The World’s Future, Aldous Huxley
The World’s Future
Before beginning on any series of forecasts, I think it is worthwhile to say a few words about man’s different conceptions of the future. Most of us do not realize that our view of the future is a fairly recent phenomenon or that the ways the future has been looked at by people both within and outside our tradition are very different from the way in which we look at it. The Indians have a cyclical idea of time—the notion that there is an eternal recurrence and that time repeats the same pattern over and over again. According to the Indian idea, we are now at the last phase of one of the great cycles, in the Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron. We have been in it for about two thousand years, and apparently there are about thirty-five thousand years more to go, during which things will get worse and worse all the time—we ‘ain’t seen nothing yet’, according to the Indians. After that, there will be a general explosion, and we may then, after several million years, start again on an Age of Gold. A similar view of time was taken by the ancient Greeks: there was a great year which repeated itself continuously.
Our present view of the future is entirely different. The notion of an eternal recurrence, which as late as Nietzsche was preached by some philosophers, has really gone out of the picture altogether. We think of time not as going round and round, but as moving irreversibly in one direction. The whole idea is expressed in the scientific notion of increasing entropy: we are continually moving in one direction, and life is a temporary reversal of entropy within the larger system.
In the Christian tradition, instead of eternal recurrence there was the idea of a definite creation in time (according to Bishop Usher, in 4004 b.c.) and a definite ending, which would take place probably very soon—and hence, a complete lack of interest in the future. This is how Professor J. B. Bury, who has written perhaps the most interesting book on the subject, sums up the Christian idea: ‘According to the Christian theory, which was worked out by the Church Fathers, and especially by St Augustine, the whole movement of history has the purpose of assuring the happiness of a small portion of the human race in another world. It does not postulate a further development of human history on earth.’
We have also changed very much in relation to this Christian tradition. One can say that the early Christian notion of the future, in so far as it was a happier and progressive future, was a notion of what is vulgarly called ‘pie in the sky’. This changed profoundly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a new conception of what might be called ‘pie on the earth’—the idea of a world improving through indefinite periods of time. This idea of a progress, which some thinkers regarded as absolutely inevitable while others regarded it as conditional, but which in any case goes forward and may be expected to reach a pitch of perfection in a distant time, replaces the ancient idea of an Age of Gold in the past with either a sudden fall (as within the Christian tradition) or a gradual deterioration (as within the Oriental traditions).
Just as in the past the old conception of ‘pie in the sky’ justified both resignation to an intolerable lot upon earth and persecution, so in exactly the same way this idea of ‘pie on the earth’ has fostered both resignation and persecution. Under the old dispensation, it was right, in St Augustine’s delicious phrase, to use ‘benignant asperity’ towards heretics in order to safeguard their eternal bliss in the next world. To destroy them in this world was as nothing compared to the good you were doing them by saving them in eternal life. In the same way, we see in the modern world the most appalling persecutions and liquidations going on, not in the name of Heaven, but in the name of the extraordinarily good time which our great-grandchildren will have in the twenty-second century. The idea is that if we liquidate enough people now, then there will be this magnificent time two hundred years from now which will go on forever, getting better and better. People used to compensate themselves for the miseries of life in this world by reflecting on life in the world to come; this same resignation to present misery is found today among people who reflect about the much better times that are coming in the future upon earth.
The compensatory idea of a better life in heaven has played an enormous part in the social life of the world. Historians agree that the Wesleyan movement in the eighteenth century was instrumental in guaranteeing England against a violent revolution. The intolerable conditions created in the first generations of the industrial revolution were made tolerable to the labouring masses, who were living in conditions of indescribable wretchedness, by this ardent preaching of the happiness which was going to be theirs after death. In the same way there seems to have been a real feeling during the nineteenth century, among the oppressed and the miserable, that this wonderful good time which was going to come on earth in two or three centuries was in some way a compensation for the miseries being suffered in the present. We have some very interesting literary expressions of this idea from the nineteenth century. One of the first is to be found in Tennyson’s poem ‘Locksley Hall’, which was published in 1842. This is a very curious poem. The hero is a young man who has been bitterly disappointed in love and who consoles himself not with philosophy, and not with religion, but by reflecting on the march of progress and on the wonderful things which will happen in the future. He talks about the increase of knowledge and of virtue and finally about the parliament of man, the federation of the world.
A few years later, in the same year as the publication of the Origin of Species, you find Victor Hugo, in France, talking even more lyrically about progress and what it means to man. He has the most fantastic passage where he speaks of man sailing in a kind of magic ship through the ether. The ship is the calculus of Newton mounted upon the odes of Pindar—a mixture of inspiration and science—and man is sailing clothed in light into the pure and divine future, into virtue, into shining knowledge, into the end of plague and disaster, into abundance, into calm and laughter and happiness, into union with heaven. This goes on for hundreds of lines. It clearly was Victor Hugo’s brand of religion, and perhaps a majority of the great literary figures of the nineteenth century felt rather the same way.
There are, however, a few exceptions. You will find in Alfred de Vigny, for example, an extremely sceptical reaction to the first railroads. He was by no means convinced, as Victor Hugo and the French historian Jules Michelet were, that railroads were going to transport the human race into universal peace and universal virtue. On the contrary, he spoke of the potential danger of new machinery to man, the danger that the machinery might actually enslave its creator. It is interesting to see this dark picture appearing just at the time when there was the most unbounded optimism in regard to technical progress.
Outside the world of literature, you find these same ideas very strongly expressed at the time of the first of the universal exhibitions, the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. This was opened by the prince consort on 1 May 1851; he spoke of it as the realization of the unity of mankind. In the staid columns of the London Times there were equally enthusiastic editorials which said the Exhibition foreshadowed universal peace, that this 1 May was the first morning since the Creation in which all the peoples had assembled from all parts of the world to perform a common act.
This tremendous enthusiasm did infect almost everybody, but it is interesting to find that the new religion of progress was regarded at the time by the guardians of Christian orthodoxy as extremely dangerous and heretical. In the Syllabus of Errors, published in 1864, Pope Pius IX lists as one of the grave errors (which must be pointed out and condemned) the idea that the Roman Pontiff should come to terms with, and reconcile himself to, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization. This was definitely a heresy which must not be accepted. Thus we see the incompatibility between the new view of time and of human development on earth, and the traditional Augustinian view of time on earth as quite unimportant, with future betterment existing only for a few and in another world.
In 1859 we come to the crucial year of the publication of the Origin of Species, which introduced the new scientific conception of the world as an evolutionary world which began in the immensely distant past and, without any breach of continuity at all between the lower forms and the highest human forms, will go on indefinitely into the future. The evolutionary theory as such is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but it can be interpreted either way. There have been progressive movements within evolution—it is absurd to say that a human being is not superior to an amoeba. He clearly is superior. At the same time, however, it is quite clear that the evolutionary process has
