The Future That Wasn't

It’s a common affectation of pundits and professional thinkers to claim for their ideas a historical importance they probably won’t have. It does happen now and then, of course, that some thinker ends up having a massive impact on the shape of history; Karl Marx relished his self-defined role as forerunner of a Communist future, though I doubt he would have welcomed the trajectory his thought actually took from the barricades and marches of the late 19th century, through the bloodsoaked debacles of the 20th century’s revolutionary dictatorships, to the slow descent into bureaucratic torpor and collapse that finally swallowed the Communist dream.

Still, it needs to be remembered that Marx was one of more than a dozen major (and scores of minor) would-be social prophets who flourished in the century or so that centered on his life and are utterly forgotten today. Charles Fourier, for example, was a massively influential figure in his time, the inspirer of hundreds of what would now probably be called lifeboat ecovillages, but I have yet to meet anyone who has read his Theory of the Four Movements or takes his theories of social change through passional attraction seriously; most people who have heard of him at all these days tend to confuse him with the mathematician Jean-Baptiste Fourier, an entirely different person whose elegant discoveries are still much used today.

The same point can be made more broadly. Most of the intellectuals who were household names in the early decades of the 20th century are forgotten now, and their ideas have dropped out of circulation so totally that canny promoters today can resurrect notions of that time and market them as the discovery of the ages. Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, the hugely successful pop spirituality phenomenon of two years ago, was exactly such a rehash of forgotten commonplaces; its promoters correctly guessed that ideas that appealed to the public during the boomtime of the 1920s, no matter how dubious those ideas were, would be just as popular during the late housing bubble. No doubt they’re sorting through the rather different self-improvement literature of the 1930s in search of a bestseller for the decade ahead of us.

The interesting thing is that there were thinkers busy during these same decades whose visions ended up having a huge and enduring impact on the way the entire Western world thinks about the future. These visionaries weren’t to be found in the ivory towers of academe or any of the other prestigious places where people, then and now, expect great minds to be found; they didn’t even have the cachet of romantically starving to death in garrets. Most of them could be found in ordinary urban apartments and homes, hunched over clattering manual typewriters, as they fed a couple of dozen cheap gaudy magazines with science fiction stories.

The impact of science fiction on current visions of the future has been on my mind of late, for reasons mostly involved with two writing projects of mine unrelated to this blog. One of them is a study of the UFO phenomenon, unimaginatively titled The UFO Phenomenon, which is due out in March. One of the themes central to that book is the extraordinary way that every UFO-related belief of the last six decades surfaced in pulp science fiction many years before it showed up in reports of UFO encounters; that inevitably focused my attention on the wider impact of science fiction on contemporary images of the future.

The second is even more directly related to the SF genre, and rather more personal. Long before I started writing nonfiction about the future, or anything else, I cherished the dream of becoming a science fiction author; I wrote something like a dozen SF novels, and amassed an impressive collection of rejection slips from nearly every publisher in the field. I shelved that dream when I launched a nonfiction writing career in 1995, but a fine bit of irony awaited; one of my SF novels has finally been published by a small press. The Fires of Shalsha – that’s the title – isn’t about peak oil, though it has more than a little ecology woven into it and some of the themes discussed in these essays are part of the story.

The fact that science fiction counts as a literary genre at all these days is one measure of the wild ride it has had through the world of letters. 19th-century science fiction, what there was of it, counted as respectable literature; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which many critics consider the first true SF novel, received the same attention as other Gothic novels of the time, and Jules Verne was no less respected as a popular novelist in his time than Alexandre Dumas. At the beginning of the 20th century, such literary talents as E.M. Forster dabbled in SF, and H.G. Wells’ novels were reviewed alongside the serious literature of the day.

Enter the pulp magazines. The pulps – the name comes from the cheap paper on which they were printed – descended from the Victorian penny dreadfuls, with the same lurid topics, loud advertising, garish illustrations, and abysmal quality that made their 19th century equivalents so profitable. American pulps covered the spectrum of popular genres – Westerns, romances, mysteries, two-fisted adventure stories, you name it – but the gaudiest of the lot were devoted to science fiction. As it became a pulp genre, science fiction traded the salon for the gutter, and for several decades few authors who valued a literary reputation would touch it.

This plunge into the depths of popular culture had immense consequences. Despite the claims of importance noted above, serious literature rarely has a major impact on society. Its readership is too small and too well educated to slip into the uncritical enthusiasm that shapes the imagination of an age. Most often it turns out to be the popular literature, the reading material of housewives, factory workers, and schoolchildren, that reaches into the crawlspaces of culture where the future takes shape. By shedding literary credentials and wrapping itself in the gaudy finery of the pulp magazines, science fiction worked its way into the collective imagination of the modern world.

In this way, drawing on the passionate modern belief in the goodness and necessity of progress, science fiction in its pulp days transformed itself from a somewhat esoteric literary genre to a folk mythology that still shapes most of our thinking about the future today. Onto the blank screen of infinite space, as a result, the modern imagination projects all the dreams, fantasies and fears other cultures assign to more obviously metaphysical realms. Many of the essays I’ve posted on this blog have focused on disputing assumptions about the future that root straight back into the science fiction of the pulp era.

What makes this all the more interesting is that the grand future shared in common by most science fiction from the pulp era straight through to the 1970s – the leap upward from Earth to the first colonies on the Moon and Mars, the expansion through the solar system, the inevitable arrival of interstellar flight, and the panorama of star federations and galactic empires to follow – has lost nearly all the conviction that once made it look like the inevitable shape of things to come. It had its day, and accomplished certain things in that time; without Jules Verne and his many successors, human footprints probably would never have been left on the Moon, but its day is over now. Those who still cling to the old hope today – I am thinking of Ray Kurzweil and the Extropians here – have been reduced to wrapping Protestant eschatology in the borrowed garments of science fiction; rapture into heaven followed by immortality is a religious concept even when the god who is expected to provide it is named Technology. It’s a measure of this loss of faith that the publication of science fiction novels in the English-speaking world, at least, has declined steadily since the late 1980s and now amounts to only a few hundred titles a year.

In this light it’s interesting to note that the impact of peak oil on the future of the industrial world has begun to be explored using the toolkit of fiction. James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand is the example most people in the peak oil scene know about, and deservedly so; it’s a rousing, readable tale that borrows from familiar genres (notably the Western) to portray the aftermath of the petroleum age in accessible terms. More experimental and, to my taste, even more interesting is Caryl Johnson’s self-published “essay-novel” After The Crash, which weaves together a tale about the writing of a narrative history of the end of the Hydrocarbon Age in post-Crash Philadelphia with social criticism directed at the present and speculation about the future.

This is not quite a new genre; its roots arguably go back to older works such as Richard Jefferies’ After London and Stephen Vincent Benet’s novella “By the Waters of Babylon,” and flowed into and then out of some of the byways of science fiction – I am thinking particularly here of Edgar Pangborn’s Davy and its sequels, alongside more straightforward SF works such as the novels of Wayland Drew’s Erthring Cycle and Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin’s The Masters of Solitude. Still, the emergence of books of this kind focused on peak oil strikes me as a hopeful sign. Just as science fiction enabled people to get their heads around such improbable realities as moon landings decades in advance, peak oil fiction could make it easier for people today to make sense of the approaching changes in our own world.

If the peak oil movement of today is going to have much effect on the future, such options probably need to be explored. Today’s intellectuals are no more immune from the future’s forgetfulness than their great-grandfathers were – I cheerfully expect my own work to be forgotten just as thoroughly as Charles Fourier’s, for example, once I’ve been dead for a century or so. The history of science fiction shows that indirect routes of influence may be the most lasting and powerful options we have, and I hope more peak oil writers and visionaries take the time to explore them.

The Age of Memory

Oswald Spengler, whose shade I have evoked several times already in these essays, is not the kind of philosopher that most intellectuals today find appealing. He had rather too much of the old-fashioned schoolmaster in him: precise, didactic, unsympathetic, dry. Worst of all, he had no patience with the fashionable logic that sees the present generation – or any other – as destiny’s darlings, to whom the lessons of history no longer apply. It’s no wonder that so few people read his books nowadays.

Still, these unendearing habits are among the reasons I find Spengler so useful as a guide just now. There are certainly times when the cultural pendulum has swung too far in the direction of logical rigor and cold analysis, when the disciplines of intellect need to be relaxed to make room for the life of the feelings and the play of the imagination. Still, I’m far from convinced that this is one of those times. Rather, it seems to me, we’ve approached the other end of the pendulum’s swing, the point when the world needs a reminder that a belief’s emotional appeal is no argument for its validity, and when what nineteenth-century writers liked to call “the heaving passions” – a phrase that seems rather too appropriate these days – have drowned out nearly everything else.

Now of course there are plenty of people these days leading the charge to flog what remains of reason out of our collective discourse about the future; it’s one of the finer ironies of cultural history that most of the people who think they’re rebelling against their culture are simply pushing its agenda a little further and faster than most of their contemporaries. This, again, is why I find Spengler so congenial. He matched up the twists and dodges of modern thought with their equivalents in the lives of half a dozen dead civilizations, and showed how those cultural factors most often claimed as evidence of progress nowadays are simply phases in a life cycle that is beginning to close in on its end. Like the poetry of Robinson Jeffers or the ethics of Epictetus, he has no time for our self-importance, and reading him clears the mind the way a bitter aperitif clears the palate.

Among his least popular arguments is the suggestion that modern Western culture – Faustian culture, as he called it – finished its creative age in the nineteenth century. Of course this is a generalization, as any statement about history must be; as generalizations go, however, it has quite a bit going for it. Take the arts as a test case: those that have their roots in the Faustian world, if they are still practiced at all, have either fossilized into repetitions of old forms, like classical music; turned for inspiration to the arts of other cultures, like popular music, which draws heavily from African music by way of the influence of blues on rock and jazz on nearly every contemporary genre; or become the self-referential concern of a narrowing circle of cognoscenti, like today’s avant-garde art music.

Similar patterns can be traced straight across the spectrum of the Western world’s cultural forms. Political thought across the industrial world, for example, is spinning its wheels in ruts laid down decades ago; a central reason why politics has degenerated into struggles over personalities and petty issues across the political mainstream, and into Utopian fantasies out on the fringes, is that nothing even approximating a new idea has entered the Western world’s political discourse since well before World War Two. (This applies to alternative culture as much as to the mainstream; nearly all of the ideas now being put forward as cutting-edge, avant-garde, New Age political ideas were already creaking with age when they were last recycled in the 1920s.) True to form, Spengler does not even give us the comfort of a good ringing denunciation of decadence. instead, he suggests that it is the natural fate of the cultural life form that sprouted in western Europe around 900, burst into flower at the beginning of the Renaissance, and has now gone to seed.

The botanical metaphor is one that Spengler himself would have appreciated, but I mean it in a slightly different way than he did. Spengler’s view of what he called civilization – the second half of a culture’s life cycle, when its creative possibilities have all been worked out – was largely negative. The ancient Egyptians, among others, would have disagreed strenuously; from their viewpoint, geared as it was to cultural stability and the preservation of traditional forms, what a Faustian mind necessarily sees as a creative period becomes a matter of blind groping in the dark, and what a Faustian mind sees as stagnation is the healthy balance of a successful society. Nor can the Egyptian viewpoint be dismissed out of hand; maintaining cultural continuity, a rich and tolerant religious life, and stunningly beautiful art and architecture as living traditions for more than three thousand years is not a small achievement.

Even within a Faustian perspective, the completion of the Western world’s cultural trajectory has potentials that need to be recognized. To return to an example I have used several times before in these essays, the sorting process that picked Aristotle’s Organon out from among scores of other Greek works on logic, and spread it throughout the Mediterranean world, happened long after the creative age of Greek philosophy was over. As culture gives way to civilization, a ruthless winnowing of cultural heritage typically begins, and those creative works and techniques that survive the process become basic to the arts, crafts, and sciences of the mature society. From there, they move past the periphery of the civilization and become part of the common cultural heritage of humankind.

This is the phase toward which Spengler saw the Western world advancing. Whether his scheme makes sense of the broader phenomenon of historical change he hoped to clarify, it provides a perspective crucial to our own time. The end of the age of cheap energy has many implications, but one of the most important – and most daunting – is that it marks the end of the road for nearly all the cultural trends that have guided the industrial world since the paired industrial and political revolutions of the eighteenth century. Those trends pursued greater size, greater speed, greater power; the replacement of human capacities with ever more intricate machines, demanding ever more abundant energy and resource inputs; an escape from the interdependence of living nature into an artificial world transparent to the human mind and obedient to the human will.

That way to the future is no longer open. The nations of the industrial world could pursue it as far as they did only because abundant reserves of fossil fuels and other natural resources were available to power Faustian culture along its trajectory. The waning of those reserves and, more broadly, the collision between the pursuit of unlimited economic growth and the hard limits of a finite planet, marks the end of those dreams. It may also mark the beginning of a time in which we can sort through the results of the last three centuries, discard the ones that worked poorly or demand conditions that no longer exist, and keep what still has value.

One useful way to talk about this process, it seems to me, is to borrow a common habit of talking about history and put it to work in a new way. Not that long ago it was common to describe the medieval period in the Western world as the Age of Faith, and to contrast it smugly with an Age of Reason that was held to have dawned with the first stirrings of the scientific revolution, and come into its own with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Oversimplified though these categories are, they point up certain important distinctions between the phases of our cultural trajectory that were primarily guided by religious thought and those guided by the expansive Enlightenment belief in the limitless power of human reason.

That latter belief is on its last legs just now, because the effort to direct human behavior solely according to reason simply didn’t live up to its advance billing; the inevitable reaction is following. Thus the faith that unchecked rationality is a ticket to Utopia, or the only hope of the human future, or whatever other set of religious ideas might be assigned to it, is wearing very thin these days, and the decline of today’s technological infrastructure in the wake of peak oil may just put paid to it. Reason will doubtless retain an active role in our collective life, just as faith has done, but other forces will likely take the lead in the decades and centuries ahead of us.

Thus it may not be inappropriate to suggest that in a very real sense, the Age of Reason is ending. If Spengler is right, what will follow it is an Age of Memory, where the collective imagination of the West turns back to contemplate its own past and extract the most useful elements from a thousand years of innovation. The cultural conserver concept, which I introduced in an earlier post here, represents one workable response to that possibility. I plan on discussing that in more detail, and in more practical terms, in the weeks and months ahead – subject to the usual interruptions, of course.