Onwards and upwards?

Vogue, 15 October 1966³³²

There’s a great risk in writing too freely about the future. The imagination overreaches itself and you can easily end up with stuff which reads like hardcore pornography. Both pornography and prophecy take place in a dateless nowhere, full of extravagant and rather dubious fulfilment. Development is limited to a spiral of ever-increasing enormity. In literature, the future, like sex, has to be measured out in small doses. Otherwise fear and hope go haywire and the whole thing degenerates into a boring fantasy of wristwatch telly, moon buses, thought police and the wilder excesses of McLuhanacy.

Anyway, the future is here already. We’re just too hell-bent on prophecy to recognize it, and like science-fiction writers, we’re so intrigued by the pornotopian possibilities of a hypothetical future that we fail to see how much our lives have already taken on the outlines of tomorrow. That’s because the real future, the future as it is actually experienced, is a mixed condition, half in and half out of the past. It’s difficult for anyone living in the middle of it to make out the details of what is really new. After all, human history is quite continuous, forwards and backwards, so that the future often starts much earlier than anyone realizes. And the past can often survive the most violent change. Because, for all their adventurous ingenuity, human beings are nostalgic, lazy creatures who hang on to outdated habits through cataclysms of technical progress. But, on the other hand, they’re very adaptable too, carelessly assuming novelty without a second thought. This paradoxical combination of inert conservatism and fickle adaptability sometimes makes it very hard for us to know where we are on the line of human progress.

It’s never been harder than now of course. In the last 20 years, since the war, and largely as a result of a technical skill which grew out of it, knowledge and power have developed faster and more comprehensively than in the rest of the history of our race. And it’s not just a matter of quantity. There is something peculiar about the quality of modern knowledge. It grows in a totally different way to anything we’ve known before. Each increment, instead of simply adding to the bulk of what is known, sets off an explosion of fresh discovery which then detonates something even bigger. The growth transcends itself from moment to moment like some enormous Domesday device working out of control.

It’s all happening so fast that it’s hardly possible to store all the information. It’s certainly not possible for any individual to keep tabs on anything but a small fraction of even a single subject. And quite apart from the bulk of it all, there’s the complexity too. Modern knowledge has become so abstruse that a vicious process of intellectual natural selection is beginning to work. It’s not just manual workers who feel the wind of change too. Progress in many fields, from economics to pure physics, is so fast that only the most excellent minds can keep up. There was a time, not so long ago, when an ordinary university degree automatically qualified one for membership in the social elite. Degrees of this sort are little better than platform tickets now, and of the intellectuals who travel, few arrive.

I can vouch for this from personal experience. I went into medicine 15 years ago in the hope of becoming a neurologist. It now turns out that I have misread the time. Neurology, like all the other hard biological sciences, was just on the point of taking off into the future. I had joined up as a result of reading the copy from the old recruiting campaign – dignified ward round, philosophical speculation, observation and so on. Most medical students of my generation went into the profession because it was the only science where good maths was not needed. Then all of a sudden they changed all that. Neurology was taken over by the physicists and became a subsidiary company in the gigantic cartel of maths and cybernetics. People like myself, who would have been bowled over by anything worse than a quadratic equation, found themselves consigned to a timber outhouse of the new glass-and-steel establishment where the computer and micro-electrode held sway. At the time I was qualified I could see that I would be pensioned out of service if I stayed longer than ten years. It seemed more and more unlikely that I would ever make a significant contribution to a subject whose growing points were already way beyond my reach. I could read the digests in Scientific American, but I was usually too dull to understand the original papers from which these popular summaries had been made. I was certainly too dim to stand a chance of making any contribution myself. So, rather than hang around as a juvenile pensioner on this renovated estate, I decided to get out while the going was good. There must be thousands of people in the same position, and there’ll be many more before the century is much older. We are a new social species. A large intellectual middle class threatened by progressive disinheritance. What’s to become of us?

But the knowledge explosion has created another sort of social refugee. These are the people who have no share whatsoever in the new knowledge – the main bulk of the population, working class and white-collar folk, who ride on the swell of the future without having the foggiest idea of what it means. This is not just a matter of nuclear physics or solid state theory. It’s something much nearer home. Their personal, political and economic destiny is determined more and more by the manipulation of knowledge to which they have no access. To some extent this has always been the case. It’s unlikely that many people below the upper-middle-class of Victorian England really grasped the issues of the Corn Law debates. But the complexity of modern economic and social wisdom makes it quite impossible for anyone except the professionals to understand the subtleties of the forces which determine their individual fates. So that both in England and in America the common people are suffering from a tremendous sense of intellectual exclusion. They feel more and more isolated from the information which, it is said, affects their future. And in both countries this has produced a rising tide of reactionary irrationalism. This may come out, as it does in America, in the form of anti-communism, John Birch movements and voting for Goldwater.333 But most of the people who hold these views are really not interested in communism one way or the other. And, in fact, in the course of the witch hunts, it was East Coast intellectuals as much as old guard Stalinists who got it in the neck. Communism simply spelled modernism; a name with which to label the vague fear of everything which threatened to overthrow the old values of common sense, hard work and traditional virtue. In England, where there is as yet no formally constituted party around which to crystallize such anxieties, the sense of intellectual impotence comes out that rather more patchily; say, in campaigns to clean up television. In fact, the Mary Whitehouse mission illustrates this rather well. On the face of it, Mrs Whitehouse and her horde of Bacchae are out to get dirt off the air. They think that television has become filthy and dangerous. But in fact they are really voicing a popular outcry against centralized sophistication. For if television is dirtier, that’s to say franker than it was before, it’s not because the controllers have lost their sense of decency, but simply because everyone concerned with modern communications has developed complicated attitudes about everything, sex included. More and more people coming into television are drawn from the universities, or at least from places where the new knowledge is available. They’re not satisfied with pedalling the old simplicities anymore, so that their programmes reflect all the complexities of modern doubt. People like Mary Whitehouse, meeting this new output head-on, completely ignorant of the sources of what they see and hear, simply put the whole thing down to moral degeneration.

And exactly the same thing goes for the modern controversy over crime and punishment. Here also is an area where special knowledge has grown out of all recognition since Beccaria first proposed a rational procedure for dealing with crime at the end of the eighteenth century. But it’s a subject upon which ordinary people, without special knowledge, also hold very strong views. And since these views arise from feeling rather than informed thought, the gap between popular and professional opinion grows wider and more painful by the moment. In becoming scientific, criminology has become very deterministic, talking of causes rather than faults, all of which tends to blur the traditional firmness of morals. Since the idea of fault is a much simpler way of understanding crime than that of cause, it’s much easier to blame than it is to explain. Faults, after all, belong to the wrongdoer. They live in him and can be eradicated, or so the belief goes, by punishing the owner. Causes, on the other hand, are much vaguer. Instead of owning the causes of his crime, the criminal is possessed by them. They are outside his personal control since they are said to be lodged in his childhood, or, even more remotely, in the cruel eccentricities of the society which surrounds him. It’s quite obvious that this sort of deterministic view makes it very much harder to come to any quick, practical conclusion about individual responsibility, and therefore culpability. It means, once again, that the professionals seem to have usurped the ordinary man’s right to judge for himself the rights or wrongs of the criminal case.

As it turns out, the uncertainty which arises from such a view of human nature comes at an unfortunate moment in the history of crime. Just when crime seems to have taken a dramatic upswing, the public is maddened to find that those responsible for dealing with it seem to have been seduced away from strong common-sense action in favour of obscure ‘pseudointellectual’ regimes which seem downright soft. And besides, all this talk of antecedent causes, rather than plain, straightforward blame, appears to threaten the idea of personal free-will on every other front, not just crime. For if blame is dissolved by determinism, praise must suffer by the same token. Virtue vanishes with the violation of vice. And to a public unfamiliar with the new knowledge it must seem that their lives are being taken over, lock, stock and barrel, by stuck-up boffins who claim to be in the know. The feeling is quite understandable and in some senses even legitimate. But it is intolerable when journalists find it expedient to whip up the feeling even further by all sorts of calculated campaigns. People, that is, who actually do know better but feign a plain man’s ignorance just in order to curry favour with the resentful mass audience. One has become very familiar with the peculiar lingo of this trahison des clercs since the gap between common sense and special knowledge makes a happy hunting-ground for thwarted intellectuals on the make – what one might call the Moseleys of modern communication. For unlike the betas and gammas of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), the intellectually underprivileged of the future are not going to be satisfied with their status. When they find that modern knowledge is becoming absurdly inaccessible, they will fall back, not into a complacent recitation of their own virtues but into a fierce and irrational hatred of the new wisdom. This protest will take many forms, most of which already exist in seedling form today. Some of these will take the form of violent bouts of intellectual machine-breaking, or sociological Luddism. Others will be less violent and more escapist – journeys into inner space on rafts of LSD. In fact, in California, where the new knowledge has already developed beyond the reaches of science fiction, psychedelic flight is rife, as are the wilder excesses of Birchism.

Surprisingly enough, it’s very rarely the science-fiction writers who accurately anticipate these social consequences of the future. It is generally left to the literary artists – people with a keen social eye for what’s going on at the moment – to make successful predictions about the way our community is going to turn out. For example, Samuel Butler anticipated modern criminology nearly a hundred years ago. In his Utopian novel Erewhon (1872) he had criminals treated as if they were sick, and patients punished as if they had committed a crime. Similarly, the wilder forms of political irrationalism were anticipated in the novels of fin de siècle American populists like Hamlin Garland and Ignatius Donnelly. So, also, it was Wells who had some of the shrewdest guesses about the madness of the future. In The Time Machine (1895) his hero discovered a tribe of blond, lotus-eating teenagers who floated vapidly around the world, bent only on pleasure, completely indifferent to the pain or misfortune of their fellows. Bernard Shaw also saw the footling hedonism in store for modern youth, though he saw by contrast with the dignified senility of his ancients in Back to Methuselah (1922).

The whole question of age, of course, may well be the crux of the future. We have always dickered with the idea of immortality, but until modern science made the astonishing advances that it has in the last 20 years, it remained a utopian fantasy. Even now, there seems no immediate possibility of our living for ever, though there has been a remarkable change in the length of human life; not in the overall length, but in the way that more and more people are given a chance of at least completing the Biblican span. Medical progress in the last 50 years has simply cleared the obstacles off the human racetrack. The lethal hedges of infancy, youth and maternity have been chopped down to size so that nearly everyone has the same chance of reaching the winning post, but the course itself remains the same length. But if medicine really can dissolve the deadline of old age, there will be a dramatic change in the whole quality of human life. Up till now, the Biblical span has been the metrical unit by which we measure the course of history. It’s a fixed value and gives some sort of scale to our sense of time, just as the fixed values of height and breadth yield the cubits, inches and feet with which we measure space.

For the first time in the history of biology it begins to look as if the fixed limits of this span may be on the edge of yielding. Organ replacements grafts and tissue transplants begin to look like practical possibilities. And at a much subtler level, our sudden increase in the understanding of biochemical codes suggest that, within the conceivable future, we may have control over the actual cellular process of ageing and degeneration. Once this becomes a reality it’s hard to calculate the effects it will have upon a species whose spiritual values have been firmly based upon the conviction that its days are but grass. What would we think of ourselves if the dawn redwood becomes the measure of our mortality? How much human folly would evaporate in the bright light of eternity? Right now the indecent haste of our short span makes us all into clowns. Hope and ambition are ridiculously distorted by the deadline we all work to at the moment. Given a century or more of vigorous life we could presumably plan our individual futures with much more leisure. Failure would cease to be the tragedy it has always been, since the whole idea of single careers would give way to successive seasons of endeavour in which the failure of one would be offset by the success of another. Or, as one of Hemingway’s heroes once said: ‘Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?’334