| The Discussion in issues 82 and 83 touches on what the 1960’s counter-culture might have called the “relevance” of science fiction, although the ideas are not expressed in exactly those terms. This issue’s guest editorial expands the topic by taking a historical view. Visitors and regulars of the Asimov’s magazine forum will recognize and welcome Gerardo. The following is adapted from one of his postings, with his permission. |
In Witold Gombrowicz’s terms, the history of the human species is the history of its search for freedom. All kinds of freedom, not just political or spiritual. Freedom from drudgery, freedom from disease, freedom for having to wake up before dawn and go feed the chickens on an empty stomach. But most of all freedom from being told what and what not, from being prevented from, from being sacrificed for.
Thus we all carry an abstract concept of freedom close to our hearts, though everyday experience tells us that it’s an ideal and an ideal only, that things don’t work out that way in the real world, that we had better make do with what we have, since what he have is rather good and it would be folly to risk it by indulging in foolish experiment.
We live in a tightly balanced world, which most people see as the best of all possible worlds, all things considered. We are reasonably free, we are reasonably prosperous, we are reasonably safe, and it will probably get better in time, as we are now better off than our grandparents, not to mention their grandparents and so on.
I do not propose to go back to some idealized laissez-faire, wild 19th century that never was. Most people then had it bad; and if you look closely you’ll find that most of them had high hopes for the 20th, which promised to relieve them of at least some of their current evils. Little did they know, but that’s another story. But they were right. Many of our best institutions and policies we have inherited from the 19th, like antitrust laws or public hospitals, but they weren’t a feature of that age, they were a reaction, a necessary compensation, against the evils and dangers and inequalities of that age.
But in one respect the Nineteenth Century (that long and complex period that in Europe and the Americas extends from 1776/1789 to 1905/1914) did exactly the right thing. And it did it very much aware of what it was doing, and why, and what the alternatives were.
The best men and women of that age saw very clearly that nothing civilization could furnish in that age of progress and change would work — much less prevent widespread and insupportable suffering — if it wasn’t accompanied by a comparable progress and change in social institutes and mores.
Some of those things took hold very fast indeed, like civil and political liberties. Others took longer, such as common education or the emancipation of minorities. Others took much longer indeed; things we now take more or less for granted are really very recent. But there was a project, and there were goals, and these last two hundred years have changed civilization beyond recognition because of that. Almost all we are today comes from there.
I don’t see a comparable project today. I don’t see such long term, idealistic goals. I don’t see thinkers and teachers pushing and proposing ways for yet another step. The last 200 years showed us we can lift ourselves by our own bootstraps. Now we seem to be content where we are; let’s party and tomorrow will take care of itself.
Well, I don’t think it will. Or it will, but woe betide the useless, the unnecessary, the unprotected. The 21st century raises no Statues of Liberty, much less proclaims to want anyone’s poor, tired or hungry. It risks becoming a barren paradise. It risks choosing to paint itself into a corner, and there’s always a way out of the corner but we already know the price of that: its name is triage; and to the victor, the spoils. Business as usual, you might say, the inevitable cycle of life.
Again, the last 200 years have shown there is no inevitable cycle. Humanity has grown up, matured a lot, but not enough to cope with tomorrow’s complex challenges. We here are in the forefront of the complaint: We need more science and technology, not less. We need space, we need goals, we need long term plans and commitments, we need to turn our dreams into reality.
We need a world where specific and detailed rules that presume to control public and private behavior on matters such as child labor, road construction or food safety are about as necessary as cannibalism control is today. Where such things are rationally and sensibly managed without sweat or publicity because the problems themselves have vanished into history, and anyone who even thought of exploiting a worker or offering dangerous food was clearly a mental case of some sort.
Not a political mental case the Soviet way, where dissenters were sent to asylums because anyone who opposed the glorious revolution was “obviously” insane. Literally dangerously out of control, like a present-day driver racing the other way on a one-way street.
The day we achieve that, and I do believe that it can be achieved if we set our minds to it, there will be little need for most of the apparat we now take for granted. And perhaps we will be able to turn to more worthwhile purposes, like exploring the stars or building time machines.
And it’s possible that if we don’t, we’ll never be able to.
Copyright © 2004 by Gerardo Brandariz
