third of the population of Central Europe, guaranteed the rise of Prussia as the head of the German confederation and paved the way for Louis XIV, the Revolution, Napoleon and all the rest.”8 But upon closer inspection, as tempting and reassuring as this kind of historicizing may be, we must remain skeptical, as Forster does. In certain respects, Huxley seems to realize this recasting

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of history is overreaching in that he nominally retracts or mutes the causal links he invites us to momentarily imagine as commensurable:

If we wish to establish the determining conditions of, say, the war of 1914-1918, we are compelled, even for such purely practical purposes as the framing of future policies, to consider a great variety of “causes,” past and contemporary, local and remote, psychological, sociological, political, economic. To determine the full list of these practically significant “causes,” their relative importance, their mode of interaction—this is an exceedingly difficult task. So difficult, indeed, as to be quite beyond the capacity of the human mind in its present state of development. (GE, 16-17)

He goes on to write, however, that this has never “deterred men and women from confidently propounding solutions” (17). What is confi-dently propounded might be seen as the cheap causal connections that reduce the geo-political complexities of World War I to, say, the problem of alliances and treaty entanglements or the rise of nationalism (or, as others put it, the failure of nationalism). But, Huxley goes on to explain, however, that “[n]o episode in history can be entirely irrelevant to any other subsequent episode” (18). He seems to imply that some propoun-ding is in order because granting the interconnectivity of historical episodes, the actions of a seventeenth-century friar likely have some relevant bearing on the world as we understand it. But this does not fully explain why Huxley believes that “if we look into [Father Joseph’s] biography a little closely” we will find that “his thoughts and feelings and desires were among the significant determining conditions of the world in which we live today” (18).

By appealing to “significant determining conditions” from the seven-teenth century to explain “the world in which we live today,” Huxley appears to retract his initial warning against “confidently propounding solutions.” He seems to be suggesting that it is simply an unfortunate but necessary fact that we must proceed with the project of painting causal pictures of events like World War I and II, even though it is quite beyond our capacity—that we are left with the imaginative task of teasing out plausible antecedent threads for those same events. Huxley claims that even though we have a limited historical view, we can understand enough of the practically significant causes of the complex current events we face to construct a partially complete causal history for “practical purposes,” i.e, “to frame policies at least a little less suicidal than those we have pursued in the past” (GE, 17-18). But it is unclear how this avoids the risk of confidently propounding solutions to these historical events (as in

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being able to articulate what definitively caused what). And it is certainly unclear if there is anything altogether practical about deducing the present from the past, because, to a certain extent, you simply prefigure your solutions to historical problems in the causal assumptions you make. At least this is Tuchman’s warning against the temptation to quantify historical data with the hope of illuminating reliable historical patterns. She writes: “Everything depends on the naming of the categories and the assigning of facts to them, and this depends on the quantifier’s individual judgment at the very base of the process” (“HGF,” 248).

Huxley never uses the word ‘inevitable’ in relation to the crises of the early part of the twentieth century. Its impact, however, is felt in this constantly blurred distinction between deducing the present from the past and seeing the past as merely illuminated by the present. For instance, Huxley argues: “By breaking the power of Austria, Richelieu and Father Joseph had made sure that, when Germany came to be united, it should not be united as a federated, non-national and not wholly German empire, but as a highly centralized, purely Teutonic nation” (GE, 293). What is so odd about this picture is that in order to weigh Father Joseph’s responsibility for the conditions that gave rise to World War I, we are forced to arbitrarily shift the burden of agency away from certain histo-rical characters and onto others. It is not clear why Father Joseph’s thoughts and feelings and desires bear special causal weight. Again, with historical deduction comes the problem of moral responsibility. And when responsibility is considered in relation to something as vast and diffusive as the socio-political evolution of nearly three hundred years of European history, it loses its moral force, enough so as to render the term meaningless. This is because if one squints hard enough a case can be made that just about anyone of socio-political influence in the sixteenth or seventeenth century could be construed as bearing some responsibility for the context in which we find ourselves today. This is what Heidegger calls the “dictatorship of the they” (das Man), that we do not supply our own bases for action, and that we inherit and are born comported to a world that is not of our own making.9 But thinking of our forbears in the context of some vague phenomenological backdrop is not what Huxley is implying here. His observations court a kind of loose historical deter-minism.

Two passages in Grey Eminence come to mind here. First, when describing the political ambition of Albrecht von Wallenstein, the (Czech) supreme commander of the armies of the Hapsburg Monarchy, Huxley says: “Crusading, for Wallenstein, was merely an excuse for the Drang nach

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Osten. That he talked of his vast projects in terms of the Cross and the Crescent was merely a historical accident and a matter of convenience” (GE, 216). This passage stands out for Huxley’s use of the phrase Drang nach Osten, an expression coined by German nationalists in the late nine-teenth century, referring to the program of German expansion into Slavic lands. This expression was later coopted by the Nazi regime to describe the policy of conquering and occupying central European Slavic and northern European Baltic territories. One might read this as an insigni-ficant parallelism with no real force behind it; one might also just as easily find in this off-handed remark an insinuation of latent Prussian / German militarism and expansionism that was somehow endemic to the regional character and of the notion that this cultural seed is what gave rise to two world wars. Recall that as generalissimo, Wallenstein stood for a symbol of the Hapsburg Monarchy’s military prowess and might. It is difficult to underscore exactly how problematic this kind of retrofitting of history is, that the spirit or logic of Drang nach Osten was somehow present in the seventeenth century, albeit in some nascent though recognizable form. Injecting this politically loaded term into the past comes dangerously close to insinuating what Karl Jaspers calls talk of a “‘natural’ national charac-ter”10—that the Nazis were merely appealing to a well-established, region-nal tradition, which on the whole was nothing worse than what Wallen-stein aspired to. Jaspers goes on to explain that such talk “is a refuge of ignorance and an instrument of false evaluations—whether appreciative or depreciative” largely because “we always describe national character in terms of arbitrarily selected historical phenomena” (QGG, 81). When Huxley explains that Drang nach Osten manifested itself in Wallenstein’s military ambition as war between “Cross and Crescent,” and that this was a matter of historical accident, he is implicitly alluding to this dubious “national character” line of thinking.

Secondly, Huxley chides Bishop Stubbs’ condemnation of “historians who amuse themselves by fixing on individuals or groups of men responsibility for the remoter consequences of their actions” (GE, 294). Stubbs argues, Huxley writes, that fixating on responsibility for the remoter consequences of certain actions is “‘not merely unjust but [shows an] ignorance of the plainest aphorisms of common sense, … to make an historical character responsible for evils and crimes, which have resulted from his actions by processes which he could not foresee’” (294-295). Huxley responds that this is “sound as far as it goes; but it does not go very far” (295). Huxley contends that even “though it is impossible to foresee the remoter consequences of any given course of action, it is by

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no means impossible to foresee, in the light of past historical experience, the sort of consequences that are likely, in a general way, to follow certain sorts of acts” (295). In other words, “Father Joseph […] had read enough history to know that policies like that which Richelieu and he were pursuing are seldom, even when nominally successful, productive of lasting good to the parties by whom they were framed” (295). What is Huxley actually arguing here? Is this really a refutation of Bishop Stubbs? It seems as though Huxley is saying nothing more than that we should consider Father Joseph responsible for the things he could plausibly foresee, for instance, that large-scale war and domestic tyranny would lead to immense human suffering. But it certainly does not follow that Father Joseph’s responsibility for perpetrating immense human suffering forces us to conclude that he is therefore remotely responsible for the unforesee-able and indeed unprecedented way in which history culminated in World War I and twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Another problem with framing historical problems this way is that it precludes the possibility for the genuinely unforeseeable and the unprece-dented. Arendt, for instance, argues that the emergence of twentieth-century totalitarianism fundamentally altered political categories as we know them. She writes: “The originality of totalitarianism is horrible, not because some new ‘idea’ came into the world, but because its very actions constitute a break with our traditions; they have clearly exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment” (“UP,” 309-310). This ‘explosion of categories’ suggests that the conditions of human experience might, at all times, be susceptible to the kinds of radical upheavals that gained traction in the early part of the twentieth century—that we must, at least, be open to this possibility. This is specifically in contrast to what Huxley believes the lesson of history to be. In The Devils of Loudun, he writes:

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consists in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different. […] But however great, however important for thought and technology, for social organization and behavior, the differences between then and now are always peripheral. At the center remains a fundamental identity. Insofar as they are incarnated minds, subject to physical decay and death, capable of pain and pleasure, driven by craving and abhorrence and oscillating between the desire for self-assertion and the desire for self-transcendence, human beings are faced, at every time and place, with the same problems, and are confron-ted by the same temptations and are permitted by the Order of Things to make the same choice between unregeneracy and enlightenment.11

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What such a characterization fails to appreciate is the radical and unprece-dented degradation historical totalitarian regimes instantiated (in terms of both scale and effect), and that part of the explosion of categories of political thought can be tied to the emergence of a new biopolitical class of (sub)citizens—the ‘living dead’ of the concentration camps and gulags. Arendt writes: “The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of elimi-nating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing.”12 In short, humans were transformed into “uncom-plaining animals” (OT, 439). The ‘free’ citizen bore a similar mark of inhumanity and degradation (this is to say the ‘free’ citizen was merely free from the camp—in many cases life outside the camps offered no better conditions; consider the Holodomor terror-famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s which claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainians). Arendt goes on to explain that “the aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any” (OT, 468); and furthermore, “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist” (OT, 474). This exposes the cruel fact that as a matter of historical record, human beings are not all faced with the same problems and temptations at every time and place. To appreciate this is to appreciate the radical and unprecedented evil that twentieth-century totalitarianism was.13

To acknowledge that such a radical shift or break in human history took place is to acknowledge the fact that similarities of tactics and means between older systems of violence and terror and twentieth-century totali-tarianism are not commensurable. Indeed, twentieth-century totalitari-anism may have been the first historical instance where violence was not a means to a political end; it became an end in and of itself. Twentieth-century totalitarians eschewed the efficient and utilitarian violence of classical despots and tyrants. Arendt explains:

Totalitarian use of violence and especially of terror […] is distinct […] not because it so far transcends past limits, and not merely because one cannot very well call the organized and mechanized regular extermination of whole groups of whole people ‘murder’ or even ‘mass murder,’ but because its chief characteristic is the very opposite of all police and spy terror of the past. All the similarities between totalitarian and traditional forms of tyranny, however striking they may be, are similarities of technique, and apply only to the initial stages of totalitarian

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rule. Regimes become truly totalitarian only when they have left behind their revolutionary phase and the techniques needed for the seizure and the consolidation of power.14

This is to say that non-utilitarian violence is integrated into the very operative structure of the totalitarian regime, and that one should be cautious of reducing totalitarian violence to its revolutionary phase. But Arendt is also suggesting that twentieth-century totalitarianism is not reducible to seventeenth-century causes, or to any causes for that matter. She writes: “The elements of totalitarianism comprise its origins, if by origins we do not understand ‘causes.’ Elements never by themselves cause anything. They become origins of events if and when they suddenly crystalize into fixed and definite forms” (“UP,” 325, note 12). This is why historians, like Jacques Barzun, have come to see the reign of Louis XIV as an example of “absolute monarchy” rather than proto-totalitarianism.15 Making the distinction between ‘absolute monarchy’ and ‘totalitarianism’ is important because it pays tribute to the irreducible historical fact of twentieth-century totalitarianism (by 1941 Huxley likely only had a small inkling of the terror which this entailed). Arendt explains:

Absolute monarchy, no doubt, was a very different affair in Spain, in France, in England, in Prussia; still it was everywhere the same form of government. Decisive in our context is that totalitarian form of government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the ‘theoreticians,’ for total domination is the only form of govern-ment with which coexistence is not possible. Hence, we have every reason to use the word ‘totalitarian’ sparingly and prudently. (OT, xxviii)

Arendt’s call to sparingly and prudently apply the term ‘totalitarian’ is a call to take stock of just how unprecedented and terrible the historical reality of totalitarianism was. This, perhaps, casts a questionable light on Huxley’s tendency to see the totalitarian menace in all forms of centraliz-ation and industrialization of nations. Huxley writes: “Even if the inten-tions of the various centralized state authorities were pacific, which they are not, industrialism would tend of its very nature to transform them into totalitarian governments” (GE, 310-311). This brings to mind how Arendt cautions those who see totalitarian trends in every “authoritarian limitation of freedom,”16 and how Slavoj Žižek reproaches those who “claim that any radical emancipatory political project necessarily ends up in some version of totalitarian domination and control.”17 These thinkers would argue that Huxley is decidedly inexact in his critique of the centralizing political projects of the twentieth century. Certainly there are

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plenty of reasons to critique “centralized state authorities,” but there is something indelicate and imprecise to discounting them all as ‘totalitarian.’ One should always be wary of those who so readily find ‘Nazi,’ ‘communist,’ or ‘totalitarian’ trends in the modes of political organization they oppose.

The impulse to resist identifying causes of totalitarianism is in part tied to the desire to resist explaining away or excusing what happened (which was part of the reason Arendt refused to acknowledge it was possible to fully understand totalitarianism—to understand is in some sense to validate or justify—this was why, in the end, Arendt could not reduce totalitarianism to a mere byproduct of ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘imperialism’ as she initially hoped to prove in the first two sections of The Origins of Totalitarianism). Is this what underwrites Huxley’s historicizing tendencies, the impulse to explain away the two major world crises that unfolded in his lifetime? Probably not. The way in which Huxley rhetorically wields ‘totalitarianism,’ I think, exposes the fact that the illumination of the past has been confused with seeing the present as deducible from the past. What Huxley identifies as incomplete totalitarianism are not the causes or inchoate building-blocks of twentieth-century totalitarianism; rather, it is more likely the case that twentieth-century totalitarianism draws us to, and illuminates, the life of Father Joseph in a compelling way—there is some-thing strikingly modern to his political demeanor. But it also seems to be the case that as a kind of historically-minded moralist Huxley was looking for simple correctives. He is genuinely concerned with “the relations between the personal and the historical, the existential and the social” (“MB,” 217)—that one man’s spiritual and political failings might produce a powerful historical pivot. This again points to his hope that individuals might escape from history and that human goodness might be marshaled to serve as an antidote for human cruelty and capriciousness. Recall Huxley’s partiality to Jeffersonian democracy, Kropotkin anarchism, and Vedantic mysticism, all highly decentralized and individualistic. This is to point out that Huxley’s generalizations are genuinely instructive in contrast to, say, Bertrand Russell, who paints wildly loose causal relation-ships in a way that offhandedly dismisses wide swaths of the philosophical tradition. For instance, in his own attempt to make sense of the unfolding crisis of World War II, Russell writes: “At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill of Locke,”18 and else-where: “The hard-headed developed, through Bentham, Ricardo, and Marx, by logical steps into Stalin; the soft-hearted, by other logical stages, through Fichte, Byron, Carlyle, and Nietzsche, into Hitler” (HWP, 642). I

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point this out to show that Huxley appears to have no such agenda in suggesting that twentieth-century violence is an outcome of Father Joseph’s power politics. Even though Huxley neglects the difficult questions of responsibility that are implicit in the way he frames Father Joseph’s relationship to the twentieth century, there is something genuinely self-reflective and cautionary to his analysis of Father Joseph’s life.

To the extent that individual experiences and choices steer the course of history, Huxley tries to locate the cause for Father Joseph’s rather violent political persuasion (since, for Huxley, this violent political persuasion is responsible for steering history in an important way). In this respect he argues that the kind of Catholicism that Father Joseph adhered to was known for “its strain of primitive savagery inherited from the less desirable parts of the Old Testament, for its incessant and dangerous preoccupations with torture and death, for its elaborately justified beliefs in the magic efficacy of rites and sacraments” (GE, 34). And later Huxley writes:

Father Joseph’s zeal for a crusade was too burningly hot to be extinguished by anything short of a sea of other people’s blood. […] The reason, it may be, is that few political idealists have spent half a lifetime brooding upon the torture and death of a man-god, by comparison with whose sufferings those of ordi-nary human beings are so infinitesimally small as to be practically negligible. (143-144)

The criticism here is that violent Catholic imagery gave rise to Father Joseph’s political cruelty—bad theology made him violent in the same way that video games are supposed to make teenagers more violent. This argument sounds strange coming from someone whose paragraphs earlier criticized historians for propounding over-simplified solutions to the course of history. Does it not seem to be the case that Huxley uncharitably reduces Father Joseph’s psychology to a surprisingly narrow cause-and-effect here? Indeed, it is much more likely that the inverse, which is much less illuminating or interesting, is so—that the existence of violence explains why Catholicism and video games are violent. It is certainly the case that violence predates both.

The history of decisions made for the sake of political expedience shows that there are many handy rationalizations for political violence. Indeed, born in another era, under another set of dogmas, Father Joseph would have made a capable Stalinist or Nazi. Huxley suggests that Riche-lieu’s

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view of himself was at bottom very similar to that which the more tender-minded of communist sympathizers often take of Lenin—that of a kind of secular saviour, taking upon himself the responsibility for intrinsically evil acts, which he performs with full knowledge of their consequences for himself, in order to ensure the future happiness of mankind. (GE, 173)

Considering that Father Joseph suffered no such compunction, he might have come off as a true believer or a righteous crusader since he could so easily rationalize that

God, the avenger, might have his reasons for wishing to destroy large numbers of Central Europeans. Indeed, since history was assumed by Father Joseph to be an expression of the intentions of divine providence, and since, as a matter of historical fact, large numbers of Central Europeans were in process of being starved and slaughtered, it was manifest that God, the avenger, did desire their destruction. (236)

No doubt in the alternate reality where Father Joseph might be a commu-nist revolutionary, he would have justified resorting to violence in a way that all tyrants and ideologues do—‘You cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs,’ and ‘God has his reasons, who am I to question them.’ One can see traces of these justifications in the reply he gave to his overseers at seminary when he was warned of the dangers of excess in his spiritual rituals—for instance, he would complete certain proscribed periods of prayer standing on flagstones on one foot in excruciating pain to avoid sleepiness. To these admonitions he responded: “the kingdom of heaven is taken by violence” (106).

Perhaps it is safer to attribute Father Joseph’s violent tendencies less to an inordinate fascination with the suffering of Christ and more to what Oliver Wendell Holmes says of his experience in the U.S. Civil War, that “certitude leads to violence.”19 In other words, it may be the case that the expectation that God’s kingdom is taken by violence leads one to easily rationalize the perpetration of violence. Huxley’s Mr Propter just about says this much in After Many a Summer. He explains to his young protégé, Pete Boone, that “‘[m]en can’t live by bread alone, because they need to feel that their life has a point. That’s why they take to idealism. But it’s a matter of experience and observation that most idealism leads to war, persecution and mass insanity.’”20 Mr Propter goes on to say, however, seemingly anticipating the failings of Father Joseph that Huxley outlines:

“Man cannot live by bread alone; but if he chooses to nourish his mind on the wrong kind of spiritual food, he won’t even get bread. He won’t even get bread, because he’ll be so busy killing or preparing to kill his neighbours in the name of God, or

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Country, or Social Justice that he won’t be able to cultivate his fields.” (AMS, 276)

When Mr Propter suggests that some are nourished on “‘the wrong kind of spiritual food’” he is precisely foreshadowing the criticism that Huxley levels against Father Joseph. In fact, Propter’s somber decla-ration—“‘nothing is unfortunately more certain than that most people will go on choosing the wrong spiritual food and thereby indirectly choosing their own destruction’” (AMS, 276)—mirrors Huxley’s critique of Father Joseph. Huxley harbors a deep suspicion that the style of mysticism Father Joseph learned and perpetuated from Father Benet and Pierre de Bérulle was not only the violent impetus for his politics but that it also made ‘real’ mysticism impossible. This ensured the likelihood that future supplicants would find themselves susceptible to a “spiritual ignorance all the more fatal for imagining itself to be knowledge” (GE, 103). Huxley explains that “[b]y the end of the seventeenth century, mysticism has lost its old significance in Christianity and is more than half dead” (103). This is significant to Huxley’s historical narrative because “[a] totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane. From the beginnings of the eighteenth century onwards, the sources of mystical knowledge have been steadily diminishing in number, all over the planet. We are dan-gerously far advanced into the darkness” (103–104). In other words, Huxley is signaling that it was the corruption of a more pure Dionysian-esque mysticism which has led to the darkening of the human spirit and the downward spiral into ignorance and illusion, and ultimately, totalitarianism. To Huxley, Father Joseph’s double crime was that he not only instituted a kind of proto-, preindustrial totalitarianism that would give rise to even more devastating twentieth-century varieties, but that he also undermined the only possible antidote to this radical spiritual darkness.

However, it is not altogether clear why there was something inherently wrong with the style of mysticism Father Joseph practiced, per se. It may not be the type of mysticism that necessitates certain terribly flawed political outcomes; there might simply be certain inherent difficulties to politics when approached with a kind of metaphysical or teleological certainty. And this says nothing of the personally corrosive nature of politics, which has been noted by many authors.21 Huxley himself says: “Again and again ecclesiastics and pious laymen have become statesmen in the hope of raising politics to their own high moral level, and again and again politics have dragged them down to the low moral level upon which statesmen, in their political capacity, are compelled to live” (GE, 221). It is

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highly plausible that Father Joseph’s entry into politics undermined or at least problematized his mysticism, and not the other way around. Anyway, this is how contemporary Catholic critics responded to Huxley’s critique. One of the early reviewers of Grey Eminence noted that Father Joseph simply overlooked St Paul’s clear warning: “Nemo militans Deo implicat se negotiis secularibus” (“No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life” [2 Timothy 2:4 KJV]).22 But Huxley also alludes to the plausibility of this explanation when he suggests that “Father Joseph had failed to see that vicarious ambition is as much of an obstacle to union as personal ambition” (GE, 170), which curiously leaves room in Huxley’s own thought for the fact that the presence of enough ruinous “ambition” might explain why Father Joseph led the political life that he did.

Žižek argues that Huxley “avoids the true paradox and opts for an easy way out,” by “putting the blame on the alleged weak points of Père Joseph’s mystical experience.”23 Žižek thinks that “the lesson of psycho-analysis is precisely that we must fully accept this paradox,” because “there is no guarantee, in your authentic private experience, what the political effects will be” (IR, 63). In other words, “there is no guarantee what the political effects of your subjective experience will be” (IR, 63). This criticism comes not only from psychoanalysis; in a similar vein Nagel writes: “To account for the difference between public and private life we must return to a point mentioned earlier: that public morality may be underivable from private not because they come from different sources, but because each of them contains elements derived independently from a common source” (“RPL,” 82). Subjective experience and personal moral-ity do not illuminate political tendencies. As with historical causes, there is no way to reliably account for all the variables which constitute human political behavior. To do so falls prey to Huxley’s own warning against reducing men to “convenient abstractions” (GE, 17).

This is perhaps a side note, but one worth mentioning. What is so striking about Huxley’s analysis of Father Joseph is that despite his own decentralist ideals, he never explicitly argues that the world in which we find ourselves living in needs no governance. If this is so, and the mystics are content to counterbalance and provide a necessary social corrective on the margins of society, what does good governance look like? Certainly someone has to become entangled with the affairs of this life. This is perhaps where the paradox of Father Joseph takes on a new dimension—if we place politics aside, would not our impulse be to select, at first glance, someone like Father Joseph, someone selfless and good, to be our

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political leader—recall that Ange de Joyeuse called him “the perfect Capuchin” (GE, 107)?24 What I mean is, if we cannot trust our impulse to elevate the virtuous and good to office, what hope is there for political leadership? This is especially relevant given Huxley’s view that just about all forms of centralization lead to totalitarianism. What are we to make of the political process where, to Huxley, mystics and theocentrics (the decentralized political ideal) provide no comparable antidote to the self-destructing, centralizing impulse, but there is also no productive way to engage in a centralizing political organization?25 I suppose it is with this grimness in mind that we are left with Will Farnaby at the end of Island, Huxley’s only positive utopia, in a state of utter ruin, a paradise lost.26

Despite the alternative explanations for Father Joseph’s propensity for violence and cruelty, that this was in spite of, not due to his Capuchin mysticism, Huxley proceeds to explain that the mysticisms that meditate on violence breed violence. He writes:

As a matter of historical fact, those whose religious life is centered upon the sufferings of a divine Saviour have not been pre-eminently compassionate, have not been more careful than all others to avoid the infliction of pain. As a matter of historical fact, the record of Buddhism is, in this respect, a good deal better than Christianity. (GE, 237)

I am not certain that Huxley’s claims to historical fact bear out. Indeed, as Derek Maher explains, in the same century that Father Joseph was perpetrating domestic tyranny and war, the Great Fifth Dalai Lama was engineering the death of his political rivals with help from the Mongol tribal chief, Gushri Khan. Maher goes on to explain that the Dalai Lama believed that

highly advanced Buddhist yogins may be able to undertake acts of violence that serve salutary ends without themselves experi-encing afflictive emotions. Under certain circumstances, cases of murder, suicide, self-sacrifice, warfare, and other types of violence may be regarded as legitimate within the Buddhist discourse as long as they are carried out by people capable of undertaking them without generating harmful mental attitudes.27

Huxley likewise notes that in the Bhagavad Gita “Krishna assures Arjuna that it is right for him to slaughter his enemies, provided always that he does so in a spirit of non-attachment” (GE, 235).

Huxley is not clear on what “a good deal better” actually means, or how one could possibly quantify such a claim. But for the sake of argument, let us suppose with Huxley that Buddhism’s record of violence is marginally better than that of Christianity. Does this then make the

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Buddhist mystical tradition objectively preferable to the Christian tradi-tion? By way of this thought experiment, what if it could be proven that, say, the average Russian fared better under Stalinist rule than the average German did under Hitler’s rule? Would we be then forced to make the mind-boggling judgment that Stalinism is preferable to Nazism?28 As systems of thought and belief, Christianity and Buddhism are by no means comparable to Stalinism and Nazism. But what this rather extreme illu-stration shows is that even if Buddhist mysticism’s record of violence is preferable to Christianity’s, it does not necessarily follow that such mysti-cism is desirable in some objective sense—that is, by arguing an alter-native mysticism is preferable to the Christian mysticism practiced by Father Joseph one may be appealing to a relatively low standard. And, of course, even if one could confidently prove that Buddhist traditions are, in general, less violent than their Christian counterparts, it would be hard to demonstrate in a convincing way that Buddhist devotees are less violent for reasons internal to Buddhism.29 In other words, it would be difficult to generalize that Buddhist mysticism offers some special antidote to the human tendency toward violence.

In short, Huxley’s criticism in Grey Eminence can be broken down this way: 1. Catholicism is inordinately violent. 2. This violence is derived from the fact that the mysticism propagated by the likes of Father Joseph elevated Christ’s and Mary’s suffering. This new focus subverted the Eastern / Dionysian mystics’ focus on a kind of amorphous godhead cloud (eternity of being), which allowed for the possibility of a socially relevant but apolitical ‘total annihilation of the self.’ This precipitated both the elevation of sacred violence and the undermining of ‘true’ mysticism. 3. Spiritual violence became reified politically—authoritarian means for spiritual ends became a self-justifying byproduct of the meditative process. That is, due to their excessive attention to Christ’s suffering, Catholic mystics of Father Joseph’s ilk both seethed with a holy vengeance and became increasingly indifferent to the proportionally negligible suffering of others (in relation to Christ’s). A violently intolerant, centralized spiritual hegemony—in the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, which was rooted in the politics of Louis XIII’s court—became not only a logical conclusion but the axiomatic realization of God’s divine will. And it was this, for Huxley, that explains Father Joseph’s place in the downward spiral of Europe’s political history.

The point of restating Huxley’s critique this way is to explore what he believes the antidote to Louis XIV’s incomplete totalitarianism is (Huxley explains that Louis XIV’s totalitarianism “was intended to be as complete

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as anything we see in the modern world, and […] only failed to be so by reason of the wretched systems of communication and organization available to the Grand Monarque’s secret police” [GE, 309]). Huxley proposes the alternative of “‘goodness politics,’” which is “the art of combining decentralization of government and industry, local and functional autonomy and smallness of administrative units with enough over-all efficiency to guarantee the smooth running of the federated whole” (312). “Goodness politics” and genuine contemplative training (‘true’ mysticism), to Huxley, might lead to imperfect, but marginally incremental social goods, in contrast to the appreciable, self-stultifying social evil demonstrated in all forms of political centralization. What Huxley appears to lament most about Father Joseph’s descent into politics are not the long-term consequences that stem from his use of violence and cruelty but rather the fact that Father Joseph’s violence fails to preserve, indeed, conspicuously precludes, the theocentric antidote to the social evils he was responsible for instigating. Huxley explains: “Even if [Father Joseph’s] mysticism had proved to be compatible with his power politics, which it did not, he would still have been wrong to accept the position of Richelieu’s collaborator; for by accepting it he automatically deprived himself of the power to exercise a truly spiritual authority, he cut himself off from the very possibility of being the apostle of mysticism” (314-315).30

Since “[s]ociety can never be greatly improved, until such time as most of its members choose to become theocentric saints” (GE, 313), Huxley prefers the marginal, subdivided organization of these enlightened saints since only these kinds of close-knit organizations allow for “a shared spiritual experience and […] moral and rational conduct” (317). These small-scale communities are manageable, intimate and foster a greater potential for receptivity to the regenerative and preservative effect of theocentric mystics. For example, Huxley prefers his mystics to be like George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends. He writes:

Fanatically marginal—for when invited, he refused even to dine at Cromwell’s table, for fear of being compromised—Fox was never corrupted by success, but remained to the end the apostle of inner light. […] That is why, in the two hundred and seventy-five years of its existence, the Society of Friends has been able to accomplish a sum of useful and beneficent work entirely out of proportion to its numbers. (320-321)

Huxley explains to his brother Julian that “[s]aints would appear to be the only antidote to statesmen” (Letters, 465), even if only partial and incomplete.

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Earlier in this essay I mentioned that Huxley’s intention in piecing together plausible causal narratives was for the practical purpose of avoiding catastrophe and political suicide in the present. It is odd, then, that, in response to the centralizing and totalizing trends he sees in government, Huxley chooses to give up on politics altogether. Further-more, it is odd that he sees an on-the-margins kind of mysticism as best equipped to further humanity’s interests in spite of the fact that this mysti-cism faces inevitable extinction at the hands of those same centralizing (i.e., proto-totalitarian / totalitarian) forces. Richard Chase, another early reviewer of Grey Eminence, also picks up on this. He writes:

The altruistic morality and the social affection of the mystics are admirable; but from the time of the Buddhist heresy down to the Quakers, this altruism has been accompanied by various unsavory anti-speculative and anti-intellectual tendencies. Huxley follows the pattern, for he rejects not only power politics but all kinds of rationally-conceived social action. He attacks not only the grosser kinds of pragmatic thought but all “analytic thinking and imagination” for these prevent “enlightenment.” (AH, 342)

Certainly Huxley’s ability to see totalitarian trends (whether real or imag-ined) in all forms of modern political organization did leave him skeptical that there was any hope in “rationally-conceived social action,” primarily due to his belief that “[t]he quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved” (GE, 311). This is the idea that it is harder to be moral in societies where citizens are more like atomistic cogs in an industrial machine than people, or more like a hapless crowd of impulsive, self-interested consumers than a dedicated, inter-dependent group of friends and neighbors.31 No doubt there is a great deal of truth to this. But it is still not clear why mystically-oriented communes are to be preferred to other forms of direct political partici-pation and humanitarian intervention. The critic C. V. Wedgwood argues that Huxley “claims too extensive a virtue for the mystic; surely the single-minded humanitarian serves as high a purpose. Who would be bold enough to decide between St. Benedict and Madame Curie [the French-Polish chemist and physicist who was honored with two Nobel Prizes]? Or is single-mindedness itself akin to mysticism?” (AH, 336) Indeed, Wedgwood touches on an important ambiguity in Huxley’s work; what qualifies as a socially-relevant, on-the-margins mysticism is vague and un-clear. But even if Huxley could offer us blueprint clarity as to how we ought to build an on-the-margins polity, it is by no means certain that such an approach to social problems would be productive. This is because, in the end, assuming it is impossible to be both a saint and a

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statesman, Huxley seems to leave us with a rather unpleasant and unsatis-fying binary: choose a morally degenerating (and degenerate), centralizing polity that inevitably pushes toward industrialization, mechanization and totalitarianism, or choose an increasingly embattled, but also increasingly politically irrelevant private “enlightenment.” Whatever the lesson of Father Joseph’s life is, I am not so sure this is it. 1 The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster, 1929–1960: A Selected Edition, ed. Mary Lago, Linda K. Hughes, and Elizabeth MacLeod Walls (Columbia, MO, 2008), 162. Hereafter, BBC. 2 Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence (New York, 1941), 18. Hereafter, GE. 3 It is important to note that not all historians agree as to just how significant a role Father Joseph played in Richelieu’s regime. This obviously has serious bearing on the factual and moral claims Huxley raises in his own biographical account. I will argue that even if we grant the historical claims Huxley makes, there is still good reason to question the moral ones. The historian James Breck Perkins, for instance, writes: “Though a skillful diplomatist and with that strength which a man gains from giving his life and energy to one pursuit, Father Joseph has been exalted to a melodramatic prominence which exaggerates the importance of the position he filled. He stands prominent among Avaux, Charnacé, and the skillful diplomats who rendered France valuable service during the early part of the century. But Richelieu’s career was no more dependent on the assistance of Father Joseph than upon that of Avaux or Chavigni, La Valette or Bouthillier” (James Breck Perkins, France Under Mazarin: With Review of the Administration of Richelieu [New York, 1887], 202-203). Furthermore, Lord Acton writes, “The fact that no difference can be observed in Richelieu’s policy or action after the death of Father Joseph is the best refutation of those fantastic legends which represent him as a malign and dominating influence, inspiring Richelieu with unholy schemes, and thwarting his excellent intentions. The fact seems to be that Father Joseph […] fell in middle life entirely under the influence of Richelieu” (Lord Acton, The Cambridge Modern History, IV: The Thirty Years’ War, ed. A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothers, and Stanley Leathes [Cambridge, MA, 1906], 149-150). 4 Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics (The Difficulties of Understanding)” [hereafter, “UP”], Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism (New York, 1994) [hereafter, EU], 319. 5 Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” Mortal Questions (New York, 1991) [hereafter, MQ], 26. 6 Barbara Tuchman, “Is History a Guide to the Future?,” Practicing History: Selected Essays (New York, 1981), 249. Hereafter, “HGF.” 7 Aldous Huxley, “Maine de Biran: The Philosopher in History,” Collected Essays (New York, 1958), 217. Hereafter, “MB.” 8 Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (New York, 1969), 464. Hereafter, Letters.

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9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), 164. 10 Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 2001), 81. Hereafter, QGG. 11 Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun (New York, 1952), 259–260. 12 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1966), 438. Hereafter, OT. 13 For more comprehensive criticism of Huxley’s use of the word “totalitarianism” see Brian Smith, “Beyond Totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley Annual, 6 (2006), 77–104. 14 Hannah Arendt, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism: An Essay in Understanding,” EU, 345. 15 Jacques Barzun, Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (New York, 2000), 241. 16 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, 1993), 97. 17 Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion (New York, 2001), 5. 18 Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (New York, 1945), 685. Hereafter, HWP. 19 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York, 2001), 61. 20 Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (New York, 1939), 276. Hereafter, AMS. 21 Michael Walzer, for instance, argues that “the dilemma of dirty hands is the central feature of political life” (“Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory [New York, 2007], 280). And Thomas Nagel says, “There is, I think, a problem about the moral effects of public roles and offices. Certainly they have a profound effect on the behavior of the individuals who fill them” (“Ruthlessness in Public Life” [hereafter, “RPL”], MQ, 76). 22 See A. G., “Review: Grey Eminence by Aldous Huxley,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 31 (September 1942), 387-388. 23 Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real (New York, 2005), 62-63. Hereafter, IR. 24 This points to Jonathan Swifts’ characterization of the Lilliputian government: “[T]hey have more Regard to good Morals than to great Abilities.” In fact, political acumen is seen as a liability to the Lilliputians who think “the Want of Moral Virtues was so far from being supplied by superior Endowments of the Mind, that Employments could never be put into such dangerous Hands as those of Persons so qualified; and at least, that the Mistakes committed by Ignorance in a virtuous Disposition, would never be of such fatal Consequence to the Publick Weal, as the Practices of a Man, whose Inclinations led him to be corrupt, and had great Abilities to manage, to multiply, and defend his Corruptions” (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Robert Greenberg, [New York, 1961], 40–41).

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25 Huxley writes, “Here again the antidote has always been insufficient to offset more than a part of the poison injected into the body politic by the statesmen, financiers, industrialists, ecclesiastics and all the undistinguished millions who fill the lower ranks of the social hierarchy” (GE, 321). 26 See Aldous Huxley, Island (New York, 1962). 27 Derek Maher, “Sacrilized Warfare: The Fifth Dalai Lama and the Discourse of Religious Violence,” Buddhist Warfare, ed. Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer (New York, 2010), 83. See also Mikael S. Adolphson, The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Monastic Warriors and Sohei in Japanese History (Honolulu, HI, 2007); and Slavoj Žižek, “Zen at War,” For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York, 1991). 28 This brings to mind the fact that when asked by an interviewer from Le Monde if he found the Holocaust “worse” than the Stalinist crimes, historian Robert Conquest answered “yes.” But when asked “why” he could only answer with “I feel so.” The point is that, as Conquest noted, there is “almost nothing to choose between the two systems” (Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century [New York, 2000], xii). 29 As intuitively satisfying as this comparison might be, it suffers from what, according to social science methodology, is called “self-selection bias”; that is, there are virtually an infinite number of plausible confounding variables (such as divergent geopolicial contexts, geographies, regime types, political institutions, etc.) that make this outright comparison infeasible. See John Gerring, Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework (2nd ed., New York, 2012), 249–50. 30 This reinforces C. V. Wedgwood’s claim that “Huxley is not studying Father Joseph, the psychological case, against a period background. He is studying Father Joseph, the mystic, against the background of eternity” (Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Watt [Padstow, Cornwall, 1975] [hereafter, AH], 336). 31 This ‘crowd versus group’ thematic is more fully articulated in Huxley’s essay “Decentralization and Self-Government” in Ends and Means (New York, 1937), 78-99.