Past Future: Evolution of the Future

“I move from a backyard to Cosmopolis…"
H.G. Wells

In the fall of 1884, 18-year-old Bertie Wells took the short train ride from Bromley to London, and became an alien invading another world.

One morning he walked across Kensington Gardens to an imposing building of red brick and creamy terra cotta, with its display of figures depicting the seven ages of man. He signed his name inside its entrance, crossed the marble mosaic floors, bypassed the wide central stairway and took the lift up to the biological laboratories on the fourth and top floor. It was, he wrote in his autobiography, “one of the great days of my life.”

Normal School of Science 1880s

It was his first day as a student at the Normal School of Science. The building was part of an impressive complex that included the Albert Hall and the magnificent new Natural History Museum. There were domes and arcades, spires and turrets all around it.  It was a deliberate and still unfinished cluster of buildings housing major institutions of the arts and sciences, constructed on what had recently been farmland.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 had been held nearby. Housed in the Crystal Palace, the largest enclosure of glass supported by cast iron ever built to that time, it dazzled visitors (including Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and Charlotte Bronte) with the latest technology. The Exhibition was very popular and profitable, with those profits devoted to building some of these South Kensington structures, including the Normal School. This area was now London’s new center of knowledge, especially in the sciences.

Natural History Museum in South Kensington today. A ceremony
was held here when Huxley retired from teaching.

On the top floor Wells found large laboratories equipped with scientific instruments. He could look down over the balcony onto the glass dome of the lecture theatre below. But it would be the labs, and especially a smaller lecture theatre adjacent to the labs that would become his most important focus. There, surrounded by black shelves of mammalian skeletons and skulls, Thomas Henry Huxley would talk.

T.H. Huxley was the Dean of the Normal School of Science, which he had advocated and created. For decades he had been the country’s chief advocate for science. “...he made a profession of science,” wrote his biographer Adrian Desmond. “With him the ‘scientist’ was born.”

T.H. Huxley

He was also a persistent advocate for education in the sciences at all levels, and this time not just for the ruling classes. In 1871 he fused together several separate schools to provide a broad science education. A decade later he gave it an official name, the Normal School of Science, an unsuccessful attempt to suggest the élan of the French Ecole Normale. Shortly after Wells’ time it was renamed the Royal College of Science.

Wells was assigned to Huxley’s basic biology course. “Here were microscopes, dissections, models, diagrams close to the objects they elucidated, specimens, museums, ready answers to questions, explanations discussions,” Wells remembered. “Here I was under the shadow of Huxley, the acutest observer, the ablest generalizer, the great teacher, the most lucid and valiant of controversialists... The year I spent in Huxley’s class, was beyond all question, the most educational year of my life.”

Huxley was one of the most famous men in England, and he inspired awe in his students, including Wells, who was told that beyond a curtain at the back of the auditorium, Charles Darwin himself had sometimes waited, listening to Huxley lecture.

In later life, Wells still wrote of Huxley and Darwin as figures representing his own ideals. “These two were very great men. They thought boldly, carefully and simply, they spoke and wrote fearlessly and plainly, they lived modestly and decently; they were mighty intellectual liberators.”

Wells and his fellow students sought out and read Huxley’s books and articles. Partly due to the structure of the course, partly because Huxley was ill much of that year, others carried out the classroom teaching and the demonstrations. Wells himself never had so much as a conversation with Huxley. He recalled a single morning when they exchanged greetings.

But Huxley gave the guiding lectures. There’s a photograph of Wells’ mimicking Huxley’s habit of draping his arm around the upright skeleton of a gorilla as he talked. Those lectures were the center of the transformation Wells experienced that year. He felt an “extraordinary mental enlargement as my mind passed from the printed sciences within book covers to these intimate real things and then radiated outward to a realization that the synthesis of the sciences composed a vital interpretation of the world."

This synthesis was implicit in the program Huxley had devised for the Normal School. In 1834 British philosopher William Whewell had argued that
the study of the material world was being fragmented, and practitioners of specific sciences didn’t know enough about how their findings related to other sciences. He proposed a new word to describe students of collective scientific knowledge. In an analogy to artists, he wanted to call them “scientists.”

Huxley would not have called his students that—he hated the name. (So did others. It didn’t become fully accepted until World War II, and by then it meant something more general.) But by Whewell’s definition, Wells was one of the first to be deliberately educated as a scientist.

Wells absorbed Huxley’s belief that science was systematic common sense—“common sense at its best,” as Huxley said, “that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.” It was an attitude, a procedure, a process.

Wells later described Huxley's course as "a vivid sustained attempt to see life clearly and to see it whole, to see into it, to see its interconnections, to find out, so far as terms were available, what it is, where it came from, what it was doing, and where it was going."

Beyond his advocacy of science, his years as an educator and his own scientific accomplishments (mostly in comparative anatomy), Huxley remains historically significant for his role in securing the legitimacy of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, particularly when it was first proposed.

What Wells learned from Huxley, particularly about Darwinian evolution, informed his thinking and his imagining for his long and varied career. Huxley’s interpretation of Darwinian evolution became the single most important and fruitful idea of Wells’ professional life, and the guiding influence on his vision of the future.

In turn, through the ways that Wells developed and expressed this core idea, it has become what we accept as the determining factor of “the future.” The future is a consequence of how humanity responds to the challenges of the present. The future evolves.

Darwin’s theory had its own history, much of it written in Huxley’s lifetime, and nearly all of it related to the age of the machine. It started with geology, and the discovery of deep time.


William Smith was a late 18th century English surveyor who took on two typical jobs of his profession in the industrial age: he did an underground survey for a coal mine, and another for a proposed canal that would link the coalfields to another canal.

The industrial age required a great deal of digging. Smith started noticing the ribbons of different colors and composition at different depths, revealed by cutting into the earth. He guessed they might be continuous, not just in one site but in many, and he made observations elsewhere that tended to confirm this. He had discovered the basic geological feature of strata.

“Because of his hands-on experience as a canal and mine surveyor,” writes Keith Thomson in his book Before Darwin, “Smith was able to tease apart the structure of the earth in ways that no theorist could.”

Smith's geological map of England

Others involved in the study of mining and minerals in Italy and Germany had also noticed the strata. Smith soon became consumed with the study of strata and the fossils found within them. By the early 19th century he had mapped the strata across England. He published a book supporting his theory that each level could be identified according to the particular fossils found in them.

This was an early step in the unassuming science of geology that in a few short decades would culminate in Darwin’s theory. It also illustrates the less obvious relationship that 19th century science had with industry.

With its need for machines, metals, energy sources and transportation, that industry fostered advances in physics and chemistry seems logical. But it also played a role in expanding knowledge in geology and the life sciences. All of these in turn transformed knowledge about the universe and time, and the history of the planet.

Before and even during the industrial age, there was no actual profession of scientist, or geologist or physicist (another word Whewell coined.) There were “natural philosophers” in the major universities, but most science was conducted by individuals with the income and leisure to devote to their researches. During the industrial age, certain individuals of lesser means went beyond their jobs to make immense scientific discoveries.

So for example, in puzzling out why the major theories on conservation of energy should have emerged more or less simultaneously from a number of individuals in different countries, historian of science Thomas Kuhn found that most of them were either trained as engineers or were working on the development of new engines when they made their contributions.

England’s leading energy theorist, Lord Kelvin, was an engineer who also worked with industry to research specific technologies. A number of other discoveries, including the speed of light, were eventual results of attempts to solve practical problems for industry, such as the need for better and more efficient machines and sources of energy.

Then there were enthusiasts like William Smith, who in trying to accumulate knowledge useful to their jobs, joined up in a chain of observations and theories that changed how we view the past.

Portrait of Lyle 1840

Such pioneer studies by Smith, Scotsman James Hutton and others caught the attention of another Scotsman, Charles Lyell, as he studied law at Oxford. While beginning his law practice, Lyell also became fascinated by new fossil finds and their apparent mysteries, such as fossils of freshwater animals found below a layer of sea-bottom sediment.

Lyle gave up the law and traveled through France and Sicily for his own systematic investigations. His detailed studies established that the types of fossils in each strata of the earth were relatively uniform, and that the lower strata contained the fossils of extinct life-forms. The deeper you dug, the more primitive those life-forms tended to be.

In June of 1830, Lyell published the first of his three volume work, Principles of Geology, which not only established geology as a science, but proved case by case (for Lyell put his original training in the law to good use) that in order for the world to be as it is, it must be many times older than was officially believed. Fossils of the same type appeared in strata separated by millions of years of volcanic activity.

For the next decade or so, the work of other geologists continued to add evidence supporting Lyell's interpretations. The earth was much, much older than anyone had previously believed it to be.

young Darwin

Charles Darwin read Lyell's first volume before he left on his famous voyage to South America on the Beagle in 1831, when he conducted the field research that provided his evidence for evolution. He carried it with him and thought of it as he gazed at the Andes.

In the second volume, which Darwin received while in South America, Lyell concluded that the earth itself had evolved. When Darwin returned with his plant and animal specimens and painstakingly worked out the details of his theory of biological evolution, he and Lyell exchanged ideas and theories, and became friends.

But Lyell had already given Darwin the one element he most needed to formulate his theory: time. The long ages of what we now call geological time were more than enough to permit the slow play of accident and incident, and the eventual effects of many momentary dramas of life and death, of survival and generation, of adaptation and change, implied by Darwin's theory of the sculpting of life by environmental forces and how life-forms adapted to them.

Lyell’s third volume even suggested that there had been evolution in life forms. The general notion of evolution had been in the air for several generations—in fact, evolution was in a way the Darwin family business. Charles’ grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had been a principal proponent of the idea.

After returning from his voyage, Darwin poured over his specimens and began working out his theory of natural selection.  He essentially had it by 1838.  But it would be nearly 20 years before he published it.

When Darwin first conceived of his theory, T.H. Huxley was 13. Huxley was born in 1825, in only slightly better circumstances than H.G. Wells would be, above a butcher’s shop in a small village outside London. His father, an educated member of the middle class, was a teacher down on his luck. The son would have to make his own way in the world.

At 15, young Huxley was an apothecary’s apprentice in a dockside slum during a time of high unemployment. He saw the suffering of mothers and children who not only could not buy his medicines, they couldn’t afford food. This experience marked him for life.

Huxley was a poorly paid naturalist for the Royal Navy when he met the independently wealthy Lyell. A few years later as an up and coming man of science in London, he met the independently wealthy Charles Darwin, who suggested he review his latest paper.

Darwin had delayed announcing his theory in part because of the furor he knew it would cause. To assert that humans weren’t specially created but were descended from earlier animals was contrary to church doctrine, at a time when there was little or no separation of church and state in England, and the church leaders were often members of the hereditary ruling class.

But his hand was forced by a former railroad surveyor who was so drawn to the flowers and insects along the routes he was mapping that he gave up his quiet Welsh countryside to become a naturalist along the Amazon.

Wallace

He was Alfred Russel Wallace. Literally in a fever, he suddenly crystallized his own theory of natural selection and sent his paper to a dumbfounded Darwin, hoping that Darwin might show it to Lyell if he didn’t think it was crazy.

Wallace used an industrial age metaphor to explain his idea of natural selection. It was a natural feedback system, like the self-correcting centrifugal governor of the steam engine.

This devastating letter prompted Darwin to immediately publish his theory, in a joint paper with Wallace. Darwin finally finished his book illustrating it, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. He remained sequestered on his estate, suffering from a series of debilitating illnesses. He relied on others to represent his views in the inevitable public debate.

His most effective champion was T. H. Huxley, by then a figure of some renown. Huxley, writes biographer Desmond, “had a huge, multi-talented intellect and seem to run ten lives simultaneously.” He was conducting his own scientific researches, particularly as more and more fossil animals were coming to him, uncovered in the growing number of new coal mines across England.  He eventually theorized that birds had evolved from some warm-blooded dinosaurs, an insight not generally accepted until well into the 20th century.

Huxley 1857

But Huxley’s chief fame came as “Darwin’s bulldog.” His celebrated confrontation with an aristocratic bishop of the time however was only part of his defense of Darwinian evolution. In addition to essays and reviews in scientific journals and the popular press, he applied his clarity of expression to a series of talks that were wildly popular with working class audiences.

In his lectures to workers, as in his lectures to students, Huxley stuck to science.  But the political implications of evolution were clear. Evolution itself means change over time, whatever causes that change.  It meant things were not the same forever in the natural world--some species died out, others appeared.  Perhaps change was possible in the order of things in human civilization, too. The future might be different.  This is one way that evolution was revolutionary.

Darwin proposed natural selection as the major mechanism of evolutionary change. Features of a particular environment sustain life-forms: the sources of nourishment, the climate, the predators etc. When the environment changes in crucial ways, these life forms must adjust and adapt, or die out.

Major adaptations over generations might be a different color to fool predators, a different beak to extract new kinds of seeds, or a new ability like flying or communicating. The process of establishing such adaptations begins with the right random mutation in one or some organisms that allow them to flourish in the new conditions. If this adaptation is passed on to their descendants, they may become fixed and essential characteristics.

Sometimes the adaptation leads to such large changes that a new species evolves. And they in turn become a new factor in the environment, to which other life-forms must adapt. It is not the only engine of change, Darwin cautioned, but the chief one.

The enormous span of time necessary for this process wasn’t the only mind-boggling challenge to orthodox belief, or even conventional modes of thinking. The establishment clergy saw that the process needed no divine intervention or even a guiding intelligence. Others (including for awhile, Huxley himself) resisted the implication that there was no final purpose, and that it cast nature as a war of all against all, all of the time.

Finally, there was a repugnance to the assertion that humans were descendants of some grubby, ugly, grunting ape species.

 The image of the ape in the mid 19th century was relatively new. Londoners had only been able to see ape species (mostly from Asia) at the Zoological Gardens since 1847. The first live African gorilla wasn’t seen in England until 1855, and even then it wasn’t recognized as a gorilla until it was dead. Terrifying stories and images regarding apes and gorillas, often with little basis in reality, had filled this void.

Yet primate fossils that Huxley studied clearly showed the relationship, bone by bone. It was all in the anatomy—that primates and the races of humanity were not very different.

The classic caricature of Darwin as ape/man

It was the celebrated insult by Bishop Wilberforce during their public debate—taunting Huxley by asking him if an ape was his grandfather or grandmother—that remains the defining moment of Huxley’s fame. Huxley replied that if he had to chose whether to have an ape as a grandfather or a wealthy and powerful man who injects “ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”

Over the next decades, there were complex political, class and racial undercurrents and issues in the fierce controversies over Darwin’ theory, particularly once the United States Civil War revived the debate over African slaves. Despite Darwin’s careful, dispassionate and even tedious writings, the idea of natural selection, which in part arose from ideas outside biological science, was fraught and emotional—as well over a century later, in some quarters it still is. In his time, Huxley was its most wily and eloquent defender, especially as it pertained to the integrity of science.

In his prime, Huxley was a tall, charismatic figure with black hair and fiery black eyes. By the time he stood in the same room as the young H.G. Wells, he was stocky and sallow, his eyes dimmed to brown, and his hair silver. He was so ill that he only made it through that year with the help of a drug another late 19th century figure would make famous (although a fictional one): cocaine.

First Royal College of Science reunion dinner, chaired by
H.G. Wells in 1908

Huxley would have at least one more significant moment, but Wells’ class at the Normal School would be the end of his 30 years in education. He was Wells’ first teacher, and Wells was one of his last students.

Arguably Wells became the most important. Huxley’s interpretation of Darwin would motivate and guide much of Wells’ influential work over the next half century, including his views on the urgency of the present. He would first take that version of Darwin’s theory about the deep past, and apply it to the deep future.

But Wells had a twisting road ahead before he got that far. His other science teachers were much less inspiring than Huxley, and he got swept up in the Debating Society, and in the school magazine he helped to start.

 Between excited explorations of London, including observing discussions in the homes of prominent socialists, he fell into reveries as he poured over Carlyle, Blake, Shakespeare, Shelley, the Buddha and Confucius in the Art Library and other adjacent institutions in the South Kensington complex.

His lethargy may also have resulted from not enough to eat.  He was living on a weekly stipend that was part of his scholarship, but he often ran short and had to skip meals.

In the end he failed to graduate with his class. He soon got enough of a degree to teach science, but at his first school he got badly injured and seriously ill. At first his mystery illness looked terminal, and he had months to contemplate time and the precariousness of life.

He convalesced at Up Park, where again he raided its library, but with new intent. “I was reading... poetry and imaginative work with an attention to language and style that I had never given these aspects of literature before.”

Back in London another teaching position followed (A.A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh, was one of his pupils) and other jobs in education (co-authoring textbooks, working for a correspondence school.) These all ended with another near-fatal fit of illness. Such work seemed to be killing him. His tentative attempts to write for publication now seemed his only alternative. He had to become a writer, but how?

He knew it should be possible to make a living at it. After all, there were many new magazines and newspapers to respond to the demands of a growing literate public.

And there was great public interest in science, his field of expertise. Though the amateur was fading from science, the tradition was still strong, and London readers were keenly following the scientific news of the day, from the latest inventions to the reports on expeditions to previously unexplored reaches of the globe.

Science was even fashionable. During the height of geological discoveries by Lyle and others, weekend rock hunting and fossil finding excursions were popular entertainment. Fashionable Londoners flocked to the zoological gardens, to gawk at the animals from around the world. They nicknamed it “the zoo,” as in the lyrics of a popular song by music hall performer The Great Vance: “The OK thing to do on Sunday afternoon is to toddle in the zoo!”

Wells struggled for awhile, but then he got a tip from a book by J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan. Barrie advised writers for the new journals to anchor their articles in the details of real life, and use the ordinary and familiar to spark their musings.

Liberating moments are highly individual to each writer, and this fairly pedestrian advice was the eccentric key that opened the floodgates. Science, art, experience, style—everything coalesced in this moment.

Wells circa 1891

Wells suddenly became a prolific and popular writer for London journals. At first he was a latter day Boz, the Dickens persona who wittily chronicled London life, often anonymously, and sometimes—as Dickens had done—in the guise of a comic character.

Thanks to the timely rise of the ambitious and generous Pall Mall Gazette, he also became a book critic who won a friend in Joseph Conrad with a sensitive review, and a drama critic who won a friend in Henry James for the same reason. He found himself walking home with fellow reviewer George Bernard Shaw from comedies by Oscar Wilde—without having met him, Wilde had furthered Wells career with a compliment on an early article to an important editor.

But for a longer, more ambitious work, Wells could not yet turn to his own life. He hadn’t yet been out of England, and his experience in a few places in his own country was very limited. He had to explore more imagined worlds.

Wells returned to an idea he sensed was golden. As a college debater he had explored the concept of time as a fourth dimension, equal to the dimensions of space. Would it be possible to travel through time, just as you can travel through space?

 He tried to write a story about it for his school magazine, but he couldn’t sustain it. Again he tried, for the National Observer, but when the publication changed hands the last installments were mercifully cancelled.

William Henley had commissioned the Observer attempt but agreed it wasn’t working. Now editor of the New Review, he encouraged Wells to try it again, but to make it more of a believable story. Could Wells invent a time-traveling character that readers identify with—someone they would want to accompany on this adventure?

Again, it was a key that unlocked the floodgates. Wells wrote and rewrote, with Henley urging him on. “It is so full of invention & the invention is so wonderful,” Henley enthused. “It must certainly make your reputation.”

First edition cover

It did more than that. In The Time Machine, Wells made the future as we know it. In its longest and most famous section, set in a far future, the novel dramatizes consequences of an aspect of the nineteenth century (and our time as well) as governed by T.H. Huxley’s interpretation of Darwinian evolution.

Almost every story of the future since has made this same assumption: the future is an effect of prior happenings, sometimes of plans and progress, but more often, a future of unintended consequences.

Such stories since have seldom been accomplished with such subtlety and rigor as this first one in modern narrative. It remains a revelation of the process that gets us to a future.

Darwin’s Origin of Species had been published only 25 years before Wells studied in Huxley’s class. Darwin himself had been dead for just two years. The debate on what Darwin meant, and its significance was still going on. Wells applied it all to the future, particularly what he had learned as a consequence of that most educational year of his life.

The skeleton of his story is Huxley’s version of how change happens from the past to the present. Wells uses it to tell us how change could happen from the present to the future, and how human consciousness could affect that future.

Next we explore that future in several (hopefully shorter) posts on The Time Machine.

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

Present: Safety Last

It's not news when somebody doesn't die.

That in a nutshell is why effective government programs go unnoticed.  Programs that increase health and safety for humans as well as laws that protect aspects of the natural environment don't make the news, because the news is that because of them, nothing happens.  The rivers run clean, people eat safe food and are nourished, and fewer people die on the highways.

But when these programs are killed or starved of funding, or the laws reversed or subverted, there will be a period in which the destruction begins and nobody notices.  Look how long it took, and how many lives sacrificed, before enough momentum developed to challenge corporate interests on guns, and how far society had to go in the wrong direction, to the point that laws limiting guns were stronger in the Wild West of the 1800s than they are now in many places.

Among the many damaging reversals going on now--too many to keep in consciousness--there's this one: after decades of fewer people dying or getting hurt on the highways, the kind of government efforts largely responsible for that life-saving trend are being killed by the current administration.

Thanks to government-imposed innovations like mandatory seatbelts and seatbelt laws, mandatory airbags and various other safety devices and design changes adopted according to government regulations, highway fatalities went down.  In 2011 they were at their lowest level since 1949, before superhighways and when there were vastly fewer cars.

But they've started going up, at least in the last two years for which there are final stats.  At least some of that is attributable to more vehicles, and drivers not using seatbelts.  But there are other troublesome trends.

Fortunately, at the same time, there are technologies that can further reduce accidents.  One identified problem was heavy trucks going way above speed limits, and unable to stop, leading to multiple car and multiple fatality accidents.  In 2016, the Obama administration proposed software for trucks that would automatically reduce speeds.  However, it was opposed by trucking companies, and the Transportation Department of the current administration has killed it.

And that's only one instance.  A recent AP story found this:

"An Associated Press review of the department’s rulemaking activities in Trump’s first year in office shows at least a dozen safety rules that were under development or already adopted have been repealed, withdrawn, delayed or put on the back burner. In most cases, those rules are opposed by powerful industries. And the political appointees running the agencies that write the rules often come from the industries they regulate."

Meanwhile, there have been no significant new safety rules adopted over the same period."
This is yet another example of conflict of interest so obvious that it amounts to openly saying that there is only one interest, that of powerful corporations.  The government is not representing the interests of citizens to be as safe as they could be.

It's not a hot political issue.  But it affects more people very directly than many so-called hot or important issues.  Driving is ordinary life.

It is also the government function that is most automatic, that in other times is least controversial.  Citizens who rail about big government somehow are not pleased when they learn that their food may be tainted, their drugs may be unsafe, their drinking water polluted, because of funding cuts and because of the kind of corruption that hands the power over regulation to monied interests, interested only in more money.

And it will take a lot of stories about a lot of people dying before this becomes an issue.  Again.  The AP story:

The sidelined rules would have, among other things, required states to conduct annual inspections of commercial bus operators, railroads to operate trains with at least two crew members and automakers to equip future cars and light trucks with vehicle-to-vehicle communications to prevent collisions. Many of the rules were prompted by tragic events.

“These rules have been written in blood,” said John Risch, national legislative director for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers. “But we’re in a new era now of little-to-no new regulations no matter how beneficial they might be. The focus is what can we repeal and rescind.”

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.