There was to be no safety for the soul in the spiritual connection to God. To the most informed and thoughtful people of the age—such as Bertrand Russell—it seemed that at best God must be a monstrous joker, if indeed he could be said to exist at all, a matter which seemed increasingly doubtful.
And there was no safety to be found for the soul in the material universe, either. The material universe was the domain of science, and modern science stood ready to say that the cosmos was a vast and alien place that held no special concern for mankind. Man was condemned to struggle to survive in this hostile world and do his utmost to rule—but he should bear in mind all the while that even if he should prove to be temporarily successful, his inevitable fate must still be disaster and death.
Man’s noblest course was to lift his chin and laugh at the Great Cosmic Joke. To accept the immense weight of the universe on his puny shoulders and smile a resolute smile even as he was inexorably ground into dust.
The shift in belief from faith in God and the rational soul to a belief in material science left Twentieth Century Western man in a confused, vulnerable and highly dangerous state of mind. Not to have a personal relationship between the individual soul and God deprived Western man of his accustomed sense of direction and value, and set him adrift.
What should he do and why? He was no longer sure.
It was at exactly this moment in the early Twentieth Century that the old-fashioned social utopian story ceased to be written. Imagining and realizing the rationally perfected Godly state no longer seemed a viable goal.
More and more, Western society looked to science for guidance, but science did not offer much help. What science seemed to say was: “Survival is all that counts. So contend among yourselves. Fight it out. Attempt to prevail. But do remember that the wages of success are still death.”
The loss of purpose, moral confusion, belligerence and despair so widespread in the West in the early Twentieth Century led almost inevitably to World War I. This war, so long rehearsed, had been imagined as a nice, clean, evolutionarily decisive struggle among nations to see which was fittest to survive and rule. In the event, however, the Great War proved to be a static, muddled, aimless, grinding conflict that nobody quite dared to win and that nobody was willing to lose.
Ever so cautiously, the war was conducted from the shelter of entrenched positions. Ever so recklessly, waves of men were sent forth from the trenches to be slaughtered in No Man’s Land. The only recognized heroes of the war were the fighter pilots on both sides—men of technology who were somehow perceived as gallant knights of the air sailing high above the fog, barbed wire and confusion. It was these men whom H.G. Wells would come to nominate as the model of what men must be if mankind were to survive.
If it accomplished nothing else, the monstrous and irrational catastrophe of the war dealt belief in the rational soul a mortal blow, and forced the acceptance of the frightful new universe revealed by modern science.
The postwar state of mind was particularly glum and apprehensive. Western man had entered upon the Age of Technology still guided by the soul, and armed with a reckless new confidence in science and its powers. The world was a ripe plum there for the taking, and the West was only too eager to seize it. But then in the Great War, technology had turned upon man. All the familiar Western dreams of empire were suddenly shattered.
Thoughts of alienation, sterility and doom now bedeviled the West. The immediate era was drawing to a close. And not at all surprisingly—given the set of beliefs that had dominated the Age of Technology—there were a good many people to whom it appeared that the long-prophesied last days of Western man were finally at hand.
These fears were lent a measure of intellectual credence with the publication of a major book by a German philosopher named Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West (1918) was the ultimate scholarly expression of the nightmare of the age. It captured a large international audience by telling people what they were more than half-inclined to believe already.
Like some pulp storyteller, Spengler recounted the now wellworn tale of the life and death of cultures. He took the measure of Western civilization, and was prepared to say outright that it had passed its peak. He even was ready to nominate a successor. Like the editor of a common tabloid, out to boost circulation, Spengler looked to the East and foresaw the rise to power of the yellow race.
It seemed that there was no way out. Every dog has its day, and the West had had its moment. Now it must be prepared to suffer the consequences.
In a succession of attempts to cope with the inevitable Fate it saw waiting, the early Twentieth Century Western world lurched from one state of bewilderment and overreaction to another. During the Teens, the West attempted to face the inexorable universe with nobility and stoic courage—and instead found itself fighting World War I, a war in which nobility and courage meant almost nothing. In the Twenties, the West did what it could to ignore the fearsome machine universe. If this was to be The End, well, what better way to go out than with one whale of a drunken party! But the world did not come to an end with the Twenties—and the wild whoopee concluded with a great economic crash.
Through the Thirties, the West sat lost in a puddle of depression, nursing its aching head. If the way to face the scientific universe and its threat was not nobility, and neither was it hedonism, then just what was the way?
Most of the West hadn’t a clue. But in fact there was a solution to the Western dilemma—if only the courage and vision existed to perceive and pursue it.
The two most crippling limitations of the Technological worldview were its insistence on anticipating the dictates of Fate, and its resolutely Village-centered point of view. The Technological Age looked forth upon vast new sweeps of space and time—but from a standpoint that was firmly rooted on this planet during the brief current phase of its existence. Western man held up his brave little matchflame of quasi-ignorance and looked out into the greater darkness of unknown possibility that surrounded him—and quailed.
He could not help but feel small and helpless and overwhelmed as he awaited a doom that seemed both preordained and inescapable.
At the outset of the era, the West had been only too glad to accept the dictates of Fate. Late Nineteenth Century Technological man was taking over the world, seizing, ruling and making a profit everywhere. Fate was on his side, an easy justification for every act of force and greed. He was Fate’s darling.
But the period had run its course only too quickly, and now, at the end of the Technological Era, certainty of success had given way to certainty of doom. Fate, once taken to be Western man’s ally, was now cast as his executioner.
The ineffective behaviors of the early Twentieth Century—the stoic nobility and the outrageous hedonism—were both attempts to deal with implacable Fate. First the resolve to be brave and keep a stiff upper lip no matter what. Then the jaunty attempt to say what the hell, shrug, and blot the whole thing out with party noises and strong drink.
But fatalistic reactions such as these were surrenders. They offered no possibility of a way out of the Western dilemma. After the wars and parties were all over, the threat of the scientific universe was still there demanding to be dealt with. And the only way to deal with this threat with any hope of effectiveness was to abandon all illusions of certainty and predetermination. To take one’s chances.
What? Take one’s chances with the unknown? That was a very difficult proposition to entertain. The scientific universe was so very large and dark and intimidating. Who in all the world was prepared to imagine taking his chances with that?
Well—not H.G. Wells, for one.
Little Bertie Wells, the social outcast, had grown up to become H.G. Wells, the oracle of the age. As early as the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Wells had identified the problem of human fate and dedicated himself to doing what he could to solve it.
It was abundantly clear to Wells that if human decline and extinction were to be avoided, it would be necess
ary for mankind to change its nature, and he said so over and over again. If human beings were to survive, men would have to become scientific and assume control of their own destiny.
So far, so good. But Wells’s advice was only a partial analysis of the problem and only a partial solution. His attachment to the conventional Earth-centered perspective of his time prevented Wells from perceiving that his cool and knowledgeable new scientific man—so urgently necessary in the face of the threat posed by the scientific universe—only made sense within the context of this larger unknown.
Wells could never completely accommodate himself to that larger universe. It is true that during his rebellious youth, when he had nothing to lose, Wells had been capable of imagining daring smash-and-grab excursions into the depths of time and space in stories like The Time Machine and The First Men in the Moon. But as an all-too-successful adult—with a heavy investment in his one-man program to make humanity scientific—Wells found the sheer immensity and incomprehensibility of the wider universe too much to contemplate, and had to turn away from it.
Wells’s response was no more than the response of the era. Technological men might well feel an occasional urgency to go outside and look at the heavens for portents. But always after a short time they would begin to find the stark glitter of the enigmatical immensities too alien and chilling to be endured. And then they would turn away with a shudder and hastily return to their familiar business indoors.
The name of the urgency that first drove Techno-man outside to study the stars was Fate. It was Fate that frightened him. It was Fate that set him to meditating on the unknown possibilities of the world waiting beyond the limits of little Village Earth. Oh, but then the remote and forbidding appearance of the scientific universe would suddenly overwhelm him and send him scurrying once again pell-mell back indoors. Back into the waiting clutches of Fate.
That was the deadly circle of futility and fear that the Age of Technology could not see any way to break. We can view the dilemma of the era written large for us in the most grandly conceived and most noble-minded SF work of the entire Technological Age—Last and First Men (1930). The author of this sweeping book was Olaf Stapledon, a 44-year-old British philosopher who was influenced by Wells, but who aimed to see beyond him.
Last and First Men is a work of fiction, but it is not a story in any familiar sense. There is very little concern with the doings and fate of individuals. Instead, this book is a historical account of the future development of man. Last and First Men is an experiment in the recounting of future history.
Stapledon’s scope is immense. He imagines the progress of mankind over the next two billion years. He sees man migrating from planet to planet of the Solar System, altering worlds, altering himself, passing through seventeen future forms.
Man’s culmination is as winged beings, creatures of great aspiration, living on the planet Neptune. It is one of these Last Men, projecting his thoughts back to a person in our own time, who is given to be the ultimate source of our narrative:
A being whom you would call a future man has seized the docile but scarcely adequate brain of your contemporary, and is trying to direct its familiar processes for an alien purpose. Thus a future epoch makes contact with your age. Listen patiently; for we who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate with you, who are members of the First Human Species. We can help you, and we need your help.227
What a wonderful promise is delivered here in Last and First Men—that humanity will not perish now, but will continue to survive for fully two billion years to come, growing and changing all the while. How far this book carries us beyond the temporary conditions and petty worries of the early Twentieth Century moment! What a sense of evolutionary possibility it displays!
And if we should pause for a moment and look back upon the first hesitant probings of time and space by SF at the beginning of the Age of Technology, and then compare these to Last and First Men, with its restructured human beings living on the farthest planet of the Solar System at an incredibly remote moment, we can only marvel. What a sweeping transformation of SF has occurred! What a lifting of horizons!
Ambitions previously unknown to SF were at work in the making of Last and First Men. In presenting his book to the reading public, Stapledon wrote:
Our aim is not merely to create aesthetically admirable fiction. We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture. A false myth is one which either violently transgresses the limits of credibility set by its own cultural matrix, or expresses admirations less developed than those of its culture’s best vision. This book can no more claim to be true myth than true prophecy. But it is an essay in myth creation.228
But for all its broad horizons and sense of evolutionary possibility, we must reckon Last and First Men at least a failed myth, if not a false one. And the reasons are not hard to find, even in Stapledon’s own terms. Stapledon had too much affection for the tragic, he was too unwilling to chance transgressing the limits of his own cultural matrix, and he failed to take into account the newest admirations developed by his culture, the new scientific thinking of men like James Jeans and J.B.S. Haldane.
Or, as we might put it instead, Last and First Men founders as myth because Olaf Stapledon was unable to overcome the most typical and familiar limitations of mind of the Age of Technology. Like his fellow philosopher, Oswald Spengler, Stapledon fell victim to the early Twentieth Century dilemma. And the result was that Last and First Men is both Village-centered and Fate-ridden.
We never do directly experience the future that we are told about. Rather, we poor petty beings fixed in our own time are condemned to sit in a circle and listen to some inadequate contemporary as he cups his hand to his ear and relays the messages he says he is receiving from the ends of time. And what he tells us sounds remarkably like the most typical fears of the Western world in the 1920s—but imagined on a larger scale.
The Last Men are the Last Men because they are a dying breed. Fate has them by the throat. From somewhere in the outer darkness, strange intense “ethereal vibrations”229 have come to bombard and infect the sun. Now it is flaring up with a cosmic fever that will either completely consume it or reduce it to a cinder. Neptune is doomed, and with it, mankind.
Already the sickness of the sun has begun to affect men:
Drenched for some thousands of years by the unique stellar radiation, we have gradually lost not only the ecstasy of dispassionate worship, but even the capacity for normal disinterested behavior. Every one is now liable to an irrational bias in favour of himself as a private person, as against his fellows. Personal envy, uncharitableness, even murder and gratuitous cruelty, formerly unknown amongst us, are now becoming common.230
It is very difficult to avoid seeing the similarity between this situation and the mental state of the Western world in the early Twentieth Century. The sick sun and attendant “general spiritual degradation”231 of the Last Men sound remarkably parallel to the Technological Age’s cretinous God and loss of belief in the soul.
We have heard the Last Man who is the narrator of the story tell us that the Eighteenth Men need our help. And were we capable of speaking to them, we might have help to give them.
The lesson that the Last Men have for us First Men would seem to be that there is a vast expansive future for mankind. We should not give up too soon.
The best help that we First Men could give to the Last Men would be exactly this same message: There is still a vast unknown future waiting. Do not give up.
Or, more specifically, we might say: If men in the past have moved from planet to planet of our solar system as it became necessary to do so, growing and changing all the while, well, why not do it once again? Why not leap boldly to the stars and become Nineteenth Man?
But, alas, the traffic on this particular pho
ne line is all one-way. We can listen to the future, but we cannot reply.
And what we hear is that the Last Men—who would advise us poor pitiful First Men to give up our petty attachment to Village Earth—are themselves undetachably wedded to their limited Village Solar System. Listen—they are telling us that they tested the outer darkness once, and like characters out of Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft, the experience drove them mad:
Recently an exploration ship returned from a voyage into the outer tracts. Half her crew had died. The survivors were emaciated, diseased, and mentally unbalanced. To a race that had thought itself so well established in sanity that nothing could disturb it, the spectacle of these unfortunates was instructive. Throughout the voyage, which was the longest ever attempted, they had encountered nothing whatever but two comets, and an occasional meteor. Some of the nearer constellations were seen with altered forms. One or two stars increased slightly in brightness; and the sun was reduced to being the most brilliant of stars. The aloof and changeless presence of the constellations seems to have crazed the voyagers. When at last the ship returned and berthed, there was a scene such as is seldom witnessed in our modern world. The crew flung open the ports and staggered blubbering into the arms of the crowd. It would never have been believed that members of our species could be so far reduced from the self-possession that is normal to us. Subsequently these poor human wrecks have shown an irrational phobia of the stars, and of all that is not human. They dare not go out at night.232
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 27
