“It
is true; there is something fierce and ratlike and dangerous about Earthly
men.” Men Like Gods, H G Wells
In
one of his less celebrated fictions, Men
like Gods, H G Wells presents to us a most curious Utopia.[1] The citizenry of Utopia are, quite naturally,
more advanced than are those of 1921, the year in which the novel is set. Their Last Days of Confusion happily are left
behind them and they live governed by the Five Principles of Liberty: privacy,
free movement, unlimited knowledge, truthfulness, and free discussion and
criticism. Our hero Mr. Barnstaple, who along with a small group of other humans,
was transported to this other world is a subject of some interest to its
inhabitants and is the occasion for some mirth on Wells’ part. A Utopian girl, for instance, asks casusally,
"And you make love?" The answer, "Not habitually, I can assure
you," he said. "Not habitually."
Nature
in general is well regulated by the natives of this Utopia with some interesting
consequences. In describing the
ecological circumstances of Utopia, Wells provides us with a pithy overview of
the concept of the Balance of Nature. Since
the history of Utopia differs from the history of Earth in minor details only
(their Christ, for example, was put to death on the wheel, not the cross) one
can assume that the transition from the Balance of Nature to the Management of
Nature proceeded in a fashion that Wells finds to be useful for contemplating
the trajectory of nature on this Earth.
The
inquiry concerning nature comes amidst a suite of criticisms that the Earthlings
levied at the Utopians during a lengthy ethnographic exchange with their hosts. The first note of disapproval is sounded by
one Father Amerton (a caricature, some say, of G K Chesterton, though a review of
the novel at the time of identify him as a Father Vaughan). Father Amerton’s objection concerns the
regulation of human affairs and not those of nature. He had already expressed concern about the
means by which Utopians limited their populations to a mere 250 million
inhabitants. “Do you”, he fulminated at the Utopians, “respect the marriage
bond?” To which a Utopian responds, “In
Utopia there are no bonds.” Pressing them further our priest concludes that
“you have abolished the family.” Always,
it seems, quick with the quippy response he is told that in Utopia the family,
in fact, is “enlarged and glorified…until it embraced the whole world.” Finally, after accusing our free-loving
Utopians of bestial promiscuity, a Utopian concluded that Father Amerton
suffered from an inflamed and diseased sexual imagination, which would be, on
the morrow “examined and dealt with.”
Mr
Freddy Mush was next to voice his concerns.
“There had been”, he declared, “something very ancient and beautiful
called the ‘Balance of Nature’ which the scientific methods of Utopia had
destroyed.” What this Balance of Nature
was, precisely, “neither the Utopians nor Mr Barnstable were able understood
all that clearly.” Mr Mush in a familiar
sounding exasperation known to those of us who seek to impose definition of
this hefty but nebulous idea finally sputtered “I hold by the swallows.” He elaborated that there were no swallows to
be seen in Utopia because there were neither gnats nor midges. The Utopians had systematically exterminated
these flies with some predicable ecological consequences – although apparently they
maintained reserves in which some species were held in isolation. Swallows had indeed become rare, but the
Utopians, wise stewards as Wells would have us believe they were, had not fully
vanquished “these delightful birds.”
In
making a transition from the primordial Balance of Nature to a subjugation
under the management of the Utopians, every noxious species was given an
advocate and was put on trial. “What
good is it? What harm does it do? How can it be extirpated? What else may go
with it if it goes”… and so on. They
had, after this deliberative process stamped out most infections and
contagions. It had been, remarks Wells,
infinitely easier to get rid of “such big annoyances as the hyena and the wolf”
than to rid themselves of the smaller pests. The Utopians had made of those big
fierce animals which had not been extirpated milk-lapping dolts (“be-cattled”,
Wells calls them.) The imposition of vegetarianism,
had, on the other hand greatly improved the intelligence of bears. Dogs had been coaxed into giving up their
bark. A short step then indeed for the
cultivation of animals and plants to the eugenic cultivation of humans. “The indolent and inferior”, we are darkly
told, “do not procreate here.”
Taking
up the theme of the Balance of Nature again, Wells reflects that the most
vexing question is what else goes
when a species is targeted for extirpation.
A nasty grub, a pest in the early stages of it life cycle, may as an
adult be beautiful, or can be necessary for the fertilization of a plant. An offensive species might be food for a more
desirable creature. Or an obnoxious
plant may be a source of “a chemically complex substance that were still costly
or tedious to make synthetically.”
The
humans represented by a Mr Catskill (supposedly a depiction of the Winston
Churchill) responded in tones of admiration, conceding that most of us Earthlings
if given the choice to give up “our earthly disorder, our miseries, our
distresses, our high death rates and hideous diseases” would avail themselves of
this chance. But Catskill goes on (in a
pretty speech that’s well worth tracking down) that for all the misery and lack
of order the Earthlings are “tempered to a finer edge” than their Utopian
counterparts. And upon reflection
regarding the prices paid for so seemingly successful a control over nature,
humans might incline to hesitate and would say no. No, because despite their attainment of a
universal unity, the Utopians successful eradication of both competition, and
of “the bracing and ennobling threat and the purging and terrifying experience
of war”, has created its own set of unintended consequences which Catskill identifies
as the forgotten dangers of “degeneration”.
And the softness bred by their “sweetness and light…and leisure” make
them vulnerable to other worlds whose “snarling voices [are] inured to every
pain.”
In
responding, and quite ruminatively too, to Catskill’s upbeat defense of the
life enhancing qualities of unseemly experiences, Urthred, a Utopian, countered
that nothing, in fact, had been lost by obliterating ghastly things. Earthlings may realize that nature can be
controlled but they dare not submit it to the harness (I’m paraphrasing here). For us humans, Urthred accuses, we prefer to
leave the workings of Nature to God or to Competition. The divine and evolution – the very meat of
contemporary squabbles – are made equivalent here because they both excuse us
from taking up reality “undraped”. What
a scientist might calls The Balance of Nature is in fact merely an “old fatalism”,
a supposed source of energy and will, dressed up as science. The Balance of Nature is a means, in other
words, of disguising the frosty meaningless of life as a mother to whom we
would abandon ourselves. The Utopians in
contrast have taken the “old Hag, our Mother in hand.”
We
leave the narrative unfurling of Men Like
Gods here for now, although there is much of interest in the way in which
our “invasive” humans introduced a new pestilence to Utopia, the manner in
which the Earthlings prepared for a war of usurpation with their hosts and so
forth. For our investigation of a
fanciful articulation of the Balance of Nature we have enough. Not only does Wells attempt to explain this
nebulous concept he, additionally, outlines an alternative for when we decree
that this description of Nature is faulty.
In doing so he describes an attitude to the management of nature that,
despite its unappetizing aspects, nonetheless, comes close to describing the
contemporary dilemmas we face in managing the environmental affair of people
and the rest of nature.
***
One
wonders why commentators on the giants of science fiction see these authors as
prophets rather than architects. Science
fiction tends to be both read by scientists and is not seldom influential in their
thinking. With the recent death of Ray
Bradbury we are hearing from our astronauts just how persuasive his vision was
to them – NASA apparently flew his to Cape Canaveral to lecture there. As is true then for the other greats of science
fiction (or science romances as Wells termed them) there is a small industry
devoted to identifying Wells’s prescient moments. H G Wells supposedly foresaw, for instance, “trends
such as the abolition of distance, nuclear war, suburbia, committed
relationships outside marriage, even the Internet.”[2] That
Wells was an ecological visionary is not fully appreciated it seems to me. Before it was fashionable to do so he was
committed to the conservation of natural resources. In Men
Like Gods speculating about our responsibilities for nature is a central
theme, and his solutions, or at least those expressed on behalf of the Utopians,
have a contemporary ring to them, even if, phrased as they are in that novel,
there is at times also a perplexing and unwholesome aspect to them. After all, management of nature and eugenic
control over “defective people” are part of the one Utopian managerial fabric.
In
Men Like Gods H G Wells articulates, on
behalf of Utopians, a set of ambitions characteristic of what some term the New
Ecology. Now, of course, the new ecology
is a decidedly old term – e.g., Gene Odum gave us a New Ecology back in 1964 (one
that was, in its essential features, a systems ecology[3]) –
but one particularly fresh New Ecology was annunciated by forest ecologist and
polymathic writer Daniel Botkin. In his Discordant Harmonies – A New Ecology for the
Twenty First Century Botkin, our latter-day Urthred, similarly groups the
divine and the competitive as inadequate conceptions of the workings of Nature.[4] Or
to be clearer, Botkin is concerned to show that the expectations of equilibrium
– the Balance of Nature – that come from theoretical models of Alfred Lotka ,Vito
Volterra and Georgii Gause, models investigating competitive or predator-prey
relations are at times as problematic as the notion of a divine order (“If
there must be such an order”, Botkin asks, “how do we explain its absence”).
For
the Utopians as for our contemporary New Ecologists, the challenge is this: we
must clear aside metaphysical conceptions of Nature whether they come to us in
the form of archaic myth or embedded in seemingly scientific, and often
mathematical, conceptions of inter-specific interactions. A world of harmony, either divinely-ordered
or ecologically balanced, typically remains, in views of such things, balanced
until disrupted by humans. Thus we are
the perennial wreckers. The appropriate
ecological response if this conceptions were to serve us is to “leave things to
God…or leave them to Competition” (Wells) or “to emphasize the benefits of
doing nothing and assuming that nature will know best.” (Botkin). Both amount to the same thing – an abdication
of our planetary responsibilities.
Once
the task of our conceptual self-emancipation is complete and we have set aside
these different versions of the Balance of Nature idea we must settle down to
the business of accepting, using, and controlling nature and in this we can “make
this Earth a comfortable home for each of us individually and for all of us
collectively in our civilization.”[5] Like the Utopians, Botkin regards the proper
response ‘for the problems we have created for the environmental with technology
is not to abandon civilization or modern technology is not to abandon civilization
or modern technology… Having altered nature with our technology, we must depend
upon technology to see us through to solutions.” Like the Utopians, Botkin is aware of the
unintended consequences associated with management. Like the Utopians, Botkin sees a need for wilderness
reserves, places to be used as baselines against which to judge our more
ferocious impacts elsewhere, pre-agricultural wildernesses where we can get a
sense of the landscape prior to its transformation by the might of modern
technology, and places of refuge where swallows (or in Botkin’s example
Kirtland’s warbler) can maintain a tiny toe-hold. Like the Utopians, Botkin urges us to know
in exhaustive details not only the state of nature, but how it functions.
Now,
there is more to be said about Wells’ novel, and much more to be said about
Botkin’s pondering over the consequences of our needful abandoning of imperfect
conceptions of Nature. For now, I note
that Wells gives us not only a masterly expression of the very awkwardness of
expressing the concept of the Balance of Nature. He showed that in abandoning metaphysical or
glibly formulated scientific views of this balance, the inevitable consequence
is that appropriate and careful management is called for. He recognized that the complexity of
ecological systems is such that displeasing surprises may result from management
and managers need to carefully assess both the provisioning of services (and
disservices) from nature. The upshot
from all is this is that disruptive proclivities of humankind become one with
the pertubant order of nature itself.
And this sounds an awful lot like a new ecology.
[1]
Wells, H G Men Like Gods, Wildside Press LLC, 2009
[2]
Cooke, Bill. "Wells, H. G. (1866–1946)." Encyclopedia of
Anthropology. Ed. . Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2005. 2310-11. SAGE Reference
Online.
[3]
Odum E P The New Ecology BioScience,
Vol. 14, No. 7, Ecology (Jul., 1964), pp. 14-16
[4]
Botkin Daniel B. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First
Century. Oxford University Press, 1990
[5]
Botkin, 189.
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