Prophecy in the many worlds
A prophet, in the ancient world, was someone who was inspired to speak on behalf of a god, the pro prefix calling to mind a herald who stands in front to get the attention of the intended audience. Or such a person might be thought of as an interpreter who acts as a bridge between two languages. The notion of a prophet being someone who predicts the future came to be the primary definition later. Though spoiling the plot of the future is something that a god might want to impart—see the various oracles in the period—many other kinds of messages might come through a prophet, especially disapproving comments about current social conditions.
If we want to find prophets today, the first place to look is in speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and their many subgenres. I say this as someone who has perpetrated a few stories of this type myself, but perhaps, Dear Reader, you will consider the claim a moment before dismissing it as self-promotion. What I mean here is that in S.F., writers and readers explore possibilities. “What if this accepted rule of reality were not so?” is a basic question in many such stories, allowing us to examine how the world would or would not change. Or these stories give us a bit of distance from our own existence sufficient to look at it from the perspective of an outsider, to see both its merits and its absurdities.
Star Trek asked viewers to think about racial conflicts, about the Vietnam War, or about the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in a time when such political topics were difficult to get on television. In Watership Down or The Lord of the Rings, we get to see how fighting for one’s friends is a worthwhile thing to do, even if all hope appears to be lost. Brave New World questions how much better life can be through chemistry. And Robinson Crusoe on Mars wants us to remember the personal in the midst of so many machines.
All right, so the last example is a schlocky entry into the total body of S.F. stories, but that in fact supports my argument. Even with small budgets and a tale copied from an earlier author whose work was itself on the borders of S.F. as adventure fiction, the message of the Muses gets through: Understand this; overcome that, and make the world better.
It is with this in mind that I turn to John Brunner’s 1968 novel, Stand on Zanzibar. The title comes from the claim that even with all the people alive today, we could still assemble all of humanity on a given small piece of territory, in this case, the island of Zanzibar, the implication being that we are not in any kind of emergency due to overpopulation.
Except that in the novel—and in the world today—too many human beings is a key driver of crises. In this fictional Earth, governments have enacted eugenics laws designed to bring down the total number and to raise the quality of the population. People live increasingly virtual lives watching media tailored to what corporations see as their racial or ideological tastes, and artificial intelligence is more and more making decisions, relieving humans of the responsibility.
This sounds as if Brunner were writing contemporary news articles, but there is one more element that could be today’s headline. Again and again, persons called muckers will snap and go on a killing spree.
The label is derived from the phenomenon of someone running amok, and in the novel, it is attributed to too many people rammed up against each other with fewer and fewer opportunities to find fulfillment in work or in family—a case of contact without connection. The solution that several of the characters come to by the end is to impose on the world a gene found in a small country in Africa that exudes pacifism—it literally codes for hormones that negate aggression both in the person with the gene and in others in the area of that person—by DNA editing. And if that turns out to be too difficult, an alternative would be to spray cities with an aerosolized version of the hormone.
If gun control advocates have not already considered such a solution to our real-world problem of mass shootings, they may soon get around to it. This would fit right in with the attitude, found in the novel and out here among actual policy makers and demanders, that if only we clamp down with enough control, we will find paradise. Life can be regimented and regulated into order, and it would be selfish to resist.
But that is precisely one of the novel’s points, a prophecy in all the senses of the word of how we have gone astray. The self as a meaningful entity is disappearing in a world of mass—and massive—production. We can take away any number of tools used in killing. We could ban many types of guns or all guns—ignoring the Constitution, but that is hardly an objection in the eyes of many—and go through whatever social disruption would be involved in carrying out such a law. We could limit purchases of diesel fuel and fertilizer. We could mandate soft plastic bottles and ban kitchen knives. Eventually, we will be able to require all cars to be operated by computers, if we do not entirely eliminate privately owned vehicles. This list of controls against potentially dangerous objects could expand without limit, and still, the muckers would find a way to kill.
That leaves us the choices of tranquilizing the whole world, of accepting deaths, or of solving the problems that drive people to snap. One area in which Karl Marx was perceptive was his idea of the alienation of labor, the loss of control that so many of us experience over the nature and products of our work. I will add that this is not in any way limited only to the proletariat. Life up and down the economic scale is today a commodity that drains individuality of meaning. Is it any wonder that some among us grasp at any opportunity, no matter how vile, to be significant?
Solving this will not be easy, and efforts to defang and declaw the population can only end up magnifying what drives the insanity. Global soporifics might work, but would life then be worth living? All that is left to us, assuming we do not accept ever increasing violence, is to build community and opportunity for meaningful achievement for all.
I have seen in memes the idea that the right wing wants us to live in The Handmaid’s Tale, while the left is working to inhabit Star Trek: The Next Generation. Conservatives and libertarians will surely object—both to how they are being characterized and to what the left desires—but the second of those two outcomes is exactly the sort of prophecy that we ought to fulfill for ourselves. We get there by asking of each new law or policy choice, does this benefit us all or only a few of us? Will life be better or worse for everyone if we do this? And are we protecting individual rights, or are we sacrificing the essence of being human—are we rejecting moral agency—on the thin promise of a moment of safety?