Investigations of the Future

by Brian Stableford

  No plausible reason seemed to exist that prevented these anti-war organizations from prospering. They pleaded in favor of disarmament, preached the theory of arbitration and enjoyed general esteem. It required a series of misfortunes to turn their intentions to evil and give them a role in European affairs that they had not sought.

  Shortly before the meeting that was to take place in Lausanne in the Spring of year 112 (1904 C.E.) it appeared that a new party was about to emerge at the conference, in opposition to the old one, which it charge with weakness, negligence and lack of intelligence. The party in question claimed to be unwilling to persist eternally in the platonic eloquence that was fundamental to the various societies in favor of peace, and wanted to attempt to regulate amicably the multiple litigious points that maintained Europe in arms. That breach of entrenched custom seemed full of peril to many sound minds; naturally, they did not say anything, for fear of seeming timid, but they thought it nevertheless, and events proved them right.

  All the newspapers of all nations immediately went on campaign as soon as there was a vague suspicion of the plans being hatched by a fraction of the conference-members; they engaged in polemics and immediately afterwards sent reporters to gather information in haste; the latter came back furnished with a mass of confused or contradictory items if information, which provoked denials, on to which further affirmations were grafted, followed by replies, slanderous accusations, personal insults, provocations and duels.

  After three weeks, European governments began to get anxious about the public excitement that they sensed increasing around them, which might overflow at any moment; they thought about agreeing among themselves to forbid the threatening manifestation that was in preparation, but none dared take the initiative of a first move for fear of seeming fearful.

  The Conference therefore took place, and had no difficulty in unmasking its intentions from the outset. When the committee had been appointed, one of the French delegates mounted the platform and demanded that, in accordance with human rights, the Alsace-Lorraine question should be settled by arbitration and a plebiscite. An immense racket composed of cheers and boos interrupted the orator’s speech. He was obliged to sit down, while the president’s hand-bell rang desperately, without being able to subdue the tumult.

  The members of the audience were shouting at one another from their eats, refusing to listen to their rare colleagues who had maintained a measure of self-control. Words extremely insulting to the two nations involved were liberally exchanged by Frenchmen and Germans, supported by their respective friends.

  From the armchair to which he was confined by an attack of gout, old Octave Thomas waved his senile hands in vain, moaning in an unctuous voice: “Don’t talk like that, my friends! My dear friends, don’t talk like that!”

  No one took any notice of his advice. The din only died down when fatigue and dust had almost worn out the vocal cords of the adversaries

  Unfortunately, in response to the outcry of German public opinion, the government of the Empire could not avoid demanding explanations from the French Republic. The latter replied courteously that it had nothing to do with the crusade preached by its nationals; that it deplored their excesses and disavowed their actions. Immediately, however—fearing that it might be accuse the press of pusillanimity and platitude—it added dryly that it was not abandoning and never would abandon the territorial claims formulated by the victims of the Treaty of Frankfurt.

  For three days, bittersweet dispatches inundated the two chancelleries; the respective Parliaments of the two States posed questions, read manifestos, improvised speeches and protested their profound love or peace, while declaring vehemently that they would be massacred to their last infantryman rather than submit to the slightest humiliation. The newspapers, for their part, printed kilometers of patriotic prose. On the fourth day, in the evening, the German general staff gave the order to mobilize a division of the army, as a comminatory measure—upon which, on the morning of the fifth day, France mobilized two.

  At the news of this double event, a frisson passed through Europe. Everyone understood that the moment had come for the great liquidation so long delayed, and without vain protests, in silence, they made preparations for the inevitable conflict. Only one power made a final effort to intervene between the belligerents: England protested in the name of humanity and offered its good offices to sort things out, on condition that it was allowed to occupy Egypt and Morocco. It was too late; there was not even time to examine the proposal.

  The Conference in favor of arbitration and disarmament continued its work nevertheless with the punctuality that true faith generates. Frightened by its own excesses, it had not taken long to take precautions against itself and to remove from the agenda the numerous burning subjects of contemporary politics. Then, relieved of any awkward concern, it had joyfully plunged back into its habitual speeches on the murderous horror of battles and the immorality of cannonballs. The members had already voted the seventh paragraph of the accustomed motion for the suppression of war when they learned that a cavalry battle between dragoons and uhlans had jut bloodied the Franco-German frontier. For the first time it was necessary to change the wording of the statement with which the conference terminated its sessions. There were no longer any grounds to give one another the annual felicitations.

  There is no need to say any more about the frightful drama of the year 112. No one is unaware of its dark vicissitudes, its long-uncertain outcome and its abrupt and unexpected denouement. In five weeks, fifteen million bayonets had been attached between the confines of the Urals and the straits of Gibraltar; there had been furious fighting in Lorraine and Poland, the contending forces incessantly obliged to change tactics by the improvement of engines of war, the victors of one day vanquished the next, the domestic lives of peoples suspended and ruined, their national existence always at the mercy of a supreme catastrophe, which was nevertheless not produced anywhere. In five months, the billions swallowed up could no longer be counted; four million men had perished. There was a moment of instinctive stupor in the souls of the combatants; the hostilities stopped of their own accord, and propositions of settlement were timidly emitted.

  The members of the Peace Conference, recovered from their recent disillusionment, thought it an opportune moment to return to the stage. They held a private meeting and began composing a memoir full of fraternal maxims, which almost reignited the conflict. Except that, as Europe was in a state of siege and subject to military rule, the governor of Paris took it upon himself to dissolve the Society in Favor of International Arbitration, and, with soldierly brutality, threatened to throw its members into prison it they would not be quiet.

  Negotiations between diplomats resumed; France and Russia, less exhausted than their powerful rivals, demanded disarmament, the restitution of Alsace-Loraine and a rearrangement of the Balkan states. A treaty was finally signed and the world was able to breathe again.

  Never in any epoch, it must be admitted, has progress moved as rapidly as in the half-century that followed the upheaval of year 112. The monarchic powers fell, one after another, almost without revolutions; emancipated from royal and aristocratic oppression, freed from anxiety about foreign invasions and relieved of a considerable part of the tax burden, nations were able to devote themselves to the development of civilization, science and general wellbeing. The earthly reign of humanity was beginning.

  The organization of labor and the abolition of capital could obviously not be organized for the day after tomorrow without many unfortunate attempts being made, and blood sometimes being shed. Violence was rare, though, and limited to places where the spirit of reaction resisted the flow. There were almost none of the scenes of massacre, burning and pillage that the prophets of the barbaric past had raised as a scarecrow before the eyes of crowds.

  Experiments were made, successively and honestly, with the various panaceas of the old schools of socialism: fixation of salary scales by the State; the intervention by
the central authority in relationships between owners and workers; the limitation of the working day to eight hours; the takeover and exploitation by the collectivity of all individual wealth; the abolition of inheritance...

  These significant reforms not only ruined the great financial feudality but also many more moderate capitalists; nor were they carried out, it is true, without a very considerable and rather disquieting diminution of the public purse. They were accepted, however, out of love of justice; then again, it is always a great amelioration of misery to think that one is not alone in being subject to it and that others are suffering as much as we are.

  The malaise was, in any case, only transitory; happiness does not emerge from social transformations, although they contributed to it when the discoveries of science had resolved the problem of economic production. From the second half of the second century onwards, the employment of the motive force of electricity gave industry an unprecedented impetus; the ebb and flow of the tides, waterfalls, rivers, and hills and mountains exposed to the wind were equipped with cumulative apparatus from which the fluid radiated to hundreds of factories; machines thus activated at a derisory cost, incessantly improved by engineers, where able to produce the objects of manufacture that had previously been the most costly by the billion.

  At the same time, the only major revolution in chemistry since the work of Lavoisier permitted the infinite transmutation of the vulgar vegetable matter that nature produces in inexhaustible quantities; cultivation of the land became almost unnecessary; the harvest of raw materials, marine or terrestrial, was accomplished effortlessly by means of mechanical methods; human genius gradually transformed the external world into a prodigious and well-equipped laboratory only requiring perfunctory surveillance.

  In the face of the abundance and the superabundance of riches, the eight-hour day did not take long to be reduced by the force of circumstances to six, to four and then to two hours. Soon, even the slightest daily assiduity became superfluous; the technology of manufacture assumed responsibility for supplying the needs of consumption amply, provided that every citizen devoted a few minutes of his week thereto. In the end, it was deemed simplest, for those duties, to hire a certain number of Chinese workers collectively; and as it was to be feared that the presence of these foreigners might constitute a danger, each commune prudently assembled a militia of Muslim mercenaries, camped outside the city, submitted to very strict discipline and always available in the improbable case of any internal or external disturbance. Henceforth, there was no one in the civilized societies who could not abandon themselves entirely to noble occupations: to the intellectual research that is the true purpose of life.

  One supreme progress remained to be accomplished, however, before humankind had taken the final step of its absolute development. In spite of the successive ameliorations induced by time and mores, Statist tyranny still weighed heavily on individual liberty at the end of the second century. To be sure, the ancient national denominations were little more than geographical expressions; the sentiment of patriotism had vanished from the most credulous souls, along with supernatural and religious beliefs. First the provinces and then the communes had gradually acquired an almost complete autonomy. Nevertheless, simply by the fact of creating, maintaining and exploiting the major means of transport and communication—roads, canals and railways—a central administration persisted, extending its ramifications from one end of a territory to the other, mistress of a police force and an army of functionaries, invested with the exorbitant privilege of levying taxes. People resigned themselves to the ineluctable necessity, but not without secret resentment.

  As always, it was science that abolished that vestige of ancient slavery. About the year 185, aerial navigation, hampered until them by a series of checks and uncertain results, entered abruptly, and with complete success, into the domain of everyday practice. In less than twenty years, it supplanted all the other means of long-distance locomotion, in such a way as to annihilate the vast more or less governmental organization that dominated European societies and maintained a vague memory of former centralization. Less than twenty years thereafter, the various communal agglomerations found themselves definitively liberated; each one had its own budget, its own laws, its own political constitution and administrative personnel, recruited internally, without any other control than that of its own will, and was not paralyzed by any tutelage in the expansion of its civilizing activity.

  The proclamation of the independence of the commune of Orléans had been issued on 16 Messidor 213, to the cheers of the crowd. Humankind had reached the Promised Land and entered into it.

  A Few Shadows on the Picture

  Resentful minds still exist who deny the possibility of further progress and contest the value of the progress thus far obtained. Thus, in the present epoch—the most prosperous ever—a few hypochondriacs contrive to draw subjects for complaint from the very prosperity they enjoy, and devote themselves to the darkest prognostications on the future of the European races. They claim to be suffering from ennui, as if ennui were plausible when one possesses a profusion of the superfluous as well as the necessary, and one can devote one’s life to research into scientific laws.

  Psychologists and physicians, consulted about these anomalies, have concluded that they are due to psychopathological lesions, whose location some place in the bone marrow and others incline to situate in the anterior lobes of the brain. Neither party, in any case, is able to indicate effective treatments—but their studies have not been a waste of time and have put them on the path to important discoveries; one day, they will acquire certainty and prove experimentally to anyone who will listen that degenerations of the nervous system are congenital, hereditary and incurable.

  The incessantly increasing suicide rate seems to justify their thesis; suicide is beginning to become a normal kind of death, if one judges by the official statistics; it does not spare children any more than adults; since the middle of the third century it is admitted by mores and does not astonish anyone.

  Pessimists reconcile themselves to that state of affairs by affirming that the evil is incurable; optimists contest the supposition that the phenomenon is an evil, seeing it as a simple manifestation of individual liberty. Economists, being more conciliatory, are willing to concede that the phenomenon is not evil in itself, but contend that its generalization would bring about harmful consequences and threaten future societies with non-existence.

  The problem of the continuation of the species was, in fact, one of those that modern civilization had not completely resolved. As the world advanced on the path to human perfection, the excess of deaths over births had increased with disconcerting regularity; people appeared to be reproducing less as material wellbeing grew. Was there a contradiction between the two terms? Some said so boldly, but the more reasonable refused to believe it, for it would have been too painful to see the effort of so many centuries only serving the happiness of two or three generations and then concluding in universal annihilation.

  The truth, sad to say and yet incontestable, is that the prodigious blossoming of medicine and surgery had favored that disquieting sterility to some extent. It was all very well to suppress the pains of childbirth by means of anesthetics; women scarcely cared to subject themselves to the annoying months of a pregnancy, which was all the more difficult because their bodies were more delicate. Ovariotomy advantageously replaced the perilous and repulsive abortive operations of old; for a long time the operation had not presented any danger; it only demanded a few days of care and rest; the practice had gradually spread among young women and the majority declared themselves satisfied by it.

  Public opinion, it is true did not accept the custom right away; in several communes, in fact, it was never freely accepted. In 237 a very curious discussion on the subject had occupied for nearly five weeks the meetings of the Municipal Council of Orléans; and although the liberals ended up triumphant, it was not without having endured the most virulent attack
s on the part of their opponents.

  The latter, in the name of the higher interests of the race, wanted to oblige women to retain their ovaries, and would not have hesitated to sanction that exorbitant obligation with the harshest penalties. The liberal fraction made the virtuous decision to oppose that retrograde system; it replied that in a society where criminal responsibility was not longer admitted and lapses from the law were assimilated to simple cases of morbidity, it seemed illogical to want to punish infertility, even voluntary. What would that resurrection of rights of the State in opposition to the inalienable rights of the individual signify? What would become of the primordial principle of the liberty of each, solely limited by the liberty of others? How could the amputation of an organ harm the independence of anyone?

  Confronted by these arguments, the Conservative fraction remained mute, or persisted stubbornly in invoking the brutal evidence of the diminution of the number of births.

  In spite of the continual emigration of country-dwellers to the cities, the population was, in fact, thinning out everywhere. No one thought of denying the phenomenon. Did it, however, imply catastrophes as imminent in reality as in appearance? Did it constitute, in sum, a commencement of peril? The prosperity and intellectual development of a country might perhaps be inversely related to the number of its inhabitants. A few young women were, in any case, to be found who clung to the instinct of maternity, and were helping to fill in these voids. Although turned away from nobler endeavors in consequence, they were doing useful work and merited encouragement.

  Then again, medicine, impotent against suicides and responsible to some extent for the sterility of women, also offered manifest compensations. The epidemics that had previously killed children, the elderly, the infirm and the debilitated—all the wretches to whom nature had refused resistant health—in droves had disappeared. The rickety, the blind from birth, deaf-mutes, epileptics, idiots and monsters survived as well and for as long as anyone else. Tubercular and cancerous infections, without being cured completely, had been attenuated sufficiently to permit sufferers often to carry their diseases into old age. Civilization rightly saw this as one of its finest conquests in the victorious struggle against death, and the teratological sciences found advantages therein; the pullulation of civilized insanity and deformity furnished them with an experimental field such as they had never known before.