Aldous Huxley's Island

I once read a passage quoted by the authors of A Pattern Language (which can be viewed in its entirety online via this fabulous website). The idea eventually slipped my mind until I picked up a copy of Aldous Huxley's Island.

"How many homes does a Palanese child have?"

"About twenty on the average."

"Twenty? My God!"

"We all belong," Susila explained, "to a MAC -a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers."

Will shook his head. "Making twenty families grow where only one grew before."

"But what grew before was your kind of family. As though reading instructions from a cookery book, "Take one sexually inept wage slave," she went on, "one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity, then bottle up tightly in a four room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice. Our recipe is rather different: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection."

"And what comes out of your open pan?" he asked.

"An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages."

Island is a work of utopian fiction set in (believe it or not) Southeast Asia. It is my first book by Aldous Huxley (unless you consider watching the movie A Brave New World akin to reading the book) and I am thoroughly impressed. Though Huxley appears to be quite fond of fantastic drug-induced mental states, I would say that his ultimately tragic vision of the nation of Pala is one of the best fictional constructions of utopian society I have read thus far. The story of the island nation is wonderfully appealing, yet the events that transpired are almost real, like something that could have happened in the region in our very recent history.

The book was written two years before Aldous Huxley died and is often considered the culmination of his utopian/dystopian writings starting with A Brave New World. Huxley envisioned a hopeful alternative to the world we have today, a human society that paid "attention" to the "here and now," and by doing so, found happiness in the most mundane.