Apr 19, 2019

What's the point of Huxley's Island?

I enjoyed this essay on Huxley & Brave New World (a), though I disagree with most of what the author says.

When reading, I noticed a typo and reached out to Hidysmith. In our correspondence, he asked:

What do you think the point of Island was? I'm not sure there was one.

My reply, hyperlinks added for clarity:

Big question. Short (& lossy) answer – Pala was one instance of a dialectic process which is reconciling Moloch & Elua on a very long timescale.

In some object-level sense, Pala failed & was overtaken by Molochian forces, but in a more zoomed-out sense, Pala pushed forward the frontier of what social possibilities could be reified & made progress towards the Moloch-Elua reconciliation.