Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [224]
‘still, it must be wonderful to have a child,’ said Burlap with proper wistfulness. ‘I often wish…’
Rampion interrupted him. ‘It must be still more wonderful to be one. When one’s grown up, I mean.’ He grinned.
‘What do you do about your children?’ asked Spandrell.
‘As little as I can. Unfortunately they have to go to school. I only hope they won’t learn too much. It’d be really awful if they emerged as little professors stuffed with knowledge, trotting out their smart little abstract generalizations. They probably will. Just to spite me. Children generally do spite their parents. Not on purpose, of course, but unconsciously, because they can’t help it, because the parents have probably gone too far in one direction and nature’s reacting, trying to get back to the state of equilibrium. Yes, yes, I can feel it in my bones. They’ll be professors, the little devils. They’ll be horrid little scientists. Like your friend Illidge,’ he said, turning to Spandrell, who started uncomfortably at the name and was annoyed that he should have started. ‘Horrid little brains that do their best to suppress the accompanying hearts and bowels.’
Spandrell smiled his significant, rather melodramatically-ironic smile. ‘Young Illidge hasn’t succeeded in suppressing his heart and bowels,’ he said. ‘Not by a long chalk.’
‘Of course not. Nobody can suppress them. All that happens in the process is that they’re transformed from living organs into offal. And why are they transformed? In the interests of what? Of a lot of silly knowledge and irrelevant abstractions.’
‘Which are after all quite amusing in themselves,’ said Philip, breaking his silence to come to the rescue of the intellect. ‘Making generalizations and pursuing knowledge are amusements. Among the most entertaining, to my mind.’ Philip went on to develop his hedonistic justification of the mental life. ‘So why be so hard on our little diversions?’ he concluded. ‘You don’t denounce golf; so why should you denounce the sports of the highbrows?’
‘That’s fairly rudimentary, isn’t it?’ said Rampion. ‘The tree shall be known by its fruits. The fruits of golf are either non-existent, harmless or positively beneficial. A healthy liver, for example—that’s a very fine fruit. Whereas the fruits of intellectualism—my God!’ He made a grimace. ‘Look at them. The whole of our industrial civilization—that’s their fruit. The morning paper, the radio, the cinema, all fruits. Tanks and trinitrotoluol; Rockefeller and Mond—fruits again. They’re all the result of the systematically organized, professional intellectualism of the last two hundred years. And you expect me to approve of your amusements? But, I tell you, I prefer bull-fighting. What’s the torture of a few animals and the brutalizing of a few hundred spectators compared to the ruining and befouling and degrading of a whole world? Which is what you highbrows have done since you professionalized and organized your amusements.’
‘Come, come,’ said Philip. ‘The picture’s a little lurid. And anyhow, even if it were accurate, the highbrows can’t be held responsible for the applications other people have made of their results.’
‘They are responsible. Because they brought the other people up in their own damned intellectualist tradition. After all, the other people are only highbrows on another plane. A business man is just a man of science who happens to be rather stupider than the real man of science. He’s living just as one-sidedly and intellectually, as far as his intellect goes, as the other one, And the fruit of that is inner psychological degeneration. For of course,’ he added parenthetically, ‘the fruits of your amusements aren’t merely the external apparatus of modern industrial life. They’re an inward decay; they’re infantilism and degeneracy and all sorts of madness and primitive reversion. No, no, I have no patience with your precious amusements of the mind. You’d be doing far less harm if you were playing golf.’
‘But truth?’ queried Burlap, who had been listening to the discussion without speaking.