10 - The New Ecology of Power: Julian and Aldous Huxley in the Cold War Era

Summary

In the historiography of the Cold War era, it has long been standard to examine the contentious period following 1945 primarily within the framework of such hard-power narratives as the advent of nuclear weaponry, the strategic division of Europe, and the catalog of proxy conflicts between the Eastern and Western blocs throughout the postcolonial world. Some aspects of soft power, such as cultural prestige and economic largesse, have steadily gained prominence in recent decades. However, in assessing the impact of the biologist Julian Huxley and the novelist Aldous Huxley on the emergence of a global environmentalist movement during the Cold War era, it is necessary to consider a third variety of power, first identified by the economist Kenneth Boulding as “integrative power,” the history of which is interwoven with, though distinct from, the strategic and economic aspirations of empires and nations states. In defining and distinguishing integrative power, Akira Iriye writes: “Destructive power entails the use or the threat of force to achieve one's objectives. Productive power works through exchange and economic activity. Integrative power is social and expressed through mutual affection.” As public intellectuals with a global audience, both of the Huxley brothers tended to frame their views on the social and political questions of the Cold War era in the integrative language of ecology. Their common tendency to employ metaphors and terms from the life sciences while generally eschewing the contemporary vocabulary of communism and anticommunism may be one of the factors that rendered their work less than au courant amid the ideologically charged culture wars of the mid- to late-twentieth century.