I was reading Lileks the other night, and thought I would check out the excerpts from his new book. One passage in particular caught my eye.

In another era these items would have been a symbol of shame. In the Seventies they thrived. Everyone knew someone whose mom was into this crap, and stuffed the house with home-made bric-a-brac that just looked stupid and weird. Owls were often involved. Owls made out of pipecleaners and elbow macaroni....

Now, this put me in mind of a similar passage in an old polemic I once read, one that might be worth your time.

The evidence of a pathetic, perpetually thwarted urgency to make something, is one of the most touching aspects of the relics and records of our immediate ancestors. There exist still in the death area about the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that furnish the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs.

That’s H.G. Wells in “The World Set Free”.

These homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better could have lived in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little rectangle of land called ‘the garden’, containing usually a prop for drying clothes and a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin, full of egg-shells, cinders and such-like refuse. Now that one may go about this region in comparative security – for the London radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportions – it is possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some effort to make.

Makes Lileks look gentle, to a degree.

Here it is a poor little plank summer-house, here it is a ‘fountain’ of bricks and oyster-shells, here a ‘rockery’, here a ‘workshop’. And in the houses everywhere there are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings. These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the walls of the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the poor buried instincts that struggled up towards the light. P156

So much for Wells’s observations on the indomitable human Will to Putter. Friedrich Nietzsche, call your decorator. What I find REALLY interesting, strictly as a prognostic curiosity, is the rest of the book. As best I can tell, Wells wrote the first fictional depiction of a catastrophic atomic war, and he did it back in,... wait for it….1913.

Naturally, it has a kind of fusty-archaic tone to it, but I give the man props for even KNOWING about atomic power…in 1913.

Of course, being Wells, he couldn’t just give you a rousing adventure story. Rousing, this book is definitely not. He was interested in big ideas, he was a concept guy.

The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinize the prices current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place of his father’s eight) that he thought the world had changed very little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well with them….p16

I kind of like the early “globalization” imagery. As for the dismaying lack of imagination, it was thought by Wells to be a real threat to long term human survival.

At the close of the nineteenth century, as a multitude of passages in the literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about the sky at him , was an amazing and perhaps culminating exercise of his intelligence and his intellectual courage. The air of ‘Nunc Dimitis’ sounds in some of these writings. ‘The great things are discovered,’ wrote Gerald Brown in his summary of the nineteenth century. ‘For us there remains little but the working out of detail.’p19

Lest we feel all smug and superior, let me point out that similar things were still being said back in the good ol' seventies...

In hearings before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress in 1976, many of the experts on technology even suggested that diminishing returns might have set in across the board and that America’s great technological strides of the past would probably never be repeated...Jeremy Rifkin "Entropy" P 85

Back to Mr. Wells, an incomparably more accomplished thinker...

All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the amount of energy that men were able to command was continually increasing. Applied to warfare that meant that the power to inflict a blow, the power to destroy, was continually increasing. There was no increase whatever in the ability to escape. Every sort of passive defence, armour, fortifications and so forth, was being outmastered by this tremendous increase on the destructive side.

Destruction was becoming so facile that any little body of malcontents could use it; it was revolutionizing the problems of police and internal rule. Before the last war began it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city. These facts were before the minds of everybody; the children in the streets knew them. P74

Okay, so prior to the commencement of World War I, we have H.G. Wells worrying about asymmetrical warfare, and weapons of mass destruction, i.e. handbag nukes.

For many years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this stringency the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world’s roads was instantaneous. In three years the frightful armored monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel. At the same time a new impetus was given to aviation by the the relatively enormous power for weight of the atomic engine…PP 33-34

Sounds nice, eh? Naturally, there has to be a worm in the apple...

This spectacle of feverish enterprise was productivity, this crowding flight of happy and fortunate rich people – every great city was as if a crawling ant-hill had suddenly taken wing – was the bright side of the opening phase of the new epoch in human history. Beneath that brightness was a gathering darkness, a deepening dismay. If there was a vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of values.

These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night.

Clearly, industrial capitalism would be inadequate to the task of building an equitable social order, be it ever so blessed with cheap energy.

Between these high lights accumulated disaster, social catastrophe. The coal mines were manifestly doomed to closure at no very distant date, the vast amount of capital invested in oil was becoming unsaleable, millions of coal miners, steel workers upon the old lines, vast swarms of unskilled or under-skilled workers in innumerable occupations were being flung out of employment by the superior efficiency of the new machinery, the rapid fall in the cost of transit was destroying high land values at every centre of population, the value of existing house property had become problematical, gold was undergoing headlong depreciation, all the securities upon which the credit of the world rested were slipping and sliding, banks were tottering, the stock exchanges were scenes of feverish panic…P 35

It’s interesting that Wells anticipates Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” here, but not especially surprising. Most of his generation lived through very interesting times, indeed.
If cold fusion had panned out, we might perhaps be facing these problems today, though hopefully with more flexibility.

For there had been no foresight of these things. There had been no attempt anywhere to even compute the probable dislocations this flood of inexpensive energy would produce in human affairs…P 36

On the other hand, we’re not out of the woods yet. If advanced nanotech is one tenth as disruptive and transformational as predicted, then we are still in for a rough ride.

The world was so little governed that with the very coming of plenty, in the full tide of an incalculable abundance, when everything necessary to satisfy human needs and everything necessary to realize such a will and purpose as existed then in human hearts was already at hand, one has still to tell of hardship, famine, anger, confusion, conflict and incoherent suffering….

Under this tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security,, plenty, the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in her very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court, the world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent litigation. PP 36-37

How very prescient. Intellectual property disputes. Being a one-worlder socialist, Wells thought of patent law as an outmoded impediment to progress.

I’ll skip lightly over the nuclear holocaust section. It reads rather oddly today ( the bombs are dropped from open cockpit biplanes, Paris, London and Berlin are destroyed). The interested reader can go here to reach a free online version. Extra ice cream includes a preface by the great man himself, circa 1921.

Here and now, let’s just say that we pull through by the skin of our teeth, and the disaster provides an impetus toward the founding of a truly just society. Gotta love those happy endings!

Men spread now, with the whole power of the race to aid them, into every available region of the earth…an astonishing dispersal of habitations has begun…They lie out in the former deserts, those long wasted sunbaths of the race, they tower amidst eternal snows, they hide in remote islands and bask on broad lagoons.

For a time the whole tendency of mankind was to desert the river valleys in which the race had been cradled for half a million years, but now that the war against Flies has been waged so successfully that this pestilential branch of life is nearly extinct, they are returning thither with a renewed appetite for gardens laced with watercourses, for pleasant living amidst islands and houseboats and bridges, and for nocturnal lanterns reflected by the sea. P 150

Is eradicating the fly ecologically sound? Where were the Peter Singers of 1913?
I do like the houseboats, though…

‘We have so many men working now,’ said Fowler. ‘I suppose at present there must be at least a thousand thinking hard, observing, experimenting, for one who did so in nineteen hundred.’
‘Not counting those who keep records?’
‘Not counting those. Of course the present indexing of research is in itself a very big work and it is only now that we are getting it properly done. But already we are feeling the benefit of that…Here…we have our copy of the encyclopaedic index – every week sheets are taken out and replaced by fresh sheets with new results that are brought to us by the aeroplanes of the Research Department. It is an index that becomes continually truer. There was never anything like it before.’ P 169

Hypertext! Well, no. But still...

The next sciences to yield great harvests now will be psychology and natural physiology….and we shall go on to mould our bodies and our bodily feelings and personal reactions as boldly as we begin now to carve mountains…P 186

‘I do not see,’ said Karenin, ‘that there is any final limit to man’s power of self-modification.’ ‘There is none,’ said Fowler.

‘And then the inconveniences of age and those diseases of the system that come with years; steadily you drive them back and you lengthen and lengthen the years that stretch between the passionate tumults of youth and the contractions of senility. Man who used to weaken and die as his teeth decayed now looks forward to a continually lengthening, continually fuller term of years. And all those parts of him that once gathered evil against him, the vestigial structures and odd treacherous corners of his body, you know better and better how to deal with. You carve his body about and leave it re-modelled and unscarred…

If only the boy Leon had picked up THIS book, instead of “Brave New World”. Ah, well.

‘And how is it with heredity?’ asked Karenin. Fowler told him of the mass of enquiry accumulated and arranged by the genius of Tchen, who was beginning to define clearly the laws of inheritance and how the sex of children and the complexions and many of the parental qualities could be determined.

‘He can actually DO…?’

‘It is still so to speak a mere laboratory triumph,’ said Fowler, ‘but tomorrow it will be practicable.’…

1913. Genetic Engineering. Yep.

‘These old bodies, these old animal limitations, all this earthy inheritance of gross inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shriveled cocoon from an imago. And for my own part when I hear of these things I feel like that – like a wet crawling new moth that still fears to spread its wings. Because where do these things take us?’

‘Beyond humanity,’ said Kahn.

H.G. Wells, transhumanist.

‘No,’ said Karenin. ‘We can still keep our feet upon the earth that made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no longer chained to us like the ball of a galley slave….

Or not.

‘In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated unfamiliar gases and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will reach out….Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glittering up into the sky, twinkling and glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows it up. They may succeed out there; they may perish, but other men will follow them…. PP 187-189

Damn, but I wish he was alive today.