...time might have arrived for Huxley's return to the discomfort zone, where we have to deal with what he said as a permanently disturbing intellectual position rather than dismissing it as an obsolete set of fads and quirks. How should we live? Can nothing harmonize the turbulence of our existence? How can we stop development from destroying the human race? The questions that racked his brain are still with us. They drove him to mysticism in the end. If we don’t want them to do the same to us, we had better find out how so brilliant a man should come to believe in the All, the Good, the Transcendental, and a lot of other loftily capitalized words that look like panic disguised as tranquillity...

...He wasn't the only one who thought that industrial society was turning out too many idiots, and he was on the side of the angels, or seemed so, in proclaiming that one of the greatest dangers the idiots posed was that they might elect dictators. Not liking dictators qualified him as a progressive in a period when George Bernard Shaw saluted Hitler as an exemplar of creative energy and H. G. Wells nose-dived to the foot of Stalin's throne. As early as 1928, in "Point Counter Point," the crowning novel of his early success, Huxley had created a British proto-Fascist called Everard Webley....

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