Island - Aldous Huxley [60]
He turned again to the album. “Let’s get back to the house in the Royal Burgh, back to James and Janet, and the six children whom Calvin’s God, in His inscrutable malevolence, had condemned to their tender mercies. ‘The rod and reproof bring wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.’ Indoctrination reinforced by psychological stress and physical torture—the perfect Pavlovian setup. But, unfortunately for organized religion and political dictatorship, human beings are much less reliable as laboratory animals than dogs. On Tom, Mary and Jean the conditioning worked as it was meant to work. Tom became a minister, and Mary married a minister and duly died in childbirth. Jean stayed at home, nursed her mother through a long grim cancer and for the next twenty years was slowly sacrificed to the aging and finally senile and driveling patriarch. So far, so good. But with Annie, the fourth child, the pattern changed. Annie was pretty. At eighteen she was proposed to by a captain of dragoons. But the captain was an Anglican and his views on total depravity and God’s good pleasure were criminally incorrect. The marriage was forbidden. It looked as though Annie were predestined to share the fate of Jean. She stuck it out for ten years; then, at twenty-eight, she got herself seduced by the second mate of an East Indiaman. There were seven weeks of almost frantic happiness—the first she had ever known. Her face was transfigured by a kind of supernatural beauty, her body glowed with life. Then the Indiaman sailed for a two-year voyage for Madras and Macao. Four months later, pregnant, friendless and despairing, Annie threw herself into the Tay. Meanwhile Alexander, the next in line, had run away from school and joined a company of actors. In the house by the rope walk nobody, thenceforward, was ever allowed to refer to his existence. And finally there was Andrew, the youngest, the Benjamin. What a model child! He was obedient, he loved his lessons, he learned the Epistles by heart faster and more accurately than any of the other children had done. Then, just in time to restore her faith in human wickedness, his mother caught him one evening playing with his genitals. He was whipped till the blood came; was caught again a few weeks later and again whipped, sentenced to solitary confinement on bread and water, told that he had almost certainly committed the sin against the Holy Ghost and that it was undoubtedly on account of that sin that his mother had been afflicted with cancer. For the rest of his childhood Andrew was haunted by recurrent nightmares of hell. Haunted, too, by recurrent temptations and, when he succumbed to them—which of course he did, but always in the privacy of the latrine at the bottom of the garden—by yet more terrifying visions of the punishments in store for him.”
“And to think,” Will Farnaby commented, “to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.”
“Agreed,” said Dr. MacPhail. “But mightn’t there be a third possibility? Mightn’t there be a tale told by somebody who is neither an imbecile nor a paranoiac?”
“Somebody, for a change, completely sane,” said Susila.
“Yes, for a change,” Dr. MacPhail repeated. “For a blessed change. And luckily, even under the old dispensation, there were always plenty of people whom even the most diabolic upbringing couldn’t ruin. By all the rules of the Freudian and Pavlovian games, my great-grandfather ought to have grown up to be a mental cripple. In fact, he grew up to be a mental athlete. Which only shows,” Dr. Robert added parenthetically, “how hopelessly inadequate your two highly touted systems of psychology really are. Freudism and behaviorism—poles apart but in complete agreement when it comes to the facts of the built-in, congenital differences between individuals. How do your pet psychologists deal with these facts? Very simply. They ignore them. They blandly pretend