The Humanisphere

by Brian Stableford

  “Oh! He has a meager salary, then?”

  “On the contrary. Little work, high wages. Once had ancient laws—of 1863 on coalitions, of 1867 on societies—in virtue of which workers were sure of being paid according to efforts and capability, at the just value of their effort and their time. But that ended up displeasing; just value wasn’t enough; more than value, ten times value—that was wanted. What did they do? Had good laws passed permitting them to organize, and organized.

  “So, in every workshop, were associated by subscription to oppose employer; all workshops of all industries associated between them; all industries of all cities and all countries, associated together to master employers. All workers of Europe organized with leaders and enormous subscriptions. Result: if an employer refuses to double his workers’ salaries when it seems good to them, the leader, by virtue of his discretionary power, secretly condemns him to death and has the sentence executed by one of them.

  “If any worker refuses to associate, to demand double salary like his comrades, the leader has him expedited the same way. They’ve had good laws made to avoid any obstacle to the functioning of that organization.”

  “But, brigands that you are,” I said, turning to the worker, who did not appear to understand me, “if one of your comrades, needy, burdened by children, without any savings, judges that it’s in his interest to work for the simple salary, or if he feels that the simple salary is an equitable remuneration for his labor, and that, in any case, to double it would be to make it impossible for his employer to meet his costs, make the withdrawals due to his own personal labor his acquired knowledge and connections, which are anterior labor, and to his capital, which is accumulated labor, and, finally, his risks; if, as I say, one of your comrades understands that, for his employer, after doubling his salary, to have a interest in working, he would have to raise the price of his product, which would result in a reduction in consumption, which might lead to the ruination of his industry; if, satisfied, just, sane and prudent, comprehending his own interests—of which, in any case, he is the sole judge—he refused to take part in your absurd and hideous machinations...”

  “To death!” said Graymalkin. “It’s not a matter of all, or a majority, being importuned by a minority, or even the converse. It’s not a matter of being just. It’s a matter of obtaining higher salaries. Besides, have arranged all that. Firstly, children, that’s no inconvenience; secondly, doesn’t matter whether labor, capital and risks of employer are remunerated, whether sells or not...”

  “What! Doesn’t matter? But he’ll close his establishment and they’ll all be out on the street.”

  “No, by virtue of the new law; no employer may close his establishment; losses or not, he must provide work for his workers, or at least pay them well—very well.”

  “Then bankruptcy is forbidden?”

  “No, but in case of failure, all the assets go to the workers; the other creditors go hungry. When circumstances of that sort occur, most of the time the workers can go for a few months without working, with good money in pocket. Thus have double reason for demanding increase in salary: to receive it and to ruin employer.”

  I was more astonished than my worker had been a few minutes before. I sought to take account of the new economic situation that was taking shape in my mind.

  “But what becomes, in the presence of your organization and your laws,” I said, “of the liberty of the individual and the free play of offer and demand?”

  “Liberty? Obliged to sacrifice it on these points. No despotism has ever existed more absolute, more energetic, more cruel and more mysterious than that of the leaders of workers’ organizations. With regard to them, workers and employers are slaves, and they have the right of life or death over them.”

  “Another thing: if salaries are exaggerated, the prices of manufactured objects must be too; now, if the prices of all products are raised by fifty per cent, and if salaries are only raised by fifty per cent, the situation of the salaried remains the same; they’re no richer, since with the additional money they only but the same quantity of things.”

  “Are rich,” said the artisan, “because, exempt from direct taxes and indirect taxes are reimbursed to us on evidence of consumption.”

  “Damn! You’ve maneuvered well! But then, everyone must want to be a worker.”

  “Yes, but impossible; our corporations don’t admit anyone who hasn’t been a member for a year.”

  “One isn’t free to be a worker, then?”

  “No; our number is diminishing every day, and we’re all the better off for it.”

  “For as long as it lasts. Industry and the other classes of society must find it less satisfactory. Now, let’s sum up, and tell me if I’ve understood correctly. The workers alone fix the level of their salary. The employer complies with their demands under penalty of death. Every worker is obliged to belong to a union and to obey them in everything, under penalty of death. Whether the employer makes a profit or not, he can’t withdraw from business. If he goes bankrupt, his assets are divided between the workers alone. The workers are exempt from all taxation. No one can be a worker who hasn’t been one for a year.”

  “Exactly,” said Graymalkin. “In addition, the hospitals and other beneficial establishments are now only open to workers. Charitable institutions only exist for them. Long live the workers! I’ll add that every worker who has worked for fifteen years receives a retirement pension from the State of ten thousand francs.”

  “Right—the equivalent of twelve or fifteen hundred of old, that is? So, they’ve arrived at constituting an aristocracy; they’re a determined number of individuals who have invested themselves with the first of privileges and are exempt from the principal social burden. They’re freed of all charges without ceasing to participate in the advantages; on the contrary, they have advantages that the rest of the community pays for but doesn’t enjoy. And in addition to the question of taxes, in order for them to gorge themselves with money, it’s necessary for the mass of consumers to pay exaggerated and artificial prices for everything, which vary according to their whim and their rapacity. In sum, they have the right of life and death over everything that impedes the functioning of the odious abuses they’ve introduced, and doubtless over everything else that displeases their caprice.”

  “That’s it, precisely,” said Graymalkin.

  “In that case, accomplice of murderers and oppressor of the people,” I said to the artisan, “Go away. I know enough.”

  And I threw him, utterly astonished, into a passing elevator.

  “Oh, I’m not surprised that there are no capitalists here, nor private incomes, no rich class or middle class; if big companies are treated by their employees as the small employers are, what advantage is there in accumulating capital? There’s only one thing to do, and that’s to devour it; in any case, since there’s no more family... But I can’t see anything in all this but the acute crisis of a nameless dementia. This state of things can’t last a year. Industry, mortally afflicted in its outgoings by high prices, in its production by the idleness and avarice of the workers and the horrible situation of entrepreneurs—only equaled in history by that of the curiales of the fourth century of the Roman Empire—equality destroyed and the people pressured to the profit of a single class, a regime of terror practiced by that class against the others and its own members...”

  “That,” said a voice behind me, “is only one of the aspects of our social edifice.”

  “Citizen 3,” Graymalkin told me.

  I invited the respectable old man in question to sit down, and, the conversation having led us on to that terrain, I asked him to explain to me the situation of the clergy.

  Chapter VI

  It is necessary to worship God or a pebble.

  “The situation of the clergy is quite simple,” he told me. “You know what it was in the nineteenth century. About 1950, it was decided to apply the formula: a free Church in a free State. The aim was to take away th
e meager salary that the State gave it; in return, and with a certain justice, it was freed from the interdictions imposed on it. The people who did that were sincere, but their successors were astonished by the results of those measures and soon reacted against some of them.

  “The piety of the faithful, taking advantage of the full entitlement that had been returned to them to dispose of their wealth in favor of the Church, had soon endowed it richly by buying the basilicas and chapels back from the State and the cities, and then maintaining them with magnificence; the communities flourished no less. On the other hand, the government had withdrawn from education in favor of more simplicity, and in the name of I don’t know what theories of liberty and non-intervention in the affairs of ‘private individuals’—as if education were not a matter of public interest—and, the University having ceased to exist, France, almost in its entirety, confided its children to the clergy.

  “Now, they accepted the formula as so many propositions, but not, it appears, with regard to its effects. And soon, in the name of liberty, it was forbidden to the rich and poor alike to give the Church a million or a sou; as for that which it already possessed, it was taken away.

  “But that would not have mattered if they had not simultaneously forbidden the fathers of families to lead their children to priests or monks, and forbidden Catholics to practice their religion in public—which is to say, anywhere except, as the law of 1978 put it: ‘a closed location of which nothing reveals externally the destination.’ One no longer even had the right to put a cross on the door of the house of God.

  “Alas, in a comparatively short time, that put paid to our temples, resplendent with hangings, paintings, statues, flowers and light, and an immense throng of people. Once, sublime songs celebrated the glory of the Lord, and people prayed with fervor. People believed then; they thought about their salvation; they strove to do good; they were occupied with their neighbor, helped him and loved him; and children were brought up in those views.

  “Today, the only kinds of worship tolerated are those of the minority, because no one fears them—but why fear ours? At any rate, they too share our sad condition, and are also being abandoned...

  “But no,” he went on, animatedly. “We’re reaching the end of our troubles; the excess of evil will soon kill the evil itself. The people will not be able to live for much longer in paganism and decadence. Business, money and the theater-hotel are no longer sufficient for them; they’ll soon demand the faith of their fathers; they’ll be hungry for a Church; the women will resume their place, and their role; wives and mothers will be seen again, hearths and families, and a hundred million French people will render thanks to God in our cathedrals, restored to worship. France was born Catholic, and will die Catholic, if it ever does,”

  “God hears you, citizen!” said Graymalkin. “In the meantime, however, it’s lanist.”

  “Indeed,” replied 3. “And that’s the result of our antireligious laws and our skepticism. Hoping, loving, praying and believing are innate human needs. They require an object. Remove God, and we worship fetishes or korrigans. Our sentiments and our thoughts, gone astray, without a guide or a goal, wander at random, until, fatigued, discouraged, desolate and fearful of the surrounding darkness, we hurl ourselves in pursuit of the first appearance that comes along. With what joy we greet it! How beautiful we find it! It seems to be exactly what we were seeking! It will console us; we shall have a traced path henceforth; the void in our soul will be filled. And who will then be powerful enough to snatch away the chimera that will be doing us so much good? We attach ourselves to it with all the more obstinacy the vainer it is and less acceptable to common sense; for, born from us, or at least only existing by virtue of an effort of our will, we cherish it as a mother loves a feeble and deformed child.

  “That is why, in the nineteenth century, when there were already a large number of irreligious minds; magnetism, somnambulism, turning and speaking tables, rappers and spiritism found followers—I ought to say victims, for those unfortunates, limited and debilitated, who allowed themselves to go to those aberrations rapidly fell into the ranks of monomaniacs. That is also why, in our day, the French, prey to a folly of the same nature, are lanists.”

  “What are lanists?” I asked, after a moment’s silence, during which we had both delivered ourselves to the train of our thoughts.

  “This is what,” he replied, smiling. “Two principles dominate their doctrine. The first is that matter does not perish, but is only transformed. The second is more debatable; there is a bond so tight between the soul and the body, say the lanists, that while one functions the other is modified. Thus, when I walk, my soul enters into a certain state corresponding to that of my body; and when I think, my body is also modified. The latter modification consists of a certain fluid emanating from the head, the seat of thought, or the breast, the seat of sentiments; that fluid, composed of immaterial and material elements, has the property—this is our second principle—of attaching itself by means of its material part to the first material objects that it encounters, and of retaining its immaterial part, which is an emanation of thought or sentiment, there.

  “It is also imagined that if certain objects are habitually exposed to the fluid, they will be more apt than others to assimilate it, and to be saturated by it.

  “One small accessory law than it is necessary not to neglect is that the assimilation in question is eternal; the part of the object that has received the fluid on the one hand, and the material or immaterial particles of the fluid on the other, will never be separated once united, and however small the particles are into which the object is divided, each fraction will retain the totality of the thoughts and sentiments that the emanation has imparted to the object in question.

  “That posited, what are the objects that will first be called upon to receive the nousthymic fluid? Our clothes, evidently.

  “Well, let us suppose now that you have in your hands a fragment of the helmet of Alexander or Napoléon I’s frock-coat. You have at your disposal a large quantity of the sentiments of one and the other.

  “Manner of making use of them: here another law intervenes; nousthymic fluid is transmissible. To infuse yourself with the sentiments of Caesar or Socrates, place a fragment of their coiffure on your head, or a filament of their mantle over your stomach. Isn’t that a rather simple discovery of transcendental physiology?

  “But, you might say, how can one procure an old section of Louis XIV’s braid, or a piece of the lining of Charles V’s doublet?

  “One doesn’t procure them; one encounters them in nature, since matter cannot perish—admire the unshakable logic of that reasoning and the solidity of the conclusion.

  “Then, you might say—but there is no question so artful that doctors of lanism cannot reply to it—how does one know that one is in the presence of a molecule of the mantle of Charlemagne, since it has probably been transformed?

  “In only one manner, evidently—everything here is evident; one knows it by virtue of feeling it Thus, you have upon you, combined chemically with the fabric of your overcoat, an atom of the tunic of Ptolemy the Flute-Player;20 what results therefrom? That the nousthymic fluid, your person and the Ptolemaic atom that is in your overcoat combine; the sentiments of Ptolemy that exist in a latent state in your overcoat pass into your heart, and you immediately acquire a liking for the flute. Reciprocally, because all this is mathematical, if you are gripped one day by a passion for the flute, it is because you have some particle of Ptolemy Auletes in your clothing.

  “And that,” he added, after a pause, “is where we are.”

  “And why lanists?”

  “Lana, wool; that is in the clothing most of the time, and in consequence, it is in cloth, in wool, that the thoughts of great men wander.”

  “Alas,” we said, in unison.

  Chapter VII

  It is science that has developed industry,

  and has give it power and grandeur;

  indust
ry will kill science, and the death of

  science will lead to the ruin of industry.

  “Fortunately,” I said, “in default of religion, you have science, which must necessarily contain reason in its deviations, and react against the action of simpletons and charlatans.”

  “Oh, science! Ask the doctor for news of that. I’m expected elsewhere. Adieu.”

  I escorted Three to the door and hastened to welcome the man who had just come in, and whom Graymalkin introduced to me as Doctor 82.

  He was a small man of the most common appearance, with the least intelligent physiognomy. He had deformed and frightfully callused hands. Seeing that they attracted my attention, Graymalkin told me, aloud, that the doctor was also a shoemaker.

  “Yes,” said the latter, “when I have no visits or consultations, I make boots. It’s my principal métier. Furthermore, I’ve only been a physician for six months.”

  “What! In six months you’ve been able to complete all your studies?” Here, I thought, is a man of genius.

  “Studies?” he said, in a puzzled one. “What studies?”

  “You’ve been able to pass your examinations and obtain your diplomas?”

  “Examinations? Diplomas? What are you talking about?”

  Graymalkin came to his aid. “The profession of medicine is free. Anyone can exercise it from one day to the next. It’s liberty: liberty for me to choose that genre of labor; liberty for you to confide or not to confide your health to one person or another.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring. Be ill, then! But how can a shoemaker draw up a prescription? Doubtless he takes one from his bag at random—the liberty of prescriptions?”

  “Prescription?” said the doctor-cum-bootmaker. “Here.”

  And he took a stout book out of his pocket, which he handed to me. It was a kind of dictionary, sufficiently methodically divided. In the first column, under the rubric Essential Symptoms I read the words: fever, palpitations, syncope, coughing, headaches, chest pains, stomach aches, etc., inflammation in the eyes, nose, lips, neck, arms, etc., insensibility, insomnia, redness, pallor, etc., etc. The second column and the third were entitled Complications, and contained further series of algic manifestations. In the fourth, narrower, column were found the names of the maladies corresponding to the various combinations of symptoms indicated in the preceding columns. To each malady corresponded, in general, four treatments under the rubrics: man, woman, child, old person.