Aldous Huxley’s “Island”
An even braver new world?

By Andreas Matthias

16 minutes read - 3246 words

The last book of visionary writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Island, is a bold attempt to envision a utopian society that provides its members with everything they need to achieve happiness in life. The author of Brave New World tried here to show a positive vision of how he thought that human beings should live and flourish – but the darkness is never far behind, even in this paradise.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

Aldous Huxley and The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a British writer and philosopher who wrote over fifty books during his lifetime, both novels and non-fiction. The most famous book of his is probably “Brave New World” (1932), which has often been included in lists of the best novels of all time. But Huxley was not only a novelist. In fact, his novels are sometimes only thinly veiled philosophical treatises. Huxley is often less interested in the plot and the character development of his protagonists, and more in the philosophical ideas that fill his books.

Aldous Huxley. Source: Wikipedia

His most valuable books for the philosophically interested reader are not the novels at all. Huxley was an advocate of ritualised and controlled drug-use, not as recreation, but as a way to open up new, ecstatic states of mind that would allow “normal” people to experience what is otherwise reserved for monks and mystics.

He himself was a user of both LSD and mescaline, a drug made of a cactus growing in Mexico, and he described his experiences in one of the most remarkable non-fiction works of the 20th century: “The Doors of Perception” (1954), from which the music band “The Doors” took their name. It is a small essay, only a few dozen pages, the description of an afternoon. But in that book, Huxley describes the world, experienced through the drug, with the precision and the poetic instinct of a world-class writer:

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers — a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. … This was something I had seen before — seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers — what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel — how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli’s picture. … “This is how one ought to see,” I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. “This is how one ought to see, how things really are.” And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. That would be enough.

Another of the greatest books of the 20th century, universally lauded since the moment Huxley published it, is “The Perennial Philosophy” (1945). In it, Huxley tries to demonstrate with quotes from holy books that the various religions on Earth have much more in common than we tend to think – and that they are much more similar to each other than they are different. “The Perennial Philosophy” has always seemed to me like a book that should be taught in religious education in schools – teaching children that the presumed “other” religion is nothing much different from their own, and that there is more reason to embrace and respect the religions of others than there is to fear them.

The Doors of Perception is Huxley’s recollection of a mescaline drug experience. It is a rare and precious document, the true, minute-by-minute protocol of how a drug can change our perception, written by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

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Attention

Island clearly was written by the same person who wrote The Doors of Perception and The Perennial Philosophy.

It is the attempt of an ageing intellectual and visionary to summarise his philosophy of life and happiness and to show it at work in the imagined world of a utopian island nation. At the same time, the book very clearly sees that the paradise of the Island is fragile and endangered – and by the end of the book, its whole utopian culture falls prey to the greed of other nations for its oil reserves.

The book begins with the protagonist, Will Farnaby, being shipwrecked close to Pala, the fictional “island” of the story. But his shipwreck is not what it seems. He has been sent there to spy for those who want to get their hands onto the island’s oil resources. He is brought to a village and gets to meet the native islanders. As he is slowly introduced to their way of living, he begins to realise that Pala is a very special place.

“I’d suggest that you listen to that bird.” He waved a hand in the direction of the dead tree, to which, after Mary Sarojini’s departure, the mynah had returned. …

“Attention,” the articulate oboe was calling. “Attention.”

“Attention to what?” he asked, in the hope of eliciting a more enlightening answer than the one he had received from Mary Sarojini.

“To attention,” said Dr. MacPhail.

“Attention to attention?”

“Of course.”

“Attention,” the mynah chanted in ironical confirmation.

“Do you have many of these talking birds?”

“There must be at least a thousand of them flying about the island. It was the Old Raja’s idea. He thought it would do people good. Maybe it does, though it seems rather unfair to the poor mynahs. Fortunately, however, birds don’t understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis'. Just imagine,” he went on, “preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him? And now,” he added in another tone, “you’d better start listening to our friend in the tree.” …

“Attention. Attention. Attention.”

So there are a thousand birds flying around that have been trained to remind the citizens of Pala to pay attention. This, of course, is one of the main ideas behind many spiritual traditions: that what causes unhappiness is our tendency to live in the past or in the future, and to disregard the present. Animals, who live in the present, are not generally thought to be depressed, anxious about the future, or remorseful about the past. They live in the moment – and if we managed to return to this state of blessed attention to the present, we might come to share their original, innocent, non-intellectualised happiness and one-ness with the universe. At least, this is what Huxley wants to suggest.

Animals, who live in the present, are not generally thought to be depressed, anxious about the future, or remorseful about the past.

The Perennial Philosophy is a sweeping overview of the world’s religious mystical traditions, emphasising the ideas that are common to humanity’s approach to the divine. It is an easy-to-read and immensely fascinating book.

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Self-knowledge

In his way, Huxley here provides a different answer to what normally is perceived to be the stance of Buddhism: that one should part with the world, ignore the shiny world of changing things, realise the impermanence of being, and then seek to see what is permanent and unchanging: the truth of the world.

For Huxley, quite the opposite is true:

Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not, puts a stop, for the moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves, all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are.

… So be aware — aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering. This is the only genuine yoga, the only spiritual exercise worth practicing. The more a man knows about individual objects, the more he knows about God.

So the knowledge that counts is not, strangely, the knowledge of abstract truths — but what the ancient Greeks already called “gnothi s’auton,” know yourself. And our knowledge of ourselves, so Huxley seems to suggest, will grow as we increasingly learn to accept what we are not, thus coming ever closer to our true core — what remains after everything that is not-us has been excluded.

Ways of living

On Huxley’s Island, the native population live peacefully, we learn, practice meditation, and raise their children together: so that the deficiencies, anxieties and psychological problems of particular parents are not passed on to their children.

An important component of happiness on Pala is population control.

Huxley saw already in the mid-20th century that an exponentially growing population on a limited planet (which might be what the idea of the “island” alludes to) is a recipe for disaster; in fact, the ecological and political disasters that we are witnessing right now.

Erich Fromm on the Psychology of Capitalism

Erich Fromm, philosopher and social psychologist, points out that capitalism, in order to work, requires a large population of identical consumers with identical taste. This is opposed to the vision of a human life as individual, unique, and valuable in its uniqueness.

His islanders can keep their way of life going because they strictly regulate their population through freely available contraception, and because they limit their private consumption and use of technology.

“You seem to have solved your economic problems pretty successfully.”

“Solving them wasn’t difficult. To begin with, we never allowed ourselves to produce more children than we could feed, clothe, house, and educate into something like full humanity. Not being overpopulated, we have plenty. But, although we have plenty, we’ve managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to — the temptation to overconsume. We don’t give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six times as much saturated fat as we need. We don’t hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set. And finally we don’t spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for World War III or even World War’s baby brother, Local War MMMCCCXXXIII. Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence — those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse.

Technologies are not generally embraced on Pala. Instead, the islanders selectively permit the use of a few technologies that are related to either medicine or food management — and reject every other technology. This is very strongly reminiscent of Fromm (see our articles here and here) — or should we say that perhaps Fromm himself was influenced by Huxley?

Erich Fromm on Our Relation to Technology

According to Erich Fromm, instead of catapulting us into a utopia of eternal youth and affluence, modern technology has condemned us to a life under constant surveillance, is destroying the planet, and, in the form of AI, now threatening to take away human employment on a grand scale. Rediscovering some of the ancient skills that we all once had may provide a way out of the problem.

The islanders of Pala would not reject life-saving surgery or antibiotics, and they would allow refrigeration that serves to preserve food and reduce the risk of famines after crop failures. But, apart from these necessary technologies, they would be mostly Epicurean about technology: they would reject every new invention that “causes a greater annoyance” than the problem it is supposed to solve, as Epicurus said.

The final, unifying experience

The book culminates in a night of ritual drug use, the traditional way by which young people are initiated and welcomed into the society of Pala adulthood. This, again, echoes many rituals worldwide, where traditional cultures have often had very similar rituals: from the shamanic practices of Siberian nomads to the hallucinogenic drugs used by the ancient Greek seers in Eleusis and Delphi, to the practices of the medicine men in indigenous American populations. The use of drugs for purposes of enlightenment and spiritual growth has been a part of human civilisation for longer than writing and historical records.

Drawing from his own experience with LSD and mescaline, Huxley describes the ritual use of what in Pala is called the Moksha-medicine:

“Do you like music?” Dr. Robert asked.

“More than most things.”

“And what, may I ask, does Mozart’s G-Minor Quintet refer to? Does it refer to Allah? Or Tao? Or the second person of the Trinity? Or the Atman- Brahman?”

Will laughed. “Let’s hope not.”

“But that doesn’t make the experience of the G-Minor Quintet any less rewarding. Well, it’s the same with the kind of experience that you get with the moksha-medicine, or through prayer and fasting and spiritual exercises. Even if it doesn’t refer to anything outside itself, it’s still the most important thing that ever happened to you. Like music, only incomparably more so. And if you give the experience a chance, if you’re prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably more therapeutic and transforming. So maybe the whole thing does happen inside one’s skull. Maybe it is private and there’s no unitive knowledge of anything but one’s own physiology. Who cares? The fact remains that the experience can open one’s eyes and make one blessed and transform one’s whole life.”

On his last night on the island, Will finally experiences the effects of Moksha himself, echoing the life-long exploration of the world of hallucinogenic drugs by Huxley. And what Will sees is almost identical to what Huxley described in The Doors of Perception, almost a decade earlier:

Will dropped his eyes. The grain on the floorboards was a brown river, and the brown river was an eddying, ongoing diagram of the world’s divine life. At the center of that diagram was his own right foot, bare under the straps of its sandal, and startlingly three-dimensional, like the marble foot, revealed by a searchlight, of some heroic statue. “Boards,” “grain,” “foot” — through the glib explanatory words the mystery stared back at him, impenetrable and yet, paradoxically, understood. Understood with that knowledgeless understanding to which, in spite of sensed objects and remembered names, he was still open.

But this moment of bliss, the apex of the book, is at the same time the moment where the final horror creeps back into Will’s world – and where the reality of a cruel and uncaring universe finally takes over and annihilates the little island of perfection and bliss. In his drug-induced vision, Will suddenly sees a lizard – magnified and imagined as a manifestation of the cosmic evil that lurks in the shadows, waiting to strike:

Will looked down again. Preternaturally real, the scaly horror with its black blank eyes, its murderer’s mouth, its blood-red throat pumping away while the rest of the body lay stretched along the floor as still as death, was now within six inches of his foot.

Then he sees a praying mantis – no, two of them, mating. The female bites off the male’s head and devours him, and in the next moment that same female is killed and eaten by the lizard: a show that, in Will’s mind, plays out as a theatre of unimaginable cruelty and horror; but that, in the end, is nothing more than the reality of our biological lives on Earth: animals that need to eat other animals to survive, a whole living universe whose underlying working principle is cold-blooded murder, a war of all against all, the endless carnage that we call natural evolution.

The scaly horror with its black blank eyes, its murderer’s mouth, its blood-red throat pumping away while the rest of the body lay stretched along the floor as still as death, was now within six inches of his foot.

What follows is very similar to the drugged, delirious visions of violence and death in Pink Floyd’s movie “The Wall”. As the medicine at last leaves his body, his first words are not of wonder or excitement:

Will opened his eyes and, for the first time since he had taken the moksha-medicine, found himself looking her squarely in the face.

“Dear God,” he whispered at last.

The next morning, the neighbouring nation’s army overruns the peaceful island of Pala, terminating its existence and erasing its unique culture. And one of the factors that contributed to that was, in the end, Will himself – the spy who had been sent to scout out how the Island could best be attacked.

“Island” is Aldous Huxley’s vision of a better world, a society that is sane and conducive to human happiness. It is an unforgettable trip to a place that never existed.

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“Island” is an attempt at describing a utopia, a perfect world, but an attempt by someone who wasn’t deluded about the human condition. As Will sees the truth at the end of his drug trip, he realises that destruction, death and horror are an integral part of what we are and of how life on this planet works. And so, when Pala in the end ceases to exist, this is not necessarily to be seen as the victory of the bad over the good. Rather, it is the victory of reality over a dream, of the particular, the open-eyed, the real truth over yet another illusion that had to be overcome.

And perhaps, beyond all illusions, even the most beautiful ones, lies a terrible truth that we have to come to terms with – because it is what we are. And because our final destiny is to learn to know ourselves as we truly are: the blood-thirsty lizard as well as the meditating saint.