The Isles of Wisdom

The Isles of Wisdom opens with a framing device that sets its satirical tone immediately. The narrator, a German intellectual, acquires at auction a mysterious encrypted volume that turns out to be a prophetic text by Nostradamus, pointing to an undiscovered archipelago in the northern Pacific. He assembles a small expedition aboard a private yacht, funded by a Chicago millionaire named MacLintock, whose practical American skepticism provides a running counterweight to the narrator's philosophical enthusiasm. The group includes a physician and a young woman, Eva, whose sharp interventions in the island debates are often more penetrating than those of the men around her. This setup is borrowed loosely from Swift, but the tone owes at least as much to Voltaire: the travelers are not naïve innocents but educated Europeans who think they understand the ideas they are about to see in action.

Each island has organized itself entirely around a single philosophical principle, enforced without exception or compromise. The first and most extended is Baleuto, the Platonic island, where Plato's Republic has been implemented literally. Philosophers govern. Women are assigned to men by lottery. Children are raised communally. Poetry is banned, as Plato prescribed, though the schoolmaster charged with teaching students to despise Homer still uses Homer to teach classical language. The novel's central joke is already visible here. The inhabitants are aware of the contradictions in their system and have developed elaborate justifications for each one. State-sanctioned abortion controls overpopulation, as Plato recommended. Pederasty, also endorsed in the dialogues, has been incorporated into civic life. The visitors are appalled but find themselves unable to win the philosophical arguments, because the Baleutoans have had centuries to refine their defenses.

Vleha, the island of favorable conditions, is built on natural abundance so extreme that no one need work. Its governing philosophy is a kind of Buddhist stoicism. The inhabitants have concluded that since they lack nothing, the highest wisdom is to desire nothing. Their priest explains that genuine happiness lies in the suppression of feeling, and that the Epicurean goal of pleasure has been achieved by eliminating the capacity for pleasure. The island is beautiful and its people are calm. The visitors find this more unsettling than the open contradictions of Baleuto.

Kradak, the island of perversions, pursues the systematic cultivation of abnormality as a philosophical program. Its spokesman, Trelloar, argues that human sensory experience has been impoverished by habit and convention, and that the expansion of sensation, including pain, represents the next stage of human development. The section is less shocking than the concept suggests. Moszkowski is more interested in the logical structure of the argument than in its content, and Trelloar is one of the novel's more coherent debaters.

Sarragalla, the mechanized island, is the sharpest and most prescient section. Its inhabitants have achieved atomic energy, a pocket telephone carried on the person, holographic projection, and a medical system that diagnoses illness through a doll surrogate of the patient. Work is considered the highest pleasure. The eight-hour day was rejected by the workers themselves in favor of twelve. Rest is classified as a symptom of mental illness. The satire is directed primarily at Walther Rathenau, the German industrialist and philosopher whose vision of a fully rationalized technological civilization had been enormously influential in Weimar Germany. Rathenau was assassinated in 1922, the year the novel was published. Moszkowski's portrait of Sarragalla is not entirely unsympathetic, which gives it its edge. The island functions, and its people are productive and purposeful. What they have lost is harder to pinpoint.

Vorreia, the reactionary island, is Sarragalla's mirror. Its ruler, Algabbi, has concluded that mechanization destroys the soul, and has spent decades systematically dismantling every technology on the island, beginning with the telephone and working backward toward the oil lamp. He is methodical, genuinely philosophical, and persuasive. The visitors find his arguments difficult to refute, even as they watch his people slip toward pre-industrial poverty. Moszkowski gives Algabbi more dignity than any other island ruler, which suggests that the critique of mechanization is the one the novel takes most seriously, even as it refuses to endorse the solution.

The remaining islands include Helikonda, devoted to the fine arts; a Buddhist utopia; a pacifist community; and several smaller stops at islands of skeptics, relativists, and Epicureans. The novel concludes with the travelers returning home and attempting to formulate what they have learned. Their summary, that every principle is bound to break down somewhere, and that if its application is enforced it transforms into a caricature of itself, is presented without irony. For Moszkowski, this is not a counsel of despair but of a kind of liberal pluralism. The only wisdom the islands actually teach is that no island should be taken as a model.

Moszkowski was seventy-one when the novel was published, and writing from a Germany that had just lost a catastrophic war and was struggling to rebuild under a new republic. The ideological conflicts dramatized on the islands, between collectivism and individualism, between technology and tradition, between philosophical purity and human messiness, were not abstractions. The novel's insistence that every systematic answer generates its own absurdity reads differently against that background than it might in calmer times.