from Brendan

“One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.”

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Pushing my broom a few weeks ago at the German Society of Winnipeg, a building that is itself an anachronism of a soon-to-be-past generation of immigrant culture, I passed my own time listening to a podcast of H.G. Wells’ 1896 book The Time Machine. Having been exposed only to moviefied, pop-culturized and parodied versions of the story until now, I was surprised to discover that the original was free of pulp and paradoxes; instead it is a muscular work of scientific and philosophical speculation on the nature of civilization as an ephemeral and tenuous construct, and human beings as one of many species subject to constant change and eventual extinction.

Just as every society has its insular beliefs about the naturalness and normalcy of its own specific social and cultural practices, so did the England where Wells was living and writing in 1896. Women couldn’t vote because their sphere of action and influence was determined by God to be domestic, and besides, it was irrefutably common knowledge then that unlike men who are ruled by reason, women are ruled by unreliable emotion. Bloodletting was considered to be a highly efficacious medical practice for combating illnesses, restoring balance to the four humors in the body; doctors didn’t know then that the reason most patients were passing out and some dying was from having their immune systems weakened at the very moment they needed them to work the hardest. Rules of etiquette, specifically for women, had reached such levels of artifice and complexity that to eat a peach at a dinner party meant performing the equivalent of Japanese Kabuki Theatre just to be able to leave with your reputation intact.

It’s an illusion of permanence that casts such temporary social constructs into concrete molds and then drops them on the heads of potentially rational people in a society. Any quick survey of the history of religion, or fashion for that matter, should dispel the myth of normalcy, yet it continually ends up being the driving force of social discourse. Politicians invoke it, educators inculcate it, media exploits it, religious leaders pontificate it, gossip flourishes by it. But its not the case. Believing in normalcy strikes whole populations dumb with complacent fatalism and makes them incapable of addressing and correcting fundamental misconceptions and inequalities. It was precisely this sort of tunnel vision that Wells took issue with and tried to correct by applying a lens wide enough to bring the surrounding context into focus. He uses his time traveler to demonstrate that nothing is static; political parties, etiquette, religions, languages, cultures, civilizations, even the human form; all have undergone countless permutations since the first hominids stood upright, and to believe that this process has stopped because now WE are here is, apart from fantasy, willful ignorance.

The British Empire, for example, of which Wells was a homeland citizen, no longer exists. Dismantled by the tectonic forces of population, philosophy, politics, education, war and economics, the world-dominating empire could do nothing to hold itself together when the time came. Obviously Wells couldn’t have known this would happen during his lifetime, but the fact that it did served to confirm his speculation that what we have at any given moment will not stick around for long. Reeling from the disaster that happened recently in Italy, Italians can unfortunately attest to this fact, that when an earthquake strikes concrete will go back to being just a pile of rocks containing the broken bones of the past.

Thinking this way has certainly crushed many a sensitive soul, because if it’s true that everything is impermanent then what’s the point? Yet Wells’ project can hardly be seen as pessimistic. The language used by the time traveler to describe his experience is so full of invention and wonder and terror; powerful existential impulses that gesture more toward the mythological than the material.

“I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown, now green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed—melting and flowing under my eyes.”

As unsettling as his experience is, of the earth rapidly changing and of his own civilization disappearing, it isn’t a good enough reason for him to take cyanide and be done with the absurdity of existence. Finding out that he is the last of homo sapiens didn’t alleviate the burden of consciousness which has, at least since the beginning of recorded history, looked outside itself, seen that life exists, and then pursues the fundamental questions. Since the time traveler finds himself among the Eloi and the Morlocks, he sets about trying to figure out what they are, how they came to be, how they function, and what his place is among them.

The Eloi and the Morlocks it turns out, are us—not just in the straightforward sense of literary analogy—they are us far into the future of the evolutionary process, which has continued the transformation of single-celled organism to sea creature to small mammal to monkey to man to the Eloi and Morlocks. What sent that evolutionary ball rolling thousands of years earlier, from human to post-human, was a specific civil structure present in Wells’ time, determined by greedy, anachronistic and hierarchical politics and culture. The time traveler reasons that the profound genetic split between the two future species happened as a result of the profound social split from his own time, between the middle and working classes.

“Proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you—and wildly incredible!—and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way…. Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?”

At the time Wells wrote, the class division in England was much more than ideological; it was indicative of vastly different living and working environments. The golden age of the industrial revolution had no use yet for the future concept of pollution, but the men and women working inhumanly long hours in the manufactories and inhabiting the dirty milltowns were totally immersed in it, living inside it like a biosphere. The middle and upper classes never had to dirty their hands or lungs with the sort of work done by their inferiors, and they would have lived either on the opposite end of town, as far away from the mills as possible, or in other cities entirely. Since daily conditions of environment were totally distinct between the working and middle classes, including: strenuousness of labor, quality and quantity of food, leisure time and activity, importance of hygiene, availability of medical care, exclusivity of education, and quality of housing; and considering that these classes were mostly separate from one another socially, sexually and even linguistically, it’s not implausible to suggest that over anthropological time the two groups would become more and more distinct, and that over evolutionary time, if the split persisted, eventually the two might become distinct species.

“Gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals: that my graceful children of the Upper-world were not the sole descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene, nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the ages.”

Before the time traveler had his first run-in with the Morlocks, it seemed to him that the Eloi had gained the full benefits of humankind’s potential to progress beyond material and social struggles. They had all the food, clothing, housing and carefree time they could possibly want, their language had become far less complex because it was no longer necessary for things like problem solving, argumentation or invention, and they seemed to live in a blissful state at the end of a rainbow. Then he encountered the Morlocks. They lived underground in total darkness, working the machinery that kept the Eloi carefree and well fed, had no vestige of human language or culture, and they looked like and lived like animals. If the two civilizations were mutually independent then there wouldn’t be much to worry about, but theirs was a brutal interdependance, locked into place far in the past by social contract and now by evolved and inextricable biological necessity.

“For the first time,” explains the time traveler, “I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!…. I saw mankind housed in splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them engaged in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical.”

This is what he thought early on when he saw that the Eloi lived without hunger, sickness and social unrest, but later, after discovering their true relation to the Morlocks, he recognized that the reality was much more unsettling than he’d first imagined.

“But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the change. What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall…. So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry… Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.”

The middle class’ constant push to attain more comfort, ease and security, the same pursuit we are steadfastly engaged in now, eventually bred out their ability to take care of themselves. The Eloi had become fully dependant on the Morlocks to run all the mechanisms of survival, and as a result they’d lost the intellectual ability to realize that the Morlocks had become dependant on them for food. They’d become as carefree, oblivious and nutritious as cows.

The Eloi didn’t necessarily become a-intellectual because there was a decline in the quality of public education, they lost their intellect because it wasn’t necessary any longer. It’s a scary idea and should be taken as a serious caution, maybe even more for us now than in Wells’ day, considering that many millions more are already much further down the evolutionary road in terms of survival-free living, which depends on the steady labor of developing nations to fill our homes with clothing, furniture, appliances, electronics; most of things the affluent West has come to rely on as necessities.

As polemical as the story is, directed specifically at the uncritical expansion of progress and the extreme inequality present in 19^th Century England, the truly remarkable aspect of Wells’ story is his scientific honesty and sense of biological altruism.

Just barely escaping having his ontological status downgraded by the Morlocks from sentient being to food source, the time traveler desperately throws his machine into random gear and propels forward millions of years further into the future. Passing swiftly through time like this he witnesses the sun dying, constellations changing shape, landscape transforming, species disappearing, until finally he stops the machine and finds himself on a strange beach, surrounded by enormous crab-like creatures. The experience is overwhelming to say the least.

“I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect…. It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over.”

The sobering point is that beyond anthropological and even somewhat measurable evolutionary time, there is geological time, to which the entire cosmos is subject. The sun will literally die and every condition on earth will change; first supporting certain species for periods of time, then supporting other species for other periods of time, and then maybe not at all and never again after that. Such temporality, says astronomer and scientist Carl Sagan in his book The Varieties of Scientific Experience, has theological implications.

“When we understand something of the astronomical dynamics, the evolution of worlds, we recognize that worlds are born and worlds die, they have lifetimes just as humans do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the cosmos if there is a great deal of life… And if, as I will speculate later, life and perhaps even intelligence is a cosmic commonplace, then it must follow that there is massive destruction, obliteration of whole planets, that routinely occurs, frequently, throughout the universe. Well, that is a different view than the traditional Western sense of a deity carefully taking pains to promote the well-being of intelligent creatures.”

Facing this vast chasm of non-human meaning, the time traveler is at least certain of one thing, that human beings are neither the pinnacle nor purpose of the existence of the universe. Nonetheless he doesn’t conclude that nothing matters. The experience of suffering, for example, although it is temporary it is also very real, taking the daily forms of hunger, disease, slavery, abuse, murder. Conversely joy and love also exist, giving people meaning, purpose and something to unite around. With a recalibration of our anthropocentric perspective on life in the universe, and with a view to how our current socio-political configurations might affect future generations, real changes can be made to solve serious human problems that can actually be solved, making whatever this life is better for everybody.

After he returns home, takes a bath, eats a hearty meal and reports his findings to a skeptical audience, the time traveler decides to get back on his machine and disappear again into the infinitude, leaving the narrator to sum up what he’d been able to glean from their conversations.

“He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the advancement of mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.”

-30-