Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought

"The interesting thing about Anticipations is what he gets right about 2000, and what he gets totally wrong. It is a turning point in his career because it kind of invents ‘futurology’ , the idea of looking forward and trying to extrapolate the future from what is happening in the present. It often has a voice of absolute confidence; just as often, it is merely the reflection of contemporary prejudices. It’s the same for Anticipations. Wells talks about transport rather well, I think. He looks at the emergent technology of the motor-vehicle, and says maybe they will be driven on asphalt, and also that the asphalt will be cambered so that the rain will run off. And you think: not bad! “He wrote all through his life about the benefits of moving to a world state” But then he talks about cities and says: of course cities are going to disappear. They will disappear because rapid transport will completely disperse the need for concentration. He describes London quite well when he predicts that it will stretch all the way down to the coast in Kent and across as far as Exeter. This is fairly accurate. But then he says that this conglomeration will be evenly distributed across the terrain because of transport, so there actually won’t be cities at all. He has been totally wrong about that. In part, the problem is that his kind of futurology works by technological determinism—as if this is the only thing that drives history. Yes, Wells’s instinct was always towards ideas of federation. He was a passionate advocate for the League of Nations after the catastrophe of the Great War, and then later the United Nations. He wrote all through his life about the benefits of moving to a world state. In Anticipations , he also talks about class and the future of class. He gets this partly right and partly wrong. He says that the upper middle class and aristocrats are becoming ever more distant from labour and from the real world. They are finance capitalists who are just waiting for their dividends to come in. This seems, to some, to have come to pass. But then he describes the working class in terms like ‘criminal’, ‘immoral’, and ‘parasitic’. He says that any life led in ‘the social abyss’ will be brief and brutal, and that in the end this social ‘residuum’ will end up dying out, like a biological extinction event. He wants to end inequality, but it’s not a pretty vision: it’s a Darwinian world view. This was a very common turn-of-the-century view. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He believed that the new class that would emerge was his own class fraction: the new class of self-reliant mechanics and engineers. Basically, what needed to be done was to dismantle democracy and give it to the technocrats. In times of extremity, as fascism and communism emerged, technocracy was an attractive idea before the Second World War. Wells was on the left, but the right-wing Rudyard Kipling agreed with him on this, and wrote several stories about a technocratic world state. The dream of an elite engineering class was a powerful one for Wells, because it was his scientifically-trained generation that could have had that kind of power. That is the vision behind Things to Come , the great Alexander Korda film of the 1930s, an adaptation of one of Wells’s utopias. Yes, he advocated both positive and negative eugenics . He joined the Fabian Society in 1903, a reformist intellectual grouping of the left often aligned to the Labour Party. He was therefore debating issues of the decline of the human race on the liberal left. But at this point in history both the left and right shared the idea of ‘eugenics’—of controlling the breeding of the human race. Positive eugenics involves trying to encourage the strong population—which usually means the middle classes—to breed. Negative eugenics involves trying to stop the weaker, residual classes—and particularly those perceived to be morally or physically ‘weak’—from breeding. One key context at this point is that the British Army had gone to South Africa and fought the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902. The British—who thought that they had the greatest and most advanced army in the world—were absolutely trashed by a bunch of farmers in the first months of the war. There was a huge convulsion of panic in Britain, and a lot of the blame was laid on the poor quality of the army recruits, many of whom came from working class areas of the big cities. There was a major government report that investigated the ‘physical deterioration’ of the race, and rang alarm bells about the decline of the working classes. The recruits were deemed not healthy enough, and people started talking about a dwarfish race being brought up in the inner cities (shades of the Morlocks again!). Wells was thinking about this along with the whole political class. How should breeding be controlled to ensure the survival of the fittest race? You get many questions being asked that are very difficult for us to countenance these days. For example: will ‘the yellow races’ take over? Do we need to kill off ‘the brown races’, or will they decline by themselves? What will allow ‘the white races’ to survive? When the Traveller says in The Time Machine that the race has ‘committed suicide’, this phrase is a very common one amongst those fearing decline: If nothing is done, the superior white race will commit suicide. These are problematic ideas, but common on both the left and the right in the Edwardian period. The political classes all shared in what was called the new quest for ‘National Efficiency’. A lot of this came out of Darwin. Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’. His ideas had been totally off the map from the 1870s onwards, but he lived until 1911. At the turn of the century, with the panic about the working class, his ideas came back into vogue. He helped establish The Eugenics Society—one of many that flowered across Europe—which lived on doing active work into the 1970s. Giving out free contraception had been illegal in the nineteenth century, but in the twentieth century it was advocated as a means of controlling the breeding of the wrong kind of people. Marie Stopes, the great hero of the birthcontrol movement, was a Eugenicist. There was a whole shift of ideas."