30 November 2019
One of Ray Bradbury’s greatest motives in writing speculative fiction was not so much to predict the future, he said, but to prevent it. I flatter myself, and I declare that I am trying to follow in that tradition. Not every future, of course, but some, and especially this one. There are better futures that I can imagine, but I’m not about to write about any of those. Happy stories are boring.
One of the great benefits of reading spec-fic, according to Isaac Asimov, is that it trains the mind to appreciate unfamiliar circumstances. Because we immerse ourselves in these strange worlds regularly, we can relate to all manner of unusual lifestyles, technologies, physiologies, and cultural norms. Habitually relating to scuttling arthropods living on a neutron star, their majesties’ bucketeers, or the cyclical transsexuals of LeGuin’s left hand, we have rather less trouble adjusting to the new neighbors from strange lands abroad or who practice unusual rituals.
It makes us better neighbors, and it also makes us better historians. “Presentism” tends to not color our judgment as much as it does most. We judge different cultures and communities less from our own personal biases (“The way it’s s’posed ta be”), but from a broader view of ideological coherence (or its more likely absence). Rather than condemning Jefferson or Lee outright on the sole basis of “owning slaves” we are able to place their behavior into a context that demanded behaviors from them that today’s society would not. It’s easy to condemn Washington’s physicians who bled him to death, but like the cop who witnessed a “furtive gesture” towards the waistband, they were just following established procedure. Today’s physicians might have saved many of the limbs that were amputated by Union and Rebel surgeons.
And, conditioned as we are, we can see that today’s sensible statists who prefer central regulation to market discipline (or taxation to freedom, or protecting global democracy to non-intervention) can be easily substituted for the 1840’s main-stream anti-abolitionist who favored a more gradual approach to emancipation, rather than sabotaging the foundations of civilization.
Slavery, and taxation, and conscription, and prohibition, and murder, all worked to the advantage of the established social order. Prudent conservatives are loathe to tear down things that work. And when it comes to the state and its prerogatives, most “liberals” are conservative, even as most “conservatives” are collectivist. Readers of spec-fic, due in part to our peculiar conditioning, are generally both liberal and conservative, and rarely democratic.