Custom «The Moral Animal and Island» Essay Paper

Compare and contrast and discuss, (providing your interpretation and opinion) the ideas regarding sex, sex education, marriage, and family life in THE MORAL ANIMAL by Wright and ISALND by Huxley.

Robert Wright in his novel "The moral Animal" gives lots of illustrations from evolutionary psychology of human activities in mating, in family life, sex, marriage, and friendships. It also highlights man's conduct in business and in many other everyday situations of our inborn proclivities and strategies which are apparently derived from evolutionarily expressed tendencies of our brain. Robert Wright says that we all want to express our feelings of closeness to our friends and in many cases we find ways to do this. There exists differences in the means that men use to express their sexual feelings to friends of one sex, and more specifically the opposite sex from us, from the means used to express many of the same feelings of those of our same sex. Robert wrights in addition says that if holding hands and petting is a good contact approach toward the person of the opposite sex, then we should solicit ourselves why is not for another same sex.

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In the novel Moral Animal, sex and sex education is not something about which we often make cognizant decision, nor do the people fascinated sexually to their own gender. One just feels right and other does not feel attracted to it. On the issue of family life Robert Wright says that it is we have propensity that tend to be helpful in the game of life and more particularly to the reproductive game. It is therefore absolutely true that we can choose not to do these actions when it is not appropriate. For example, Wright established that when a married woman's champion husband is around she feels right, and also a baboon can do the same in the presence of a larger rival hence the essence of protection.

Marriages in Wright's novel The Moral animal are classified into polygamous and monogamous. To stress on the need to have a monogamous marriage Robert Wright says that in a society where little is stowed for a rainy day, a man who shares his resources between two or more families may end up with a few or no children surviving. Wright considers in a marriage a woman who chooses a polygamous man over a monogamous man is still settling for much less in the way of material well being.

Concerning family life and marriage we can also bring advanced reticence into play such as the reluctance to hurt the other by a sexual signal that might give a false declaration of commitment. It is unlikely that the baboon ever has these thoughts. Robert Wright therefore says that it serves no useful human purpose to not be able to put away feelings once we have made a decision. This implies that it would be much more rational and contented to put away our feelings once our upper intellect has decided but we cannot deny our heritage even if we can direct it. Also according to Wright most females would like to think they are guided by a more insubstantial sort of love, and that they have somewhat more pride than a long billed quagmire wren.

Island is about a community, soon to be swept away by the mad voracity of the rest of the world, in which there has developed up a way of life based on the perpetual philosophy, hallucinogenic plants and other yoga's which are taught at school. Huxley notes that the Island has a life decrepit with a bad sexual history, and it's converted to its way of life. According to Huxley most of the characters live without complexities, whether of irony or anything else, thus making the best of the here and now for them, coping intelligently with birth and sex, marriage, and family with economics and visionary experience.

In the Island, children are taught methods of helping crops to be more productive as well as eugenic methods of improving the Palanese race through artificial insemination. Unlike in The Moral Animal, sexual exploration of any form in the novel Island is encouraged and the children are parented within adoption clubs of twenty families. As far as family life is concerned the word mother is the name of a provisional function and not a undying relationship and various forms of behavioral conditioning are used with young children to help them learn a generous attitude towards the world. Also the Palanese are anti-dogmatic and as a result they engage in delivering contraceptives to everyone by post every month and using all and any physical or mental method that they know will be useful in improving their families and marriage.

Unlike in the Moral Animal, the islanders are engrossed in the yoga of everything, which Huxley attempts to exaggerate in a scene where Farnaby takes Palanese perception mushrooms and has a visionary experience. Huxley says that the Islanders are keen on the yoga of love, but they are certainly not inhibited and reach total fulfillment in sex. Huxley creates Palanese who, lacking a sagacity of remorse appears to be denying that they are sinners like everybody else while on the contrary we have the cruel misrepresentations of the Rani and her son who declare the exact opposite. The implication is that the sacramentalization of sex is just an excuse for being involved in extremes of sensuality.

In Huxley's Island, the yoga of love, it is fundamental that a family requires that a man and woman shall share a common purpose that is the development of attention. Huxley says that if this lacks one of the partners in the marriage will experience nothing more than false spirituality. Huxley does not does not polarize the issue into pro-family or anti-family camps. He therefore fabricates his own variation of a family that houses both the closeness and security that comes from a two-parent arrangement as well as the variety and freedom that come from child having several homes to choose from. Palanese society therefore is a mixture of the best in every society that Huxley knows.

Would Wright approve of the approach advocated by the people of PALA on Huxley's island utopia?

Wright would not approve the approach advocated by the people of Pala because it is a regrettable truth that the wicked utopia makes better reading than the good and one sympathizes with Huxley's effort to make Pala interesting. Huxley suggests that the Pala-model might be something for under-developed rather than developed countries. Again Wright will not approve it because focusing on it as it does on the inner and not merely the material life, Pala is a new departure for utopia. This means that impractical as much of it may be, it is still more provocative than the usual reports of commissions on national goals.

Besides that the religion of the Pala is denies the world's as it teaches that everything from sex, family life, and marriage can be a road to enlightenment and liberation. On the other hand Wright focuses on how evolution influences man's natural selection criteria on issues concerning sex, marriage, and family. In the novel Island fifteen of twenty-five households combine to form an extended family. Huxley thus says that the Pala advocated that any child fed up with his own parents can take a refreshing vacation in another home and that artificial insemination was frequent but voluntary. This was employed by couples who wanted more variety in their children and a better genetic heritage for them.

Another reason why Wright would not approve Pala on Huxley's Island Utopia was because of its sexual behavior. Pala commissions certain mature ladies to give practical instructions to young male virgins. In the novel Island, we realize that the ends of this supposedly liberation Utopia are the ones he approves of but Huxley ceases to qualm about the ways of enforcing them and as a result loses all compassion with non-compliance. Huxley explains that as children his Islanders are steadily indoctrinated and persuaded, as adults they are kept happy and politically dormant by the sex yoga.

Another reason why Wright will not approve the approach advocated by Pala is on the basis that Pala is a fiction and Huxley is the God of Pala. It might not help a bona fide country to accept a siege economy: who would stop the big bad disparate world outside the fortification walls from being reproduced within the walls as a small bad unequal world. Huxley further established that the islanders have all experienced a transpersonal dimension where they are part of a general oneness when they return to the material world and they remain inspired by the foretaste of the ideal.

Should Pala's ideas be applied in our society? Could they be applied? Why, or why not?

Pala's ideas cannot be applied to our society because of its monarchy particularly given that it is precisely this feature that ensures its destruction. Huxley argued that "Pala does not serve to highlight the contradiction inherent in his account of that type of utopia's origins: the fact that it is a liberation society created by essentially authoritarian means". Pala's ideas are also challenge which rematerializes at the end of Island, when it becomes clear that the whole libertarian panoply of autonomous initiative and self fortitude can be erased as easily as it was created.

Pala in addition shows the return to the traditional location of earlier utopian narrative an island in some unspecified southern sea. We should note that however refreshing this may be, in reality Huxley's stress on the virtues of maturity, of individual freedom and responsibility may be particularly in a utopian context, familiar problems arise when it comes to translating theory into practice. Huxley says that while some people may complain about Pala's pragmatic assessment, a certain amount of pain and sorrow is an inescapable part of the human condition and therefore his ideas cannot be applied in our society.

At some point we should consider taking an example of the fictional Palanese not to become an addict and assume a positive way of thinking but not applying the ideas in our society. This implies that we need less practical thinking bearing in mind it is better to have tried and failed to achieve rightness than never to have tried and achieved nothing at all. Huxley established that what was more striking was the manner in which the Palanese people handled the overtaking of their Island. On the basis that they had no army they accepted the attack without fight back.

In addition Pala's ideas cannot be applied in our society because the fundamental features presented in the Palanese community seem worth to attain and on the basis of the ideal society, life without fight back and disagreements factors that do not seem desirable but rather boring. Most of the ideas in the Pala are therefore delusion projections far from apprehension. This is because the endeavor to represent a good society however difficult is a useful complement to the attempt to show how bad things are now.

The fact that Pala's origin is manmade and elucidated in an unusual detailed way adds to the assumption that Huxley's suggestions in the Island were meant seriously as a motivation to improve actual life. This means that they could not be applied in our society. Also witnessing Pala perish in the end was with the intention that a good judgment of certainty and viability rubs off on the ideas in the novel. These ideas should therefore not be applied in our society because their main aim was to kindle argument and to compel the reader into a deliberation of the practicabilities and allegations of the Utopian society.