Just To See What Will Happen

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23131, 21 September 1940, Page 5

Just To See What Will Happen

Hopousia, or the Sexual ami Economic Foundations of a New Society. By J, D. Unwin. With an Introduction by Aldous Huxley. Preface by T. J. Lubback. Allen and Unwin. 475 pp. (31s net.)

[Reviewed by ARTHUR WALEY in the “New Statesman."]

In “Sex and Culture,” published in 1934, J. D. Unwin set out to prove that social energy depends upon sexual continence. Sometimes the theory is expressed in a qualified way: certain kinds of repression lead to energy and ultimately to expansion. But in his present book the qualifications tend to disappear; for example (p. 92), “The group which inherited the sternest sexual regulations has dominated the other groups.” Logically, therefore (though Unwin does not envisage this), expansions ought to have been led by a caste of celibates. In “Hopousia” he performs a laboratory experiment. He takes a society such as ours, isolates it and injects energy into it (on the principles discovered in “Sex and. Culture”), not in order to create a Utopia or imaginary paradise, but “just to see what will happen,” Aldous Huxley in his introduction raises the objection that “an isolated society does not exist any more than doe- an isolated individual”; and he-goes on to say that a great part of the energy of contemporary societies is devoted to war or preparation for war. “No scientific observer of human behaviour can afford to neglect this fact,” Unwin, however (this at any rate is my theory), would as soon have

thought of carrying armfuls of muck from the Camberwell road into his tidy Settlement study as of putting war into this book. It is clear to me that his little hermetic world was elaborately constructed as an escape from reality, and that “Hopousia” should be read as a pendanf to Franz Kafka’s story, “Der Bau.”

of his death in 1936) is that it has some of the characteristics of a scripture. It is capable, as tures commonly are, of being inter-' preted in a number of different ways. Aldous Huxley speaks of Unwin’s “plan of campaign against embattled evil and stupidity,’’ regardless of the fact that the author refused to be considered a reformer and did not (p. 112) regard his test-tube* construction as more “desirable” than the existing world. The Song of Solomon itself has not been interpreted more oddly or variously than “Sex and Culture.” Pacificists hailed it as a new gospel; but apart from a curious prejudice against headhunting, Unwin nowhere condemns aggression. Orthodox churchmen frequently begged him to harangue them, despite the fact that he cared nothing for traditional morality, candidly protesting at his lectures that he was not concerned with right and wrong, but only with what would happen “if a society did resolve to display great energy.” Personally, I like his book and his conversation because they set me off thinking about many things I should never otherwise have thought of; for example, the chastity of Chingiz Khan’s grandmother. But this was not all. It is stimulating and rare to meet, cither in talk or books, with intense intellectual excitement. That Unwin lived in such a state is apparent in all that he wrote.

Unwin’s fundamental conceptions have been criticised by specialists. He attached paramount importance to the chastity of girls during the few years between puberty and marriage. The psychologists pointed out that character is largely determined by the experiences of the first five years of life, and that a few years of adult restriction could not have the sweeping effect that Unwin postulated. Again, the ethnologists naturally discovered that some of his information about the private lives of savages was incorrect. A general criticism that might be made is that his conception of social energy was somewhat narrow and conventional. He had his eye on showy territorial expansions and on the stock “golden periods” of literature and art; but it does not seem to have occurred to him that immense social energy can express itself in ritual and dancing. Thus on p. 92 he says that no “energetic society” has ever been “matriarchal” (which, strictly speaking, means that the dominant member of the family is the mother’s brother). The fact that Malabar (the locus classicus of matriarchy) produced the kathakali dance-drama is entirely ignored. Yet surely the building up of a great traditional drama is a display of social energy equal to that of expanding a frontier or making a temple?

The importance of Unwin’s first book (shared by the present work, which he left unfinished at the time

Simple Mathematics for Gunner Officers (Gale and Polden Ltd. 40 pp. 1/6 net.), by J. C. S. Hymans, M.A., explains the elementary ideas of trigonometry and logarithms in so far as they arc of use to artillery officers. An appendix explains some of the commoner empirical rules.