June 9, 2023
I have been thinking about the future, although I know that doing so is not always regarded as wise. For some people, the future will simply not bear thinking about: “I have seen the future, brother: it is murder,” says Leonard Cohen. The daughter in Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing” says there is no reason to think about the future because “we’re all going to be atom-dead in a few years.” From this point of view, thinking about the future is like thinking about your own death. It’s inevitable, and it’s inevitably going to be bad, and that’s precisely the reason not to think about it.
There is an opposite reason not to be concerned with the future. Jesus said, “Take no thought for the morrow” (Matt. 6:34). The whole chapter in which that counsel appears elaborates the idea of not worrying about what we will eat or how we will be clothed. Instead, we should have faith that the heavenly Father will provide. Mind you, there are plenty of people willing to correct Jesus, telling him that God helps those who helps themselves. They would cite as their own scripture Aesop’s fable of the ant who works hard and puts food by for the future while the grasshopper says, “What, me worry?” The grasshopper then faces starvation come the winter. But in a Christian context, the grasshopper’s attitude is not just lazy parasitism: in James Joyce’s satiric version of the fable in Finnegans Wake, the grasshopper becomes “the gracehoper.” Jesus says it is the Gentiles who worry about the future. Christians trust in Providence. “All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” said the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich.
However, this probably has to be understood in a larger context, that of the widespread early Christian expectation that the world would end soon. For in fact, as Mircea Eliade said in a famous book, The Myth of the Eternal Return, all three of the Biblical religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are, in the history of world religions, almost uniquely obsessed with the future. In traditional mythology, Eliade says, time is cyclical: while there is no exactly repetition, the same kind of thing happens again and again. Human time is thus readily assimilated to the cyclical rhythm of nature: to everything there is a season, the sun also rises and goes down again, and the cycle of life simply has to be accepted. Actually, after its early revolutionary phase, after hopes of an imminent end of the world began to fade, Christianity accommodated itself to the cyclical point of view. There is no use thinking about the future because no one knows how many cycles of time are left before the end-time finally arrives. To be sure, not everyone was resigned to such passivity. In the 12th-century, the monk Joaquim of Floris divided history into three periods. The Old Testament period, Joachim said, was the Age of the Father, the age of the Law; the New Testament period was the Age of the Son, the age of the Gospel. But a third Age was imminent that will be the Age of the Holy Spirit, in which the Church would fade away because the presence of God would be indwelling in every heart. The Church, however, had no interest in fading away, and the message of Joachim was declared to be heretical. The message was not “The kingdom is at hand,” but rather “Pray and obey.”
The sense of linear time driving towards an end that is its goal and fulfilment was thus held in abeyance—until modern times. One way of defining modernity is as the feeling that humanity is now responsible for its own fate. Nietzsche said that “God is dead,” meaning that it is no longer possible to believe in God or the gods. All gods are simply projections of the human power to create. Nietzsche intended this as a gospel, or anti-gospel, of liberation, though he predicted that there would be widespread panic when the message hit the streets. I have wondered in previous newsletters whether the human race has not reached a point in its development comparable to an adolescent crisis. There is an increasing perception that it is time to break away from dependency on a Father God and Mother Church and take responsibility for human life. The child takes no thought for the morrow and is confident that Daddy and Mommy will take care of things. But the first thing that parents say to an adolescent is, "Shouldn't you be thinking about the future? You’re not going to have us around to take care of you forever, you know.”
Nietzsche was right about the widespread panic. The growing secularism of the modern world has provoked a reactionary backlash, a religious conservatism that the historian Oswald Spengler called a “second religiousness” and regarded as a symptom of cultural decadence. Beginning in the late 19th century, a kind of Roman Catholicism grew up whose central tenet is “Let’s go back to the timeless Middle Ages.” Among Modernist intellectuals of the early 20th century this produced a number of high-profile conversions to Catholicism, or, more usually, to Anglo-Catholicism, since Catholicism was seen as too working-class and, anyway, obeying an infallible Pope was seen as really just a bit too much. Actually, the Pope had only been infallible since 1870, the doctrine of Papal infallibility of that year being itself a way of denying the growing suspicion that, whatever was true of God, the Church and the Pope were human and fallible. From 1910 to 1967, as part of the crusade of Pius X, all Catholic clergy and professors in theological seminaries were required to swear the Oath against Modernism, modernism being defined in rough terms as the idea that our understanding of Christian truth evolves over time. The antithesis of the Oath against Modernism is Milton’s great prose pamphlet Areopagitica, in which Milton boldly declared that we do not have the truth but in the course of history are working towards it by clarifying our vision. Christianity is not a timeless bastion of truth established once and for all and to be defended against the incursions of humanism and secularism: it is itself progressive and evolutionary. It looks forward to a future of greater understanding of Christian revelation. Far from being a newfangled rationalism, such a view is an extension of the Bible’s own vision of the future, known as typology, in which the New Testament is not a rejection of the Old but a clarified understanding of it, and therefore its fulfilment. Moreover, the progressive clarification of vision did not end with the departure of Christ, as the Catholic Church claimed, but is ongoing. It seems to me that, at its best, Judaism holds to a conviction that is very comparable: hence the enormous energy put into commentary on the Law, the attempt to refine our understanding of it, an attempt that is endless, the opposite of the legalism that would freeze the Law into something limited, reductive, and final. But the idea that we do not possess an absolute Truth right now, definitively understood, is very threatening to some people, even though Paul said that in this life “we know in part” (I Corinthians 13:9).
The Protestant backlash to modernity is fundamentalism. Fundamentalism rejects every form of progressivism in both religion and secular life, and, as conservative Catholics are nostalgic for the Middle Ages, fundamentalists are nostalgic for the good old days when “traditional values,” basically the values of a patriarchal, theocratic nationalism, supposedly held sway. Its view of the future is a version of what Northrop Frye in his younger days called the butterslide theory: the world is sliding downhill, growing more evil every day, and only authoritarian governance can arrest the decline. More extreme versions have lost hope in anything short of an end to the future altogether. The end time is approaching, and it is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Clearly it is difficult for the human race to hold on to the feeling that the future might be something to look forward to rather than to dread, that it is full of possibility and might be better than the past. Among the Romantics, Blake and Shelley were revolutionary progressives who tried to construct a new mythology of future hope based on the human creative imagination. In the later 19th century, Hegel produced a philosophical vision of history as the evolutionary awakening of the Spirit. Hegel’s Spirit, however, is not supernatural but a superior kind of consciousness. Marx turned Hegel on his head, as he put it, transforming Hegelian Idealism into Marxist dialectical materialism, but retained the idea that history develops towards an eventual happy ending. Strongly influenced by Shelley, George Bernard Shaw combined a Hegelian-type vision of history as a progressive mental awakening with his own version of socialism.
We may contrast these attempts at a future-oriented hopefulness with the famous saying of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Nothing has been more out of fashion in the intellectual world during my lifetime than an optimism about historical progress. There has been considerable reason for this: during the 19th and early 20th centuries, “progress” was all too often defined as improvement of the life of white people through the subjugation and exploitation of non-white cultures. This co-opting by imperialism of the ideal of future progress has gone a long way towards discrediting it altogether. Even academic Marxism, to achieve intellectual respectability, has had to minimize its vision of a hopeful future in which social justice will be achieved and the state will wither away in favor of concentrating on the present class war. If anyone should have been optimistic about future progress, it was a utopian socialist like H.G. Wells. But Wells’ utopian novels, written later in his career, with titles such as Men like Gods, are uninspired, or inspired only by his ideology, not his imagination. What his imagination gave him was The Time Machine, a vision of the far future in which the present class war has become utterly, literally dehumanizing.
After World War I, no one in Europe was, to put it mildly, interested in hopeful optimism, and after World War II, the most popular philosophy was existentialism, whose premise is that life is absurd, in other words meaningless. Existentialism is not a counsel of hopelessness: it is still capable of inspiring younger people with the promise that, although life has no inherent meaning, each individual is faced with the heroic task of constructing a meaning and living by it. However, since the 1960’s, the various theories lumped together under the umbrella terms “post-structuralism” and postmodernism” have assiduously “demystified” such a notion, which they see as a remnant of bourgeois humanism. We do not construct meaning: instead, we are ourselves constructed by vast power systems that predestine us as effectively as any Calvinist God.
The early mythology of the United States was based upon a hopeful vision of the future. We were the New World, the land of opportunity not just in an economic sense but in the sense that we were a new beginning, a chance to redo history and avoid the mistakes and corruptions of the Old World. The American Revolution was inspired much more by this kind of hope than by ideological motives: “No taxation without representation” is not exactly a thrilling battle cry. And ever after, the United States has been the land of promise, of starting over. It is a bittersweet legacy, because to this day it draws immigrants who are then feared and resented by some Americans when they arrive. The fabled “American optimism” derives from this positive vision, and that optimism survived two world wars relatively intact, in large part no doubt because neither war was fought on its territory. Yes, that optimism has sometimes become a euphemism for “shallowness,” but it has its genuine form. The poetry of Walt Whitman is not shallow, and its affirmations are just as much a part of both our literary and our social imagination as the nearly despairing skepticism of a Melville.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, science fiction grew up as a new form of the ancient genre of romance, the tale of wonders. Despite the fact that Jules Verne preceded him, H.G. Wells is often regarded as the true father of science fiction because of his greater literary sophistication. The British tradition that stems from him tends to be considerably darker and more pessimistic than early American science fiction, which was born in 1926 with the founding of Amazing Stories by Hugo Gernsback. Amazing Stories was one of the pulp magazines: cheap, popular commercial entertainment with no literary pretensions. Some British science fiction writers and readers have never quite forgiven the United States for hijacking a form that had been regarded as serious literature and forever associating it with the vulgar, immature fantasies of adolescent boys, with magazine covers on which tentacled monsters clutched half-naked women, with heroes who were engineering geniuses sporting crew cuts and ray blasters. A good number of people take seriously the argument of English science fiction writer Brian Aldiss that the first science fiction novel was Frankenstein, not so much because it makes sense generically (Frankenstein is a Gothic with scientific rather than alchemical and occultist trappings) but because of a social-services desire to rescue the genre from an unfit parent.
It is true that pulp-era science fiction only gradually acquired literary quality—even some second-generation writers like Isaac Asimov could be crude writers who will be remembered for their vision rather than their style, and at least one, A.E. van Vogt, will be remembered for inspiring writers who wrote what van Vogt would have written if he had had any talent. However, the same is true of any nascent genre—early Elizabethan drama, for example. But pulp science fiction challenged the attitude of tragic doom that dominated the British tradition of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon. In particular, it challenged the argument of Frankenstein, that science, or more accurately technology, will inevitably be used for selfish and thus ultimately destructive purposes. Science can be used to better human life: Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist (2010) argues that science has been more beneficial than religion ever was, and makes an impressive catalogue of ways that science has dramatically improved our quality of life, starting with modern medicine and the near-doubling of human life expectancy in little over a century. True, he is conveniently silent about how science has made possible the collapse of civilization and even the destruction of the planet, from nuclear war, climate change, the Internet, and now AI. Nonetheless, if we are responsible for our own fate, like it or not, we must wrest control of science from capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and the mass media and set it to the task of building utopia—utopia being defined as the fulfilment of human primary concerns, not as social control, since freedom and diversity are primary concerns. The idea that we may look forward to a better world through scientific progress was the theme of all the 20th-century’s world’s fairs: the Chicago World’s Fair of 1939, whose official theme was “A Century of Progress”; the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York City, which I visited as a wonder-struck 13-year-old; and the Montréal Exposition in 1967, although the latter was also a political celebration of the centenary of the Canadian Confederation of 1867 that brought Canada into existence as a nation.
The lectures that Northrop Frye delivered on the occasion of the Canadian Exposition became The Modern Century, one of his darker works, in fact, which opens with an analysis of what he calls “the alienation of progress” (11), going on to say that “The root of this aspect of alienation is the sense that man has lost control, if he every had it, over his own destiny….actually, there has never been a time when man felt less sense of participation in the really fateful decisions that affect his life and his death” (12). If scientific progress means no more than something trivial like the flying cars of The Jetsons cartoon show, obviously we shouldn’t get our hopes up. And if it means simply greater technological capacity for destruction, then science is the chief source of alienation in our time. Some people have lost hope that the problems of earth can be solved. For them, the use of science is to develop spacecraft with which to leave earth and start again somewhere else—in other words, to repeat the American myth of the frontier. That is why my favorite rock group, Jefferson Airplane, changed its name to Jefferson Starship, after having created an unforgettably dark and powerful song about the end of the world through nuclear war, “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil.” So much for the cheerful optimism of the Summer of Love. Ideological hysteria makes strange bedfellows: the most prominent person currently advocating space colonies so that the human race will survive after having turned earth into a hellhole is…Elon Musk. But in 1966, one year before the Canadian Exposition, a television show appeared that offered an alternative vision. Star Trek presented a future in which the human race has grown beyond the nationalistic psychoses of both the space race and the nuclear arms race, in which people of all races and ethnicities shared the same deck in mutual respect.
In Star Trek, earth has not been abandoned after having been trashed, like an apartment vandalized by bad tenants. Yet earth has been left behind, and I find myself wondering why. Why the impulse driving towards a new frontier? The pat answer is “imperialism”—look at all those galactic empires in old science fiction. There is no little truth to that, especially in the era of the 1940’s and 1950’s, when the predominant editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., more or less required the writers of his stable to adhere to an ideology of interstellar Manifest Destiny. The field is currently undergoing a fierce backlash against that kind of galactic imperialism, a backlash with which I am in complete sympathy. But I persist in thinking that there is something more to space exploration, in both real life and science fiction. We began as hunter-gatherers, and one wonders whether the human race is not nomadic to the bone. Why else did prehistoric humanity populate both Europe and the Americas over the span of millennia? There were no doubt practical reasons: seeking new food supplies, moving away from the hostility of competing clans. But there also may have been other reasons, reasons both higher and deeper. A controversial but important critical work about the futuristic optimism of American science fiction, by Alexei and Cory Panshin, is titled The World Beyond the Hill (1989). We have no reason to be, yet we are curious about the world beyond the hill. In the end, perhaps we go there as the bear went over the mountain: to see what he could see.
John F. Kennedy called space the new frontier. Star Trek called it the final frontier. There is perhaps a reason we are driven to it even beyond curiosity, the desire to know “why,” a desire that, after all, is the origin of science. That further reason is named in the title of another, well, pioneering critical work about science fiction, Damon Knight’s In Search of Wonder (1956, 1967). The gadget-happy proclivities of Gernsback-era science fiction were quickly assimilated to the literary genre of romance, the tale of wonder. “Wonder” is a recurrent word in Shakespeare’s last four plays, the romances. There are people who are quite impatient with spending “all that money,” as they say, on space exploration when it could be used to solve problems here, back home. This is a pretext. We actually do not spend much on space exploration. I think I once read that NASA’s budget does not equal the combined budget of the brass bands of the various militaries. Oh, no doubt we should have our minds on the real world, and the reality principle must have its due. But science has closed off religion—at least religion in its usual unmodernized form—as a source of wonder, and there is no more “world beyond the hill” on a planet that has been fully explored for well over a century. There are no more “lost civilizations”: anywhere you go, the indigenous people have the Internet. But, as T.S. Eliot had a little bird tell us in Four Quartets, humankind cannot bear too much reality. We must flee, and there is no place in the present to flee. We can flee in imagination to the past, but we cannot live in the past: the attempt to do so directly results in the kind of nostalgia that is a refusal to live. In the genre of romance, the commonest symbol of wonder is magic. But it is a common romance motif that magic dwindles and dies as the world becomes modern. The critic John Clute calls this slow disappearance of magic “thinning,” an evocative word.
Where has magic gone? Into the earth, to sleep with dead wizards and kings. And to the stars. The commonest word in science fiction titles is “stars.” The mystical yearning for the stars is a yearning for “wonder,” and wonder is a yearning to break through the reality principle into a greater reality whose roots are in the human imagination. Thus, extremes touch, and the “outward urge,” as one science fiction title called it, is also an inward urge. As a form of romance, the main structural principle of science fiction is the ancient mythological symbol of the axis mundi, the axis of the world, one manifestation of which is the world tree. The stars are the fruit at the top of its branches, and its roots are in the underworld of the human mind. Arthur C. Clarke said famously that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, so that in science fiction magic is born again. But technological magic, in the dream-logic of scientific romance, has a way of appearing side by side with magic drawn from a mysterious inward reservoir, the imagination become a source of power. The Jedi knights of Star Wars still fight with swords, albeit swords made out of energy, and they are able to draw upon the Force in a way that would have been familiar enough to Gandalf or Harry Potter. The science fiction subgenre called “space opera” is a refurbishing of the old romance plot of the quest myth, the myth of the hero, as George Lucas realized when he based the plot outline of his whole Star Wars epic on Joseph Campbell’s famous study, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
At a certain pitch of intensity, science fiction attempts to push beyond the limits of the human condition itself, to break through the limits of the mind and senses into the inconceivable: “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” as the screen title of the visionary ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey has it. At this point, critics begin speaking of science fiction as essentially religious, and there is a real kinship between the most visionary science fiction and, say, the ending of Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which Dante himself is “transhumanized” and goes “beyond the infinite,” in an epic whose three parts each end with the word “stars.”
Romance is not all wish fulfilment. Its other pole is nightmare, the epitome of evil, everything the human race fears and abhors. The social form of nightmare is the dystopia, and dystopias may deepen into horror, a form of romance that has also been modernized in our time. Right now, dystopian science fiction and horror dominate the field, inevitable vehicles of the sense of widespread depression and anxiety of this chaotic time. But I grew up believing that, though I would not live to see it, we could look forward hopefully, not just to progress in the utopian sense, though that too, but to a return of “wonder.” The wistful nostalgia of an old man? Perhaps. But I think that wonder is a human need even beyond Frye’s primary concerns: it is what Paul Tillich called an ultimate concern. Being a theologian, Tillich thought of ultimate concern as religious. But I think that wonder is a need more basic than “salvation.” Humanity cannot live by the reality principle alone. Romance is not just an escape from but a critique of the reality principle, a form of illusion that ends by questioning whether what we call “reality” is real after all. This critique, what Blake called “Mental Fight,” takes place in time, and its outcome lies in the future, at the point at which the future transcends time altogether. Or so we dare to hope.
Reference
Frye, Northrop. The Modern Century. In Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, edited by Jan Gorak. Volume 11 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2003. 3-70. Originally published 1967.