Island discussion #3: Suffering, sex, and chucking sacred cows out the window
Monday, September 29, 2008
For the next several weeks, we will be discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.
The other night I got together with a few friends to watch the first presidential debate, and I couldn’t get the Ken Wilber video posted last Friday out of my mind. In that video, Wilber says that the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals comes down to what they think causes human suffering.
Conservatives think suffering comes from within: a lack of willpower, the wrong values, or weakness. Liberals on the other hand think that suffering is caused by the way society shapes us: lack of opportunity, lack of support, or oppression.
Watching John McCain and Barack Obama debate, I saw this difference playing out before me clear as day. And I wondered, why does neither candidate seem to see that both points of view are valid?
Suffering comes from both places—from internal and external limitations—and a culture that truly cares about the happiness and development of its members must address both sources. Looking to one or the other simply won’t work—we can all see this for ourselves in the failed policies of both Democrats and Republicans. As Nurse Radha says in Island, “We attack on all fronts at once.”
We can clearly see this in the way Palanese culture looks at sexuality, which we learn about through Radha and her friend and lover Ranga. In their practical, matter-of-fact way, the two teenagers teach Will about maithuna, or the yoga of love (also called Male Continence by the intentional community at Oneida, and coitus reservatus by Roman Catholics), in which a man controls his orgasm so as not to ejaculate within his partner.
Beyond having the practical benefit of resulting in fewer accidental pregnancies, maithuna allows lovers to use sexuality as a vehicle to higher knowledge and awareness. “If you’re a Tantrik,” explains Ranga, “you don’t renounce the world or deny its value ... No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself.”
Practicing and teaching maithuna—in school! to teenagers!—provides Palanese citizens with internal support to make sexuality a meaningful experience. At the same time, contraceptives are delivered to each household every month—external support to help families ensure they have only the children they want and can properly care for. Consequently, families are strong, people are fulfilled in their relationships, and the population grows at a manageable rate.
Again we see Huxley’s willingness to chuck every taboo out the window in the service of finding a way to live that works. Why should sexuality be something we can only talk about in crude terms? Why should it not be elevated into the sacred? Why shouldn’t we use every experience available to us—even sex—to increase our knowledge, our ability to perceive, and our connection with each other and the world? And, in addition to all this, why not provide contraception as well, to “attack on all the fronts”?
Our sad, cynical protagonist laments the poverty and anguish he’s witnessed in his travels: “Keeping babies alive, healing the sick, preventing the sewage from getting into the water supply—one starts with doing things that are obviously and intrinsically good. And how does one end? One ends by increasing the sum of human misery and jeopardizing civilization. It’s the kind of cosmic practical joke that God seems really to enjoy.”
“God has nothing to do with it,” replies Ranga, “and the joke isn’t cosmic, it’s strictly man-made. These things aren’t like gravity or the second law of thermodynamics; they don’t have to happen. They happen only if people are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here in Pala we haven’t allowed them to happen, so the joke hasn’t been played on us ... And the reason is very simple: we chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way.”
This little interchange reminds me of a conversation I had repeatedly with my father as I was growing up. Something would offend my sense of justice and I would say, “That isn’t fair!” to which my father would always answer, “Life isn’t fair, shorty.” And my indignant response would always be, “That’s because people like you go around saying things like ‘life isn’t fair’ and letting life be unfair!”
I guess my thinking hasn’t changed much since I was little—I still think that at least half of human suffering could be avoided by thinking about life differently, chucking fear and blame out the window, and focusing on what works. When we learn to do this, to attack on all the fronts, to shore up the internal and external resources available to us all, then the future we want will already be here.
Apparently Huxley agrees with me. What do you think?
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I absolutely agree! I seem to remember having a similar sense of dissatisfaction with the “Life isn’t fair” line that parents like to deliver to dissatisfied kids. And as an adult, I once sat in a car full of my relatives, staunchly asserting that a world without war was possible while they all seemed to be shaking their heads at my poor, misguided fancy. Isn’t it possible that everyone alive could agree that war is not desirable? And thus, to agree to other methods of dealing with conflict? One thing I like in The Island is the acknowlegement that there is no ONE solution or even one kind of solution to society’s problems. I think this is a root misconception and it leads to the kind of deadlock you reference conservatives and liberals facing - internal solution vs. external solution. I think the one-solution error exists because of ego-identification. We must remove our egos from the discussion of what is best for society. Often, I get the feeling that cause-crusaders are most driven by the desire to have the RIGHT answer than the desire to actually help anybody. And final comment, I think it is beautiful how the Palanese entirely ignore the taboo of sex to use this most powerful of human experiences to raise spiritual awareness. This is the aspect of the community that would most encourage me to emigrate! And, this idea of no male ejaculation, in a way, reinforces a principle of happiness through restraint as detailed on p. 175, “But, although we have plenty, we’ve managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to-the temptation to overconsume. We don’t give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six time as much saturated fat as we need. We don’t hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set. And finally we don’t spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for Word War III...and while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster. Ignorance, militarism and breeding, these three-and the greatest of these is breeding. No hope, not the slightest possibility, of solving the economic problem until that’s under control. Another ten to fifteen years of uninhibited breeding, and the whole world, from China to Peru via Africa and the Middle East...all dedicated to the suppression of freedom....” Huxley is so prescient here, it’s hard to believe that the Western overconsumption he describes above has only accelerated in the past 46 years. I hope and pray that we are ready, finally, to get it.
Sarah, thank you so much for your insightful comment. It’s true there is no one silver bullet that will make a better world. Instead I think our task is to sort through the wealth of history, absorb different cultural intelligences, and use our own eyes and hands and brains and hearts to experience and experiment with different ways of living.
In a conversation last night a friend told me of a quote that inspires him—he can’t remember where it came from, and I’d never heard it before. It was something to the effect of “Creating a new world is a matter of living as though the world you want already existed.” This sounds a lot like “Be the change you want to see,” but it hits me even harder, because it is explicit about bringing possibilities for the future into right now.
I think Huxley does this brilliantly in Island by imagining what that new world could look like. It’s part of the reason I love this book so much—because it lays out a map for us to follow on our search. This map is probably not completely accurate—I’m sure the culture we create will not look exactly like Pala—but there is so much truth in it, and so many pointers and signposts to ways of being that may work better than what we have now…
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