Present: Labor's Love Lost

Update: At the Atlantic, Garrett Eps (I will take the credit for starting his career as a journalist by publishing him in Washington Newsworks so very long ago when I was its editor) shows why this case is playing out at the Supreme Court as a complete partisan scam, with the Republicans offering no facts whatsoever in challenging current law.

These days, being guided by past experience can be dangerous.  Too many things have changed.  But I remember when labor unions were strong, and they were the most vital supporters of Democratic candidates and the Democratic agenda. Moreover, despite some corrupt leadership, they moved America towards justice and equality.

But it seems that very soon the last remnant of this relationship is going to be destroyed by the Supreme Court, and today's hip commentators are unanimous that the Democrats are going to pay a huge price.

In a Slate piece titled Labor Lost, Sean McElwee and Mark Joseph Stern summarize the situation: the Supreme Court is about to decide whether public employees must pay dues to their union.  In its previous decision on the subject, the Court said yes, because all members benefit from the contracts the union negotiates on their behalf.

But with the cover of dubious constitutional arguments, the partisan Republican Court is about to decide the opposite, thus weakening if not destroying public employee unions.  The real reason will be: because that's what the Republican party wants.

Like suppressing voters, Russian interference and gerrymandering when GOPer legislatures do it, Republicans justify everything that gives them an unfair advantage.  Unions have long been a target, which is why Ronald Reagan and the 1980s Republican party did all they could to get rid of them, including the encouraging of jobs moving offshore to places where unions wouldn't be a problem for them.

Since then, public sector unions have been the last bastion and mainstay for Democrats.  Now the Supreme Court Republicans are about to take care of that, in a very likely 5-4 decision.

 This decision will go down in history along with Citizens United, Bush v. Gore and whatever case it was that sanctified opposition to all gun regulations because the Second Amendment was given a literal interpretation which parallels an interpretation of Genesis as officially naming creation day as October 23, 4004 BC.  All of these "decisions" twisted the Constitution in order to blatantly favor the Republican Party.

This comes at a time when one of the Democrat's new hopes, Conor Lamb, who making a race of it for Congress in a western PA district that went heavily for Trump, is advising that Democrats return to their union roots.  Ella Neilsen in Vox summarizes: Focused on recapturing blue-collar workers, Lamb’s campaign represents one school of thought — going back to labor-liberal economic values and working with unions to retake territory in Midwest and Rust Belt states that voted for Donald Trump in 2016."

But Democrats also have themselves to blame, for meekly accepting the decline of unions and the party's relationships with union leadership and members.  As Eric Levitz in New York succinctly put it last month: "The GOP understands how important labor unions are to the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party, historically, has not."

When Levitz says "historically" he means in recent decades.  From FDR to JFK and LBJ, the party certainly understood this.  In the elections I was part of, the party and the political committees of the unions were partners.  And this was in western Pennsylvania, which was reliably Democratic as long as those relationships were maintained.  Unions educated their members on issues, and represented their members' needs and wants to the party, and to its elected officials.

Unions were crucial as well to the Civil Rights movement.  They were in the leadership and in the crowd at the March on Washington.  They were progressives of the time.

That much of their white membership has grown so dismally right wing may well be partly if not largely due to weak or vanished unions, and the Democrats not responding to union issues as much anymore.  Levitz shows how much Democrats lost from a weakened union movement, and more importantly, what American society lost because of it, in laws that weren't passed and programs not enacted.  Including universal healthcare and a non-political national response to global heating, with enough time to save the future.

The survival of public sector unions to this point is due almost entirely to the past Supreme Court clarity on the right to organize.  But even some who support that right (or pretend to) question whether unions are compatible with public sector service.  That apparently includes conservative Republican justice Anthony Kennedy, considered a moderate or swing justice on at least some subjects, who made two blistering speeches on the first day of oral arguments on this matter on Monday, questioning the public sector unions right to exist.

It's no coincidence that public sector unions are largely comprised of minority and women.  Many public sector jobs are on the basis of exams or degrees, and rigorously color and gender blind.  That minorities and women tend to support Democrats because they agree with them on issues doesn't much matter to Republicans.  They see these unions as political entities opposed to them.

It used to be that once in awhile a Republican might suggest that the way to disengage unions from their historic ties with Democrats might be for Republicans to represent the interests of their members.  But that never got very far, and would be soundly booed at CPAC today, if not the cause of guns coming out of holsters and full scale riot.

  The Slate piece quotes research that suggests weakened unions will drive down voting.  It may not be so pronounced, or fatal to Democrats.  But then again, it might.  Regardless it's a big partisan win for Republicans, and for their very open brand of political corruption.

The great grandparents of many in the industrial areas of America literally bled and starved so that their unions could deliver a living wage and some just return on their labor.  Few tell that story anymore, or why unions--for all their faults--are still essential, and could do so much more that needs to be done if they were stronger.

  Some Democrats, like President Obama, have told this story, but not often enough.  And as Levitz shows, they haven't backed it up with legislation in recent decades.

And so Republicans will get away with this without the kind of public clamor that could make it a political liability.  Because the Democratic Party has forgotten its union roots.

Past Future: The Future Begins

The idea of the future that H.G. Wells expressed in his first novel, and that has been the basis of our idea of “the future” ever since, arose from particular historical circumstances, especially as young Wells experienced them.  To suggest the full significance of that idea, we need to explore those circumstances.

The future begins with the personal.

People think about the future when they see things change. In mid 19th century England, change was everywhere.

When Joseph Wells met Sarah Neal, he was the latest of several generations of gardeners for large estates. His previous employer had encouraged him to broaden his horizons, and gave him books on botany. But when Joseph’s benefactor died he lost his position. He wound up at a smaller estate called Up Park.

Sarah had grown up in the ancient town of Midhurst, where many buildings were three or four hundred years old. It was on a main road to London, so several of her ancestors stabled horses for the coaches.

 Her father owned and operated an inn. After working there as a girl, she went to school to learn skills required for a position as maid to aristocratic women. She was employed at Up Park as a lady’s maid when she met Joseph.

Up Park

Sarah and Joseph were lower middle class, probably the most vulnerable position in the English class system. Some of the occupations that had provided stability and security were disappearing. The great estates were fading, and with them the demand for the traditionally secure and relatively genteel positions of house servants.

Sarah and Joseph had a basic lower middle class education—they could read and write, and do enough arithmetic to keep basic accounts. But they were ill-equipped to deal with what was happening around them.

The industrial age was changing everything. England had been the first to industrialize so thoroughly, and the massive changes began within a generation, and didn't stop.

Beginning in 1825, railroads sliced the countryside (by mid-century, this tiny island still had a quarter of the world’s railroad track), dividing and consuming the land, darkening the skies and splitting the air with roaring noise. The railroads redefined the natural world in an historical instant.

Industries also required other transportation systems such as canals to bring in resources and send out parts and products to ports and around the country. Coal to fuel the engines of industry meant large-scale mining, which transformed the landscape even more brutally and extensively, and left much of it depleted and despoiled.

s.s. Great Britain

But industry was the key to the country's wealth and power, especially when linked with commerce. England was already the world's premier naval power when in 1842, steam was harnessed for the first screw-propelled iron steamship, the Great Britain. The new larger and quicker ships propelled faster and more extensive trade, and accelerated the exploration, exploitation and colonization of the last unknown and unconquered territories on the planet.

All of this took land and labor. Mining and machine industry followed the first large-scale agriculture on tracts of lands often taken through the Enclosure Acts from small farmers and especially from the commons, the lands that no one had owned but everyone was free to use.

This brought drastic change in the lives of many.  Families were forced off the land to live in towns that were often little more than slum encampments thrown together near the mines and factories that the poet William Blake named for all time as the “dark, Satanic mills.” Many of these families drifted into London to work, fade and die in the anonymous mass. They were the new working class.

While the new industrialists who owned and operated the mines and factories became wealthy and powerful, the landed gentry lost much of its accustomed income from the agricultural fruits of its great estates. Land was no longer the main source of wealth, and so the hereditary upper class was slipping away. Class no longer determined wealth; wealth was beginning to determine class.

The era’s great novelists such as Thackery, Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and especially Charles Dickens chronicled how these changes affected everyday lives at almost every level.

 The changes were especially evident in the fast-forming middle class. This volatile industrial expansion was providing them with new occupations and opportunities. Yet there were still dangers for these aspirants, even as these transformations reached out to the old towns and their inhabitants, edging them into this new age.

When Sarah and Joseph were courting, her father became ill and she was called back to Midhurst. He died, and a few months later so did her mother. Sarah was shocked to find that the family inn was deeply in debt, and lawyers were taking most of what remained. Whatever expectations she might have had to share in the business were shattered.

She and Joseph married. A relative offered to sell them a house and attached shop, with its stock and china and household crockery, to provide them with a sustaining income. As there were no gardener jobs available, they used Sarah’s small inheritance to make the purchase.

The ramshackle house was in Bromley, another ancient town from the 9th century, when it was a woodland clearing. The business however was a bust from the beginning. As London expanded and Bromley became more of a railroad suburb, new shops from the city made prospects worse. Sarah Wells worked hard to keep her family respectable, but they were only clinging to the lower edge of the middle class.

street where H.G. Wells was born

These were the unpromising circumstances into which Herbert George Wells was born in 1866, the third of three sons. (A sister he never knew had died from an illness two years before his birth, at the age of 9.) We are perhaps accustomed to stories of early poverty and later success, especially in America. But there and at that time, such an ascent was very rare, and practically impossible.

Years later, in his Experiment in Autobiography H.G. Wells would mark a painful childhood incident as the turning point of his life. He was between seven and eight years old when an accident while playing with a family friend left him with a badly broken bone in one leg. His long and at times excruciating convalescence required him to stay in bed. His father borrowed books to help him pass the time, and Bertie Wells got his first glimpses of a wider world.

illustration from Woods'
Natural History, an 1859
book he saw at this time

One illustrated volume “took me to Tibet, China, the Rocky Mountains, the forests of Brazil, Siam and a score of other lands,” he recalled. He learned about whaling and American Indians, the Battle of Waterloo and the American Civil War, about tigers in India, wolves in Russia and gorillas in Africa (which gave him nightmares.) He read about the vast distances to the stars.

None of his classmates at school knew about any of these things. Later he believed everything that came afterward in his life began with those hours propped up in bed, warmed by the kitchen stove. “ Probably I am alive today and writing this autobiography instead of being a worn-out, dismissed and already dead shop assistant, because my leg was broken.”

His hunger for books continued. Though his parents were worried that his dedication to reading was unhealthy, his father continued to borrow books for him from the Literary Institute in the Bromley Town Hall. Notable among the reading he remembered are Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos, the first attempt to describe the planet as a single system, as well as a smattering of Shakespeare and a lot of Dickens.

Bertie Wells was good at school—an excellent student, respected by teachers and well-liked by classmates, who he entertained with enthusiastic stories and funny drawings. Wells’ son Anthony West commented in a book on his father that a photograph taken during Bertie’s school days “shows my father radiant with the discoveries of this world...”

But boys of his class generally ended their formal education at around 13. Then it was time to concentrate on their future. Sarah Wells was determined to see her sons firmly entered in secure occupations. They had to learn a trade, and the trades she knew were in the shops.

Boys learned their trade through apprenticeships that qualified them for jobs. These apprenticeships were themselves a business: families paid shop owners to train their boys, and often to provide room and board.

Bertie’s first shop apprenticeship was a disaster. He was quickly dismissed. But an opportunity arose when an uncle decided to start a school, and enlisted Bertie to help him. There was yet no organized education system in England, and most schools were private ventures. At the age of fourteen, Bertie became a pupil-teacher, and applied the interest and discipline to his tasks that he could not summon for his shop assistant training. He also had the benefit of boarding with a baker, whose wife took pity on him and fed him well. It was the only period of his life until manhood that he was not under-nourished.

But as quickly as it had begun, his uncle’s school closed. He was again apprenticed to a shop. Once again, it was a disaster, but it ended in an intriguing way. It was a chemist shop (a drug store or pharmacy in American terms.) Bertie was sent to a nearby school for an hour each day to learn enough Latin to read medicine labels and write up prescriptions. He astounded the school’s headmaster by learning more in a few hours than his other pupils learned in a year.

The building that housed Midhurst Grammar School

Horace Byatt, headmaster of Midhurst Grammar School, encouraged Wells to become a full time student. The chemist shop gladly parted with the otherwise incompetent Bertie, and he moved in with Byatt.

Once again Bertie flourished. He particularly cherished his first lessons in science: the exaltation he felt when he realized he was standing on land that had once been at the bottom of a Cretaceous sea, and the thrill of peering through a telescope to find the moons of Jupiter.

But Sarah Wells wasn’t happy. By then she had returned to Up Park as head housekeeper. She felt (as Anthony West wrote) that the school was giving her son ideas “above his station,” encouraging unrealistic ambitions and unhealthy fantasies which would doom her attempts to give him “a good start in life.”

So she arranged for his third apprenticeship, at a drapery emporium in the town of Southsea. This time she had to pay a substantial sum for his training. Bertie knew that if he quit, his parents would forfeit an amount equivalent to a year of his mother’s wages.

Her wages was about all the family had. Joseph Wells had supplemented the meager shop income with his small earnings as a professional cricket player. He was good at it—one of his records stood for a century. But he’d fallen from the house roof while pruning the grapevine he’d coaxed into flourishing, and badly damaged a leg. His cricket days were over.

So Bertie understood the stakes of the investment in his apprenticeship, and he went. “At fifteen he had no answer to this kind of blackmail,” West comments.

Southsea in the early 1880s was a prosperous town on the southern coast of England. Gentlemen in frock coats crossed Southsea Common and Clarence Parade to attend meetings of the Southsea Bowling Club, or to play billiards at the Bush Hotel. They might attends talks on medieval miracle plays or “The Earth and Its Movements” at the nearby Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society. If unattached, they could meet young ladies from the best families at dances.

That was not the life of Bertie Wells, from the age of 15 to 17. He lived in a dormitory of boys who were similarly apprenticed to the Southsea Drapery Emporium, an early version of what would become the department store. They were rousted out of bed to clean the shop before it opened, then fed a brief breakfast of bread and butter in the cellar canteen.

Sale day at an emporium of the period

Bertie’s day consisted of fetching and carrying rolls of flannels and twills, folding sheets of ginghams and sateens, unfolding lace curtain material and holding it up for customers while the salesman extolled its virtues, wrapping packages and straightening up, as well as generally doing the bidding of sharp-eyed and disapproving managers. Then scrubbing floors and fixtures after the shop closed—in total a 13 hour day.

Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle in front of the Bush Villa
where he lived in Southsea

His employer was fairly enlightened for the time. The dining room was airy, the dormitory neat and adequately large. A young doctor who lived nearby was available for their medical needs. (As it happened, he was Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, years before he began writing his Sherlock Holmes stories. He and Wells were destined to become friends, but much later.)

Nevertheless, Bertie Wells was at the edge of despair. Not only did he hate what he was doing, he was bad at it. Thin and short for his age, he wasn’t physically equipped for the heavier work, but also awkward at folding fabric and packaging purchases. He was given to daydreaming and fits of temper. He couldn’t cope with either the regimented tedium or the onslaught of demands. He was failing.

But even if he did better, it might not make much of a difference. If his mother believed he was training for a secure place, he soon found she was wrong. From older boys at the shop and others, he learned how difficult it was to find a position and that it was even harder to keep it. A poorly paid shop assistant could be fired on a whim, and that could be the end of him. As Wells wrote, “You swam for as long as you could and then, if you could not scramble into some sort of shop, down you went to absolute destitution, the streets and beggary.”

Kings Road Southsea, location of the Emporium

Anthony West explained the context in this way: “... However liberal that vanished [19th century] order may have been in rewarding the successful, it had no pity on those who fell behind in the struggle to get on. My father was in real danger of being trapped in the worst of all social niches, that of the white-collar worker who had to keep up the appearances of gentility while earning a day-labourer's wage. A shop assistant had no security of employment….He knew that he would be as good as finished before he'd begun if he gave way and accepted the role that had been assigned him."

Yet to rebel against it was at least as risky. Wells knew, as scholar Frank McConnell writes, “...your odds were poor ever to rise out of the class you were born to and quite good to fall below it.”

Bertie endured it for two years. His only escapes were the vacations he spent at Up Park, where he haunted the library left by the free-thinking aristocrat who had inherited the place. Wells spent hours there, pouring over books published in the 18th century, including volumes by Voltaire and Thomas Paine, and his first look at Plato’s Republic. He enthusiastically read the works of Jonathan Swift, including the unexpurgated Gulliver’s Travels, books not readily available elsewhere as Swift was then considered a scandalous author.

Southsea Beach

But vacations ended, and he was back at his Southsea grind. Bertie was only halfway through his four year apprenticeship but he could endure no more. There seemed no way out. He wrote letters to everyone who might conceivably help him, but no rescue arrived.

After his workday ended at 8:30 and in the hour before the doors were locked, he would go down to the seaside and stare into the black water, with thoughts of suicide.

He didn’t think he was meant for better things, as he wrote later, but for different things. But so far, all he had been good at was school.

As it happened, school was slowly becoming an avenue of hope. Education in England was changing. The growth of industry demanded not only laborers, bookkeepers and clerks but managers, engineers, chemists and skilled technicians. They were not all going to come from the aristocracy.

The government instituted an ongoing series of educational reforms designed to disperse learning and develop talent more widely across the country and across classes. Several of these new programs in the 1880s were to make all the difference in the life of Bertie Wells.

While at Southsea he learned of a provision of a new education law that supported student teachers, so he wrote to his most recent mentor—Horace Byatt at the Midhurst school—and asked him if there was a way for him to be employed there. All Byatt could offer him was room and board and a year as a student teacher without pay, with the possibility of a paid position in the future.

That was good enough for Wells. But he had to persuade his parents to approve the cancellation of his apprenticeship. He wrote letters home without success. So one Sunday morning, Wells escaped from the Southsea Emporium dormitory and walked the seventeen miles to Up Park to plead with his mother in person. It’s probable if not certain that Wells had read David Copperfield by then, but in any case it was a dramatic gesture suggesting the desperate trek of Dickens’ young hero, though without the immediately triumphant outcome.

Wells believed he was fighting for his life. The new school term was beginning in September but as summer approached, his parents were still unrelenting. Then a letter from Byatt ended their opposition. Thanks to government programs Midhurst school was expanding, so he could offer Wells a paying position after all. It was a solid sum, with the prospect of higher wages the following year. His parents’ last arguments dissolved.

present day exterior of the old Midhurst School 

When Wells left Southsea his ambitions were not especially high. His goal was a career as a schoolteacher. In his first year back at Midhurst he did so well and was promoted so rapidly that he could dare to believe he could be headmaster by the time he was 35.

But all that changed again with a sudden surprise. During Wells’ year back at Midhurst, Byatt had taken advantage of another new national policy that provided grants to schools if students tested high on exams. Wells was good at school, but he was even better at exams. Byatt concocted new courses for him to take—sometimes he was the only student, essentially working on his own—and his exam scores brought in grant money.

But by most accounts neither Byatt nor Wells realized those exams were scrutinized for an additional purpose. Another new educational effort was beginning, to provide scholarships for superior students to study at the Normal School of Science in London, which despite its pedestrian name was the government’s new science university (its name would soon be changed to the Royal College of Science.) National exam results helped identify potential recipients.

So Wells was puzzled as he opened a letter from the Normal School. His exam scores qualified him for a scholarship, the letter said, and he was invited to apply for one. The forms were enclosed.

Despite anxiety about leaving a secure position with a better income that his parents together earned, he filled out the blue forms and sent them in. He didn’t tell anyone until he got a reply. But when he received an offer of a full scholarship to attend university in the fall, plus a small stipend for living expenses, he ecstatically accepted.

Neither Byatt nor Wells’ parents were happy about it at first, but it was uncharted territory for them all. Young men of the lower middle class almost never got to university.

Joseph Wells

A final interlude, a kind of coda to his youth, occurred that summer before he left for college. Rather than spending it at Up Park with his mother, Wells lived with his father in the old Bromley home, the place he was born.

  Joseph Wells was nearly lame by then, but still an enthusiastic walker. They resumed their rambles through the countryside together. Perhaps this was a result of an earlier visit the two made to his father’s boyhood territory, where Joseph showed him the places that had meant the most to him, including features of the landscape. He pointed out the birch trees, and discoursed on the careful process of making cricket bats from them.

kingfisher, one of the birds Wells' father remembered

This last summer of Bertie’s boyhood, his father talked to him about the local landscape he had known as a younger man. He described the meadows and groves that had been destroyed as Bromley’s suburban population grew, and recalled trout fishing in the now polluted waters.  He pointed out a hill near Up Park where he sprawled at night to look at the stars.

 He pointed out the birds and flowers that had been abundant in the countryside before, and showed him where he and his friends had foraged for mushrooms to eat, seasoned with the salt they happened to bring with them.

Joseph was keenly interested in what his son told him about the latest science. Wells saw his father and his thwarted dreams in a new way, as he perceived the confusions within his resolute mother. He would remain close to his parents and his brothers, and in times to come would at least temporarily be supporting them all.

Then at summer’s end, little more than a year after his failure and despair in the Southsea Drapery Emporium, Wells was off to the great city of London. His impassioned attention to his own future had changed his life, and would soon change the world’s view of its future.

to be continued...

for previous posts in this series, click on the "soul of the future" label under this post.

Present: A Quotation.3

A Parkland student speaks: leading a nationwide revolt of high school students
 and others to demand gun control.Their scheduled march on Washington now aims
 for 500,000 participants.

"With all our focus on the mental illness of crazed killers like Nikolas Cruz and Stephen Paddock, we tend to lose sight that it’s another sign of mental illness that American political leaders and their apologists do nothing while the country literally destroys itself with gun violence."

Frank Rich

Past Future: Anticipations

“…Wells was a prophet, not merely in the popular sense of having predicted space travel, processed food and the Common Market, but in the wider sense of being able to think in a completely new way about the future---to be, as it were, at home in the future.”
Roslynn D. Haynes

“Something in us pursues information and data with some passion, but the soul is always eager to hear another story.” Thomas Moore

To remember the future, anticipate the past...

The idea of applying scientific principles to anticipate the future was not new when 1970s futurists claimed it as their defining and innovative procedure. Nor was it new when RAND and Herman Kahn started up their computers in the 1950s.

This approach to the future, re-discovered in the middle of the 20th century, had been proposed and applied as the century began. At that time it was the work of one man: H.G. Wells.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Wells was known for his novels and short stories, many of which he described as “scientific romances.” These include the classics for which he is most remembered in the 21st century, such as The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.

But he became famous in his own time as the result of a series of magazine articles on the future. They were published in England and the United States in 1901, and collected the following year in a book, titled Anticipations. It was a surprise success, outselling any of his novels.

Wells described a future dominated by big fast cars, long-distance buses and fat trucks traveling on wide asphalt highways, passing mega-cities and prefabricated suburban communities of air-conditioned homes filled with labor-saving appliances, along a solid sprawl spread unbounded from Boston to Washington, D.C.

Futurama 1939

This was still the future in 1939, when Futurama showed it at the New York World’s Fair. But Wells foresaw it before Henry Ford had sold a single Model T, or London had a single motorized bus.

Wells foresaw electric appliances and other labor saving devices in homes, when English homes were lit by coal gas lamps, or even oil lamps and candles.  He also saw social ramifications: the end of house servants, the beginning of keeping up with the Jones.

He saw darkness in the future as well: a series of major and highly mechanized wars. The next war would feature the “land ironclads” (or tanks, also not yet invented.) As soon as mid-century, war would be dominated by aircraft, flying in formation in large numbers. He was writing two years or so before the Wright Brothers demonstrated a successful airplane.

Victory will depend on expertise and planning, but he also envisioned the ghastly consequences for soldiers, with a vocabulary that eerily anticipates words later written by poets and novelists who were soldiers in World War I: “Tramp, tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen.”

But in the far future Wells saw nations coming together in common markets and then in a world state.

These were not wild prophecies, but based on Wells’ wide reading. The book covers economics and class, forms of government, education, science, journalism and structures of social relationships and families, including improvement in the status of women. From the perspective of the actual future he got a lot wrong, and a few things wrong-headed (his advocacy of eugenics, for instance) that he needed to correct later. But in terms of the study of the future, Anticipations sets several standards.

“What made the book so successful was the willingness of the author to look at alternative futures,” writes Wells biographer David C. Smith, “to discuss his ideas with his readers, and to invite them to participate in his work of future-making.”

So Wells presaged alternative futures and participatory or democratic futures all at once. Even more basically, he made a case for the scientific study of the future, long before the 70s futurists.

He articulated this argument most elaborately in a speech, also in 1902, that was subsequently published as The Discovery of the Future.

He developed a daring thesis that the future can be foreseen, with at least the same accuracy as we know the past. “And the question arises how far this absolute ignorance of the future is a fixed and necessary condition of human life, and how far some application of intellectual methods may not attenuate even if it does not absolutely set aside the veil between ourselves and things to come. And I am venturing to suggest to you that along certain lines and with certain qualifications and limitations a working knowledge of things in the future is a possible and practicable thing.”

We can know as much about the future as about the past, he argued. Our knowledge of the past depends on partial information, inference and interpretation. As new information is uncovered, old information given new weight and relevance, and as interpretations change, so does our picture of the past.

This is especially true, he said, of the 19th century’s exploration of the remote past, such as the geological ages. Evidence is sparse, yet inferences can be made.
“...it may be possible to throw a searchlight of inference forward instead of backward,” to see the future as well as we see the deep past, using the same basic inductive methods. Such a vision of the future would be “infinitely more important to mankind” than even the view of the past that transformed 19th century thought.

It would be a scientific undertaking, he insisted. He reminded his audience that all science is ultimately about the future: a theory of gravity predicts what will happen when someone throws an object into the air, anytime in the future. The theories that result from scientific analysis of facts are tested by their ability to yield “confident forecasts.”

The key to forecasting the future is to combine scientific predictions of separate phenomena—including even “so unscientific a science as economics.” If “first-class minds” did something like that, couldn’t they create “an ordered picture of the future that will be just as certain, just as strictly science, and perhaps just as detailed as the picture that has been built up within the last hundred years of the geological past?”

Such forecasts would be useful in guiding present actions. There is “no reason why we should not aspire to, and discover and use, safe and serviceable generalizations upon countless important issues in the human destiny.”

“I must confess that I believe quite firmly that an inductive knowledge of a great number of things in the future is becoming a human possibility,” Wells asserted as his lecture reached its climax. “I believe that the time is drawing near when it will be possible to suggest a systematic exploration of the future.”

Wells’ speech was widely praised, and together with Anticipations, made him “a mind and a force to be reckoned with,” biographer Smith wrote. “He had become a great man.”

But no one seemed to take up the challenge to develop a scientific study of the future—not until the idea was rediscovered a half century later.

Wells himself wrote many more non-fiction books, all of them in one way or another expressing his vision of things to come. He had announced this commitment that guided the rest of his long career in The Discovery of the Future. He divided those who find their direction in the past, from those who look to the future. The past-oriented look for causes, the future-oriented for possible effects. “…the main dispute even in most modern wars…will be found to be a reference, not to the future, but to the past…”

The difference defines divergent ideas of a person’s purpose in life. One sees it as ”simply to reap the consequences of the past,” while the other believes “our life is to prepare the future.”

It was clear which Wells was going to be. “Yet though foresight creeps into our politics and a reference to consequence to our morality, it is still the past that dominates our lives. But why? Why are we so bound to it? It is into the future we go, to-morrow is the eventful thing for us.”

But in championing the future Wells did not restrict himself to articles, commentaries, non-fiction books and speeches. He returned to fiction, including many novels about the future. Some of his fictions were also eerily accurate about the future within his lifetime, but he did no more systematic forecasting as he began to do in Anticipations.

One reason could be that in fairly short order, he realized there were limitations to a scientific study of the future.

Partly because of the stir that the Anticipations articles created in the United States, Wells was invited for a lecture tour. He went, and subsequently wrote a book, The Future in America, published in 1906. There he retreated on his claims for a “scientific sort of prophecy,” admitting that his The Discovery of the Future lecture “went altogether too far in this direction.”

" Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible, but the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts and will of unique incalculable men,” he wrote. “With them we have to deal as our ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to be not 'scientific' at all for all the greater issues, the humanly-important issues, but critical, literary, even—if you will—artistic. Here insight is of more account than induction and the perception of fine tones than the counting of heads.”

The artistic method he often chose—the method he returned to—was storytelling. In addition to the “perception of fine tones” there are other decisive features of stories that make them our portals into alternative futures.


Story, writes Mark Turner, a neuroscientist as well as an English professor, “is the fundamental instrument of thought.”

Story is also “our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, of explaining.”

“We look for stories in everything. If stones are thrown on the ground, they make a story," observed novelist Brian Kitely. "Consciousness is a story. It is a condensing of the world’s details into narrative.”

“Knowledge is stories,” writes Roger C. Shank, former director of Yale’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Explanations in science itself tend to be narratives, even beyond the basic story of the if/then statement. “Science is the storytelling of our time,” asserts William Irwin Thompson. “By telling stories about our origins, from the big bang to the African savanna, science is really telling stories about what and where we are and where we want to go from here.”

As worthy and useful as futures studies might be, they are not what "the future" means to most people. Neither jargon-propelled generalities nor carefully couched projections and matrices quite get to the texture of life, to the quality of the future, the smell of it. Nor can they set up a realistic dynamic that makes room for behavior, emotion, creativity, spontaneity, instinct, dedication, insight, perception, perverseness, influence, aspiration, faith, courage, learning, intent, love, hope, imagination…in a word, soul.

Producing that kind of scenario is not really the futurist's role. That's the job of the storyteller.

In envisioning a future, stories can better provide the human element through characters and their emotions. This adds a necessary complexity to these futures.

Story can provide motivation and points of view. They can expose various self-interests. By showing effects on characters it adds the crucial condition of emotion, of human reaction and response.

Stories can explore consequences on the individuals and groups they tell us about. Stories can dramatize challenge and costs to society and individuals, and suggest qualities of mind and spirit needed to confront those consequences, to meet those challenges.

Stories can place a future in several layered contexts—the personal, interpersonal, cultural, and societal. They can place the future in the context of time—of present and pasts. They can suggest the context of an entire world.

In his fictions, H.G. Wells exemplified all of this. In her study of the influence of science on Wells’ writing, Roslynn D. Haynes concluded, “Thus Wells tends not to examine scientific principles per se, but their effect on individual characters and their causal implications for society or mankind as a whole.”

Since stories appear to be how we think and how we learn, they also have the advantage of seizing our attention, and remaining in our memories. Reports clotted with number and levels of probabilities, snowstorms of data plowed with arcane instruments of analysis, plus charts and graphs of dubious usefulness, aren’t likely to give many people a picture of the future. Nor much hope for the future either, beyond anticipating getting to the end of them and going out for ice cream.

But something that reaches almost everyone is a story. Stories may provide a sense of one alternative future, but more than that, stories suggest meanings. When we experience a story, feel what the characters feel, we get some sense of what the complex essence, what the soul of such a future might be.

Stories can’t do it all, any more than a scientific report or a comprehensive description. Stories are limited by their form, and by the skills of the storyteller. They have beginnings and endings, and concentrate on significant events. They may use analogy, irony, paradox. Or they may be quite a bit cruder in their effects. But they have definite advantages in considering the future.

They link with other stories and archetypal themes that suggest humanity’s deepest desires, fears and aspirations. In bringing us into the story and helping us to identify with characters, they offer the possibility of empathy, not only with our potential future selves in a given alternative future, but also with others.

That is a crucial element in the kind of systems thinking that was a cornerstone of 1970s futurism. According to one author on the subject, “the systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another.”

Some stories hope to tell us what future to avoid. Others suggest how we need to change to get to a future we need. Futurist Willis Harman noted: “The most carefully designed social measures will not achieve their desired goals unless they involve not only rationally designed programs and structures, but also changes in deep-rooted beliefs, values, attitudes and behavior patterns.”

“There is only one crisis in the world,” wrote futurist John Platt. “It is the crisis of transformation.” Stories can help us get to where we need to be.

In the end, all we actually have of the past or future are the stories we tell ourselves. So stories also reflect back to us what we feel about the future in general, or one or another alternative tomorrows.

The rest of this series will concentrate on such stories, their contexts and ramifications, as reflections of how we think and feel about the future.

Most of these stories are widely known and shared, many have historical significance, and a few are lesser known but just as indicative. They tend to be foundation stories—the first or best known, in print or as movies or television—of a particular kind, representing a significant view of the future. In many cases, other stories like them followed, including those still being told.

But fair warning: even the well known stories may not always be ones that usually get classified as foundation stories of the future, or of particular approaches to the future. Analysis of the literature, for example, doesn’t always include bug-eyed monster movies of the 1950s, Star Trek: The Next Generation or the American Indian Ghost Dance movement of the 1890s.

We begin with the foundation story of “the future” itself. For several years before he wrote the now forgotten Anticipations, H.G. Wells proposed and dramatized the basic idea of “the future” we have accepted ever since. Not in any essay or exegesis, but in a story that has been read and remembered for well over a century. Before Wells invented futurism, he invented the future.

This future begins with the personal. Its roots are found in a dingy house in an obscure village outside London, where Bertie Wells was born in the mid-19th century. So why did the son of two former servants start thinking about the future?

 Because his life depended on it.

to be continued...

President Day

Nation Cruelly Reminded That It Once Had a President was the headline for satirist Borowitz when President Obama's portrait was unveiled on Lincoln's Birthday.  The story continued:

In a televised event that many deemed unnecessarily cruel, millions of Americans were briefly reminded on Monday that they once had a President.
Unsuspecting Americans who turned on cable news Monday morning were suddenly assaulted with the memory of a time when the country’s domestic affairs, international diplomacy, and nuclear codes were entrusted to an adult.

Compounding the cruelty of the televised event, the networks lingered unnecessarily on a speech that only served to remind viewers that the nation once had a President who rigorously obeyed rules of grammar and diction.

In a mercifully brief discussion of the antipresident's domination of the past year at a Christmas party, a friend commented that he was especially alarmed by what he had to let go by.  We've all had to survive by, on some level, ignoring the latest from the fulminating con man who has destroyed the presidency, perhaps forever, and so degraded the public world that sanity as well as blood pressure are threatened by paying the normal attention of a citizen.

This is perhaps why I noticed that while I was hanging out at a bookstore in Menlo Park for an hour before Christmas Eve festivities, several people came in asking for "the Obama book."  It was the book of photographs by the official White House photographer called Obama: An Intimate Portrait.  I looked through it, and even though I'd seen most of the photos before, it was hard to hold back tears.

I didn't buy it then (I got the Ursula LeGuin book--easier to carry home) but I ordered it when I got back to Arcata.  However the book was so unexpectedly popular that the edition sold out, and it has been unavailable for more than a month.  Good news is that yesterday I got an email saying I could expect my copy in early March.  I decided to get it because I want it to leave to younger members of my family, so they will have some evidence of the existence of what we used to call a President.

Update: A survey of historians released Monday concludes that James Buchanan is no longer the worst president in American history.  You might be able to guess who has replaced him, after only a year in office.  President Obama on the other hand has moved up into the top ten of best presidents.

You Are Responsible (Updated)

Update Sunday: What seems to be different this time, however, is the extent to which the young survivors of the massacre have quickly and publicly banded together to take political action, urging adults in power to act on gun control. Today, junior Cameron Kasky and his classmates announced that they are planning a nationwide march on March 24th, dubbed the March For Our Lives."

NBC: Students are taking hold of the gun debate in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, by organizing a series of school walkouts across the country and a march in Washington to protest gun violence.

The events begin with the Women's March EMPOWER branch, which is dedicated to youth-led advocacy. It has called for "students, teachers, school administrators, parents and allies" to take part in a national school walkout on March 14.

The goal is for everyone to walk out of their classrooms for 17 minutes at 10 a.m. "to protest Congress' inaction to do more than tweet thoughts and prayers in response to the gun violence plaguing our schools and neighborhoods," the organization said in a statement.

Students from Parkland, meanwhile, are organizing their own event on March 24 in Washington called the "March for Our Lives." The protest will "demand that a comprehensive and effective bill be immediately brought before Congress to address these gun issues," according to its mission statement. "No special interest group, no political agenda is more critical than timely passage of legislation to effectively address the gun violence issues that are rampant in our country."

NY Daily News: "Children are dying, and their blood is on your hands because of that. Please take action. Stop going on vacation in Mar-a-Lago,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg told Trump on Sunday via an interview with Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.” “Take action. Work with Congress. Your party controls both the House and Senate. Take action. Get some bills passed. And for God’s sake, let’s save some lives,” the student continued."

SATURDAY: Students survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School  in Florida rallied on Saturday, with chants of "No More Guns!" and "You Are Responsible!"

Senior Emma Gonzalez was equally blunt in her speech: If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy, and how it should never have happened, and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association. But hey, you want to know something? It doesn’t matter, because I already know: $30 million. … To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you!... They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence: We call BS!"

As the New Yorker commented in introducing Emily's Witt's report on students in Parkland: It was a bad week for a lot of reasons, but at least we had evidence of one incorruptible value: the American teen-ager’s disdain for hypocrisy.

Other Floridians were also mad as hell, and rallied to say they weren't going to take it any more.  The AP reported: Pressure is growing for tougher gun-control laws after a mass shooting at a Florida high school, with thousands of angry protesters at state rallies demanding immediate action from lawmakers, and more demonstrations planned across the country in the weeks ahead.

One prominent Republican donor in Florida announced he wasn't going to give it anymore: no more money for Republicans who don't support an assault weapons ban.

There is Nothing More American Than Gun Control

One of many lies the greedy gun lobby and its deluded followers perpetuate is that restrictions on guns is unAmerican, and specifically an invention of rich liberals to take away their rights so they can be controlled, or just have less freedom and fun.

And unfortunately even those liberals and the establishment press have accepted the premise that gun control is contrary to American history.

But there is nothing more American than gun control, not even guns.  And that specifically applies to the notorious Old West.  If you grew up on TV westerns you would know this but fortunately a recent article by Matt Jancer in Smithsonian Magazine and a book by Adam Winkler provide the actual historical record.  For example, in the West:

“Tombstone had much more restrictive laws on carrying guns in public in the 1880s than it has today,” says Adam Winkler, a professor and specialist in American constitutional law at UCLA School of Law. “Today, you’re allowed to carry a gun without a license or permit on Tombstone streets. Back in the 1880s, you weren’t.” Same goes for most of the New West, to varying degrees, in the once-rowdy frontier towns of Nevada, Kansas, Montana, and South Dakota.

And in the South:

The practice was started in Southern states, which were among the first to enact laws against concealed carry of guns and knives, in the early 1800s. While a few citizens challenged the bans in court, most lost. Winkler, in his book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, points to an 1840 Alabama court that, in upholding its state ban, ruled it was a state’s right to regulate where and how a citizen could carry, and that the state constitution’s allowance of personal firearms “is not to bear arms upon all occasions and in all places.”

But today we've insanely regressed to the point that this hardly qualifies as a civilization.  Our moral morons who prevent gun control are now as responsible for gun violence and deaths in Florida and elsewhere as the actual shooter.  Perhaps more culpable, if the shooter is mentally ill.

They are indicted by the merest recitation of the facts.  From Think Progress on Wednesday:

A 19-year-old former student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Wednesday afternoon, killing 17 people.

The suspect, identified by law enforcement officials as Nikolas Cruz, chose the same weapon used to carry out some of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history: an AR-15.

It’s the same assault rifle that was used at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Adam Lanza killed 27 people, including 20 first graders. It was used in Aurora, Colorado, where James Holmes killed 12 people in a movie theater. It was used in San Bernardino, California, where Syed Farook killed 14 people. And it was used in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Steven Paddock killed 58 people — to date, the deadliest mass shooting in United States history.

The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the U.S. according to the National Rifle Association (NRA); there are an estimated 9 million in circulation as of 2014. Its popularity is likely due to the fact that it is extremely customizable and accommodates high capacity magazines that can fire off 100 rounds or more within minutes, features the NRA frequently touts on its blog.

The rifle’s popularity is also likely due to how frequently the NRA promotes it. The organization’s Twitter feed has regularly featured messages of admiration for the AR-15, even after the assault rifle was used to murder numerous people in several mass shootings."

From New York Daily Intelligencer on Thursday, noting that since the antipresident took office a year ago:

... the president has rolled back a rule that would have made it more difficult for the severely mentally ill to obtain firearms; made it easier for fugitives to purchase guns; and proposed $12 million in cuts to America’s background check system. He has also tried to slash $625 million from federal mental health programs, and $1 trillion from Medicaid, one of the top sources of health insurance for the mentally ill in the United States.

And, of course, Trump and his party have prevented any piece of legislation regulating the firearms market from making it into law."

By media accounts, the Parkland police did the best they could under current law in monitoring a troubled young man tempted by guns, as did his parents.  The school had practiced procedures in the case of a shooting and were as prepared as they could be.  Teachers acted heroically to protect their students.

But against an AR-15 in an open carry state, and the people running Florida and this country, they were helpless.

Update: 2/16:According to an article in the Washington Post, the number of school shootings in the US in 2018 provided by a nonprofit group and widely reproduced (by ThinkProgress among many others) is inflated.  Their argument is persuasive, and I've removed those statistics from the ThinkProgress quotes.  Inaccuracy in such matters is damaging because it's distracting and, well, because it's inaccurate.

 The figures that the Post accepts are bad enough: An ongoing Washington Post analysis has found that more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999...A recent study of World Health Organization data published in the American Journal of Medicine that found that, among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by bullets lived in the United States...On average, two dozen children are shot every day in the United States, and in 2016 more youths were killed by gunfire — 1,637 — than during any previous year this millennium."

The Post piece is accompanied by the photo below, of a mother outside Parkland school after the shooting.  I noticed the smudge on her forehead: not only was the shooting on Valentine's Day but it was also Ash Wednesday, a holy day of repentance for many Christians.  The ashes are reminders of death.