Island (novel) - Major Themes

Major Themes

Island explores many of the themes and ideas that interested Huxley in the post-World War II decades, and were the subject of many of his nonfiction books of essays, including Brave New World Revisited, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Some of these themes and ideas include overpopulation, ecology, modernity, democracy, mysticism, entheogens, and somatotypes.

Common background elements occur in both Island and Brave New World, used for good in the former and for ill in the latter. Such elements include:

Theme comparison
Island	Brave New World
Drug use for enlightenment and self-knowledge	Drug use for pacification and self-medication
Group living (in the form of Mutual Adoption Clubs) so that children would not have unalloyed exposure to their parents' neuroses	Group living for the elimination of individuality.
Trance states for super learning	Trance states for indoctrination
Assisted reproduction (low-tech artificial insemination)	Assisted reproduction (high-tech test-tube babies)
Freely-available contraception to enable reproductive choice, expressive sex	Mandatory contraception, socially-mandated recreational and promiscuous sex
Dangerous climb to a temple, as spiritual preparation	Violent Passion Surrogate
Parrots trained to utter uplifting slogans	Ubiquitous disembodied mechanical voices

The culture of Pala is the offspring of a Scottish secular humanist medical doctor, who made a medical visit to the island in the 19th century, and decided to stay and work with its Raja, who embodies the island's Mahayana Buddhist tradition, to create a society that merges the best of East and West. The Old Raja's treatise Notes on What's What is a book within the book that explains Pala's philosophical foundations.

A central element of Palanese society is restrained industrialization, undertaken with the goal of providing fulfilling work and time for leisure and contemplation. For the Palanese, progress means a selective attitude towards technology, which Huxley contrasts to the underdeveloped poverty of the neighboring island of Rendang, and with the alienating overdevelopment of the industrialized West, chiefly through Will Farnaby's recollections of London. The Palanese embrace modern science and technology to improve medicine and nutrition, but have rejected widespread industrialization. For example, hydroelectricity is made available for refrigeration, so that surplus fresh food can be stored, improving nutrition and protecting against food shortages. Huxley viewed this selective modernization as essential for his "sane" society, even if it means that such a society is unable to militarily defend itself from its "insane" neighbors who wish to steal its natural resources.

The Palanese also circumspectly incorporated the use of "moksha medicine", a fictional entheogen taken ceremonially in rites of passage for mystical and cosmological insight. The moksha mushroom is described as "yellow" and not "those lovely red toadstools", e.g. the Amanita muscaria; this description of the moksha medicine is suggestive of Psilocybe mushrooms, a psychoactive that captivated Huxley during the latter half of his life. The recommended dosage of 400 mg, however, is in the dosage range of mescaline as opposed to psilocybin. Huxley had also been fascinated towards the end of his life by the potential benefit to humanity of substances such as mescaline and LSD. Brave New World and most of Huxley's other books were written before he first tried a psychedelic drug in 1953.

Many of the ideas used to describe Pala as a utopia in Island appear also in Brave New World Revisited's last chapter, which aims to propose actions which could be taken in order to prevent a democracy from turning into a totalitary world like the one described in Brave New World.

Huxley used a scene of two mantids (Gongylus gongyloides) mating to make philosophical observations about the nature of death. In another memorable scene, Will Farnaby watches a Palanese version of Oedipus Rex with a little girl. Will points out that in his version Oedipus pokes his eyes out. The girl replies that that is silly, since all the king had to do was stop being married to his mother.

The novel has served as the inspiration for the Island Foundation, a non-profit corporation "dedicated to the creation of a psychedelic culture."