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H.G. Wells and Visions of Monsters and Cannibals

I am fascinated and bemused by this comment from G.K. Chesterton on the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, whom all loyal sons of the goddess scientifiction revere as the founder of our little walled city in the wilderness of literature:

The world did have new visions, if they were visions of monsters in the moon and Martians striding about like spiders as tall as the sky, and the workmen and capitalists becoming two separate species, so that one could devour the other as gaily and greedily as a cat devours a bird. No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells and his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these nightmares that were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth century. They meant that the bottom had fallen out of the mind at last, that the bridge of brotherhood had broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the chasms this infernal light like a dawn.
— From GK Chesterton, WHAT I SAW IN AMERICA

Let me give the comment in its surrounding context, so you can savor his point: 

That is what had happened to the democratic ideal in a hundred years. Anybody can test it by comparing the final phase, I will not say with the ideal of Jefferson, but with the ideal of Johnson. There was far more horror of slavery in an eighteenth-century Tory like Dr. Johnson than in a nineteenth-century Democrat like Stephen Douglas. Stephen Douglas may be mentioned because he is a very representative type of the age of evolution and expansion; a man thinking in continents, like Cecil Rhodes, human and hopeful in a truly American fashion, and as a consequence cold and careless rather than hostile in the matter of the old mystical doctrines of equality. He ‘did not care whether slavery was voted up or voted down.’ His great opponent Lincoln did indeed care very much. But it was an intense individual conviction with Lincoln exactly as it was with Johnson. I doubt if the spirit of the age was not much more behind Douglas and his westward expansion of the white race. I am sure that more and more men were coming to be in the particular mental condition of Douglas; men in whom the old moral and mystical ideals had been undermined by doubt but only with a negative effect of indifference. Their positive convictions were all concerned with what some called progress and some imperialism. It is true that there was a sincere sectional enthusiasm against slavery in the North; and that the slaves were actually emancipated in the nineteenth century. But I doubt whether the Abolitionists would ever have secured Abolition. Abolition was a by-product of the Civil War; which was fought for quite other reasons. Anyhow, if slavery had somehow survived to the age of Rhodes and Roosevelt and evolutionary imperialism, I doubt if the slaves would ever have been emancipated at all. Certainly if it had survived till the modern movement for the Servile State, they would never have been emancipated at all. Why should the world take the chains off the black man when it was just putting them on the white? And in so far as we owe the change to Lincoln, we owe it to Jefferson.

Exactly what gives its real dignity to the figure of Lincoln is that he stands invoking a primitive first principle of the age of innocence, and holding up the tables of an ancient law, against the trend of the nineteenth century; repeating, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, etc.,’ to a generation that was more and more disposed to say something like this: ‘We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,’ and so on. I do not believe that creed, left to itself, would ever have founded a state; and I am pretty certain that, left to itself, it would never have overthrown a slave state. What it did do, as I have said, was to produce some very wonderful literary and artistic flights of sceptical imagination. The world did have new visions, if they were visions of monsters in the moon and Martians striding about like spiders as tall as the sky, and the workmen and capitalists becoming two separate species, so that one could devour the other as gaily and greedily as a cat devours a bird. No one has done justice to the meaning of Mr. Wells and his original departure in fantastic fiction; to these nightmares that were the last apocalypse of the nineteenth century. They meant that the bottom had fallen out of the mind at last, that the bridge of brotherhood had broken down in the modern brain, letting up from the chasms this infernal light like a dawn. All had grown dizzy with degree and relativity; so that there would not be so very much difference between eating dog and eating darkie, or between eating darkie and eating dago. There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt that we were the superior sort.
 

If I do not misread his meaning, Chesterton was saying that the imagination of Wells shows the peculiar conclusions to which a scientifically minded man, or society, must be driven if for scientific reasons, or what pretends to be scientific reasons, once he dismisses all the Christian mysticism about men being created, being endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, or being equal in the regard of that great Power who is no respector of persons but who judges each man stripped as naked as Adam of worldly rank and bloodline.

An atheist can make the arguments (and, I think with almost success) that each man on earth retains a potential economic benefit to every other man, such that a mutually benevolent system of laws or customs respecting the rights and property of others will in long run be mutually advantageous, and the benefit will outweigh the short-term benefits or piracy, plunder, conquest, or slavery. The theory is that the mere possibility of mutually beneficial long term relationships between any two persons whatsoever imposes an assumed social contract of non-aggression, which duty springs out of the enlightened self interest of all parties involved.

Noble as this doctrine is in the abstract, I wonder how persuasive it would be to someone long advanced in years, or troubled with deadly disease, without any heirs of particular affection to him, or any nations or institutions holding his interest that might outlive him. I have read more than one story where the antagonist is an evil octogenarian who seeks the secret of eternal life with a blazing fanaticism, willing to sacrifice anything toward that end. The reason, I suspect, why the ghastly crimes of hormaguants and ringwraiths, or villains such as Anton Arcane or The Graven Warlock, exist only in fiction is that no real world technology for life extension has been invented.

Putting the noble theory of an assumed social contract to a hypothetical test, I wonder what argument grounded on merely agnostic self-interest could be presented, let us say, to King Ferdinand of Spain, hearing the report of the Conquistadors that a new world has been discovered: a city-dwelling race of people, called the Aztecs, who regularly sacrifice thousands and tens of thousand of innocent souls to their vain and horrid idols dwell therein, throughout a mountain region rich with gold and silver: and this gold in Your Most Catholic Majesty’s coffers would enable you to secure your realm against the Saracen invaders so recently repelled from Andalusia, who otherwise would descend as jackals upon prey, if Your Majesty’s forces are seen as weak.

I am not sure why the long-term benefit of peaceful trade with the Aztecs, perhaps selling them gunpowder to allow them to conquer even more of their neighbors, and settling their bloodstained empire on even firmer foundations, would outweigh, in this case, the short-term benefit of destroying them, looting them, and taking their gold to fund the rise of the Spanish Empire, destined to be greater in extent than even the Roman Empire at her greatest.

I can understand the religious argument, starting from the mystical principle that all men are created in the image of God, as to why Spain should spare the Aztecs; but I cannot understand the atheist argument, starting from the scientific principle that the Aztecs are loathsome descendants of killer apes who indulge in a particularly unhygienic form of human butchery for absurdly superstitious reasons, as to why Spain (or anyone) should spare them.

From the point of view of HG Wells, how are Aztecs more worthy of the olive branch (on which the dove of peace rests, cooing) extended by the Brotherhood of Man than, for example, the Morlocks?

About

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.

April 12, 2010 @ 5:55 pm
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