Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  It is a question of the relationship between human consciousness and the rest of the universe, whether by oneself or through intermediaries. Western culture, selling itself as the last outpost of individualism, has been as quick to stifle this characteristic as the East has been. The West has merely been less aware, and thus less candid, about the consequences of its major decisions. It is also a characteristic of the West that we must believe in absolutes. We demand them. Our language assumes them. We ask: "What is it?" And we say: "It either is or it isn't."

  The verb "to be" betrays us.

  Some of the East escaped this pitfall, but shared our tendencies toward the designed state, toward all-inclusive planning. We in the West seduced the East not through guns and massive power, but through engineering and planning. We captured most of the Eastern consciousness through engineered "contingency factors."

  An engineer of my acquaintance, servant of a powerful industry, when asked how his industry dealt with unknown contingencies in its long-range plans, said:

  “We put a very large item in the budget and label it contingency. When the unexpected problem arises, if it's something money won't solve, we borrow facilities from other areas. We patch together a temporary solution until we can fill in the gaps."

  He went on to explain that the cost of such solutions was added later to the price which the public pays.

  The question of absolutes—absolute solutions, absolute control—remains at the core of our science, our science fiction, and our approach to the solution of crises. It is, without a doubt, a battle of ingrained conservatism against outer chaos. Our Utopian dreams of Eden are essentially conservative. We dream of a designed state wherein all the needs of the designers are secure. The main function of paradise is to entertain the needs of its human creators. Everyone must be a Bozo, happily comfortable, and thus limited in severely designed ways. There goes freedom of choice and in come Santaroga and Walden Two.

  And God had better answer our prayers or we'll stop worshiping him. We'll vote for somebody else.

  Few seem to have remarked the failure of demanding, ego-centered prayer as an argument for the current revival of Satanism, witchcraft, and the like. The morality argument has fallen on hard times recently. Is it significant that both Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, candidates who offered themselves on morality platforms, lost by about the same proportion? There does appear to be an element of moralizing which says: "Why can't you be more like me?"

  When the chips were down, the American electorate may have said: "I'll render my own moral judgments, thank you, and you can stuff that preacher pose."

  “Judge not lest ye be judged."

  In a sense, the struggles of our world, the crises arising from these struggles, and the stuff of our literary creations which reflect on the sensory universe represent a battle over human consciousness and its judgments. It's not so much the minds and hearts of men that are at stake, but their awareness, the ideas they are permitted. The struggle is over what is judged valuable in our universe. Some of the antagonists follow a value system based on what can be measured, counted, or tabulated. They call this attitude "realpolitik." Others base their standards on undefinable terms (undefinable because they change when we touch them) such as freedom, the rights of man, morality, the law of God.

  These latter concepts defy programming. They must be continually reinterpreted. Witness the provisions for change in the United States Constitution. Islam provided for Qazi, judges who rule on secular matters as they derive from the Koran. Qazi must be "adult, free, Muslim and unconvicted of slander."

  Even as they are defined, these concepts fall outside current conventions of language which, as a set of symbols, remains finite and forever incomplete as a communications tool. Language opens up the reflection of thought, but by its very nature it also creates boundaries which appear insurmountable when posed against infinity. Language programs us, decides what we see and how we see it—what value judgment we place on anything we see. It is a root of prejudice and a limiter of perceptions as the embodiment of previous experiences which have been judged and catalogued. A new occurrence, pervaded by past perceptions, can be misconstrued. Power—secular and religious—is grounded in language. To assault the barriers of language is to do something dangerous to those who hold power because you open the way to new validity forms, new relationships, new laws, new ways of ordering society. Language represents an intervening force when we articulate our dream Utopias. It prevents the realization of dreams. It is a sea of paradox, the substance of interesting times, curses and blessings and interesting stories.

  Without language there would be no science fiction. What a crisis that would be!

  Remember that Thomas More, the author who gave us the word Utopia and the dream of uniformity which the Old Chinese and the modern West find so enchanting, conceived his paradise in the form of the army—as does Skinner in Walden Two, as the pure-gospel Communists do, as the ancient Essenes did, as they did in the Oneida Colony. The rule appears so very simple:

  “From every person according to his ability and to every person according to his needs."

  This requires, however, that someone pass judgment on the needs and abilities, setting limits for them. More's Utopia provided public kitchens, public clothing repair shops, public laundries, etc., and guidelines for public behavior. I invite you to run your own survey. Ask people who have served in a branch of the military if they judged that a Utopian existence. Personally, I recall an unspoken military commandment: "No individual crises allowed!"

  Walden One, as seen through Thoreau's prejudices, was a place where the physical universe and the human spirit were to be interwoven harmoniously. Thoreau permitted no machines. Only the simplest things that the earth provided made up his tools. He professed himself perfectly contented in this condition.

  Thoreau was not the first on that path. Rousseau drew similar surroundings for his "noble savage." St. Francis of Assisi employed his religious genius in rebellion against life-styles of the thirteenth century. To know God, it was necessary to discard all material possessions and marry nature. He said, in Christ's words, "The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man hath not where to lay his head."

  And then there were the earlier Pan god prototypes.

  Pan is still with us.

  Religion says: "Love is the answer."

  Science says: "There's infinite energy out there just waiting for the right blend of imagination and creativity to bring it into the service of man."

  Rebellious youth says: "I'm going back to the farm."

  The Black says: "I want it all; share it!"

  The American Indian says: "Give it back before you wreck everything."

  The social engineer says: "The key to our many problems remains in proper ordering and efficiency."

  Listen to the social engineer because he has the inside track. Constant planning is a Walden Two obsession. That's familiar, isn't it? There we go again trying to impose our human order on an infinite universe.

  However, when we narrow our frame of reference to the earth itself, as Thoreau did, it appears nature is a circle of delicately balanced systems which function efficiently only when man doesn't tamper with them. According to this view, man introduces chaos into what was originally a well-ordered plan, a system of symmetry and balances, and our attempts to establish our own kind of order open us to new complexities and crises.

  But the desire for that abstract condition which we call security is implicit in our attempts to plan and order our lives. Disorder and chaos, the uncertainties of an infinite universe, threaten our peace of mind if not our physical comfort. Against such a background, behavioral (social) engineers such as Skinner can be heard pleading with us: "Please! Let us plan the world in a way that will set our minds at ease."

  Translation: "Why can't everyone be more like me?"

  Because the mind at ease is a dead mind.

  For civilization to exist as
we know it, socializing processes must be strong and pervasively thorough. We are programmed in a multitude of ways, many of them operating unconsciously. By the time we awaken even faintly to the awareness that we have been socially conditioned, we find ourselves so indoctrinated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to break the old patterns. The reinforcements of the system are powerful, many of them rooted in our animal past, and such systems have been taken over entirely by the unconscious socializing programs. Our history also shows us that there has always been a majority in human society which never becomes aware of any need for change.

  Survival pressures demanding that we evolve, grow, and change, however, continue to proliferate. We don't want to change, but the floodgates open abruptly and we are overwhelmed.

  Crisis!

  Western tradition faces such demands with the concept of absolute control. You control the force which seeks to change your world. You build a dam. You organize an army, a navy, an air force, a space service, more efficient police. You control the mob—even that mob in yourself. You control crime or the Mafia or the heroin traffic. Never mind that the control concept is in direct conflict with the American myth of individuality: the thing you fear must be controlled.

  How the control concept works with the heroin traffic exemplifies what happens when we apply such pressures to a system without sufficient understanding of the system's internal behavior. Understand first that we have never discovered an upper limit to what the heroin addict will pay for his fix. The demand impulse of the system has a wide open upper limit, assumed as infinite. Result: New Yorkers no longer live in Fun City. It's Fear City, made that way by this lack of understanding about the drug traffic. New York at night is effectively in a state of siege reminding one of the Mekong Delta at the height of the Vietnam War. Remember? "The night belongs to Charley." New Yorkers know their addicts will pay any price asked of them—your life, your household goods, anything.

  But our dominant approach continues to operate out of that judgmental edict: Heroin is nasty! Suppress it! Control it!

  Even with our wildest control binge, however, the heroin traffic cannot be completely shut off. Some of it will get through. Remember the industrial engineer's comment on unknown contingencies? You put in a big contingency fund which is passed along to the consumer. Thus, some heroin will enter the United States because the head of a friendly government (or his uncle, or his sister) profits from the traffic; or because a federal agent has been paid off; or because a high United States military officer has become an addict and is forced to use his facilities in the traffic; or, finally, because there are just too many holes through which the stuff can enter the nation.

  It may cost a bundle to corrupt a federal official, a general, or a member of the State Department, but what the hell! The consumer will pay.

  Ultimately, even if you are not an addict, that consumer-who-pays is you.

  Our control efforts do little more than raise the price of the heroin that does get through. There's no upper limit on that price; thus it's a wide open system.

  If we really wanted to make a social adjustment to the heroin traffic, our actions would have to be somewhat different. We would have to accept first that our new approach would bring its own problems, that it would not be the final and absolute answer. But let's begin by assuming that it's not a good thing to allow a flow of money which can corrupt high officials and whole police departments. Let's assume that we want to stop that flow of corrupting cash. Very well; we take the profit out of the heroin traffic. We make the addict's fix available at a reasonable price—say for about fifty cents and under medical supervision. Then we prepare ourselves to deal with the other socio-medical aspects of the drug problem which would be certain to surface under these new conditions. We could do this by understanding that we would be dealing with our mutual problem, not controlling it.

  The one-pointed view of the "control it" approach invariably seduces us into making faulty assumptions. A fundamental cause of depressed urban areas has been found to be an excess of low-cost housing, rather than the housing shortages which we assumed to be the problem. City tax bases and legal structures gave incentives for not tearing down old buildings. But aging industrial buildings bring a decline in employment. Residential structures, as they age, attract lower income groups who are forced to use them at a higher population density. Jobs decline while population rises. Then, we come in with our development schemes and add more low-cost housing. This attracts more people from the low-income group into the area where jobs are decreasing. Our well-intentioned efforts help to create what Jay W. Forrester of MIT calls "a social trap."

  But that wasn't what we wanted at all, was it? My God! We have to control this sort of thing!

  Pakistan wanted to control its mosquitoes because the insects are a vector in a runaway malaria problem. However, Pakistan already suffered from the control disease which it caught from our Western culture. Having only enough funds and other resources for about a seventy-five percent mosquito control program, Pakistan demonstrated how well it had learned from the West by going ahead with an incomplete program. Result: the surviving mosquitoes are now resistant to former control techniques and malaria is again on a runaway increase.

  Attempting to control something "evil," we precipitate a larger crisis. This may be a general human tendency. We feel helpless and alone when faced with large problems. Loneliness influences us to grab for the reassurance of anything offered to us as the solution. We want someone to assure us he has the answer and if we'll only follow him. It produces very odd behavior. The more complex a problem appears, the more apathetic we become; the more we turn away, the more strongly we grasp at a proffered solution which is presented with the promise of immediate relief. After all, Pakistan's seventy-five percent mosquito control program did ease the malaria problem, temporarily.

  We know that a single-pointed attempt to solve a problem is more likely to increase that problem's complexity, make the problem harder to solve and, eventually, confront us with a crisis. The arguments for planetwide planning of human existence are relatively easy to accept, but the danger of massive, single-entry "solutions" remains as long as humans demand "immediate relief."

  It is astonishing how many college-level young people writing scenarios for a Utopian rebuilding of world society begin their scenarios with a worldwide disaster which kills off ninety percent or more of the human population. The scenarios then have the survivors (including the scenario author, of course) climb back to a planned civilization based on "nonrepressive freedom." The quote is from an actual scenario by a twenty-year-old college junior.

  Many of these young writers turn to Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Soleri (strange bedfellows, indeed) for supportive arguments, and they draw heavily from the works of such writers as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Ted Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Jack Williamson, Tony Boucher (W. A. P. White), John Campbell, Lester del Rey, Hugo Gernsback, Henry Kuttner, C. M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Fritz Leiber, Murray Leinster, Judith Merril, Margaret St. Clair (Idris Seabright), Clifford Simak, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn (Philip Klass), Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, A. E. van Vogt.

  This is just a partial list of authors named as sources by students in university classes writing Utopian scenarios. The science fiction authors are understandable in this list, but Soleri and Marcuse may need some explanation. Soleri provides them with the concept of arcologies (the single social superstructure, world village) and Marcuse outlines the psycho-mythology of rebellion. It is Marcuse who provides the justification for killing the world's population down to a "manageable" size. Soleri leads the scenario writers to think of mining "the old cities" for materials to construct new super-urban communities linked by high-speed transit. We in science fiction provide social and technological innovations—the frosting on the supercake.

  Inevitably, the scenario writers come down to hard judgments, decisions about the limits within which people will be forced to li
ve. Even with London a half hour from New York City and most of the world's surviving population living underground to free the surface for agriculture and other human requirements, the consequent accelerated demand for efficiency produces its own paradox which the scenario writers fail to resolve. They turn to more and more planning, a pervasive planning-octopus which reaches deeper and deeper into the individual life. Current concepts of freedom are abandoned "for the general welfare" and heavy social conditioning is accepted as "inevitable." The demand for more god produces more satan. In come the Skinnerians and another crisis lurks at the end of this road.

  Well, the Club of Rome and MIT in their study of the limits to human growth warned us what was happening. They said humans cannot go on increasing their numbers anarchically or exponentially beyond specific limits on this finite planet. They told us that growth must be selective, oriented, governed—that is, planned. Equilibrium must be maintained between the human population and its habitat. But this equilibrium cannot be reached if world society remains in a state of imbalance. Social justice and peace have definite ecological impact. But people en masse are loath to face up to issues which seem beyond human comprehension and control.

  World population, which took hundreds of generations to reach present numbers, will double its size in the next thirty years. That means more than seven billion people—all demanding homes, schools, industry, entire cities, highways, harbors, and all the rest of it. No relevant body of opinion has so far faced up to this challenge. There is no they out there working on the big answer. Some sort of global planning may be undertaken in this decade, but political pitfalls line the way. The problem may become too big and complicated to be dealt with at all before even the first hesitant steps are taken.

  Now there is a crisis for you.

  Science fiction has explored such fancies and continues to explore them, but the basis for today's world planning concepts remains firmly seated in a commitment to absolute goals—political and physical. The holders of power in this world have not awakened to the realization that there is no single model of a society, a species, or an individual. There are a variety of models to meet a variety of needs. They meet different expectations and have different goals. The aim of that force which impels us to live may be to produce as many different models as possible.