Introduction
Aldous Huxley writes here about self-transcendence and the various methods used in its pursuit. He expresses opinions about the use of drugs which might surprise many readers, until it is realized that they were written before his first experiences with psychedelic drugs: the following is the Epilogue to The Devils of Loudun, published in 1953. Very soon thereafter, Huxley was to take the psychedelic drug mescaline under the guidance of the Canadian psychiatrist and researcher Humphrey Osmond. In 1954 and in light of his first psychedelic experiences, Huxley published The Doors of Perception which represented a complete metamorphosis in his thinking about the use of drugs for self-transcendence and personal growth. Such complete reversals of thinking on the basis of evidence are, unfortunately, far too rare among professionals of any kind, and the comparison of what is written here with The Doors of Perception should provide an important lesson to the many researchers and politicians who have since denounced psychedelic drugs as a "scourge of humanity": in the following piece we hear some of the very same ignorant pronouncements about drugs still echoed today by those having the least direct knowledge of the properties or potential of psychedelic drugs to assist humanity to find a more satisfying and ecological mode of existence.
—Peter Webster
Without an understanding of man's deep-seated
urge to self-transcendence, of his very natural reluctance to
take the hard, ascending way, and his search for some bogus
liberation either below or to one side of his personality, we
cannot hope to make sense of our own particular period of history
or indeed of history in general, of life as it was lived in the
past and as it is lived today. For this reason I propose to
discuss some of the more common Grace- substitutes, into which
and by means of which men and women have tried to escape from the
tormenting consciousness of being merely themselves.
In France there is now one retailer of alcohol to
every hundred inhabitants, more or less. In the United States
there are probably at least a million desperate alcoholics,
besides a much larger number of very heavy drinkers whose disease
has not yet become mortal. Regarding the consumption of
intoxicants in the past we have no precise or statistical
knowledge. In Western Europe, among the Celts and Teutons, and
throughout medieval and early modern times, the individual intake
of alcohol was probably even greater than it is today. On the
many occasions when we drink tea, or coffee, or soda pop, our
ancestors refreshed themselves with wine, beer, mead and, in
later centuries, with gin, brandy and usquebaugh. The regular
drinking of water was a penance imposed on wrongdoers, or
accepted by the religious, along with occasional vegetarianism,
as a very severe mortification. Not to drink an intoxicant was an
eccentricity sufficiently remarkable to call for comment and the
using of a more or less disparaging nickname. Hence such
patronymics as the Italian Bevilacqua, the French Boileau and the
English Drinkwater
Alcohol is but one of the many drugs employed by
human beings as avenues of escape from the insulated self. Of the
natural narcotics, stimulants and hallucinators there is, I
believe, not a single one whose properties have not been known
from time immemorial. Modern research has given us a host of
brand new synthetics; but in regard to the natural poisons it has
merely developed better methods of extracting, concentrating and
recombining those already known. From poppy to curare, from
Andean coca to Indian hemp and Siberian agaric, every plant or
bush or fungus capable, when ingested, of stupefying or exciting
or evoking visions, has long since been discovered and
systematically employed. The fact is strangely significant; for
it seems to prove that, always and everywhere, human beings have
felt the radical inadequacy of their personal existence, the
misery of being their insulated selves and not something else,
something wider, something in Wordsworthian phrase, "far
more deeply interfused." Exploring the world around him,
primitive man evidently "tried all things and held fast to
that which was good." For the purpose of self-preservation
the good is every edible fruit and leaf, every wholesome seed,
root and nut. But in another context—the context of
self-dissatisfaction and the urge to self- transcendence—the
good is everything in nature by means of which the quality of
individual consciousness can be changed. Such drug-induced
changes may be manifestly for the worse, may be at the price of
present discomfort and future addiction, degeneration and
premature death. All this is of no moment. What matters is the
awareness, if only for an hour or two, if only for a few minutes,
of being someone or, more often, something other than the
insulated self. "I live, yet not I, but wine or opium or
peyotl or hashish liveth in me." To go beyond the limits of
the insulated ego is such a liberation that, even when
self-transcendence is through nausea into frenzy, through cramps
into hallucinations and coma, the drug induced experience has
been regarded by primitives and even by the highly civilized as
intrinsically divine. Ecstasy through intoxication is still an
essential part of the religion of many African, South American
and Polynesian peoples. It was once, as the surviving documents
clearly prove, a no less essential part of the religion of the
Celts, the Teutons, the Greeks, the peoples of the Middle East
and the Aryan conquerors of India. It is not merely that
"beer does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to
man." Beer is the god. Among the Celts, Sabazios was the
divine name given to the felt alienation of being dead drunk on
ale. Further to the south, Dionysos was, among other things, the
supernatural objectification of the psychophysical effects of too
much wine. In Vedic mythology, Indra was the god of that now
unidentifiable drug called soma. Hero, slayer of dragons, he was
the magnified projection upon heaven of the strange and glorious
otherness experienced by the intoxicated. Made one with the drug,
he becomes, as Soma-Indra, the source of immortality, the
mediator between the human and the divine.
In modern times beer and the other toxic short cuts
to self-transcendence are no longer officially worshipped as
gods. Theory has undergone a change, but not practice; for in
practice millions upon millions of civilized men and women
continue to pay their devotions, not to the liberating and
transfiguring Spirit, but to alcohol, to hashish, to opium and
its derivatives, to the barbiturates, and the other synthetic
additions to the age-old catalogue of poisons capable of causing
self-transcendence. In every case, of course, what seems a god is
actually a devil, what seems a liberation is in fact an
enslavement. The self-transcendence is invariably downward into
the less than human, the lower than personal.
Like intoxication, elementary sexuality, indulged
in for its own sake and divorced from love, was once a god,
worshipped not only as the principle of fecundity, but as a
manifestation of the radical Otherness immanent in every human
being. In theory, elementary sexuality has long since ceased to
be a god. But in practice it can still boast of a countless host
of sectaries.
There is an elementary sexuality which is innocent,
and there is an elementary sexuality which is morally and
aesthetically squalid. D. H. Lawrence has written very
beautifully of the first; Jean Genet, with horrifying power and
in copious detail, of the second. The sexuality of Eden and the
sexuality of the sewer—both of them have power to carry the
individual beyond the limits of his or her insulated self. But
the second and (one would sadly guess) the commoner variety takes
those who indulge in it to a lower level of subhumanity, evokes
the consciousness, and leaves the memory, of a completer
alienation, than does the first. Hence, for all those who feel
the urge to escape from their imprisoning identity, the perennial
attraction of debauchery and of such strange equivalents of
debauchery as have been described in the course of this
narrative.
In most civilized communities public opinion
condemns debauchery and drug addiction as being ethically wrong.
And to moral disapproval is added fiscal discouragement and legal
repression. Alcohol is heavily taxed, the sale of narcotics is
everywhere prohibited and certain sexual practices are treated as
crimes. But when we pass from drug-taking and elementary
sexuality to the third main avenue of downward
self-transcendence, we find, on the part of moralists and
legislators, a very different and much more indulgent attitude.
This seems all the more surprising since crowd-delirium, as we
may call it, is more immediately dangerous to social order, more
dramatically a menace to that thin crust of decency,
reasonableness and mutual tolerance which constitutes a
civilization, than either drink or debauchery. True, a
generalized and long-continued habit of overindulgence in
sexuality may result, as J. D. Unwin has argued,*( J. D. Unwin, Sex
and Culture, London, 1934), in lowering the energy level of
an entire society, thereby rendering it incapable of reaching or
maintaining a high degree of civilization. Similarly drug
addiction, if sufficiently widespread may lower the military,
economic and political efficiency of the society in which it
prevails. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries raw alcohol
was the secret weapon of the European slave traders; heroin, in
the twentieth, of the Japanese militarists. Dead drunk, the Negro
was an easy prey. As for the Chinese drug addict, he could be
relied upon to make no trouble for his conquerors. But these
cases are exceptional. When left to itself, a society generally
manages to come to terms with its favorite poison. The drug is a
parasite on the body politic, but a parasite which its host (to
speak metaphorically) has strength and sense enough to keep under
control. And the same applies to sexuality. No society which
based its sexual practices upon the theories of the Marquis de
Sade could possibly survive; and in fact no society has ever come
near to doing such a thing. Even the most easygoing of the
Polynesian paradises have their rules and regulations, their
categorical imperatives and commandments. Against excessive
sexuality, as against excessive drug-taking, societies seem to be
able to protect themselves with some degree of success. Their
defense against crowd-delirium and its often disastrous
consequences is, in all too many cases, far less adequate. The
professional moralists who inveigh against drunkenness are
strangely silent about the equally disgusting vice of
herd-intoxication—of downward self-transcendence into
subhumanity by the process of getting together in a mob.
"Where two or three are gathered together in
my name, there am I in the midst of them." In the midst of
two or three hundred, the divine presence becomes more
problematical. And when the numbers run into the thousands, or
tens of thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the
consciousness of each individual, declines almost to the
vanishing point. For such is the nature of an excited crowd (and
every crowd is automatically self-exciting) that, where two or
three thousand are gathered together, there is an absence not
merely of deity, but even of common humanity. The fact of being
one of a multitude delivers a man from his consciousness of being
an insulated self and carries him down into a less than personal
realm, where there are no responsibilities, no right or wrong, no
need for thought or judgment or discrimination —only a
strong vague sense of togetherness, only a shared excitement, a
collective alienation. And the alienation is at once more
prolonged and less exhausting than that induced by debauchery;
the morning after less depressing than that which follows
self-poisoning by alcohol or morphine. Moreover, the
crowd-delirium can be indulged in, not merely without a bad
conscience, but actually, in many cases, with a positive glow of
conscious virtue. For, so far from condemning the practice of
downward self-transcendence through herd-intoxication, the
leaders of church and state have actively encouraged the practice
whenever it could be used for the furtherance of their own ends.
Individually and in the co-ordinated and purposive groups which
constitute a healthy society, men and women display a certain
capacity for rational thought and free choice in the light of
ethical principles. Herded into mobs, the same men and women
behave as though they possessed neither reason nor free will.
Crowd-intoxication reduces them to a condition of infrapersonal
and antisocial irresponsibility. Drugged by the mysterious poison
which every excited herd secretes, they fall into a state of
heightened suggestibility, resembling that which follows an
injection of sodium amytal or the induction, by whatever means,
of a light hypnotic trance. While in this state they will believe
any nonsense that may be bawled at them, will act upon any
command or exhortation, however senseless, mad or criminal. To
men and women under the influence of herd-poison, "whatever
I say three times is true"—and whatever I say three
hundred times is Revelation, is the directly inspired Word of
God. That is why men in authority—the priests and the rulers
of peoples—have never unequivocally proclaimed the
immorality of this form of downward self-transcendence. True,
crowd-delirium evoked by members of the opposition and in the
name of heretical principles has everywhere been denounced by
those in power. But crowd- delirium aroused by government agents,
crowd-delirium in the name of orthodoxy, is an entirely different
matter. In all cases where it can be made to serve the interests
of the men controlling church and state, downward
self-transcendence by means of herd-intoxication is treated as
something legitimate, and even highly desirable. Pilgrimages and
political rallies, corybantic revivals and patriotic
parades—these things are ethically right so long as they are
our pilgrimages, our rallies, our revivals
and our parades. The fact that most of those who take part
in these affairs are temporarily dehumanized by herd-poison is of
no account in comparison with the fact that their dehumanization
may be used to consolidate the religious and political powers
that be.
When crowd-delirium is exploited for the benefit of
governments and orthodox churches, the exploiters are always very
careful not to allow the intoxication to go too far. The ruling
minorities make use of their subjects' craving for downward
self-transcendence in order, first, to amuse and distract them
and, second, to get them into a subpersonal state of heightened
suggestibility. Religious and political ceremonials are welcomed
by the masses as opportunities for getting drunk on herd-poison,
and by their rulers as opportunities for planting suggestions in
minds which have momentarily ceased to be capable of reason or
free will.
The final symptom of herd-intoxication is a
maniacal violence. Instances of crowd- delirium culminating in
gratuitous destructiveness, in ferocious self-mutilation, in
fratricidal savagery without purpose and against the elementary
interests of all concerned, are to be met with on almost every
page of the anthropologists' textbooks and—a little less
frequently, but still with dismal regularity —in the
histories of even the most highly civilized peoples. Except when
they wish to liquidate an unpopular minority the official
representatives of state and church are chary of evoking a frenzy
which they cannot be sure of controlling. No such scruples
restrain the revolutionary leader, who hates the status quo
and has only one wish—to create a chaos on which, when he
comes to power, he may impose a new kind of order. When the
revolutionary exploits men's urge to downward self-transcendence,
he exploits it to the frantic and demoniac limit. To men and
women sick of being their insulated selves and weary of the
responsibilities which go with membership in a purposive human
group, he offers exciting opportunities for "getting away
from it all" in parades and demonstrations and public
meetings. The organs of the body politic are purposive groups. A
crowd is the social equivalent of a cancer. The poison it
secretes depersonalizes its constituent members to the point
where they start to behave with a savage violence, of which, in
their normal state, they would be completely incapable. The
revolutionary encourages his followers to manifest this last and
worst symptom of herd-intoxication and then proceeds to direct
their frenzy against his enemies, the holders of political,
economic and religious power.
In the course of the last forty years the
techniques for exploiting man's urge toward this most dangerous
form of downward self-transcendence have reached a pitch of
perfection unmatched in all of history. To begin with, there are
more people to the square mile than ever before, and the means of
transporting vast herds of them from considerable distances, and
of concentrating them in a single building or arena, are much
more efficient than in the past. Meanwhile, new and previously
undreamed-of devices for exciting mobs have been invented. There
is the radio, which has enormously extended the range of the
demagogue's raucous yelling. There is the loudspeaker, amplifying
and indefinitely reduplicating the heady music of class- hatred
and militant nationalism. There is the camera (of which it was
once naively said that "it cannot lie") and its
offspring, the movies and television; these three have made the
objectification of tendentious phantasy absurdly easy. And
finally there is that greatest of our social inventions, free,
compulsory education. Everyone now knows how to read and everyone
consequently is at the mercy of the propagandists, governmental
or commercial, who own the pulp factories, the linotype machines
and the rotary presses. Assemble a mob of men and women
previously conditioned by a daily reading of newspapers; treat
them to amplified band music, bright lights, and the oratory of a
demagogue who (as demagogues always are) is simultaneously the
exploiter and the victim of herd-intoxication, and in next to no
time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless
subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make
fools, maniacs or criminals of so many.
In Communist Russia, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi
Germany, the exploiters of humanity's fatal taste for herd-poison
have followed an identical course. When in revolutionary
opposition, they encouraged the mobs under their influence to
become destructively violent. Later, when they had come to power,
it was only in relation to foreigners and selected scapegoats
that they permitted herd-intoxication to run its full course.
Having acquired a vested interest in the status quo, they
now checked the descent into subhumanity at a point well this
side of frenzy. For these neo-conservatives, mass intoxication
was chiefly valuable, henceforward, as a means for heightening
their subjects' suggestibility and so rendering them more docile
to the expressions of authoritarian will. Being in a crowd is the
best known antidote to independent thought. Hence the dictators'
rooted objection to "mere psychology" and a private
life. "Intellectuals of the world, unite! You have nothing
to lose but your brains."
Drugs, elementary sexuality and
herd-intoxication—these are the three most popular avenues
of downward self-transcendence. There are many others, not so
well trodden as these great descending highways, but leading no
less surely to the same infra-personal goal. Consider, for
example, the way of rhythmic movement. In primitive religions
prolonged rhythmic movement is very commonly resorted to for the
purpose of inducing a state of infra-personal and subhuman
ecstasy. The same technique for achieving the same end has been
used by many civilized peoples—by the Greeks, for example,
by the Hindus, by many of the orders of Dervishes in the Islamic
world, by such Christian sects as the Shakers and the Holy
Rollers. In all these cases rhythmic movement, long-drawn and
repetitive, is a form of ritual deliberately practiced for the
sake of the downward self-transcendence resulting from it.
History also records many sporadic outbreaks of involuntary and
uncontrollable jigging, swaying and head-wagging. These epidemics
of what in one region is called Tarantism, in another St. Vitus's
dance, have generally occurred in times of trouble following
wars, pestilences and famines, and are most common where malaria
is endemic. The unwitting purpose of the men and women who
succumb to these collective manias is the same as that pursued by
the sectaries who use the dance as a religious rite—namely,
to escape from insulated selfhood into a state in which there are
no responsibilities, no guilt-laden past or haunting future, but
only the present, blissful consciousness of being someone else.
Intimately associated with the ecstasy-producing
rite of rhythmic movement is the ecstasy-producing rite of
rhythmic sound. Music is as vast as human nature and has
something to say to men and women on every level of their being,
from the self-regardingly sentimental to the abstractly
intellectual, from the merely visceral to the spiritual. In one
of its innumerable forms music is a powerful drug, partly
stimulant and partly narcotic, but wholly alterative. No man,
however highly civilized, can listen for very long to African
drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn-singing, and retain
intact his critical and self-conscious personality. It would be
interesting to take a group of the most eminent philosophers from
the best universities, shut them up in a hot room with Moroccan
dervishes or Haitian voodooists, and measure, with a stop watch,
the strength of their psychological resistance to the effects of
rhythmic sound. Would the Logical Positivists be able to hold out
longer than the Subjective Idealists; Would the Marxists prove
tougher than the Thomists or the Vedantists? What a fascinating,
what a fruitful field for experiment! Meanwhile, all we can
safely predict is that, if exposed long enough to the tom-toms
and the singing, every one of our philosophers would end by
capering and howling with the savages.
The ways of rhythmic movement and of rhythmic sound
are generally superimposed, so to speak, upon the way of
herd-intoxication. But there are also private roads, roads which
can be taken by the solitary traveler who has no taste for
crowds, or no strong faith in the principles, institutions and
persons in whose name crowds are assembled. One of these private
roads is the way of the mantram, the way of what Christ
called "vain repetition." In public worship "vain
repetition" is almost always associated with rhythmic sound.
Litanies and the like are chanted, or at least intoned. It is as
music that they produce their quasi-hypnotic effects. "Vain
repetition," when practiced privately, acts upon the mind,
not because of its association with rhythmic sound (for it works
even when the words are merely imagined), but in virtue of a
concentration of attention and memory. The constant reiteration
of the same word or phrase frequently brings on a state of light
or even profound trance. Once induced, this trance can either be
enjoyed for its own sake, as a delicious sense of infra-personal
otherness, or else deliberately used for the purpose of improving
personal conduct by autosuggestion and of preparing the way for
the ultimate achievement of upward self-transcendence. Of the
second possibility more will be said in a later paragraph. Here
our concern is with "vain repetition" as a descending
road into an infra- personal alienation.
We must now consider a strictly physiological
method of escape from insulated selfhood. The way of corporal
penance. The destructive violence which is the final symptom of
herd- intoxication is not invariably directed outward. The
history of religion abounds in gruesome tales of gregarious
self-whipping, self-gashing, self-gelding, even self-killing.
These acts are the consequences of crowd-delirium, and are
performed in a state of frenzy. Very different is the corporal
penance undertaken privately and in cold blood. Here the
self-torment is initiated by an act of the personal will; but its
result (in some cases at least) is a temporary transformation of
the insulated personality into something else. In itself, this
something else is the consciousness, so intense as to be
exclusive, of physical pain. The self-tortured person identifies
himself with his pain and, in becoming merely the awareness of
his suffering body, is delivered from that sense of past guilt
and present frustration, that obsessive anxiety about the future,
which constitute so large a part of the neurotic ego. There has
been an escape from selfhood, a downward passage into a state of
pure physiological excruciation. But the self-tormentor need not
necessarily remain in this region of infra-personal
consciousness. Like the man who makes use of "vain
repetition" to go beyond himself, he may be able to use his
temporary alienation from selfhood as the bridge, so to speak,
leading upward into the life of the spirit.
This raises a very important and difficult
question. To what extent, and in what circumstances, is it
possible for a man to make use of the descending road as a way to
spiritual self-transcendence; As first sight it would seem
obvious that the way down is not and can never be the way up. But
in the realm of existence matters are not quite so simple as they
are in our beautifully tidy world of words. In actual life a
downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an
ascent. When the shell of the ego has been cracked and there
begins to be a consciousness of the subliminal and physiological
othernesses underlying personality, it sometimes happens that we
catch a glimpse, fleeting but apocalyptic, of that other
Otherness, which is the Ground of all being. So long as we are
confined within our insulated selfhood, we remain unaware of the
various not-selves with which we are associated—the organic
not-self, the subconscious not-self, the collective not-self of
the psychic medium in which all our thinking and feeling have
their existence, and the immanent and transcendent not-self of
the Spirit. Any escape, even by a descending road, out of
insulated selfhood makes possible at least a momentary awareness
of the not-self on every level, including the highest. William
James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, gives
instances of "anaesthetic revelations," following the
inhalation of laughing gas. Similar theophanies are sometimes
experienced by alcoholics, and there are probably moments in the
course of intoxication by almost any drug, when awareness of a
not-self superior to the disintegrating ego becomes briefly
possible. But these occasional flashes of revelation are bought
at an enormous price. For the drugtaker, the moment of spiritual
awareness (if it comes at all) gives place very soon to subhuman
stupor, frenzy or hallucination, followed by dismal hangovers
and, in the long run, by a permanent and fatal impairment of
bodily health and mental power. Very occasionally a single
"anaesthetic revelation" may act, like any other
theophany, to incite its recipient to an effort of
self-transformation and upward self-transcendence. But the fact
that such a thing sometimes happens can never justify the
employment of chemical methods of self-transcendence. This is a
descending road and most of those who take it will come to a
state of degradation, where periods of subhuman ecstasy alternate
with periods of conscious selfhood so wretched that any escape,
even if it be into the slow suicide of drug addiction, will seem
preferable to being a person.
What is true of drugs is true, mutatis mutandis,
of elementary sexuality. The road runs downhill; but on the way
there may occasionally be theophanies. The Dark Gods, as Lawrence
called them, may change their sign and become bright. In India
there is a Tantric yoga, based upon an elaborate
psychophysiological technique, whose purpose is to transform the
downward self-transcendence of elementary sexuality into an
upward self-transcendence. In the West the nearest equivalent to
these Tantric practices was the sexual discipline devised by John
Humphrey Noyes and practiced by the members of the Oneida
Community. At Oneida elementary sexuality was not only
successfully civilized; it was made compatible with, and
subordinate to, a form of Protestant Christianity, sincerely
preached and earnestly acted upon.
Herd-intoxication disintegrates the ego more
thoroughly than does elementary sexuality. Its frenzies, its
follies, its heightened suggestibility can be matched only in the
intoxications induced by such drugs as alcohol, hashish and
heroin. But even to the member of an excited mob there may come
(at some relatively early stage of his downward
self-transcendence) a genuine revelation of the Otherness that is
above selfhood. This is one of the reasons why some good may
sometimes come out of even the most corybantic of revival
meetings. Some good as well as very great evil may also result
from the fact that men and women in a crowd tend to become more
than ordinarily suggestible. While in this state they are
subjected to exhortations which have the force, when they come
once again to their senses, of posthypnotic commands. Like the
demagogue, the revivalist and the ritualist disintegrate the ego
of their hearers by herding them together and dosing them with
plenty of vain repetition and rhythmic sound. Then, unlike the
demagogue, they give suggestions some of which may be genuinely
Christian. These, if they "take," result in a
reintegration of broken-down personalities on a somewhat higher
level. There can also be reintegrations of personality under the
influence of the posthypnotic commands issued by a rabble-rousing
politician. But these commands are all incitements to hatred on
the one hand and to blind obedience and compensatory illusion on
the other. Initiated by a massive dose of herd-poison, confirmed
and directed by the rhetoric of a maniac who is at the same time
a Machiavellian exploiter of other men's weakness, political
"conversion" results in the creation of a new
personality worse than the old and much more dangerous because
wholeheartedly devoted to a party whose first aim is the
liquidation of its opponents.
I have distinguished between demagogues and
religionists, on the ground that the latter may sometimes do some
good, whereas the former can scarcely, in the very nature of
things, do anything but harm. But it must not by imagined that
the religious exploiters of herd-intoxication are wholly
guiltless. On the contrary, they have been responsible in the
past for mischiefs almost as enormous as those brought upon their
victims (along with the victims of those victims) by the
revolutionary demagogues of our own time. In the course of the
last six or seven generations, the power of religious
organizations to do evil has, throughout the Western world,
considerably declined. Primarily this is due to the astounding
progress of applied science and the consequent demand by the
masses for compensatory illusions that have an air of being
positivistic rather than metaphysical. The demagogues offer such
pseudo-positivistic illusions and the churches do not. As the
attractiveness of the churches declines, so also does their
influence, so do their wealth, their political power and, along
with these, their capacity for doing evil on a large scale.
Circumstances have now delivered the churchmen from certain of
the temptations, to which, in earlier centuries, their
predecessors almost invariably succumbed. They would be well
advised voluntarily to deliver themselves from such temptations
as still remain. Conspicuous among these is the temptation to
acquire power by pandering to men's insatiable craving for
downward self-transcendence. Deliberately to induce
herd-intoxication—even if it is done in the name of
religion, even if it is all supposedly "for the good"
of the intoxicated—cannot be morally justified.
On the subject of horizontal self-transcendence
very little need be said—not because the phenomenon is
unimportant (far from it), but because it is too obvious to
require analysis and of occurrence too frequent to be readily
classifiable.
In order to escape from the horrors of insulated
selfhood most men and women choose, most of the time, to go
neither up nor down, but sideways. They identify themselves with
some cause wider than their own immediate interests, but not
degradingly lower and, if higher, higher only within the range of
current social values. This horizontal, or nearly horizontal,
self- transcendence may be into something as trivial as a hobby,
or as precious as married love. It can be brought about through
self-identification with any human activity, from running a
business to research in nuclear physics, from composing music to
collecting stamps, from campaigning for political office to
educating children or studying the mating habits of birds.
Horizontal self- transcendence is of the utmost importance.
Without it, there would be no art, no science, no law, no
philosophy, indeed no civilization. And there would also be no
war, no odium theologicum or ideologicum, no
systematic intolerance, no persecution. These great goods and
these enormous evils are the fruits of man's capacity for total
and continuous self-identification with an idea, a feeling, a
cause. How can we have the good without the evil, a high
civilization without saturation bombing or the extermination of
religious and political heretics The answer is that we cannot
have it so long as our self-transcendence remains merely
horizontal. When we identify ourselves with an idea or a cause we
are in fact worshipping something homemade, something partial and
parochial, something that, however noble, is yet all too human.
"Patriotism," as a great patriot concluded on the eve
of her execution by her country's enemies, "is not
enough." Neither is socialism, nor communism, nor
capitalism; neither is art, nor science, nor public order, nor
any given religion or church. All these are indispensable, but
none of them is enough. Civilization demands from the individual
devoted self-identification with the highest of human causes. But
if this self-identification with what is human is not accompanied
by a conscious and consistent effort to achieve upward
self-transcendence into the universal life of the Spirit, the
goods achieved will always be mingled with counterbalancing
evils. "We make," wrote Pascal, "an idol of truth
itself; for truth without charity is not God, but His image and
idol, which we must neither love or worship." And it is not
merely wrong to worship an idol; it is also exceedingly
inexpedient. The worship of truth apart from
charity—self-identification with science unaccompanied by
self-identification with the Ground of all being—results in
the kind of situation which now confronts us. Every idol, however
exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for
human sacrifice.