Published in 1962, nine years after his psychedelic experience that he documented in Doors of Perception, Huxley writes the “yang” to Brave New World’s “yin”. This story follows a cynical journalist who is shipwrecked on an island called Pala. These people do things in their own way thanks to the chance encounter between a Scottish doctor and the previous King of Pala about a hundred years prior to the main story in the book. The island represents a utopia imagined by Aldous with the best of east and west. This book started off with a bang then lagged a little in the middle but picked up at the end. Like many utopian ideas there is no shortage of opportunities to pick holes in ideas and explain why they wouldn’t work, but instead of doing that I’ll point out some ideas that seemed really interesting:
- Mutual Adoption Clubs- the idea here is that a kid has 15-20 different parents that they can rotate through. Thus, allowing for different responsibilities and settings to be experienced in youth
- Manual labor jobs were worked in shifts- a worked would be a lumber jack for a couple months, then copper smelter, then fishermen etc.
- Intellectuals were encouraged to spend a couple hours a day working with their hands
- Naturally aggressive people were trained to use their aggression in manual labor and other ways that would benefit the nation
- Children were taught elementary psychology- mostly in terms of Emotional Intelligence
- The ability to experience is the equalizer - this is especially interesting while reading the bell curve. No matter what talents or lack thereof, all people have the capacity for deep experience of “being” and “suchness” This was Huxley’s last book he published before dying about a year later and literally died on an LSD high as a journalist said, “tripped his way out of this world”. Mushrooms play a prominent role in this book. In fact, one could almost make a flowchart of all the different utopian remedies for social problems in this book and if the solution didn’t start with mushrooms, it was definitely in there somewhere. Some people may look at that as short sightedness or lack of imagination, but to me it sounds like a true mushroom believer. Some of my criticisms of this book is that the characters in the book were fairly two dimensional. The main character was complicated but that is because he was on a journey from one viewpoint to the other. The other characters were either agreeing with the utopian ideas and were portrayed as mini buddhas or they weren’t with the program and were portrayed as Hitlers. (sometimes literally). Also, earlier I said the island was his imagination of the best of east and best of west combined. What that turns out to be in practice is that the west is pretty much completely trash at everything except some science. That the east has really nailed down the truth of existence. Secure in their knowledge that they aren’t pull out kings, all the eastern folk can chuckle politely at the entire western cannon of philosophy, watching as little Freud and Plato mess around in the sandbox, while the adults are busy making lotus necklaces. This approach didn’t bother me too much as it might be the case but did strike me as a bit heavy handed at times. That being said, many of his critiques were fair while others went over my head. In conclusion, I can imagine shaping your life after the pattern laid out in this book and it doesn’t seem like it’d be the worst pattern. By the end of the book, I really would have liked to live on the island.
Aldous Huxley