In Huxley's day, sex was a controversial subject: Freud was merely making inroads. In the east, on the other hand, where such erotic masterpieces as The Perfumed Garden and the kamasutra had long been openly available and read, the word 'sex' had little of the associations of guilt and hush-hush.
"Westerners have outgrown the prejudices with which their eastern brothers still surround the notion of food. We are prepared to eat practically anything...." By 'eastern brothers', Huxley had Hindus and Muslims in mind; for further east, they are prepared to eat practically anything. He looks forward to the day when "...the word 'sex' will be pronounced and heard with as complete a calm". That day has arrived in the west. Having surpassed the east, they condemn the latter for being prudes.
The west has achieved "loosening of restraints" in matters of nutrition and copulation. That has been the outcome of democracy. When one can effectively control other people by means of bombs and bullets, it is useless to control what they eat or with whom they make love.
Liberty and the libertine and the gourmet all go together.
Those of us then who claim to be westernised clearly cannot have the same experience of food and sex and democracy like our western counterparts. We learn English words in English medium schools but the associations are local. We think we are thinking and feeling like white persons, but that is only a trick of words. At the level below words what words refer to and intimate we are as alien to them, and they to us, as reptiles and mammals.
The meaning of a word resides in the rules for its use in a way of life. Meaning amputated from a way of life becomes merely a word. This is the finding of Wittgenstein and the Sapir-Whorf thesis. It implies that one cannot translate between languages, nor transplant a word to another society that must necessarily be incapable of understanding the meaning. Words are portable; not ideas. [5]
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