futures volume 7 issue 2 1975 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2875%2990103-2] i.f. clarke -- 6. the end of...

8/11/2019 Futures Volume 7 Issue 2 1975 [Doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2875%2990103-2] I.F. Clarke -- 6. the End of the W

1/6

Futures Essays: From Prophecy to Prediction

157

10

Simon Caulkin, Volvo versus Ford,

M anagement Today

January 1973, page 44

11. Guidelines Kockums Malmo), 1973,

page 3

12. H. Lindestad and J.-P. Norstedt,

Auto-

nomou.rGroups and Payment by Result s

Falko-

ping, Confederation of Swedish Employers,

May 1972) page 47

13. J.-P. Norstedt and S. Aguren, The SAAB-

Scarnia Report Viisteras, Conf. of Swedish

Employers, February 1973) page 27

14. The Condemned Piecework Stockholm,

Confederation of Swedish Employers, 1973)

page 3 1

15. Andre Thiria, Labours Voice Joins the

Corporate Board Stockholm, The Swedish

Institute, June 1973)

16. Board representation for the employees

in joint stock companies and co-operative

associations. Act adopted by the Riksdag,

Dee 14,1972

17. See ref 9 and ref 8, Table 14.

rom Prophecy

A serialised survey of the movement

to Prediction

of ideas developments in predictive

fiction and first attempts to forecast

the future scientifically

6. The end of the world is at hand

I. F. Clarke

ONE

of the main points in Decembers

discussion of Evolution and Expec-

tation was the King-Hele Conun-

drum-that futurologists have the habit

of predicting what is socially accept-

able because the price of their

survival is that they should conform to

the necessarily optimistic requirements

of their society. After the proposition

comes the corollary: the way in

which a society regards the future is

often the consequence of a prevailing

mood and this may have very little to

do with the concrete quantifiable

conditions that decide the nature and

workings of that society. Human beings

are less rational than they would admit;

and some of our most powerful illu-

sions derive from fantasies that are

attempts to find coherent images for

the many hopes and fears that are the

life-long companions of Homo sapiens.

How is it otherwise possible to explain

I. F. Clarke is Chairman of the Department of

English Studies, University of Strathclyde. He

received the Pilgrim Award for 1974 from the

Science Fiction Research Association of America

in recognition of his contributions to their field.

the widespread expectation that any

day now visitors from some other world

will descend upon our planet? Indeed

this variation on the legendary tales

of the divine sky-travellers has close

associations with the modern versions

of that other archaic myth-the com-

ing end of the world.

Beneath the surface complexities of

industrial civilisation the ancient myths

live on with undiminished vigour;

for the polar tensions between hopes

and fears-between paradise and per-

dition-find their most recent expres-

sion in a modern iconography that is as

explicit as the frescoes in any Egyptian

temple. The television screens of our

world display the never-ending tri-

umphs of the invincible Captain Kirk

in his role of Horus the falcon of the

heavens. The sky-ship Enterfirise voy

ages eternally through the far reaches

of the galaxies and the achievements

of the sky-god carry the comforting

assurance for a time of troubles that

the human race will go forward for

ever from new horizon to new horizon.

In like manner the images of universal

FUTURES April 975


2/6

158 From Prophecy to Prediction

destruction in recent films about the

end of the world-Dr Strangeloue and

On the Beach, for instance-have clear

precedents in the ancient myths; and

these come through with such added

force in so many prophetic tales about

the last days of humanity that the

evident parallelism speaks for itself.

Like the ancient Sumerians we teach

our children that our society came into

existence after the fortunate conjunc-

tion of the powers that shape the

universe. For them it was the silt and

sun of the river valleys and the divine

will of Marduk who turned chaos into

familiar cosmos. For us it has been the

coal and iron of the old world with

which the new technologies began the

industrialisation of our planet.

From the beginnings of the modern

world in the smoke and steam of the

Industrial Revolution the most gloomy

anticipations have alternated with the

most hopeful predictions. Just as the

Sumerians found their destiny encoded

in the episodes of the Enuma elish, the

tales of the future and the projections

of the forecasters have mapped out the

shape of things to come from the start

in the late 18th century. In their differ-

ent ways they renew the explanatory

myths of the archaic cosmogonies;

for the earliest accounts of the utopian

condition of life in the future have their

black opposites in the Malthusian

prediction of too many mouths to

feed and in the new myth of Tlre Last

Man. That singular vision was one of

several profound and intuitive respon-

ses to the creation of industrial society

by the power of technology. Indeed

the mythic sources of our anxieties can

be seen in the fact that the end of our

world has been a constantly recurring

fantasy ever since the European recep-

tion of

Le dernier homme

in 1805. And

this evidence for the chronic anxieties

native to modern society finds con-

firmation in the contemporary inven-

tion of Frankenstein which the young

Mary Shelley wrote during the rainy

summer of 18 17 in a villa overlooking

Geneva. She was all of 20 years of age

and in the extraordinary way of

human imagination she found the per-

fect fantasy with which to explain the

wilful act of the modern Prometheus

the man of science who subverts the

order of the universe and turns cosmos

into chaos.

The subtle relationship between a

society and its myths is apparent in

the way the facts of science have

always found their natural correlative

in fantasies of the future. The first of

the modern scenarios of The Last Man

started in 1798 the climactic year

when Jenners announcement of the

smallpox vaccine promised a better

future for all mankind and Malthus

denied that hope with his prediction

of universal famine. In that same year

a man of 60 who had begun his

career in a seminary as the friend of

the renowned Abbe de SiCyes set to

work on an epic account of the experi-

ences of The Last Mau. According to

Cousin de Grainville the end of human

life would follow when the declining

fertility of the soil and the constant

increase in population had led to final

disaster. There is a strangely modern

quality about the beginning of the end

as Grainville describes it: The in-

habitants of the ancient world after

having exhausted their soil inundated

America like torrents cut down forests

coeval with creation cultivated the

mountains to their summits and even

exhausted that happy soil. They then

descended to the shores of the ocean

where fishing the last resource of

man promised them an easy and

abundant supply of sustenance. Hence

from Mexico to Paraguay these shores

of the Atlantic Ocean and South Seas

are inhabited by the last remains of

the human race.

It seems that God

had foreseen the theories of Malthus;

for from the very beginning of man-

kind the duration of human life was

wisely regulated by the omniscient

mind of the Almighty according to

the size of the globe and the fecundity

of its inhabitants. And in the last days

of humanity there was an additional

FUTURES April 975


3/6

The Ark is the prototype of any modern stories of the few who survive the coming disaster

John Martins painting of The Last Man was the source of Campbells line:

The skeletons of nations were Around

that lonely man.

Reproduction by courtesy of Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)


4/6

The momentary death of all

things

in Conan Doyles

Poison Be/f 1913

The ruined arches of London

Bridge are a well-established

element in the inconography

of the end of life on earth


5/6

From Propheg to Prediction

161

motive for this limitation in the pro-

found improvements making in medical

science by which the lives of thousands

of the infantine world would have been

snatched from the empire of death and

who in thus becoming the heads of

numerous progenies are laying the

foundation of an immense population

which the earth in after ages will be

inadequate to sustain.

For some 20 years after the publica-

tion of Le dernier homme in 1805 the

melancholy experiences of

The Last

Man

were a favourite theme with

writers and painters. There were new

editions and imitations in France; and

across the Channel the English trans-

lation introduced a vogue for poetry

about the final catastrophe. There

were poems from Thomas Campbell

George Darley Thomas Hood Edward

Wallace and Byron. John Martin

painted two versions of The Last

Man

a desolate creature alone be-

neath a lurid sky; and Joseph Candy

produced a watercolour of the Bank

of England-that symbol of eternity-

in total ruin The last version came from

Mary Shelley who discharged her grief

at the loss of her husband in her own

account of The Last Man which ap-

peared in 1826. And then the theme

vanished abruptly from the tale of the

future and did not emerge again until

the last decade of the 19th century.

Since then it has continued to reappear

at regular intervals and nowadays it

is a favourite subject in fiction. As it

was in the beginning so it is in our

time; for the circumstances that en-

couraged the first visions of The Last

Man

provide reasons for the vigour

of this myth in the second half of the

20th century. In fact it would seem

that the

Ragnarok

theme of the end

of all things was a necessary and natural

response to the extraordinary circum-

stances of the first decades of the last

century. A great war had involved the

entire

continent from Moscow to

Madrid; and the new technologies had

served notice on the future with the

success of the first steamboats the

beginnings of gas illumination and the

invention of the steam printing press.

At that time when the new tech-

nologies had begun their great work of

transforming the condition of human

life throughout the planet the catas-

trophic vision of universal desolation

was a means of expressing deep-seated

fears for the future of mankind. More-

over as the many developments in

science and in society forced all to

acknowledge the passing of the old

order the myth of

The Last Man

was a

way of saying goodbye to what was

thought to be the stability and coher-

ence of a more natural way of life.

And so it has continued to the present

day since The Last Man is the familiar

ghost of industrial civilisation as the

fear of the universal flood was the

immemorial terror of the ancient

societies of Eurasia. The ghost appear-

ed again with great effect during the

troubled times at the end of the 19th

century when political differences be-

tween France and the United Kingdom

had raised grave doubts about the

future. And so Camille Flammarion an

eminent French writer came in right

on cue in 1894 and revived the old

fear in his account of La jin du monde;

and in 1895 H. G. Wells drew on

Darwinism and the latest ideas about

entropy to describe the run-down

world of The Time Machine and three

years later he produced a variant on

the coming world catastrophe in the

interplanetary conflict related in The

War of the Worlds. The link between

contemporary anxieties and the im-

agined disasters of The Time Machine

can be found in Wellss statement that

he had based the story on the idea

of the human species developing about

divergent lines. The degraded and

divided world of the subterranean

Morlocks and the effete Eloi is the judge-

ment of nature on the wickedness of

social inequalities and the desolation

at the end of the story is a lament for

human mortality. In a most ironic way

it came about that the admired de-

signer of so many utopian plans for the

FUTURES April 975


6/6

162

From Prophecy to Prediction

future of society began his career with

a vision of catastrophe and dissolution

and with equal irony the Time Travel-

ler from the advanced civilisation of

the 1890s becomes The Last Man who

sees the eternal sunset that marks the

end of the world:

It would be hard

to convey the stillness of it. All the

sounds of man the bleating of sheep

the cries of birds the hum of insects

the stir that makes the background of

our lives-all that was over.

For the space of two decades the

end of the world was a matter for

international discussion. American

British French and German writers

brought out their versions of the future

cataclysm with titles that spoke for

themselves:

The Last American, La_fin du

monde, Der Weltuntergang. For a time it

was a topic with the illustrated maga-

zines-The Last Man: How Will He

Perish?-and in 1896 the subject

was considered serious enough for the

readers of the Revue internationale de

Sociologic who had an erudite account

of the collapse of industrial civilisation

from Gabriel de Tarde in his Fragment

dhistoire future.

Quite suddenly about

1910 The Last Man vanished from

literature only to reappear in the

1920s after the experiences of the

First World War had delivered an

unmistakeable message to the indus-

trial nations. And then came the

Second World War the atomic bomb

the race for the hydrogen bomb the

development of the inter-continental

missiles and all the other changes-

political and technological-that gave

cause for anxiety. Once again the fear

of the future has carried over into many

visions of the final disaster. One of the

most compelling allegories of the dread-

ful destiny facing mankind came from

the Swedish poet Harry Martinson

who described the last human beings

in their vast space-ship Aniara, apt

symbol of the technological skills that

can destroy. As they journey towards

their doom the narrator explains how

the human race has turned cosmos

into chaos:

I had coveted a Paradise for this race

but since we left the one we had destroyed

the Zodiacs lonely night became our

only home

a gaping chasm in which no god could

hear us.

The eternal mystery of Heavens stars

the miracle of the celestial mechanism

is the law but not the Gospel.

Mercy can only thrive where there is life.

That was a doomsday message from

the Sweden of 1956; and although it

may seem to have nothing in common

with the apocalyptic computer print-

out from the runs of the World 3

simulation model the Swedish poet

and the authors of Limits to Growth

have their place in the doomsday tradi-

tion that goes back to Malthus on

Population and Cousin de Grainville on

Le dernier homme. Can it be that the

MIT computer has truly predicted

what will come? Or can it be that the

programme repeats the mythic ritual

of destroying the world in order that

it may be regenerated in the more

perfect time of the future ? Magnus ab

integro saeclorum nascitur ordo

FUTURES April 975

futures volume 7 issue 2 1975 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2875%2990103-2] i.f. clarke -- 6. the end of...

Documents