by Philip Wylie
In that process, we have lost all sight, educationally, of the most fundamental teaching of all--the inculcation of an understanding of the principle upon which our national entity (and all our past national "success") has been founded. And science fiction has played its ancillary part in the tragedy.
Long ago, before there was any real science or any awareness of the nature of
"fiction," men compounded tales of heroes and gods who achieved nth-degree extensions of their sensory faculties. The strength of Hercules was as the strength of modern machines. The speed of Mercury was as the speed of the plane and the telegram. The ability of Circe to see things happening far away might have been owing to the witch's possession of a television set. Thor's hammer was like an A-bomb. A hundred old heroes and gods could fly--many disastrously, like Icarus and Phaethon. Legendary heroes could hear things going on at a distance of vast leagues, even as you and I hear over the telephone. The list is literally endless--a list of magic tricks invented by every barbaric people and every ancient nation--a list of mythological characters who could "do"
miraculously what we have later on so painfully learned to do, each man for himself, with machines, but in actuality.
These old myths were the substance or the personification of what corresponded in ancient peoples to what is today religion. But science, as we know, has not itself been of religious value to the devout and doctrinal. It has not yet found "God" amongst the galaxies. It has not touched any Heaven with radar or beamed communications to any angels or demons. Nevertheless it has built up, through science fiction, a vast body of legend that corresponds to those old legends which are, as the psychologists have shown, still the hidden substance of so much of modem religious doctrine. The venerable myths were merely an imaginary picturization of all that the various ancient peoples hoped to do or yearned to do--or, of course, feared might be done to them! Science fiction, by exactly the same process, takes what we know for certain, or for a reasonable certainty, and, by going on from there, expresses what we hope and yearn to achieve, as well as what we dread in the light of the things we now know.
This process--the teleological yearning from what is merely wanted toward what is not yet known or not yet available--was surely the basis of the start of religious thought. Out of it, step by step, man evolved his whole philosophy. And if the contributions of idol-worshipping pagans were horrendous and shocking, they nevertheless played a part by leading on to later, magnificent contributions, such as, for instance, the Golden Rule. Science itself is religious in form, though not in content: it hews steadfastly to the highest subjective principle man has so far been able widely to adopt: absolute inner honesty toward outer objects. This is, essentially, a mere transposition of the subjective teachings of Jesus to the outer world. Many authors have said, rightly, in the opinion of this one, that true science was impossible before the teachings and ideals of Jesus had been disseminated.
It is, therefore, the quasi-religious, the certainly philosophical aspect of the
"modern mythology" that is science fiction, which leads many commentators to assume its function is ipso facto for the general good. That assumption does follow, providing the example of science fiction in question actually represents at least some part of a formulation, process or philosophy that stands for what at is "best" or "truest" or
"highest" or "most complete" in all of science. The early myths were certainly both effective and affective: you can hardly find one that we have not turned into steel, vacuum tubes and whizzing electrons today. Hence the presumption that present "myths"
will automatically lead men onward--and upward.
There is, however, a difference between the two. The old myths formed a complete although naive grouping of the natural and real hopes and fears of everybody.
But our latter-day, self-conscious science fictions rarely exhibit a comparable inclusiveness. Early man proceeded to imagine from his feelings and his yearnings.
Modem imaginers proceed, as a rule, not from the total needs or total dreads of their societies, but, simply, from their private hankerings and alarms. Early man had, as the
"scientific" basis for his "science fiction," nothing more than a knowledge of his body: his running feet, lifting back, hearing ears, throwing arm--along with the capacities of the bodies of animals and the behavior of the elements seen in the incomprehended raw. But modem men have at their disposal a body of knowledge (which they regard as unassimilable for anyone person) but, as has been suggested here, no guiding, general principle.
Thus, to the ancient Scandinavian, it would have been wonderful to have a hammer like Thor's. But, because the old Nordics were close enough to instinct to remember its workings, they knew there were no absolutes in human nature and no unopposable, solitary forces. Thor therefore had his weaknesses--as when he failed to wrestle Death to the earth--as did the other mythological powerhouses. Achilles' heel is the Greek parallel.
To the modern writer of science fiction, however, these psychologically valid factors are unknown. Save when such writers intuitively copy the ancient myth-makers, they have no sense of the importance of myth as allegory--or of the balance required by all such extrapolation, if it is to remain congruent with human nature past, present and future. Hence the bulk of their offerings, unlike the old legends, contains no germ of human truth whatsoever. So it is a great mistake to identify science fiction with mythology and from the identification to deduce the deep benefit of the former. Indeed, as shall be suggested, the intellectual aegis under which most current science fiction is written suggests that its very depersonalization represents a kind of insanity--a loss of contact with reality . . . in this case, with human reality.
There are some exceptions, to be sure. H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come perceived that man's first greeting to the atomic age would be one of frenzy--that fear would lead to war--war to catastrophe--catastrophe to civilized rout--and only after that, would the wise among the surviving few endeavor to put together the human fragments on a basis of a philosophy loftier than the raging terrors of the interim. (As a
"civilization" we are starkly and plainly well into this dire expectation and exhibiting the emotional build-up that went before Wells' calamity.)
Even more strikingly, Olav Stapledon, in Odd John, has sensed how modern,
"scientific" man has failed to develop (by the same means of integrity and painful, slow empiricism) a science of himself and his motives adequate to match his objective science and so to conduct him securely through such crises as the present imbalance. In Odd John, the very few "superior" people who did possess that much sense, imagination, knowledge and insight were first forced to find each other in a world of comparative nitwits, next obliged to set up a truly rational and scientific society on a remote island, and, finally, under attack by a battle fleet dispatched from a stupid and interfering world (which they could easily have destroyed) these superior but still entirely human beings became so discouraged that they gave up their intention to create and promulgate a paradise for all men--and destroyed themselves. The book was written long before groups of busybodies publicly attempted to call a ten-year "moratorium" on scientific research. It was composed a very long time before the Congress of the United States (for all practical purposes and democratic aims) actually did call such a moratorium for the entire Earth.
As we sit in our urban homes today--and tonight--the lack of philosophy expressed in Odd John has loaded the engines of destruction foretold in The Shape of Things to Come. One small blunder, or one rageful afternoon in Washington or in the Kremlin, involving only a few men, could bring the world awake tomorrow morning with its hundred greatest cities smashed flat, aflame and radioactive and tens of millions of the burned, mad, horrified, starving and hysterical, surging on defenseless countrysides the world around. All the cities might follow in the ensuing weeks. This situation grows more homicidal with each passing year, in a ratio almost geometrical, and there is not a sign or symptom of i
ts abatement, anywhere.
Certainly, if science fiction plays any large part in leading the minds of men toward new goals, the goals toward which it has led most of its addicts to date are more evil than those of their less well-informed forebears. Even among those authors of current science fiction who assert that, for a quarter of a century or more, science has been their passion, one does not find a deep and new insight, based on any science. Rather, their orientation leads most frequently to wild adventure, wanton genocide on alien planets, gigantic destruction and a piddling phantasmagoria of impossible nonsense. One needs only to read the contents of half a dozen representative magazines and anthologies to recognize the fact. The fiction is of a perverse order in that it departs from what is scientifically known of man's nature. The science is most commonly employed either ignorantly or for sadistic melodrama. Thus the very writers who claim a long and philosophical intimacy with science and pronounce themselves leaders of the developing future and inspirers of youth, do not know sciences enough to take their privilege with any sense of real responsibility.
They are nearly all ignorant of one area of science as large as all the rest: psychology. They have neither factual knowledge nor insight into that science which deals with subjectivity. Their factual knowledge--even when they have any real knowledge whatever (and some of the writers are renowned men of science)--is limited to a square or two of the universe, a category or two of gadgets, a few cross-sections of objective data. Their own motives, fears, hopes, temper, values and imaginings remain unweighed and obscure. Yet, without a science of such matters, what they write is irresponsible, in the sense that it pretends to be "modem" whereas it is contemporary in detail only--and inevitably, in meaning, archaic. What they are attempting to accomplish, then, is not what the Greeks or the Norsemen or the Indians accomplished for themselves in their time and their frames of reference--although they claim it to be, often enough.
They but create a new and sinister folklore, in which the latest facts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology are superimposed on a human insight hardly more developed than that of Bushmen.
Part III
It is for that reason Superman and Buck Rogers have given as frequent and severe nightmares to America's youth as the hoods and assassins who infest another area of American entertainment. Science fiction as a whole has made it possible for millions of adult Americans uncritically to accept the idea that the earth is being visited by men from outer space in dish-shaped ships. Books, magazines and aggregations of individuals, all representative of presumptively sober and responsible citizens, have been emboldened to give the lie to the Air Force, on their private recognizance. This psychologically toxic effect has been the most conspicious, so far, of science fiction. It has undoubtedly led many a young boy into scientific fields (where, as has been said, he possibly remained an undisturbed bigot in all areas save his own); but science fiction has contributed little information to the general public concerning humanity. On the contrary, under the reckless outpouring of purple exploit, it has probably made the public more credulous and befuddled than ever. And it has certainly destroyed much of the stable skepticism once present in the population--as was shown years ago by the Jersey panic which Orson Welles and his radio Martians so absurdly precipitated. Now, with the air-raid sirens of every big city in America set to sound warning, at a moment's notice, of the approach of atomic bombs, of the bacteria of a new sort of war, of nerve gases, of fusing hydrogen isotopes and heaven alone knows what else--the average citizen, oriented in the irresponsible myths of science fiction, can be thrown into a tizzy by an odd glimpse of Venus, a high balloon, or, likely, flyspecks on his walls--if he's told the Russians precipitated them there.
Our judgment of things and situations has been shattered. To be sure, seven years of federal secrecy in science have added a huge quantum of fear and credulity to that nation-wide neurosis. But the roots of the disease lie in the modern mythology of science rather than in scientific information itself--or even in the withholding of such information. The average person knows "a lot" could happen any time. He has no appropriate way, any longer, of determining what is possible and what is not--what is likely--and what is not, although "secrecy" has not yet, at least, alienated him from reality to any such degree. The myths of science fiction produced the alienated condition by their irresponsibility, their psychological wantonness and their abuse of logic and reality.
Most science fiction is trash, ill-conceived and badly written. Little distinction is made between stories that are scientifically probable (or, at least, conceivable) and stories called "pure fantasy" that have no purity as such. Every fantasy, impossible though it may be from the standpoint of "happenability," has an effect. And unless fantasy either consciously or intuitively states a complete philosophical hypothesis or truth, its only effect on the reader will be one of shock--like the shock occasioned by hearing a horrid account of a nightmare from someone else. Readers who consider themselves beyond the point at which they can be "shocked" in that sense, usually are unaware that their unconscious minds respond, often enough, in a way opposite to the fashion in which they think. All those (few) readers who do understand the subconscious, will see in the savage, silly amorality of the usual science-fiction fantasy a symptom of our general, mental disorder.
For whenever the imagination is allowed full play by a contemporary mind too naive to see the implications of the plots, situations, characters, action and symbols it conjures up, what is produced is merely a sample of the neurotic personality almost universal in this age. By all such process, the brain is deliberately detached from reason.
Most brains, furthermore, lack instruction and education in the vast knowledge of mind and personality that lies, largely unused, in the files of modern science. The story planner who works in that now-obsolete fashion therefore has recourse to nothing save archaic and subaware material, such as bad dreams are made of. To clap a "happy ending" on a tale in which (say) whole planets-full of hostile Zoogoos have been radioactively exterminated by an aggressive American hero, is merely to set ringing echoes of our primitive hatreds and the inevitably accompanying creep of primordial fears.
To our common American way of "thinking" (since the lowest denominator of the most popular tales reflects that way) the universe is ninety or more per cent dangerous and hostile. Most space ships plunge across their abysses into combat with, or captivity, menace or torture by, brainy beasts of fathomless indecency. (We appear to trust brains less than knives in our own hands!) And where the universe is seen as benign, the quality is paternal: i.e., some mighty superman (as in the recent motion picture, The Day the Earth Stood Still) lands on earth (or is joined afar by "earthlings") and sets aright everything that galls, frightens, worries or enrages the author. So, we have not individuated as persons or as a species. We either battle madly and without asking why, against a world we hate and resent, or else we maintain through adulthood an infantile attitude--expecting a "deity" of some sort--or a Man from Mars to fix things up the while we do as we damned please.
Such is a sampling of the "psychology" of the ordinary science-fiction story.
There are, it must be repeated, a few exceptions and all of them, if written articulately enough, have become classics.
Men like Freud, Adler, Jung, Toynbee and many more have shown the nature and the overwhelming importance of the myth to man. To Freud (if some oversimplification may be permitted here) random myths are infantile efforts to recapture situations that have no place in the mature mind. Often compulsive, always, in such cases, symptomatic, fantasies carry the lusts and hates of the cradle into the grown-up years. To Adler, invented legends attempt to compensate for a sense of insecurity, doubt of self, and inferiority feelings. To Jung and to Toynbee, myths are the philosophical stuff upon which whole societies are built; and when a given set of myths decays or becomes obsolete in the face of reality, it is a sign the believing and practicing society is doomed.
Our science fict
ion, as has been indicated, shows a regressive mythological bent; as has also been suggested, where it evades the rules of science and draws on the imagination without regard to logic or knowledge, it is obsolete. The fact that hardly a handful of science-fiction authors have any knowledge of the discoveries of the psychologists indicts the rest as obsolete for this age of crisis. It indicts, equally, the physical scientists themselves, for their pronunciamentos concerning everything but their sciences are as unlearned, the reader will recall and perceive, as the cosmic opinions that used to be uttered for the press by the late, great Babe Ruth.
So--all unconsciously--the majority of us who write from time to time a fiction of science, have devoted ourselves to the science of things and stayed kindergarten--
ignorant of the science of human beings. It is not a timely or intelligent functioning, in a world where data for a more contemporary performance is available.
The proper function of the science-fiction author--the mythmaker of the twentieth century--would be to learn the science of the mind's workings and therewith to plan his work (as many "serious" writers do) so it will represent in meaning the known significance of man. Logical extrapolations from existing laws and scientific hypotheses should be woven into tales congruent not with our unconscious hostilities and fears but with the hope of a subjective integration to match the integrated knowledge we have of the outer world. Pure fantasies should be rendered truly pure--and every ending, "happy"
or ironic, ought to describe a process of personality and conform to facts of inner experience.
For the reader not only projects himself into each tale he encounters, but he considers it, whether he is aware of the fact or not, from the allegorical standpoint. It becomes a parable to him and even though he forgets the detail, its lesson (implication) remains in him as a "feeling." If the lesson be no more than that the universe, including man, is a great zoo of horrible beasts, his subsequent responses will be such as we see on every hand, these days: fugue, flight, aggression, and panic like the one Orson Welles precipitated, or a slug-nutty apathy such as overcomes pigs in mazes too difficult for their insight-"hysteria," in short, the kind that characterizes most Americans this very day. For while we know our cities can be swept away overnight and may be, few of us will even prepare for the onslaught, or make ready to defend ourselves or pick up our wounded and bury our dead. We prefer to take a mocking or guiltily recessive view of our own "Civil Defense"!