The Con Committee came
up with a list of questions to kick off the Update. They asked all of the
Guests of Honor four questions (question 3 was in two parts.) Question 1 was: “What
is the greatest (scifi) idea, that you’d like to see invented/come into being
in the next one hundred years? Why? (It can be social, technological, etc.)”
John-Henri Holmberg
replied: “I’ve actually tried to take this seriously over a few days, keeping
it at the back of my mind while following the daily news. Over the years, sf
has offered us an almost unlimited number of realistic or fanciful innovations,
ideas, and debates…Poul Anderson’s Brain
Wave, published in 1954. In that story, our Solar system emerges from the
cosmic cloud it has been traveling through for the last many thousand years, a
cloud full of particles that have inhibited the speed of neural impulses. And
since mammal life evolved before we entered the cloud, our bodies begin again
to function in the way they were designed – and intelligence in all species is
vastly increased, not least in humans. In the novel, this means that we can
finally turn away from childish things: superstition
and envy, racism and nationalism, war and the lust for power over others,
narrow-mindedness and intolerance. What will happen then will be up to the
different beings we become. But it would be a new beginning. And that seems
to be what is
called for…”
According to
Wikipedia, Holmberg is a “Swedish author, critic, publisher and translator, and
a well-known science fiction fan…[having] published over 200 science fiction
fanzines of his own…One of the fans with whom he worked was fellow Swede Stieg
Larsson [author of The Girl With the
Dragon Tattoo and the rest of that Millennium
series].”
I don’t know Mr.
Holmberg’s beliefs, but in the SFE: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, he is characterized
this way: “In his critical work, he has stressed the secular, rationalistic
basis of sf literature and often discussed Feminist and Gender-oriented sf.” I
would guess from the information above that his personal philosophy would tend
toward Humanism, that is, “[the] philosophy informed by science, inspired by
art, and motivated by compassion. Affirming the dignity of each human being, it
supports the maximization of individual liberty and opportunity consonant with
social and planetary responsibility. It advocates the extension of
participatory democracy and the expansion of the open society, standing for
human rights and social justice. Free of supernaturalism, it recognizes human
beings as a part of nature and holds that values-be they religious, ethical,
social, or political-have their source in human experience and culture.
Humanism thus derives the goals of life from human need and interest rather
than from theological or ideological abstractions, and asserts that humanity
must take responsibility for its own destiny.– The Humanist Magazine”
That’s good for
him. I’m sure he has no personal beef with me for being a Christian. I’m sure
we could sit down for a drink and talk science fiction with little or no
trouble. I’m sure both of us could behave just fine, and if we happened to hit
it off, we might even be friends.
The issue I take,
is that based on my personal view, it was Humanity that chose to irrationally
disregard a clear direction and consequence for that disregard (“…from the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not [n]eat, for in the day that you
eat from it you will surely die. …”) from the Individual in charge. That led to
the intended system falling apart.
Seems pretty
simple to me.
A Humanist rejects
any kind of supernatural explanation and appears (to me) to make the assumption
that Humans possess the ability to, en masse, make rational decisions. It’s
just that we haven’t grown up enough yet (at least not all of us seven billion
have.) Growing up, we would (in a curious allusion to the Christian New
Testament “When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a
child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish
things. 1 Corinthians 13:11”) leave
behind such things as “superstition, envy, racism,
nationalism, war, lust for power over others, narrow-mindedness, and
intolerance.”
In Anderson’s
novel, Humanity leaps into space there to discover that because we evolved in
the energy dampening cloud, we are more intelligent that all of the other
intelligences in nearby space. The main character remains on Earth to live with
the newly intelligent animals and former Humans with mental disabilities while
the others meet various fates.
This is the future
that Mr. Holmberg hopes will come about (though he doesn’t see any real hope of
that based on his brief ending remarks). Even so, it seems somewhat unrealistic
that once everyone comes out of their “slow thinking” phase at some future
time, our societies (which would disappear, I assume?) would grow to a point of
dropping all religious, national, race, envy, tolerance, opinion, violence, and
control issue.
Certainly Ada
Palmer (who is planning on being at the Helsinki WorldCon) has made a stab at
visioning such a society in her book, which I’m reading now Too Like the Lightning.
Hopefully they’re
on a panel together! [If they are, Paul Foth, would you take notes for me?] I
would love to hear some practical suggestions of steps for us to take now – a bit
more concrete than “be more tolerant”... or “don’t be envious”.
Program Book: http://www.worldcon.fi/files/progress_report_4_a4.pdf
Image: http://www.leidenanthropologyblog.nl/images/sized/images/uploads/Pels_Header_New_York_Worlds_Fair_1964_Bell_Telephone_Pavilion-578x220.jpg
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