Socratic Dialogues of the Moment | Vanity Fair (2025)

Socratic Dialogues of the Moment

Showing That, for a Newspaper Editor, Intelligence is the Most Inhuman Quality of the Human Race

ALDOUS HUXLEY

STEATOCEPHALUS: A Newspaper Editor.

EVANDER: A Man in the Street.

EVANDER: Good morning, Steatocephalus. It's a very long time since we last met.

STEATOCEPHALUS: It is, Evander. Much water, as they say, has flowed under the bridges since then. How time flies!

EVANDER: It does. But tell me, is it true that you have been appointed the editor of The Daily Firelighter?

STEATOCEPHALUS: True indeed. Without false modesty I may say, like Louis the Fourteenth: The Firelighter, c'est moi. I have made it what it is.

EVANDER: And, pray, what is it?

STEATOCEPHALUS: What is it? I will answer that in a word: A Great Paper.

EVANDER: Of course, Steatocephalus, that goes without saying. You have a million circulation and publish sixteen pages a day—I know all about that.

STEATOCEPHALUS: And you have omitted to state that we ensure our readers gratis against sickness. Adults are ensured against croup, chicken-pox, rickets, hooping-cough and German measles; while children under sixteen receive five pounds a week sickness benefit while suffering from cancer, diabetes, Bright's disease and gout. Few journals, I flatter myself, have ever offered such generous terms to their readers.

EVANDER: They are positively philanthropic. But to return to my question—I was not asking you about insurance schemes, or circulation, or number of pages, or acreage of wood-pulp. When I ask for a description of a human being. I like to know something about his soul as well as his material carcass. Tell me about the soul of the Daily Firelighter.

STEATOCEPHALUS : Brightness and humanity —those two words concisely sum up the spiritual qualities of my paper. Humanity refers to the content, brightness to the form. To take an obvious example, if I print a photograph of Mrs. Asquith saying good-bye to her infant granddaughter and write underneath, "Ta-ta, Granny," I am giving the public something that is essentially human in substance, and essentially bright in expression. You follow me? EVANDER : Perfectly.

STEATOCEPHALUS: For us journalists, the term Human connotes these four great ideas— Home, Mother, Pathos, Amour.

EVANDER: Don't you include intelligence or reason?

STEATOCEPHALUS: Certainly not.

EVANDER: But surely intelligence is also human. After all, the species to which we belong is called Homo Sapiens. It isn't Homo Amans, or Homo Lacrimans, or Homo Maternalis, or Homo Domesticus.

STEATOCEPHALUS: NOW you're trying to be paradoxical, Evander. But it's no good; believe me, my dear boy, it's no good. When you pronounce the words "Human Nature" you don't have any notion of reason or intelligence in your mind, do you?

EVANDER: I suppose not.

STEATOCEPHALUS: YOU call a man human when he likes his family, or gets drunk, or breaks the seventh commandment. When he's intelligent, he is called inhuman. It may be laid down as a general truth that all the qualities which man shares with the lower animals are human; those which he does not share with them are inhuman. I hope I make myself clear.

EVANDER: Perfectly. But to return to The Daily Firelighter—don't you find it rather difficult sometimes to give the morning's news just the right bright human touch? So much of it must be dreadfully inhuman.

STEATOCEPHALUS: Of course. But there's where the art of editing comes in. We emphasize only what possesses news value. The news value of any piece of information varies in direct ratio to its human interest. Murders, football matches, divorces and the actions of the rich have a higher news value than politics, economics, science or the fine arts; they are more human. But generalizations are terribly inhuman things; they remind one too much of mathematics. Let me give you a concrete example.

EVANDER: DO. That will make it much easier to follow.

STEATOCEPHALUS: Consider for a moment the news value of the various members of the Asquith family. There is, to begin with, Mr. Asquith. Once, in the time of his premiership, he had considerable news value; indeed, to do him justice, he made the family name. But look at him now; a mere statesman out of office possesses no news value whatever. His wife, on the other hand, is particularly rich in this virtue. To begin with, a woman is always more human than a man and so possesses more news value than a man of equal distinction. But Mrs. Asquith is not merely a woman; she moves in the best society and is the author of some amazingly human reminiscences. For The Daily Firelighter her lightest saying or doing is more important than the weightiest pronouncement by Mr. Asquith. Only less valuable is Mr. Anthony Asquith. An ex-infant prodigy who knows how to prove the truth of the Einstein theory by music must inevitably take a prominent place on my front page. It is the greatest pity he was not born a girl. That is the great advantage possessed by his sister, Princess Bibesco, who now bids fair to outdo in news value even her mother. A prince's wife, an authoress and the wittiest woman in Washington—she has all the odds on her side. Compared with the Princess and her younger brother, the rest of the family are nothing. They have almost as little news value as their poor father. We should only report their doings at the bottom of a back page.

EVANDER: YOU make it all luminously clear.

STEATOCEPHALUS: It is my business to make things comprehensible to the meanest intelligence.

EVANDER : Thank you. . . . And now may I ask you rather a stupid question ?

STEATOCEPHALUS: Certainly, my dear fellow.

EVANDER: Well then, this is what I should like to know. What is the good of your bright and human paper when you have gone to all the trouble of producing it? You profit by it, of course, financially. But how do its readers profit? Does it educate them—is it meant to stimulate them to thought?

STEATOCEPHALUS: Thought? A newspaper, my dear young friend, is not meant to stimulate thought; it is meant to be a substitute for it. People read the newspapers for the same reason that they go to the movies, or listen to brass bands, or collect postage stamps-in order that they may keep their minds occupied, while not subjecting them to the slightest strain or fatigue. It is my proud achievement to have made The Daily Firelighter so human, and so bright that it provokes less thought and occupies the mind more effectively than any other newspaper on the market.

EVANDER: I congratulate you, Steatocephalus. And now, I fear I must be going.

STEATOCEPHALUS: Good-bye, then, my

friend.

EVANDER: Good-bye and thank you.

The Influence of Science on Immortal Literature

CODRUS: A Novelist.

PYTHAGORAS: A Man of Science.

CODRUS : And so you have not read my latest novel. What an extraordinary thing! I thought everyone had read it.

PYTHAGORAS: I have no time for reading novels. I am very sorry.

CODRUS: Don't apologize to me, my dear fellow. The loss is yours, not mine. It is I, who should be sorry for you; for you are ignorant of what, without presumption, I may call one of the world's Immortal Books. All the critics declare that there has never been such a nobly tragical picture of spiritual conflict, such acute insight into character, so vivid a presentation of world-weariness and ecstasy as are to be found in this last book of mine, Satan's Mother-in-Law. I have the newspaper cuttings in my pocket.

PYTHAGORAS: Pray, don't trouble to look for them. I have written reviews myself, you know.

CODRUS: Oh, very well. I only wanted to show you what you had missed by not reading Satan's Mother-in-Law.

PYTHAGORAS: But I know exactly: an immortal book. You said so.

CODRUS (archly): Ah, now you begin to flatter me, Pythagoras.

PYTHAGORAS (reflectively): I sometimes wonder what our descendants some two or three hundred years from now will think of our immortal books. It may be that men's ideas will have changed so radically by then, that our immortal works will seem to them singularly meaningless. A few centuries hence, when the psychologists have thoroughly and completely explored the human mind, when the real motives for our actions in every typical crisis of life are to be found in every elementary text-book, is it likely that people will continue to read the extremely crude attempts at analysis made by the ignorant novelists and playwrights of an earlier generation? Or take your famous spiritual conflicts. What are they but conflicts between the natural desires and the laws of an outworn society, turned into conscience by a herd instinct that is as powerful as the instincts of sex or self-preservation? Establish a decent social order, make current reasonable opinions and most of your spiritual conflicts, most of your consciousness of sin and your nervous breakdowns will automatically vanish—and with them all but the merest historical interest in your immortal books.

(Continued on page 102)

(Continued from page 41)

CODRUS (yawns abysmally): Excuse me.

PYTHAGORAS (continuing with growing exaltation): And sex, think of sex.

CODRUS: I do, very often.

PYTHAGORAS: Put sexual relations on a sensible basis, do away with the old taboos and the occupation of most of you novelists will be gone. And as for world-weariness, my dear Codrus, can you suppose that a perfected medical science will allow that very pathological emotion to go on existing? When the ductless glands all function like clockwork, and the small intestine is no more, Byron and de Musset will be incomprehensible and your own Satan's Mother-in-Law will read like the mumblings of an imbecile. (His face glows, he makes the gestures of a public speaker.) No, there are no immortal books. Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—they will all be utterly forgotten in the perfected world of but a few generations hence. And the time approaches. The March of Progress, my dear Codrus. (Pythagoras turns his eyes from the far horizons on which they have been ecstatically fixed, towards the place where his interlocutor has been standing, and becomes aware that he is no longer there. Codrus quietly left the building some time ago.)

Socratic Dialogues of the Moment | Vanity Fair (2025)
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