Aldous Huxley's Island

Huxley's Island, his utopian counterpoint to Brave New World, was not what I expected. Although I read Brave New World over 15 years ago, I recall a primitivist solution of sorts that Huxley promoted in the 1930s. Thirty years later, when Island was published, Pala, the Southeast Asian utopian society of the novel, is not a primitive society. Instead, Huxley seems to propose a fusion of sorts of Eastern and Western civilization for an attainable utopian world which adopts some of the material and technological advances of Western civilization in a sustainable manner. 

Instead of capitalism or communism, or mass consumption and a lack of preventative care, Pala continues its own traditions of Mahayana Buddhism, Shivaite practices, and moksha-medicine for a completely different social order. Written at the height of the Cold War, and with World War II a recent memory (indeed, Will Farnaby, the protagonist of the novel, was in Germany during the War), Pala must be how Huxley saw a possible solution between totalitarianism (of the fascist or Stalinist sort) on one hand, and the alienated, consumer societies of the West. 

Unfortunately for the people of Pala, their boy Raja and his mother, the Rani, are plotting with Colonel Dipa of nearby Rendang-Lobo to undo the society to bring industrialization, extractive oil industries, and the Sears Catalogue (imported manufactured goods). Undone by internal factors and the megalomaniacal Colonel Dipa (who is also sleeping with Murugan), Pala's society is destined to unravel. To what extent a society predicated on sustainable development, harmony with their ecological setting, and human happiness could last in a world threatened by the West, the East, and Global South nations hell-bent on imitating the worst aspects of either is resolved by the novel's conclusion. 

Indeed, can a society truly be utopian if it practices an isolationist foreign policy, like Pala? And just as Will Farnaby makes the momentous decision to side with the doomed residents of Pala, Pala's status as a utopia is terminated. Nonetheless, Huxley's vision of an ideal society deserves kudos for avoiding any form of primitivist or unforgivable Orientalist tone. However, it lives up to the worst of the 1960s counterculture: drug-fueled mysticism, perhaps as bankrupt as the inter-war mystics, and proto-New Agey solutions to the problems of modern life.