It’s Aldous Huxley’s 130th birthday today. He was born July 26, 1894 in England and became a respected writer and philosopher, nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times throughout his life.
Huxley’s writing has insight into human nature and its social dynamics and development, from the famous Brave New World to his seemingly lighter novellas about his contemporary world, as seen in this quote from “After the Fireworks.”
I’d just been saying… that one ought to say what one thinks as well as do what one likes; but it seems to be hopeless—and he said he entirely agreed, it was perfect, so long as you had the luck to like the sort of things that kept you on the right side of the prison bars and think the sort of things that don’t get you murdered when you say them.
Aldous Huxley, “After the Fireworks”
I’ve always had a bit of trouble with the ideal of free expression. It is certainly much simpler in the abstract.
In a culture that constantly pays lip service to the call to “be yourself” or “express yourself” there’s an underlying understanding of certain socially acceptable boundaries. It’s a tension of the individual versus the interpersonal that needs to be acknowledged and reconciled.
Which I don’t think our culture is great at.
Social media has only amplified the problem. It’s easier than ever to express ourselves individually, to a far wider potential audience.
Sometimes the social boundaries that would usually come from community or friends and acquaintances are reflected in the form of amusing ways people comment on certain oversharing videos or posts: “maybe that one should have stayed in the drafts” or “we really need to bring back shame.” Other times the reaction to certain opinions or topics is much more dangerous, leading to accusations of everything from bigotry to crime, or even to threats of harm from incensed strangers who take exception to the poster’s existence.
Extremes are the order of the day. It’s difficult to strike a balance between unfiltered bluntness of both speech and action with no consideration for how they might affect others, and self-censorship to the point of never expressing a true thought or taking a controversial step for fear of how others might possibly react.
Certainly there is a place for self-restraint and, as the speaker in the Huxley quote so wryly points out, there are very real consequences for certain kinds of self-expression that are laid out by society, or by powerful interests within it.
It’s fair to say that Huxley had at the very least a skepticism, if not outright suspicion, of the government’s tendency to dictate the forms and extents of “free expression” through social conditioning. Obviously, there is a place for the penal system, but there are also pervasive influences through society all around us that we often don’t question, keeping us in figurative prisons, preventing us from exploring certain ideas or avenues for fear of where it might lead.
Fictitiously Yours 