V. Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants
We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity. We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot. And the more we approach the problems of human history with this keen and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind. The hypocrites shall not deceive us into thinking them saints; but neither shall they deceive us into thinking them hypocrites. And an increasing number of cases will crowd into our field of inquiry, cases in which there is really no question of hypocrisy at all, cases in which people were so ingenuous that they seemed absurd, and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous.
There is one striking instance of an unfair charge of hypocrisy. It is always urged against the religious in the past, as a point of inconsistency and duplicity, that they combined a profession of almost crawling humility with a keen struggle for earthly success and considerable triumph in attaining it. It is felt as a piece of humbug, that a man should be very punctilious in calling himself a miserable sinner, and also very punctilious in calling himself King of France. But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it. The whole secret of the practical success of Christendom lies in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled. For with the removal of all question of merit or payment, the soul is suddenly released for incredible voyages. If we ask a sane man how much he merits, his mind shrinks instinctively and instantaneously. It is doubtful whether he merits six feet of earth. But if you ask him what he can conquer--he can conquer the stars. Thus comes the thing called Romance, a purely Christian product. A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs. The mediaeval Europe which asserted humility gained Romance; the civilization which gained Romance has gained the habitable globe. How different the Pagan and Stoical feeling was from this has been admirably expressed in a famous quotation. Addison makes the great Stoic say--
"'Tis not in mortals to command success; But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it."But the spirit of Romance and Christendom, the spirit which is in every lover, the spirit which has bestridden the earth with European adventure, is quite opposite. 'Tis not in mortals to deserve success. But we'll do more, Sempronius; we'll obtain it.
And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that every one has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and mysterious. Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be a vice. Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride. It is mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity. Humility will always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold; pride is that which refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much. In a word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success; it is too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue. Humility is not merely too good for this world; it is too practical for this world; I had almost said it is too worldly for this world.
The instance most quoted in our day is the thing called the humility of the man of science; and certainly it is a good instance as well as a modern one. Men find it extremely difficult to believe that a man who is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas, tearing down temples and stretching out hands to the stars, is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks to be allowed to indulge his harmless old hobby and follow his harmless old nose. When a man splits a grain of sand and the universe is turned upside down in consequence, it is difficult to realize that to the man who did it, the splitting of the grain is the great affair, and the capsizing of the cosmos quite a small one. It is hard to enter into the feelings of a man who regards a new heaven and a new earth in the light of a by-product. But undoubtedly it was to this almost eerie innocence of the intellect that the great men of the great scientific period, which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous power and triumph. If they had brought the heavens down like a house of cards their plea was not even that they had done it on principle; their quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident. Whenever there was in them the least touch of pride in what they had done, there was a good ground for attacking them; but so long as they were wholly humble, they were wholly victorious. There were possible answers to Huxley; there was no answer possible to Darwin. He was convincing because of his unconsciousness; one might almost say because of his dulness. This childlike and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science. Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase is, in the part; they are beginning to be proud of their humility. They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of the world, beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed, of the discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern English, they are beginning to be soft about their own hardness. They are becoming conscious of their own strength--that is, they are growing weaker. But one purely modern man has emerged in the strictly modern decades who does carry into our world the clear personal simplicity of the old world of science. One man of genius we have who is an artist, but who was a man of science, and who seems to be marked above all things with this great scientific humility. I mean Mr. H. G. Wells. And in his case, as in the others above spoken of, there must be a great preliminary difficulty in convincing the ordinary person that such a virtue is predicable of such a man. Mr. Wells began his literary work with violent visions--visions of the last pangs of this planet; can it be that a man who begins with violent visions is humble? He went on to wilder and wilder stories about carving beasts into men and shooting angels like birds. Is the man who shoots angels and carves beasts into men humble? Since then he has done something bolder than either of these blasphemies; he has prophesied the political future of all men; prophesied it with aggressive authority and a ringing decision of detail. Is the prophet of the future of all men humble ? It will indeed be difficult, in the present condition of current thought about such things as pride and humility, to answer the query of how a man can be humble who does such big things and such bold things. For the only answer is the answer which I gave at the beginning of this essay. It is the humble man who does the big things. It is the humble man who does the bold things. It is the humble man who has the sensational sights vouchsafed to him, and this for three obvious reasons: first, that he strains his eyes more than any other men to see them; second, that he is more overwhelmed and uplifted with them when they come; third, that he records them more exactly and sincerely and with less adulteration from his more commonplace and more conceited everyday self. Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected--that is, most romantic. Adventures are to the shy: in this sense adventures are to the unadventurous.
Now, this arresting, mental humility in Mr. H. G. Wells may be, like a great many other things that are vital and vivid, difficult to illustrate by examples, but if I were asked for an example of it, I should have no difficulty about which example to begin with. The most interesting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he is the only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. One can lie awake at night and hear him grow. Of this growth the most evident manifestation is indeed a gradual change of opinions; but it is no mere change of opinions. It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to another like that of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat the other. Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had once found arguments for so startling a view would ever have deserted it except for something yet more startling. Mr. Wells has deserted it in favour of the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated or assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class, a class of engineers. He has abandoned the sensational theory with the same honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.
Mr. H. G. Wells exists at present in a gay and exhilarating progress of conservativism. He is finding out more and more that conventions, though silent, are alive. As good an example as any of this humility and sanity of his may be found in his change of view on the subject of science and marriage. He once held, I believe, the opinion which some singular sociologists still hold, that human creatures could successfully be paired and bred after the manner of dogs or horses. He no longer holds that view. Not only does he no longer hold that view, but he has written about it in "Mankind in the Making" with such smashing sense and humour, that I find it difficult to believe that anybody else can hold it either. It is true that his chief objection to the proposal is that it is physically impossible, which seems to me a very slight objection, and almost negligible compared with the others. The one objection to scientific marriage which is worthy of final attention is simply that such a thing could only be imposed on unthinkable slaves and cowards. I do not know whether the scientific marriage-mongers are right (as they say) or wrong (as Mr. Wells says) in saying that medical supervision would produce strong and healthy men. I am only certain that if it did, the first act of the strong and healthy men would be to smash the medical supervision.
The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it connects the idea of health with the idea of care. What has health to do with care? Health has to do with carelessness. In special and abnormal cases it is necessary to have care. When we are peculiarly unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. But even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless. If we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men, and they ought to be told to be careful. But when we are sociologists we are addressing the normal man, we are addressing humanity. And humanity ought to be told to be recklessness itself. For all the fundamental functions of a healthy man ought emphatically to be performed with pleasure and for pleasure; they emphatically ought not to be performed with precaution or for precaution. A man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy, and emphatically not because he has a body to sustain. A man ought to take exercise not because he is too fat, but because he loves foils or horses or high mountains, and loves them for their own sake. And a man ought to marry because he has fallen in love, and emphatically not because the world requires to be populated. The food will really renovate his tissues as long as he is not thinking about his tissues. The exercise will really get him into training so long as he is thinking about something else. And the marriage will really stand some chance of producing a generous-blooded generation if it had its origin in its own natural and generous excitement. It is the first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries. Let us, then, be careful about the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything that can be managed with care. But in the name of all sanity, let us be careless about the important things, such as marriage, or the fountain of our very life will fail.
Mr. Wells, however, is not quite clear enough of the narrower scientific outlook to see that there are some things which actually ought not to be scientific. He is still slightly affected with the great scientific fallacy; I mean the habit of beginning not with the human soul, which is the first thing a man learns about, but with some such thing as protoplasm, which is about the last. The one defect in his splendid mental equipment is that he does not sufficiently allow for the stuff or material of men. In his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had begun with the human soul--that is, if he had begun on himself--he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon. And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world. For if we admit that there must be varieties in art or opinion what sense is there in thinking there will not be varieties in government? The fact is very simple. Unless you are going deliberately to prevent a thing being good, you cannot prevent it being worth fighting for. It is impossible to prevent a possible conflict of civilizations, because it is impossible to prevent a possible conflict between ideals. If there were no longer our modern strife between nations, there would only be a strife between Utopias. For the highest thing does not tend to union only; the highest thing, tends also to differentiation. You can often get men to fight for the union; but you can never prevent them from fighting also for the differentiation. This variety in the highest thing is the meaning of the fierce patriotism, the fierce nationalism of the great European civilization. It is also, incidentally, the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity.
But I think the main mistake of Mr. Wells's philosophy is a somewhat deeper one, one that he expresses in a very entertaining manner in the introductory part of the new Utopia. His philosophy in some sense amounts to a denial of the possibility of philosophy itself. At least, he maintains that there are no secure and reliable ideas upon which we can rest with a final mental satisfaction. It will be both clearer, however, and more amusing to quote Mr. Wells himself.
He says, "Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant). . . . Being indeed!--there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his back on truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals." Mr. Wells says, again, "There is no abiding thing in what we know. We change from weaker to stronger lights, and each more powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque foundations and reveals fresh and different opacities below." Now, when Mr. Wells says things like this, I speak with all respect when I say that he does not observe an evident mental distinction. It cannot be true that there is nothing abiding in what we know. For if that were so we should not know it all and should not call it knowledge. Our mental state may be very different from that of somebody else some thousands of years back; but it cannot be entirely different, or else we should not be conscious of a difference. Mr. Wells must surely realize the first and simplest of the paradoxes that sit by the springs of truth. He must surely see that the fact of two things being different implies that they are similar. The hare and the tortoise may differ in the quality of swiftness, but they must agree in the quality of motion. The swiftest hare cannot be swifter than an isosceles triangle or the idea of pinkness. When we say the hare moves faster, we say that the tortoise moves. And when we say of a thing that it moves, we say, without need of other words, that there are things that do not move. And even in the act of saying that things change, we say that there is something unchangeable.
But certainly the best example of Mr. Wells's fallacy can be found in the example which he himself chooses. It is quite true that we see a dim light which, compared with a darker thing, is light, but which, compared with a stronger light, is darkness. But the quality of light remains the same thing, or else we should not call it a stronger light or recognize it as such. If the character of light were not fixed in the mind, we should be quite as likely to call a denser shadow a stronger light, or vice versa If the character of light became even for an instant unfixed, if it became even by a hair's-breadth doubtful, if, for example, there crept into our idea of light some vague idea of blueness, then in that flash we have become doubtful whether the new light has more light or less. In brief, the progress may be as varying as a cloud, but the direction must be as rigid as a French road. North and South are relative in the sense that I am North of Bournemouth and South of Spitzbergen. But if there be any doubt of the position of the North Pole, there is in equal degree a doubt of whether I am South of Spitzbergen at all. The absolute idea of light may be practically unattainable. We may not be able to procure pure light. We may not be able to get to the North Pole. But because the North Pole is unattainable, it does not follow that it is indefinable. And it is only because the North Pole is not indefinable that we can make a satisfactory map of Brighton and Worthing.
In other words, Plato turned his face to truth but his back on Mr. H. G. Wells, when he turned to his museum of specified ideals. It is precisely here that Plato shows his sense. It is not true that everything changes; the things that change are all the manifest and material things. There is something that does not change; and that is precisely the abstract quality, the invisible idea. Mr. Wells says truly enough, that a thing which we have seen in one connection as dark we may see in another connection as light. But the thing common to both incidents is the mere idea of light-- which we have not seen at all. Mr. Wells might grow taller and taller for unending aeons till his head was higher than the loneliest star. I can imagine his writing a good novel about it. In that case he would see the trees first as tall things and then as short things; he would see the clouds first as high and then as low. But there would remain with him through the ages in that starry loneliness the idea of tallness; he would have in the awful spaces for companion and comfort the definite conception that he was growing taller and not (for instance) growing fatter.
And now it comes to my mind that Mr. H. G. Wells actually has written a very delightful romance about men growing as tall as trees; and that here, again, he seems to me to have been a victim of this vague relativism. "The Food of the Gods" is, like Mr. Bernard Shaw's play, in essence a study of the Superman idea. And it lies, I think, even through the veil of a half-pantomimic allegory, open to the same intellectual attack. We cannot be expected to have any regard for a great creature if he does not in any manner conform to our standards. For unless he passes our standard of greatness we cannot even call him great. Nietszche summed up all that is interesting in the Superman idea when he said, "Man is a thing which has to be surpassed." But the very word "surpass" implies the existence of a standard common to us and the thing surpassing us. If the Superman is more manly than men are, of course they will ultimately deify him, even if they happen to kill him first. But if he is simply more supermanly, they may be quite indifferent to him as they would be to another seemingly aimless monstrosity. He must submit to our test even in order to overawe us. Mere force or size even is a standard; but that alone will never make men think a man their superior. Giants, as in the wise old fairy-tales, are vermin. Supermen, if not good men, are vermin.
"The Food of the Gods" is the tale of "Jack the Giant-Killer" told from the point of view of the giant. This has not, I think, been done before in literature; but I have little doubt that the psychological substance of it existed in fact. I have little doubt that the giant whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not unfrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head and one man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the giant was a particularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know was whether he was a good giant--that is, a giant who was any good to us. What were the giant's religious views; what his views on politics and the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of children-- or fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense ? To use a fine phrase for emotional sanity, was his heart in the right place? Jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in order to find out. The old and correct story of Jack the Giant-Killer is simply the whole story of man; if it were understood we should need no Bibles or histories. But the modern world in particular does not seem to understand it at all. The modern world, like Mr. Wells is on the side of the giants; the safest place, and therefore the meanest and the most prosaic. The modern world, when it praises its little Caesars, talks of being strong and brave: but it does not seem to see the eternal paradox involved in the conjunction of these ideas. The strong cannot be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong. The only way in which a giant could really keep himself in training against the inevitable Jack would be by continually fighting other giants ten times as big as himself. That is by ceasing to be a giant and becoming a Jack. Thus that sympathy with the small or the defeated as such, with which we Liberals and Nationalists have been often reproached, is not a useless sentimentalism at all, as Mr. Wells and his friends fancy. It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school. Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity more good than the advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like dragons. If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight him; but in that case, why not call him the Saint? But if he is merely stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger, I do not care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with us at least for all the strength we have. It we are weaker than he, that is no reason why we should be weaker than ourselves. If we are not tall enough to touch the giant's knees, that is no reason why we should become shorter by falling on our own. But that is at bottom the meaning of all modern hero-worship and celebration of the Strong Man, the Caesar the Superman. That he may be something more than man, we must be something less.
Doubtless there is an older and better hero-worship than this. But the old hero was a being who, like Achilles, was more human than humanity itself. Nietzsche's Superman is cold and friendless. Achilles is so foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony of his bereavement. Mr. Shaw's sad Caesar says in his desolate pride, "He who has never hoped can never despair." The Man-God of old answers from his awful hill, "Was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?" A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more. And when Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you, `be hard,'" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, `be dead.'" Sensibility is the definition of life.
I recur for a last word to Jack the Giant-Killer. I have dwelt on this
matter of Mr. Wells and the giants, not because it is specially prominent
in his mind; I know that the Superman does not bulk so large in his cosmos
as in that of Mr. Bernard Shaw. I have dwelt on it for the opposite reason;
because this heresy of immoral hero-worship has taken, I think, a slighter
hold of him, and may perhaps still be prevented from perverting one of
the best thinkers of the day. In the course of "The New Utopia" Mr. Wells
makes more than one admiring allusion to Mr. W. E. Henley. That clever
and unhappy man lived in admiration of a vague violence, and was always
going back to rude old tales and rude old ballads, to strong and primitive
literatures, to find the praise of strength and the justification of tyranny.
But he could not find it. It is not there. The primitive literature is
shown in the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer. The strong old literature is
all in praise of the weak. The rude old tales are as tender to minorities
as any modern political idealist. The rude old ballads are as sentimentally
concerned for the under-dog as the Aborigines Protection Society. When
men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks and hard laws,
when they knew what fighting really was, they had only two kinds of songs.
The first was a rejoicing that the weak had conquered the strong, the second
a lamentation that the strong had, for once in a way, conquered the weak.
For this defiance of the statu quo, this constant effort to alter the existing
balance, this premature challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature
and inmost secret of the psychological adventure which is called man. It
is his strength to disdain strength. The forlorn hope is not only a real
hope, it is the only real hope of mankind. In the coarsest ballads of the
greenwood men are admired most when they defy, not only the king, but what
is more to the point, the hero. The moment Robin Hood becomes a sort of
Superman, that moment the chivalrous chronicler shows us Robin thrashed
by a poor tinker whom he thought to thrust aside. And the chivalrous chronicler
makes Robin Hood receive the thrashing in a glow of admiration. This magnanimity
is not a product of modern humanitarianism; it is not a product of anything
to do with peace. This magnanimity is merely one of the lost arts of war.
The Henleyites call for a sturdy and fighting England, and they go back
to the fierce old stories of the sturdy and fighting English. And the thing
that they find written across that fierce old literature everywhere, is
"the policy of Majuba."
This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College.
H.G. Wells and the Genesis of Future Studies
by W. Warren Wagar
The importance of H.G. Wells to the development
of future studies lies not only in what he wrote, but in his influence
on later thinkers. Historian and futurist W. Warren Wagar reviews the range
of Wells's contributions to the discipline of future thinking.
Every field of study, like every nation, has its
founding fathers and mothers. Figures of legend or of history, they help
give the oncoming generations a sense of identity. They instill pride,
confidence, and purposefulness. They supply standards by which to measure
the performance of new practitioners.
Examples spring easily to mind. In modern
physics,
Another by-product of
Anticipations was the lecture that
the Royal Institution asked Wells to deliver in January, 1902, published
later in the same year as a short book, The Discovery of the Future.
Here Wells took a step further, and called for the emergence of a whole
new science.
The time was drawing near, he wrote, when "a systematic
exploration of the future" could yield a firm inductive knowledge of the
laws of social and political development. A scientifically ordered vision
of the future "will be just as certain, just as strictly science. and perhaps
just as detailed as the picture that has been built up within the last
hundred years to make the geological past." Not that geology or any other
science gave us absolute and final truth. But a "working knowledge of things
in the future" was well within man's reach.
Wells spent most of the rest of his life attempting
to fulfill the promises of that early lecture. In the light of all that
he did achieve, and inspired others to achieve, until his death in 1946
at the age of seventy-nine, it is not far-fetched to fix January 24, 1902,
the day of Wells's Royal Institution lecture, as the day when the study
of the future was born.
But in the history of ideas nothing is born
out of nothing. Wells was surely not the first person to think of studying
the future, nor even the first to do so systematically. He inherited the
wealth of centuries of futurism. Whatever he managed to pass on to his
successors, he adapted in good measure from this rich heritage.
The elements of future study that Wells inherited
consist of five layers, each "deposited" somewhat earlier than the one
above it. By far the earliest of the five was the investigation in Jewish
and Christian theology of what will happen at the end of time, the discipline
known as "eschatology."
In the 18th century, the place of eschatology
was usurped for many thinkers by the idea of the general progress of the
human race. A vast scholarly literature arose to expound this idea. well
illustrated by the Marquis de Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture
of the Progress of the Human Mind, first published in 1795. Its final
pages glow with the expectation of a golden future for all mankind.
In the 19th century. three other modes of futures
study were firmly established. The social sciences appeared first on the
scene, fields of rigorous inquiry into the dynamics of human interaction
modeled on the natural sciences. Among them were economics and sociology,
both claiming predictive power, from the dire forecasts of Parson Malthus
to the elaborate and more hopeful syntheses of Auguste Comte, Karl Marx,
and Herbert Spencer.
The two remaining ways of exploring the future perfected
in the 19th century occupy disputed territory, midway between science and
art. But the best work of both is just as serious, just as well informed,
and just as successful in divining the future of bona fide social scientists.
I refer now to the many utopian visions produced
by 19th century prophets, and also to the beginnings of speculative fiction
about the future. The utopia, in earlier centuries usually a tale about
an ideal society located on some remote island, became more typically in
the 19th century a blueprint for the ideal society of the future. Examples
abound, written by the likes of Charles Fourier, William Morris, and Edward
Bellamy. Meanwhile, a new genre of chiefly popular fiction reared its inquisitive
head. a fiction devoted to the future possibilities of science and technology,
known today as "science fiction."
As Brian Aldiss tells us in Billion Year Spree,
the founding mother of science fiction was Mary Shelley, the author of
Frankenstein
( 1818) and The Last Man (1826). But the genre attracted few writers
or readers until the closing decades of the 19th century. Jules Verne in
France and George Griffith in Britain were among the gifted writers who
made it so popular in those years.
The astonishing thing about H.G. Wells, of
course, is that he wove all these strands of earlier futurism into a single
body of work. more than one hundred volumes in all, published over a span
of more than fifty years. Between the mid-1890s and the mid-1940s, he was
the foremost public advocate of the belief in progress, the foremost popularizer
of the social (and natural) sciences, the foremost writer of literary utopias,
and the foremost science-fiction author in the English-speaking world.
He even brought eschatology into his futurism,
perhaps without realizing it. Time after time. in works both of fiction
and non-fiction, he borrowed what I would call the Biblical paradigm of
future days. Like the prophets of the Old and the New Testaments. he predicted
that an evil season was near at hand, that the nations would wage a spectacular
terminal war, and that in the fires of Armageddon would be forged a post-holocaust
kingdom of heaven on earth.
But Wells was more than the sum of his parts. None
of the earlier traditions and genres of futurism that he inherited can
be termed a scientific study of the future as such. Each had a somewhat
different focus or purpose: service of God, interpretation of history,
study of society, speculation about science, and so forth. It was not until
Wells put them all together in Anticipations and called for a new science
of things to come in The Discovery of the Future that a systematic
study of futures rises into view.
Nowadays much of Wells's work is neglected, But Wells was more
than the sum of his parts. None of the earlier traditions and genres of
futurism that he inherited can be termed a scientific study of the future
as such. Each had a somewhat different focus or purpose: service of God,
interpretation of history, study of society, speculation about science,
and so forth. It was not until Wells put them all together in Anticipations
and called for a new science of things to come in The Discovery of the
Future that a systematic study of futures rises into view en Like
Gods (1923), are less often delved into, despite their importance in
their own day. The same is true of his many "mainstream!' novels, like
Tono
Bungay (1909). Of his popularizations of social science, only
The
Outline of History (1920) remains familiar.
Seldom consulted even by specialists are the scores of volumes on social
problems and issues that flowed from Wells's pen, year after year, throughout
his life. Many had their start as articles for newspapers or magazines,
and many are woefully "dated."
But what stands out, even now, is the single minded attention that
Wells directed in these works to the future of mankind. His obsession with
the future is apparent just from the titles of some of these volumes
The
Future in America (1906), New Worlds for Old (1908), The
War That Will End War (1914), What Is Coming? (1916), War
and the Future ( 1917), A Year of Prophesying ( 1924), The
Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939). Most explicit of all is the title of his
fictional outline of future history, The Shape of Things to Come
(1933), a phrase used thousands of times since Wells coined it, often by
people who know nothing of the Wellsian original.
World of corpA complete recital of Wells's forecasts would fill a volume
in itself. His first published book,
The Time Machine, gave a terrifying
glimpse of the far future, in which warfare between the classes had led
to the permanent separation of humanity into two equally degenerate new
species. It was a warning, more than a serious prophecy. When the Sleeper
Wakes (1899) anticipated a Brave New orate tyranny and behavioral conditioning,
written when Aldous Huxley was still a small boy.
As Wells grew into middle age early in the new century, he became
more alarmed about the prospects for war among nations. Some of his luckiest
hits as a forecaster
unfortunately!--had to do with the scale and technology of modern warfare.
In short stories, novels, and non-fiction. He foresaw the modern tank and
warplane, before either existed. He understood that major wars in the 20th
century would be total wars, fought by nations with all the human and natural
resources at their disposal.
The War in the Air (1908) pictured the destruction
of civilization by aerial bombardment of cities. In The Shape of Things
to Come, published six years before the start of World War Two, Wells
predicted that the war would break out in 1940, beginning as a conflict
between Germany and Poland. The real war broke out one year sooner than
Wells's, between the same two nations. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union
in June, 1941, with what seemed like an irresistible host, Wells immediately
wrote an article for a London Sunday newspaper predicting his defeat. "The
war has still to be won," he wrote, "but there is no question that it has
been lost by Germany." Again, Wells was right.
Wells's most uncanny prediction of future wars came many
years later, in the spring of 1914, with the publication of his novel The
World Set Free. Like other Wellsian scenarios, The World Set Free
looked forward to a ruinous world war, which almost obliterated mankind.
Out of its ashes mankind rose again and won salvation through world government.
But the unique feature of the novel was its forecast of nuclear weapons.
Wells's scientists managed to construct "atomic bombs" from an artificial
radioactive element known as Carolinum. When dropped on cities by warplanes,
the bombs became raging volcanoes that devastated everything for miles.
As the novel's historian of the future muses, nothing could have been more
obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity
with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see
it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling
hands.
Wells's futurist imagination roamed over far more ground than
the battlefields of coming wars. He anticipated, campaigned for, and in
his way helped to create the League of Nations in 1918-19. When he realized
how little power the new League would have, he promptly repudiated it as
a travesty of world government, "a blind alley for good intentions . .
. a weedy dump for all the weaknesses of European liberalism."
During the Second World War, he tried again to make a new world
order a goal of Allied policy. The only concrete result of his labors was
a declaration of human rights issued by a committee of public figures under
his chairmanship. It helped pave way for the less sweeping human rights
declaration of the United Nations in 1948.
In other works, such as a novel published in three volumes in
1926, The World of William Clissold, Wells turned to the idea of
an "open conspiracy" spearheaded by multinational corporations. He foresaw
the gradual extension of corporate power worldwide until it might entirely
usurp the role of governments. For better or worse, much of what he anticipated
has come to pass, as documented in the work of the Trilateral Commission.
One of his grandest schemes, and one of his last, was the suggestion
of a global organization for the synthesis of all knowledge. The organization
would publish a world encyclopedia in every major language. an encyclopedia
subject to continuous revision by a research and writing staff as big as
the faculties of three or four universities. "It would become," he wrote,
"the central ganglion, as it were, of the collective human brain." Wells's
ideas summed up in his 1938 book World Brain, influenced such younger
futurists as Oliver L. Reiser and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Another futurist
who acknowledges the direct inspiration of World Brain is Michael
Marien, founding editor of the World Future Society's invaluable monthly
bibliographical journal, Future Survey.
Needless to say, Wells was not alway prescient. In the early
days of the first World War, he made the same mistake as almost everyone
else, predicting that the war would be over in a few months, with a decisive
victory by Britain, France, and Russia. He did not anticipate the Russian
Revolution of 1917. When it came. he had little faith in the power of the
Bolsheviks to rejuvenate and modernize their shattered nation without massive
outside help. Wells also proved fairly unsophisticated as a forecaster
of events in the Third World.
His most serious shortcoming was one that many of
us share: he too often let wishful thinking overshadow his common sense.
In his eagerness to "invent" the future, as Dennis Gabor would say, he
let himself see events on the horizons that were simply not ready to happen,
if ever.
He made the same mistake, in reverse, in his last book, Mind at
the End of Its Tether (1945). Ill, depressed, and clearly not his own
man, he now foresaw the fast approaching final ruin of civilization. Nothing,
he lamented, could save us. Mankind had let its last chances slip away.
All such lapses and losses of nerve notwithstanding, Wells's
rightful place as the supreme futurist of the first third of the 20th century
is impossible to deny. For decades newspapers and magazine editors automatically
turned to him if they wanted an article or a comment on the shape of things
to come. He was the futurist laureate of the Western world.
Not that he lacked rivals. In every category. he had formidable
ones. His generation contained several great social scientists and popularizers
of social science with an abiding interest in the future, such as the British
sociologist L.T. Hobhouse. Prominent philosophers wrote about the future
of mankind such as Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell, Journalists
like Sir Philip Gibbs, novelists like Jack London playwrights like Bernard
Shaw all offered provocative visions of things to come. But none of them
had Wells's versatility, or devoted so much time and effort to futures
study.
Then came the first post-Wellsian generation, the men
and women born between about 1880 and 1905 who grew up in his shadow and
who carried on his work. Many knew Wells, and emulated him. Others did
not. But his influence was pervasive, even when it took a negative form,
as in the writers who rejected his faith in science and progress and world
government The authors of the great anti-utopian novels of the our century Yevgeny
Zamyatin Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell--were all nourished in their
formative years on Wells's fiction.
Another article would be necessary to sketch the achievements of this
first post-Wellsian generation. Most of its members are now dead, but they
were the immediate forerunners of the leading lights of the futures movement
of today. They include Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Gerard Heard, Olaf
Stapledon and John Wyndham, Ralph Borsodi and Lewis Mumford, W.F. Ogburn
and Pitirim Sorokin, Sir Julian Huxley, H.G. Wells's collaborator in writing
that monumental survey of biology, The Science of Life (1931), was
another prominent member.
Am I trying to suggest with all this namedropping
that the study of futures is not just some marginal and slightly sleazy
phenomenon of the last few years, butpotentially,
at leasta central
activity of the human mind? Does it draw upon the resources of science,
philosophy, sociology, history, and all the arts and letters? Is it even
a plausible candidate to be the new "queen" of the sciences that may some
day unify human knowledge, as Wells prophesied in World Brain?
The answer to each of these questions isabsolutely
yes! With the right investment of effort by enough first-rate minds, the
disciplined study of the future can revolutionize human life and thought.
This may sound like a tall order Wells covered so much ground,
touched so many imaginations. and saw so far and so accurately into the
future, that he leaves us all just a little cowed. Looking around today,
I don't see many Wellses. In fact I see none. We may wonder if we can ever
live up to his example, much less revolutionize human thought.
But no writer was ever less awed by himself than Wells. "I wave the
striving immortals onward," he once laughed. He was content to write for
immediate consumption, and not worry about his standing with the critics.It
follows that the best way to honor Wells is to pause, remember what he
achieved, and then get on with our own work. Let the critics be damned.
Study the future. Invent the future. Try to bring it under rational control,
for the good of all mankind. From his corner of Valhalla that is surely
what H.G. Wells will always be telling us to do.
This article is posted with permission of Dr. Wagar. It first appeared in the World Future Society Bulletin January/February 1983, pp. 25-29.
W. Warren Wagar is Professor of History at the State University of
New York at Binghamton and has written widely on the history of ideas in
the modern world including two books on H.G. Wells and futurism. His address
is Department of History, Binghamton University-SUNY, Binghamton. NY 13902-6000.
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