A Journey Through Utopia: Early and Late Visions in Plato and Huxley
By Adam Sedia
Utopian literature is ubiquitous enough to constitute its own sub-genre of fiction – and to contain its own spinoff subcategory of dystopian literature. The term “utopia” comes from the title of St. Thomas More’s utopian work and derives from the Greek οὐ τόπος, or “not a place.” That is, utopias are thought-experiments, products of conjecture to illustrate an ideal as though it were embodied in reality. Dystopias, from δυσ τόπος, or “bad place,” is an anti-utopia, equally imaginary, but instead envisioning an embodiment of evil, usually to advocate for its opposite ideal.
Plato is considered among the first utopian thinkers based on the ideal city he describes in the Republic, and among twentieth-century dystopias the world of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has been particularly influential. Less well known, however, are both Platos’ and Huxley’s later works, the Laws and Island, respectively. These two late works address the same themes as their earlier and better-known counterparts and treat those themes from an opposite view.
This essay will compare these early and late works of Plato and Huxley and compare not just the works, but how both authors treat their utopian visions differently between their earlier and later works. In both authors’ visions, idealism is favored, but practicality wins in the end.
Plato: the Republic and the Laws
Plato’s Republic is considered one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy. Like the vast majority of Plato’s dialogues, he presents it as a conversation between his mentor Socrates and Glaucon, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, and Adeimantus – all students of his – along with Polemarchus’s father Cephalus.
The dialogue begins with Cephalus discussing how in his old age he can dedicate himself to justice to prepare for the afterlife. Socrates then asks his interlocutors to define justice, to which Thrasymachus infamously responds that, effectively, “might makes right.” From there the discussion turns towards justice and injustice in an individual, and Socrates suggests the city (that is, a nation) as a metaphor to seek how justice enters into the soul of an individual.
Thus Plato begins his thought experiment of constructing an ideal society. Different roles are needed, and the task of leading and defending falls to a class of “guardians.” Because the guardians must have knowledge to distinguish friend from foe if they are to protect the city, they must be philosophers and therefore trained as such.
In discussing the role of the guardians, Plato, always through the guise of Socrates, discusses their education and the role art and poetry are to play. Because God is good and therefore eternal, the traditional Greek myths have no place in Plato’s city, and poetry should represent only virtue to encourage its imitation.
Plato then discusses the “noble lie” that is to be the foundational myth of this ideal state: people possess different qualities of character, analogized to gold, silver, and bronze. Because these “metal” qualities are not hereditary – a gold child may be born to a bronze parent and vice versa – Plato asserts his infamous injunction that the guardian class hold property and even wives in common so that none may see another as master or slave.
Once the ideal city is presented, Plato, through Socrates, poses the question, “Is all of this practical?” He provides the famous answer: yes, “if philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers.” Philosophers are those who see past the forms to the ideals. To illustrate this principle, Plato gives his famous analogy of the cave, in which viewers are chained to see only shadows cast on the wall in front of them from the light entering the cave behind them. The shadows are the physical realm of everyday perception; the unseen objects casting them are the ideals they cannot see. The philosopher is the one who turns around and sees the ideals, and it is the duty of education to “return to the cave” and show others the ideals behind the forms.
From this discussion of the ideal, Plato returns first to his ideal city, comparing the forms of government in descending order of happiness: first the guardian, then the timarch (one who seeks honor), then the oligarch (one who seeks riches), then the democrat (one who seeks public approval), and lastly the dictator (one who seeks power).
For Plato, man possesses a tripartite mind, consisting of reason, passion (or spirit), and desire (or appetite), and describes the function of law as taming the passions and desires of those who cannot do so themselves. Expanding on this tripartite nature, Plato holds the ideal itself superior to its embodiment, which is in turn superior to a representation of that embodiment. Because poets and painters deal in representations, they are two steps removed from reality and appeal to the passions, the worst side of human nature. Thus Plato’s further infamous injunction to “expel all poets from the republic.”
From there Plato concludes the dialogue with a discussion of the soul. The mind is immortal, and a defect (immorality) does not destroy it. Good and bad souls are nonetheless judged, then either blessed or purified, then reincarnated, as the soul is immortal.
The Republic has been a favorite target of Platonism’s detractors, who point to the strict communism among the guardian class and his infamous “expulsion of the poets” as both inhumane and unhuman. The criticisms, however, fail to account for the primary purpose of Plato’s discussion. Plato’s purpose is not to discuss how to govern an actual city, but to govern an individual soul. The city only serves as a extended metaphor for the soul’s moral guidance.
The central discussion of the Republic is the exposition of the concept of the ideal as truth beyond the representations perceived by the senses. Just as the ideal exists independently of its representations, Plato’s ideal city exists independently of actual cities. Plato is not offering advice on how to govern a city, but presenting his ideal city as a metaphor to discuss how to govern a soul.
But Plato did not leave actual government of a city undiscussed. He addresses that subject at length in his Laws. The Laws is both Plato’s last and his longest dialogue, and also the only one not to feature Socrates. It comes from a very different place and achieves a very different goal from the Republic.
Plato’s Seventh Letter provides some autobiographical background for the years leading up to the Laws. On a visit to Syracuse in Sicily, Plato befriended Dion, the brother of the ruling tyrant. When Dion’s nephew, Dionysius II, became tyrant in 367 BC, he was completely inexperienced in public affairs, and Dion summoned Plato to instruct his nephew. Dion, however, increasingly detested his nephew’s luxurious lifestyle, and Dionysius began to regard his uncle with suspicion. Plato was caught in the middle of this dispute, and was forced to flee Syracuse when Dionysius suspected him of disloyalty. Despite this, he returned to Syracuse for a third visit to test whether his former student had learned anything. Disappointed, he returned to Greece. In Olympia, he found Dion, now in exile, preparing an expedition to overthrow his nephew. Dion requested Plato’s support, but Plato refused, as he had received Dionysius’s hospitality. Dion’s invasion would prove a success; in 357 BC he overthrew Dionysius and installed himself as tyrant, only to be assassinated three years later by Calippus, another student of Plato.
The Laws originates from Plato’s perspective of having participated in – and likely being jaded by – power politics. Far from the “pure” philosophy for individual edification in the Republic, the Laws is practically oriented.
Whereas the Republic is a dialogue between Socrates and young men, the participants in the Laws’ dialogue are three men explicitly described as elderly: an unnamed Athenian; Cleinias, a Cretan; and Megillus a Spartan). The dialogue is also set at Knossos in Crete, as the characters follow the path Minos took to receive dictation of his laws from Zeus.
The dialogue begins by discussing the differences between the Athenian and Spartan systems as background for choosing laws. Plato, an Athenian, favors the Spartan constitution as preserving balance between the kings, ephors (elected overseers), and the gerousia (assembly of elders). By contrast, Plato views the Athenian constitution as having devolved into mob rule.
While the Spartan and Cretan argue that laws should be ordered to war, the Athenian believes laws should instead be ordered to virtue, both the human virtues of health, beauty, strength, and wealth, and the divine virtues of good judgment, self-control, justice, and courage. Plato’s Athenian then states the purpose of the dialogue: “The real difficulty is to make political systems reflect in practice the trouble-free perfection of theory.”
Plato then begins a general discussion of political theory: of the evolution of the nation from a Hobbesian “every man a law unto himself” to a “primitive city” dictated by religious and family custom, to at last a nation-state; of the necessity of excluding the ignorant from office even if accomplished and clever and conferring office on the wise even if illiterate; of the two “mother constitutions” of monarchy, taken to an extreme in Persia, and democracy, taken to an extreme in Athens; and of proportion as the necessary virtue to guard against arrogance and injustice. The lawgiver should therefore frame his code with an eye on freedom, unity, and wisdom.
Cleinias the Cretan then asserts that his nation is constructing a new colony and that he is a member of a committee charged with composing a legal code, and suggests that the three characters construct an imaginary community for Crete to use as a framework.
Again the conversation turns towards generalities, this time about legislation. The best legislator is a dictator who demonstrates self-control and leads by example, subject to an admonition:
“We should run our public and our private life, our homes and our cities, in obedience to what little spark of immortality lies in us, and dignify this distribution of reason with the name of ‘law.’ But take an individual man or an oligarchy, or even a democracy, that lusts in its heart for pleasure and demands to have its fill of everything it wants – the perpetually unsatisfied victim of an evil greed that attacks it like the plague – well . . . if a power like that controls a state or an individual and rides roughshod over the laws, it’s impossible to escape disaster.”
The law should be supreme. That is, winners do not deprive the losers and their descendants from power. Laws must favor the good of the state and not any particular section of the community. Rulers must be servants of the law and the government the slave of the law.
In the Laws’ ideal state, the law safeguards against excessive accumulation of wealth. Land is evenly divided initially, and the parcels are inalienable – they may not be sold, subdivided, or merged. Holding excess gold, silver, or foreign money is also prohibited, with any excess confiscated by the state. This system, however, is not communistic. Plato expressly enjoins, “Indiscriminate equality for all amounts to inequality, and both fill a state with quarrels between its citizens.” Equality therefore consists of justice: “granting the ‘equality’ that unequals deserve to get.”
The Laws, like the Republic, has a class of “guardians of the law” – elected this time – and a separate council to balance the monarchic and democratic systems. As for the laws themselves, they should consist of a text and a preamble to persuade of their necessity. Courts should have three grades of courts: “If a litigant is dissatisfied with the judgment of this court, he may apply to a second, but if the first two courts are both unable to settle the argument, the verdict of the third must close the case.” Education is to be public and universal (including for girls), and to include not only music, physical exercise (including dancing), and mathematics, but literature as well.
Regarding crimes, Plato first addresses crimes against the state – political crimes, as we would call them today – and states, “[T]he first need is to let the man in the street play his part in judging them. A wrong done to the state is a wrong done to all its citizens . . . .” For Plato, crime is “involuntary:” the combination of a “voluntary” act and an “involuntary” mental state; punishment (including the death penalty) is to “cure” the criminal. Causes of crime range from the emotional to the intellectual (ignorance), with the desire for pleasure falling between them.
Plato’s criminal code does not provide for much imprisonment; the main punishments are death, banishment, restitution, a fine paid to a temple, and public opprobrium. Plato also criminalizes three “heresies:” that the gods do not exist; that they exist but are unconcerned about human affairs; and that they exist and are concerned but can be influenced by sacrifices and supplications. Plato has far less to say about property and commercial law, but it is noteworthy that he presumes the existence of slavery in his state.
Plato then closes his dialogue similarly to the Republic, with a discussion of the soul. “No mortal,” Plato says, “can ever attain a truly religious outlook” unless he grasps two doctrines: (1) that the soul is immortal and controls the entire world of matter; and (2) that reason is the supreme power among the heavenly bodies. It is essential, therefore, to “frame consistent rules of moral action” and provide a reasoned explanation for them. “No one who is unable to acquire these insights and rise above the level of the ordinary virtues will ever be good enough to govern an entire state, but only to assist in government carried on by others.”
Plato’s Laws differs significantly from his Republic – not because they are inconsistent nor because Plato’s views changed over time, but rather because the two works serve very different ends. The ideal state of the Republic is a thought experiment that serves as a vehicle to a greater discussion of individual virtue. The Laws expressly sets up a constitution and laws to govern a state: a state constructed “from scratch” as a new colony; not a new system to reform an existing state.
The Laws is eminently practical, the application of Plato’s philosophical principles to human conditions as they exist in reality. The governing concerns are balance and proportion: the ideal state as a balance between the extremes of monarchy and democracy, and of justice itself as a balance of human and divine virtues. Plato’s system is designed to prevent accumulation of wealth and power into too few hands, from his division of land into inalienable plots to his prohibition on accumulating money to his system of different councils serving as a check on each other. The entire system is designed not only to achieve balance, but to preserve it. Underlying all of this, though, is Plato’s acknowledgment that once any society puts individual or partisan interests before the state, it is doomed.
Significantly, many ideas proposed by Plato have become standard practice in the contemporary Western world: laws including an explanatory preamble; a three-tiered court system; public education; and a rehabilitative theory of punishing crimes. In practice our world looks quite different from the one envisioned by Plato, but in that respect even Plato’s practical constitution is still an ideal, and the government systems today are mere representations of the ideal.
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World and Island
Paralleling Plato’s dialogues in many ways are Aldous Huxley’s novels Brave New World and Island, which serve roles in Huxley’s outlook similar to those that the Republic and the Laws respectively serve in Plato’s.
Brave New World was published in 1932, when Huxley was 38 years old. It remains by far his most famous work.
The novel is set in a future London of the year AF (After Ford) 632, in a World State based on Henry Ford’ model of mass production, with Christian expressions like “Our Lord” transformed into “Our Ford” and Christian crosses having their tops cut off to represent the Ford Model T. These mass-production principles are applied to humans, who are engineered into predetermined castes based on intelligence, labelled alpha through epsilon, with the gamma, delta, and epsilon castes undergoing the “Bokanovsky process” in utero, creating up to 96 identical persons destined to perform menial labor. Children are not born but “decanted,” and undergo indoctrination and conditioning programs in lieu of education. Meanwhile, the adult population is kept at bay through entertainment, including the “feelies” (an expanded version of movies), recreational sex, and consumption of a soothing drug called soma (named after a ritual drink referenced in the Hindu Vedas).
The popular and sexually desirable Lenina Crowe (named for Lenin) and Bernard Marx go on vacation to a Savage Reservation in the American Southwest, where they observe natural-born people, disease, ageing, other languages, and religious ritual for the first time. There they meet Linda, who originally came from the World State but remained on the reservation out of shame when she became pregnant, along with her naturally born son, John, now a young man. Linda taught John to read from the only two books available: a scientific manual and the complete works of Shakespeare, and John expresses himself in Shakespearean language. Linda wants to return to London and John wants to see the “brave new world” (quoting from The Tempest) he hears about.
John, called “the Savage” in the World State becomes a curiosity. Lenina finds him physically attractive and attempts to seduce him, but her casual attitude towards sex is incompatible with his Shakespearean ideas of courtship and romance, and he attacks her. When he learns that his mother is dying, he rushes to her bedside, causing a scandal, as mourning is not considered the correct attitude towards death. John then tries to prevent distribution of soma to a low-caste group, telling them he is freeing them and causing a riot, which the police quell with soma vapor.
John is then brought before Mustapha Mond, the “Resident World Controller for Western Europe” (and named for both Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who Westernized Turkey’s traditional society, and the British industrialist and Zionist Alfred Mond).
Here Mond articulates his society’s justification for its caste system:
“It’s an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work–go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized–but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren’t sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can’t help himself; he’s foredoomed. Even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle – an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,” the Controller meditatively continued, “goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. . . .
. . .
“The optimum population,” said Mustapha Mond, “is modelled on the iceberg–eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.”
“And they’re happy below the water line?”
“Happier than above it. . . . .”
“In spite of that awful work?”
“Awful? They don't find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It’s light, it’s childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for?”
Later in this dialogue, Mond articulates his society’s views on pleasure and pain:
“[C]ivilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended–there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren't any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There's no such thing as a divided allegiance; you're so conditioned that you can't help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren't any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears–that's what soma is.”
. . .
“Isn't there something in living dangerously?”
“There's a great deal in it,” the Controller replied. “Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.”
“What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.
“It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That's why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.”
“V.P.S.?”
“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It's the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”
“But I like the inconveniences.”
“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.
“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. “You're welcome,” he said.
John requests exile in the Falkland Islands, which Mond considers a reward for nonconformists, who all live there together. But Mond refuses, wanting to observe what happens to him. John then moves to an abandoned lighthouse, where he lives as an ascetic hermit, practicing self-flagellation to purify himself of civilization – but the practice draws reporters and hundreds of tourists who treat it as a curiosity. Eventually a filmmaker releases documentary of John’s self-flagellation and crowds arrive demanding he perform his penitential ritual for them. Among them is a woman implied to be Lenina, and he whips her in a fury and turns the whip on himself. This excites the crowd, which then engages in a massive soma-fueled orgy. The next morning, consumed by regret, John hangs himself.”
Critics usually characterize the society of Brave New World as a dystopia. G.K. Chesterton saw Brave New World as “a revolution against Utopia,” a criticism of the naïvely optimistic promises of socialism envisioned by H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. The economist Ludwig von Mises read the word as satire, writing, “Huxley was even courageous enough to make socialism’s dreamed paradise the target of his sardonic irony.”
But Huxley’s presentation is more complex. In many ways it seems utopian. His World State is a society that has everything worked out. The castes are unequal and caste membership is predetermined from birth, but each person is happy in the role for which he is designed and “decanted.” There is even a place for nonconformists, who are happy in exile with each other, and for “savages” on the native reservations.
Mond’s justifications for both the caste system are rational. Principals of utilitarianism and efficiency are the overriding concern. It all sounds dystopian to present readers because we have not been conditioned to life in such a world. Our condition – the natural human condition – is represented by John, “the Savage,” who has utterly no comprehension of the society and who, as much as he tries to live separated from it, ultimately falls victim to its all-consuming banality.
Huxley was treating his imagined future society not as utopian or dystopian, but as an objective analysis of where he believed society was heading. This is borne out by his 1958 nonfiction work, Brave New World Revisited, in which he discussed whether he believed society was heading towards or away from the society envisioned in his novel, and he concluded that it was indeed moving in that direction, much faster than he expected.
But Huxley began having different ideas. In his new preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, he wrote:
If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the Utopian and primitive horns of his dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity. . . . In this community economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative. Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not (as at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final End, the unitive knowledge of immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahman. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle—the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?”
The ideas germinating in this passage finally bore fruit in Huxley’s final novel, Island, published in 1962.
Island’s plot is simple and covers only the span of a few days. Will Farnaby, an English journalist, deliberately wrecks his boat on the shores of the Kingdom of Pala, an island halfway between Sumatra and the Andaman Islands. Farnaby also works as an agent for the oil baron Lord Joseph Aldehyde, and has been tasked with persuading Pala’s Rani, or queen, to sell the island’s untapped oil reserves. The neighboring island nation of Rendang-Lobo ruled by the military dictator Colonel Dipa, also wants to persuade Pala to open its oil fields to foreign companies – for a percentage of the profits. Both the Rani’s and her son, Murugan, have been educated abroad and show contempt for their society’s values in favor of a Western consumerist mentality. Murugan, moreover, is the protégé and lover of Colonel Dipa, and reveals to Farnaby that in a few days he is to succeed his mother as Raja.
Most of the novel is focused on exposition of the Palanese way of life, as told through the family of Dr. Robert MacPhail, great-grandson of a Scottish physician who worked with the Rani’s grandfather, the Old Raja, to develop that unique society.
The Palanese islanders live peacefully according to a combination of western science and Mahayana Buddhism. They emphasize living always in the moment, and keep myna birds trained to parrot “Attention!” to keep them in the moment. They directly confront suffering and death, meditate often, and openly engage in a form of coitus reservatus called maithuna. To achieve these ends, they use moksha-medicine, a local hallucinogenic mushroom. They raise children in common, forming mutual adoption clubs (MAC’s) for that purpose.
After observing life on the island, Will considers the Palanese way superior to Western ways and he regrets his part in its downfall. At last he tries the moksha-medicine. His host guides him out of himself until he sees first the absolute, then the evil that is matter, and finally reality in all its realness. When he awakens, he hears gunshots and a radio announcement that Pala has joined with its neighbor to form the United Kingdom of Rendang and Pala with Murugan as Raja and Colonel Dipa as Prime Minister.
Island is less a novel than Huxley’s own final musings on what he considers the meaning and purpose of life. The society he constructs is founded at once on reason and Eastern mysticism without the ritual. Sex practices keep the population from exploding; overconsumption and mass production are absent, as is extreme wealth inequality; science is used for medicinal rather than military ends; the people are compassionate and remarkably self-controlled. Huxley’s own experimentation with hallucinogens convinced him of the transcendent meaning of the universe, and he incorporates them into his utopian vision.
Indeed, Huxley’s vision of society in Island contains many of the same elements as Brave New World; they are used for opposite ends:1
Yet in the end it is Western capitalism and consumerism that win out. “The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night,” as Huxley says in the novel. In the end, it seems, Huxley acknowledges that the world he constructed in Island is an ideal – or a fantasy. The society that Brave New World takes to the extreme conquers all in the end.
Conclusion: Comparison of Plato’s and Huxley’s Utopias
Plato’s Republic presents an ideal state not as a model to be copied, but as a vehicle to illustrate his conception of the ideal, and ultimately to govern the morality of the individual. For the model of an ideal state, Plato presents the proposed Cretan colony in the Laws. The Plato of the Laws had the benefit (if such it can be called) of operating close to realpolitik and observing its machinations. His recommendations, therefore, are eminently practical. Yet he never loses his vision of the ideal. The ideal state of the Laws, while it recognizes human shortcomings, creates a system to safeguard against them, and ultimately acknowledges that even the most foolproof system will fail if the officeholders do not treat the law as supreme and instead as a tool for advancing their own personal and partisan interests.
Huxley in Brave New World presents what most would call a dystopia, but he presents no value judgments. Instead, Huxley presents an imaginary society as he believes will result from the contemporary developments he observes. In Island, by contrast, Huxley presents a society as he would have it be could he fashion it himself. And in the end, Huxley admits his society is a fantasy, for he has it last a mere century before it is destroyed by the same forces that he hypothesizes will create the society in Brave New World.
In both Plato and Huxley the early work is a thought experiment, meant to illustrate in Plato’s case a metaphor for individual morality and in Huxley’s case a prediction of where mass-production and mass-marketing trends will lead. And in their respective later works, both authors present what they explicitly regard to be an ideal society. In Plato’s case it is a “toned-down” version of the extreme society he conjectured in the Republic; now wives are no longer held in common, property is inherited, and poets and literature have a place. In Huxley’s case, the utopian vision is exactly the opposite of where he earlier conjectured society to be heading, and ultimately destroys his utopia at the hands of that earlier vision.
What is most striking about both utopian visions, though, is how real – how achievable – both seem. Both the Laws and Island acknowledge human error, evil, and ignorance, and address how those shortcomings are dealt with in the ideal society. And explicit in both is a recognition that no society, no matter how ideal, will last forever. Because humanity is fallen, even its most marvelous creations eventually succumb to human vice. But that ultimate failure does not detract from the utopia’s existence, just as death does not detract from a life well-lived. For both Plato and Huxley, the ideal society is possible and worth the effort to bring about.
This is not a license to would-be revolutionaries to imitate the horrors of the French or Russian Revolutions or the Khmer Rouge. The city in the Laws is a colony established on virgin ground, a chance to start from scratch, building from nothing – a concept that inspired the creation of the American republic as a “shining city on a hill,” a society constructed from reasoned discourse without the need to cast aside history or tradition. Pala, for its part, was the product of a reformist monarch and a physician combining the cold rationality of scientific method with existing religious tradition. Neither Plato nor Huxley had any place for violent revolution.
Humanity (and the material world in general) is flawed and societies are fragile, but what both Plato and Huxley teach is that utopias are not always mere thought experiments, but ideals that each of us by our individual actions can realize.
Adam Sedia (b. 1984) lives in his native Indiana, where he practices as a civil and appellate litigation attorney. His poems have appeared in print and online publications, and he has published two volumes of poetry: The Spring's Autumn (2013) and Inquietude (2016). He also composes music, which may be heard on his YouTube channel. He lives with his wife, Ivana, and their two children.