Sunday 28th June 2009
15:25

“Other epochs have witnessed disasters, have had to suffer disillusionment; but in no century have the disillusionments followed one another’s heels with such unintermitted rapidity as in the twentieth, for the good reason that in no century has change been so rapid and so profound. The mal du siècle was an inevitable evil; indeed, we can claim with a certain pride that we have a right to our accidie. With us it is not a sin or a disease of the hyperchondries; it is a state of mind which fate has forced upon us.”
In his 1923 essay, Accidie, Huxley argues that accidie (boredom, melancholy, despair, ennui), once seen a disease caused by ‘vapours of the spleen’, had been assimilated into acceptable culture and understood a consequence of the course human history. It’s interesting then that the course of 20th Century history has returned us to the idea that ‘accidie’ is a disease, not of the spleen but of the mind; an unacceptably human irregularity to be psychiatrically and chemically modified. We’ve moved away from the idea that we are subject to the unnatural demands of the society in which we live, and returned to the late medieval belief that we suffer from an internal sickness. I don’t mean to suggest there’s no such thing as mental illness, but when a populous is so heavily medicated that it collectively shits measurable amounts of pharmaceuticals back into the water supply, shouldn’t we start to wonder whether or not our pursuit of happiness has gone slightly off course and consider that we may have fallen short of happiness and settled stuporously into a comfortable numbness? I need not mention Huxley’s subsequent thoughts on what a society that wholly embraces such ideas might one day look like.
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