1956
The History of Tension
ALDOUS HUXLEY
The following address was delivered at a conference at which the majority of papers read pertained to the new tranquilizing agent meprobamate [Miltown]. It was another occasion when Huxley9s was the lone voice from the world of letters at a gathering of physicians and scientists. His monograph “is concerned with the use of certain chemical compounds that produce certain changes of consciousness and so permit a measure of self-transcendence and a temporary relief of tension” No less than seven radio and television appearances were lined up for him when he arrived in New York for the conference.
THE TITLE OF this paper is somewhat misleading for, strictly speaking, the history of tension does not exist. Tension is a form of disease; and diseases, as such, are beyond the scope of history. There is no such thing, for example, as a medieval stomach-ache, no such thing as a specifically neolithic focal infection, a characteristically Victorian neuraglia, or a New Deal epilepsy. So far as the patient is concerned, the symptoms of his illness are a completely personal experience, an experience to which the public life of nations, the events recorded in the headlines or discussed in scientific journals and literary reviews are totally irrelevant. Politics, culture, the march of civilization, all the marvels of nature, all the triumphs of art and science and technology—these things exist for the healthy, not for the sick. The sick are aware only of their private pains and miseries, only of what goes on within the four walls of the sickroom. For them the infinite universe has contracted almost to a point; nothing remains of it but their own suffering bodies, their own numbed or tormented minds. Disease as an actual experience is more or less completely independent of time and place. Consequently there cannot be a history of disease as experience; there can only be a history of medicine—that is to say, a history of theories about the nature of diseases and of the recipes employed at different times for their treatment, together with a history of the ways in which organized societies have reacted to the problems of disease within the community.
While tension, as a psychosomatic illness, has no history, at least some of the causes of tension lie within the public domain and can be made the subject of historical study. The same is true of the procedures sanctioned by various societies for the prevention and relief of tension. The subject is enormous; my time is short and my ignorance encyclopedic. I shall therefore make no attempt to discuss all the historical factors associated with tension, but shall confine myself to those that are most manageable and, at the same time, most relevant to the problems confronting us today.
Let me start with what I shall not talk about. I shall not talk, except perhaps incidentally, about the historical causes of tension. This would entail a discussion of two vast and complex themes—the transformation of culture patterns and the relations subsisting between a given culture and the individuals brought up within it.
At the risk of indulging in those Original Sins of the intellect, over-simplification and overabstraction, let me sum up this entire matter in one large, comprehensive generalization. Tension, I should say, arises in persons who, because of some congenital or acquired weakness, are unable to cope with certain distressing situations. These distressing situations are produced by conflict—conflict between the fundamental drives to self-affirmation and sex on the one hand, and the equally fundamental drive to gregariousness on the other. The drive to gregariousness is canalized by society, sanctioned by tradition, and rationalized in terms of religion and philosophy; hence the intrusion of historical factors into a situation that, on the animal level, would be exclusively biological. The disease of tension seems to have arisen under all cultural conditions—in shame cultures as in guilt cultures, in primitive cultures no less than in highly developed cultures—and fundamentally similar devices for the relief of tension have been developed in all the societies of which we have any knowledge. It is with these devices for the relief of tension that I shall be concerned in this paper.
Like all other diseases, tension tends to narrow the patient’s awareness until, in extreme cases, he is conscious of nothing but himself. Grave illnesses profoundly change the personality of their victims. To this changed personality the narrowing of awareness induced by the illness soon comes to seem almost normal and is taken for granted. Tension is not a severe illness, and those who suffer from tension are well enough to feel and suffer from the cramping self-centeredness imposed upon them by their psychosomatic disorder. They are like those lost souls whose punishment is, in the words of the great Catholic poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, “to be their sweating selves, but worse.” The victim of tension knows and is acutely distressed by his sense of being his sweating self, but worse. And here we may remark that even healthy people are often distressed by the realization that they are condemned to be the separated, insulated individuals they so irretrievably are. Neurotics hate being their sweating selves, but worse. Normal people hate being their sweating selves, period. One of the most disagreeable symptoms of tension is simply the normal distress at being an island universe raised, so to speak, to a higher power. Man is a self-adoring egotist, but an egotist who often feels an intense distaste for the object of his idolatrous worship. Correlated with this distaste for the beloved self, there exists in all human beings an urge to self-transcendence, a wish to escape from the prison of personality, a longing to become something other and greater than the all-too-familiar Me, a susceptibility to nostalgia for a world superior to, or at least different from, the boring or painful universe of everyday reality. The religious man has attributed this universal urge to self-transcendence to an innate and deep-seated yearning for the divine. The biologist sees the matter somewhat differently, and he attributes man’s desire for self-transcendence to the workings of his innate gregariousness. The individual longs to be merged with the herd, but he is too self-centered to be able to do so completely and too self-conscious to be able to sustain the attempt for long. He is therefore condemned to live in a state of chronic dissatisfaction, constantly pining for something that, in the very nature of things, he can never have.
These two explanations are not mutually exclusive, and I should be inclined to think that both are partially correct. Be that as it may, the facts for which they profess to account are genuine facts. There is an urge to self-transcendence and, with it, a profound distaste for the insulated ego, a distaste which, in the victims of tension, becomes acute and agonizing. In every human culture certain procedures for achieving temporary self-transcendence, and thereby relieving tension, have been developed and systematically employed. These procedures may be classified under a few comprehensive headings. There are chemical methods, the musical and gymnastic methods, the methods that depend on the subjection of insulated individuals to the influence of crowds, the various religious methods and, finally the methods whose purpose is mystical self-transcendence—the various yogas and spiritual exercises of Oriental and Western traditions. Hours would be needed to do justice to all these stratagems, and I must limit myself to a discussion of only two of them, the most popular and the most difficult to control, namely, the chemical method and what may be called the crowd method.
This monograph is concerned with the use of certain chemical compounds that produce certain changes of consciousness and so permit a measure of self-transcendence and a temporary relief of tension. These tranquilizing drugs are merely the latest additions to a long list of chemicals that have been used from time immemorial for changing the quality of consciousness, thus making possible some degree of self-transcendence and a temporary release from tension. Let us always remember that, while modern pharmacology has given us a host of new synthetics, it has made no basic discoveries in the field of the natural drugs; it has merely improved the methods of extraction, purification, and combination. All the naturally occurring sedatives, narcotics, euphories, hallucinogens, and excitants were discovered thousands of years ago, before the dawn of civilization. This surely is one of the strangest facts in that long catalogue of improbabilities known as human history. It is evident that primitive man experimented with every root, twig, leaf, and flower, every seed, nut, berry and fungus in his environment. Pharmacology is older than agriculture. There is good reason to believe that even in paleolithic times, while he was still a hunter and a food-gatherer, man killed his animal and human enemies with poisoned arrows. By the late Stone Age he was systematically poisoning himself. The presence of poppy heads in the kitchen middens of the Swiss Lake Dwellers shows how early in his history man discovered the techniques of self-transcendence through drugs. There were dope addicts long before there were farmers.
Here let me mention a fact of some importance. To relieve tension, a chemical compound need not have the characteristics of a tranquilizer. Alcohol, for example, is far from tranquilizing, at least in the middle stages of intoxication, and it has been relieving tension ever since Noah made his epoch-making discovery. Self-transcendence can be achieved by an excitant as well as by a narcotic or a hallucinogen. Tension is relieved not only by such contemplative drugs as opium, peyote, kava, and ayahuasca, but also by active, extraverted intoxicants such as wine, hashish, and the soma of ancient India. Physiologically and socially, some drugs are much less harmful than others, and are therefore to be preferred, although such merely utilitarian considerations have never carried much weight with the drug taker. For him anything that produces a measure of self-transcendence and release seems good. So long as it works here and now, who cares what may happen later on?
In his Varieties of Religious Experience William James says: “The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature. It is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier stages of what in its totality is so degrading a poison. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.”
Elsewhere in the Varieties James cites the dictum of one of his medical friends: “There is no cure for dipsomania except religio-mania.” In their somewhat too epigrammatic way, these words express a truth that the collective experience of Alcoholics Anonymous has amply confirmed. Mystical experience stands to drunkenness in the relation of whole to part, of health to sickness. For the alcoholic as for the mystic there is an opening of doors, a bypassing of what I have called the cerebral reducing valve, the normal brain function that limits our mental processes to an awareness, most of the time, of what is biologically useful. For both there is a glimpse of something transcendent to the world of everyday experience—that narrow, utilitarian world that our self-centered consciousness selects from out of the infinite wealth of cosmic potentialities. What the drunkard sees in the earlier phases of intoxication is immediately recognized as excellent. What is not excellent is the particular method employed for achieving this transcendental experience.
Alcohol is one of the oldest and certainly the most widely used of all consciousness-changing drugs. Unfortunately it is a rather inefficient and, at the same time, a rather dangerous drug. There are other and better ways than getting drunk for achieving the same intrinsically excellent results. Some of these ways are chemical, others are psychological. Others involve fasting, voluntary insomnia, and various forms of self-torture. All these procedures modify the normal body chemistry and so facilitate the bypassing of the cerebral reducing valve and the achievement of a temporary escape from the prison of insulated self-hood. Some day, when psychology becomes a genuine science, all these traditional methods for producing self-transcendence will be systematically examined, and their respective merits and defects will be accurately assessed. For the present we must be content with such fragmentary knowledge as is now available.
William James’s characterization of alcohol as an exciter of the mystical faculties is strikingly confirmed by what the mystics themselves have said of their ecstatic experiences. In the mystical literature of Islam, metaphors derived from wine and winebibbing are constantly employed. Precisely similar metaphors are to be found in the writings of some of the greatest Christian saints. Thus St. John of the Cross calls his soul la interior bodega di mi Amado—the inward wine cellar of my Beloved. And St. Teresa of Avila tells us that she “regards the center of our soul as a cellar, into which God admits us when and as it pleases Him, so as to intoxicate us with the delicious wine of His grace.”
The experience of self-transcendence and the release of tension produced by alcohol and the other consciousness-changing chemicals is so wonderful, so blessed and blissful, that men have found it quite natural to identify these drugs to which they owe their momentary happiness with one or other of their gods. “Religion,” said Karl Marx, “is the opium of the people.” It would be at least as true to say that opium is the religion of the people. A few mystics have compared the state of ecstasy to drunkenness; but innumerable drinkers, smokers, chewers, and snuff-takers have achieved a form of ecstatic release through the use of drugs. The supernatural qualities of this mental state are projected outward upon the drugs that produced it. Thus, in Greece wine was not merely sacred to Dionysus; wine was Dionysus. Bacchus was called Theoinos—Godwine—a single word equating alcohol with deity, the experience of drunkenness with the holy spirit. “Born a god,” said Euripides, “Bacchus is poured out in libations to the gods, and through him men receive good.” That good, according to the Greeks, was of many kinds—physical health, mental illumination, the gift of prophesying, the ecstatic sense of being one with divine truth. Similarly, in ancient India, the juice of the soma plant (whatever that plant may have been) was not merely sacred to Indra, the hero-god of battles; it was Indra. And at the same time it was Indra’s alter ego, a god in its own right. Many similar examples of this identification of a consciousness-changing drug with some god of the local pantheon could be cited. In Siberia and Central America various species of hallucinogenic mushrooms are regarded as gods. The Indians of the southwestern United States identified the peyote cactus with native deities and, in recent years, with the Holy Ghost of Christian theology. In classical times the northern barbarians who drank malt liquor worshiped their beer under the name of Sabazius. Beer was also a god for the Celtic peoples, as mead seemed divine to the Scandinavians and the Teutons. In Anglo-Saxon, the idea of catastrophe, of panic, of the ultimate in horror and disaster is conveyed by a word whose literal meaning is “the deprivation of mead.” Almost everywhere the consumption of consciousness-changing drugs has been associated, at one time or another, with religious ritual. Drinking, chewing, inhaling, and snuff-taking have been regarded as sacramental acts, sanctioned by tradition and rationalized in terms of the prevailing theology. In the Moslem world alcohol was forbidden, but the urge to self-transcendence could not be suppressed, and there were and still are places within the Moslem world where the consumption of Cannabis indica is not only sanctioned by society, but has even been turned into a kind of religious rite. Certain Mohammedan authors have seen in hashish the equivalent of the sacramental bread and wine of the Christians. Among the Jews many efforts were made to give a religious sanction to winebibbing. Jeremiah refers to the “cup of consolation,” which was administered to the bereaved. Amos speaks of men who drink wine in the house of their God. Micah has some harsh words for those who, in his day, used to prophesy under the influence of alcohol. Isaiah denounces the priests and prophets who have “erred through strong drink.” They have erred, he says, “in vision.” Traditionally, Dionysus was the god of prophecy and inspiration; but alas, the revelations of alcohol are not altogether reliable.
From self-transcendence by chemical means we now pass to self-transcendence by social means. The individual makes direct contact with society in two ways—as a member of some familial, professional, or religious group, or as a member of a crowd. A group is purposive and structured; a crowd is chaotic, serves no particular purpose, and is capable of anything except intelligent action. Using an analogy that is not too misleading, we can say that the first is an organ of the body politic, the second is a kind of tumor, generally benign, but sometimes horribly malignant. The greater part of most people’s lives is passed in groups. Participation in crowd activities is a relatively rare event. This is fortunate, for individuals in a crowd are different from, and in every respect worse than, individuals in isolation or within purposive and organized groups. A man in a crowd loses his personal identity, and that, of course, is why he likes to be in a crowd. Personal identity is what he longs to transcend, what he desires to escape. Unfortunately, the members of a crowd lose more than their personal identity; they also lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very excitable, lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, are subject to sudden and violent accesses of rage, enthusiasm, and panic, and become capable of performing the most monstrous, the most completely senseless acts of violence—usually against others, but sometimes against themselves. In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what may be called herd poisoning. Like alcohol, herd poison is an active, extraverted drug. It changes the quality of individual consciousness in the direction of frenzy, and makes possible a high degree of downward self-transcendence. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from insulated selfhood into a kind of subhuman mindlessness.
From the beginning men have done their work and gone through the serious business of living in purposeful groups. Crowds have provided them with their psychological vacations. Nourishment drawn from the group has been their staple food; herd poison has been their delicious dope. Religion has everywhere sanctioned and rationalized intoxication by herd poison, just as it has sanctioned and rationalized the use of consciousness-changing chemicals. Alfred North Whitehead’s statement that “religion is what the individual does with his solitariness” is true only if we choose to define religion as something that, as a matter of historical fact, it has never been, except for a small minority. And the same would be true of a definition of religion in terms of what the individual does with his experience of being in a small, dedicated group such as the Quaker Meeting or the “two or three gathered together in my name,” of whom Christ spoke in the gospel. The spirituality of small groups is a very high form of religion, but it is not the only or the commonest form—it is merely the best. Significantly enough, Christ promised to be in the midst of a group of two or three. He never promised to be present in a crowd. Where two or three thousand, or two or three tens of thousands are gathered together, the indwelling presence is generally of a very different and un-Christlike kind. Yet such crowd activities as the mass revival meeting and the pilgrimage are sanctioned and even actively encouraged by religious leaders today just as they were in the pagan past. The reason is simple. Most people find it easier to achieve self-transcendence and relief from tension in a crowd than in a small group or when they are by themselves. These herd poisonings in the name of religion are not particularly beneficial; they merely provide brief holidays from insulated self-consciousness.
The history of man’s efforts to find self-transcendence in crowds is long and, for all its strangeness, its weird aberrations, profoundly monotonous. From the potlatch and the corroboree to the latest outburst of “rock ‘n roll,” the manifestations of herd poisoning exhibit the same subhuman characteristics. At their best, such performances are merely grotesque in their subhumanity; at their worst, they are both grotesque and horrible. One thinks, for example, of the festivals of the Syrian goddess, in the course of which, under the maddening influence of herd poison and priestly suggestion, men castrated themselves and women lacerated their breasts. One thinks of Greek maenadism, with its savage dismemberment of living victims. One thinks of the Roman saturnalia. One thinks of all the outbursts of crowd intoxication during the Middle Ages—the children’s crusades, the periodical orgies of collective flagellation, and those strange dancing manias in which self-transcendence through herd poisoning was combined with self-transcendence by gymnastic means and self-transcendence through repetitive music. One thinks of the wild religious revivals, the frantic stampedes of those who believed that the end of the world was at hand, the frenzies of iconoclasm in the name of God, of senseless destruction for righteousness’ sake. These are bad enough, but there is something much worse—the crowd intoxication that is exploited by the ambitious rabble-rouser for his own political or religious ends.
In the spring of 1954, while I was staying at Ismailia on the Suez Canal, I was taken by my hosts to the local movie theater. The film, which was drawing record crowds, was Julius Caesar played in English, but with Arabic subtitles. The spectators sat in spellbound attention, their eyes riveted on the screen. Why on earth, I kept wondering, should twentieth-century Arabs be so passionately interested in a sixteenth-century Englishman’s account of events that had taken place at Rome in the first century B.C.? And suddenly it was obvious. Caesar, Brutus, Antony, all those upper-class politicians fighting for power and, in the process, cynically flattering and exploiting a proletarian mob they despised but could not do without, were thoroughly familiar and contemporary figures to the Egyptian audience. What had happened in Rome just before and after Caesar’s murder was very like what had been happening only a few weeks before in Cairo when Naguib fell, rose again, in triumph, and was once more brought low by a rival who knew how to play on the passions of the crowd, how to make use of its drunken enthusiasm and drunken violence for his own purposes. Looking at Shakespeare’s play, the moviegoers of Ismailia found themselves looking at an uncensored report on the latest coup d’etat.
Of course, the greatest virtuoso in the art of exploiting the symptoms of herd poisoning was Adolf Hitler. The Nazis did their work with scientific thoroughness. All the resources of modern technology were mobilized in order to reduce the greatest possible number of people to the lowest possible state of downward self-transcendence. Phonographs repeated slogans. Loudspeakers poured forth the brassy and strongly accented music, the repetition of which drives people out of their minds. Concealed sound machines produced subsonic vibrations at the critical, soul-stirring rate of fourteen cycles per second. Modern methods of transportation were used to assemble thousands of the faithful under the floodlights in enormous stadiums, and the voice of the arch-hypnotist was broadcast by radio to millions more.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” So wrote Wordsworth of his experience of herd poisoning in the first, joyful months of the French Revolution. In our own time, millions of men and women, millions of enthusiastic boys and girls have had a similar experience. For the herd-poisoned members of the mobs that are used for the making of revolutions and the buttressing of dictatorial power, the dawn even of Nazism, even of Communism, seems blissful. Unfortunately, dawns are succeeded by laborious and often unpleasant days and evenings. In those later hours of revolutionary history, bliss is apt to be conspicuous by its absence. At the moment of sunrise, however, nobody ever thinks of what is likely to happen in the afternoon. Like alcoholics or morphine addicts, the victims of herd poison are interested only in releasing self-transcendence here and now. “After me the deluge,” is their motto. And sure enough, the deluge punctually arrives.
From the history of tension let us turn, in conclusion, to the present and the future. It is clear, I think, that the problem of tension will be completely solved only when we have a perfect society—that is to say, never. Meanwhile, it always remains possible to find partial solutions and temporary palliatives. Let us consider a few practical steps that it would be fairly easy to take.
First of all we might incorporate into our present profoundly unsatisfactory and disappointing system of education a few simple courses in the art of controlling the autonomie nervous system and the subconcious mind. As things now stand, we teach children the principles of good health, good morals, and good thinking, but we do not teach them how to act upon these principles. We urge them to make good resolutions, but we do nothing whatever to help them carry these resolutions into practice. A main source of tension is the consciousness of miserably failing to do what we know we ought to do. If every child were given some training in what Hornell Hart has called autoconditioning, we should do more for general decency and good feeling than all the sermons ever preached.
The next step to be taken is prophylactic in character. Human beings pine for self-transcendence, and getting drunk on herd poison is one of the most effective methods of taking a holiday from insulated selfhood and the burdens of responsibility. So long as they indulge in crowd-intoxication at football games and carnivals, at revival meetings and the rallies of democratically organized political parties, no harm is done. We must never forget, however, that the spellbinders, the rabble-rousers, the potential Hitlers are always with us. We must never forget that it is very easy for such men to turn an innocent orgy into an instrument of destruction, into a savage, mindless force directed toward the overthrow of liberty. To prevent them from exploiting crowd intoxication for their own sinister purposes we must be perpetually on our guard. Whether a world inhabited by potential Hitlers on the one hand and potential herd-poison addicts on the other can ever be made completely safe for rationality and decency seems doubtful, but at least we can try to make it a little safer than it is at present. For example, we can give our children lessons in the elements of general semantics. We can tell them about the frightful dangers of intellectual sin. We can make their flesh creep by reciting to them the disastrous consequences to societies and to individuals of the rabble-rouser’s oversimplification, overgeneralization, and overabstraction. We can remind them to live in present time and to think concretely and realistically, in terms of observable fact. We can unveil the absurd and discreditable secrets of propaganda and illustrate our lectures with examples drawn from the history of politics, religion, and the advertising industry. Would such a training be effective? Perhaps—or perhaps not. Herd poison is a very powerful intoxicant. Once they get into a crowd, even upright and sensible men are apt to lose their reason and accept all the suggestions, however nonsensical or however immoral, that may be given them. All we can hope to accomplish is to make it more difficult for the rabble-rouser to do his nefarious work.
The third step we must take will, in fact, be taken whether we like it or not. Once the seeds of a science have been planted they tend to sprout and develop autonomously according to the law of their own being, not according to the laws of our being. Pharmacology has now entered upon a period of rapid growth, and it seems quite certain that in the next few years scores of new methods for changing the quality of consciousness will be discovered. So far as the individual human being is concerned, these discoveries will be more important, more genuinely revolutionary, than the recent discoveries in the field of nuclear physics and their application to peacetime uses. If it does not destroy us, nuclear energy will merely give us more of what wc have already—cheap power, with its corollary of more gadgets, larger irrigation projects, and more efficient transportation. It will give us these things at a very high price—an increase in the amount of noxious radiation, with its corollaries of harmful mutations and a permanent fouling of man’s genetic pool. But the pharmacologists will give us something that most human beings have never had before. If we want joy, peace, and loving kindness, they will give us loving kindness, peace, and joy. If we want beauty, they will transfigure the outside world for us and open the door to visions of unimaginable richness and significance. If our desire is for life everlasting, they will give us the next best thing—aeons of blissful experience miraculously telescoped into a single hour. They will bestow these gifts without exacting the terrible price that, in the past, men had to pay for resorting too frequently to such consciousness-changing drugs as heroin or cocaine, or even that good old stand-by alcohol. Already we have at our disposal hallucinogens and tranquilizers whose physiological price is amazingly low, and there seems to be every reason to believe that the consciousness-changers and tension-relievers of the future will do their work even more efficiently and at even lower cost to the individual. Human beings will be able to achieve effortlessly what in the past could be only achieved with difficulty, by means of self-control and spiritual exercises. Will this be a good thing for individuals and for societies? Or will it be a bad thing? These are questions to which I do not know the answers. Nor, may I add, does anyone else. The outlines of these answers may begin to appear a generation from now. Meanwhile, all that one can predict with any degree of certainty is that it will be necessary to reconsider and re-evaluate many of our traditional notions about ethics and religion, and many of our current views about the nature of the mind, in the context of the pharmacological revolution. It will be extremely disturbing; but it will also be enormous fun.