The Time Machine.3: Traveller's Progress

“The broadest and ultimately the most far-reaching effect of his [Wells’] work was the introduction into literature of a new awareness of the future.”
Roslynn D. Haynes

Though the 1960 George Pal film was in color, this is the most
complete view I found of its now iconic version of the time machine.

The Time Traveller goes down the long corridor to his laboratory, makes the final adjustments on his Time Machine, and begins his journey. “I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both hands, and went off with a thud.”

Like any good machine, this one has controls, including in which direction it can be sent. The Time Traveller could go to the past and witness a spectacular historical event.

Instead he makes history by choosing the future. Eventually that choice will shape how we've thought about the future ever since.

The choice of the future was not foreordained. In Mark Twain’s story, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” the journey is to the past. Rip Van Winkle wakes in the future, but he fell asleep in the past.

I first read the story in this Classics
Illustrated  comic bookversion in the 1950s,
with its 20th century time machine

But an imagined future was the destination of several late 19th century utopian tales, notably Samuel Bellamy’s Looking Backward and News From Nowhere by William Morris, a book Wells mentions in a short story. And at first, a future utopia is the destination the Traveller imagines for his journey.

Though the above named novels portrayed socialist utopias, others--including capitalists and middle class society generally-- confidently expected a future developing towards perfection. For the great faith of the machine age was Progress.

The machine and the idea of progress grew up together. While progress in human knowledge and society was championed by individual thinkers in the 16th and 17th century, and was part of the rationale for the American and French Revolutions, material progress began to take hold more comprehensively in the 18th century, the dawn of the industrial age.

Writers such as Voltaire and Kant were advocates, but progress soon became the common cry of industry, and was its one-word rationale for the massive destruction in the landscape and in society involved in the building of industrial infrastructure.

Progress as a self-evident argument bulldozed its way through the next two hundred years. “Progress is our most important product” was General Electric’s indelible mid-20th century slogan. But it was in the mid-19th century that the acolytes of progress found (or appropriated) a scientific foundation.

Wells’ friend and contemporary George W. Shaw wrote of Charles Darwin: “He had the luck to please everybody with an ax to grind.” Figures of the time seized upon one or another of many interpretations of Darwinian evolution—usually the one that comported with their previous beliefs.

One of these was progress. By a process of natural selection over time, Darwin showed, life forms become increasingly more complex: from the amoeba to humanity, or up the long ladder from the lower animals through the primates to Homo sapiens.

Human society progresses in the same way, proponents reasoned: from primitive to technically sophisticated, small to large, poor to rich, caves to cities, stone axes to the electric dynamo.

So human society—and its machines—would naturally be advanced in the future almost beyond imagining. That’s what the Traveller was expecting—or at least hoping for.

The Traveller put on the brakes in the very far future—A.D. 802, 701 by the Time Machine’s gauge. He lands in a hailstorm that possibly his machine created. There’s a moment of suspense when he can’t yet see what’s beyond the veil of frosty water.

He finds himself in a park-like clearing, surrounded by lovely but unfamiliar foliage and in view of several impressive structures in the distance. He sees figures coming towards him—human figures.

But instead of commanding figures of the future, they are but four feet tall, with small features. One approaches him, “a very beautiful and graceful creature,” a “fragile thing out of futurity.” At first he is charmed.

But he soon finds they are passive and simple, “with the intellectual level of one of our five year old children.” He admits that “I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything.”

“A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had built the Time Machine in vain.”

The Eloi—as they called themselves—are a parody of progress. To deepen the ironic comeuppance to this popular misinterpretation of evolution, they look like humanity perfected. Wearing simple tunics suggesting the Greek philosophical ideal of Plato’s Republic, they live in a place akin to paradise.

The Eloi of this Eden eat only the fruit of the trees. They have no apparent animal adversaries, or disease-bearing insects. They serve as a sardonic turnabout for those scandalized by the idea that humans could be descended from apes or any animal form. The Eloi as end product of civilization are the epitome of refinement, wandering in beautiful and vacuous helplessness.

Evolution does not mean progress, although the word itself seems to suggest it. “Evolution” literally means a kind of rolling out, an unfolding, a flowering. It suggests a fulfillment of a potential, or a destiny.  As such, it was an unfortunate choice because Darwin's theory of natural selection did not guarantee progress towards an ideal form or situation.

Darwin rarely used the word “evolution,” probably because that isn’t what he meant. (Few of his contemporaries used it either at first—it was at least a decade before “evolution” replaced “Darwinism” as the handle for Darwin’s theory.)

Darwin also cautioned that natural selection could result in less complexity, and even retrogression or degeneration, as Wells learned from Huxley.

The Traveller will explore these possibilities, as well as other misconceptions of Darwin’s work. But in these first moments in the future, he knows that progress is not inevitable, or at least not a permanent upward process ending in perfection. And without inevitability, the future may depend a great deal more on what is done and not done in the present than the Traveller’s dinner guests can as yet realize.

To be continued...For earlier posts in this series, click on the Soul of the Future label below.