It is with sorrow that we
report that Dr. Eduard Prugovecki passed away at his home in Lake
Chapala Mexico on October 13th
2003
In his article H.G. Wells Sees It Through, Charles Keller II describes
the great variety of social activities in which Wells engaged during
the course of his eventful life, as well as his changing allegiances to various
causes. There is, however, one constant that apparently underlines that life:
his striving for a better world, and his belief that such a world, devoid
of exploitation, can be realized. Due to his conviction that science and
education lead to progress, he envisaged that an elite of experts would guide
mankind on the path to such a peaceful and progressive world order.
As an undergraduate student in science I used to share
in that belief. However, my later direct encounters with Big Science during
my studies for a Ph.D. in mathematical physics at Princeton University gave
rise to my first doubts, as I observed first-hand the widening moral and
methodological gap between the old and the new generation of scientists,
with the latter subscribing to a totally new set of values. Eventually I
came to agree with such statements as that “I can’t find any fundamental
difference between the scientific method and the procedures for making progress
in business and the arts,” made by an American sociologist of science, and
reproduced on p. 65 of The Subjective Side of Science (Elsevier, Amsterdam,
1974) by I. I. Mitroff. One the physicists interviewed by Mitroff also states:
“Some [people] are very successful in pure science but it really isn't pure;
nobody is pure. ... People want to sell their point of view, beat down the
other guy because it means more glory, more ego satisfaction, more money.”
(Ibid., p. 70.)
Wells died in 1946, namely right after the end of World
War II. But, as S. S. Schweber states in Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics
in the 1950's (L. M. Brown et al. Eds., Cambridge University Press, 1989),
“World War II altered the character of science in a fundamental and irreversible
way: the importance and magnitude of the contribution of scientists and engineers,
particularly physicists, to the American war effort changed the relationship
between the scientists and the military, industry, and government.”
However, instead of becoming the leaders of the “world
revolution” envisaged by Wells, scientists of all stripes became pliant tools
in the hands of the North American establishment. Their feeble protests were
easily disregarded when the decision was made to drop the atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Later on even such mild expressions of dissent were
no longer heard publicly––except in very rare cases, such as those of Albert
Einstein and Leo Szilard. Had he lived, Wells would have been very disappointed
by the direction in which his presumed harbingers of social progress were
moving.
Well-known political events during the 1960s, and the
way in which elected politicians systematically disregarded the explicit
wishes of large parts of their constituents, made me also realize that, behind
the constantly flaunted slogan of North American “democracy,” hid an intransigent
and irresponsive system designed to create political illusions rather than
provide solutions to serious social, racial, economic and political problems.
The demand for participatory democracy that rang in 1968 from France throughout
all of Europe, and echoed even in North America, convinced me that one should
search for better systems than that of representative forms of democracy
in which politicians can betray their electoral promises the moment they
assume power.
In 1974, during my first sabbatical year as a professor
at the University of Toronto, I took advantage of some of my free time to
formulate my germinating ideas on social organization in the form of the
utopian/dystopian novel Memoirs of the Future that contrasts two imaginary
countries, Terra and FWF, which had emerged from the ashes of a devastating
nuclear Last War. (At that time such a war seemed rather imminent.) These
two countries possess the same technology, but employ it with totally different
aims in mind, thus illustrating the fact that advanced technological tools
can be used for benign as well as for evil purposes––a departure from Wells’
early scientific romances, which tended to emphasize the undesirable uses
of science and technology.
On the other hand, Wells might have approved of the fact
that the Terran society was founded by scientists and technicians, who had
survived the Last War since they were sheltered in underground research laboratories
established by the various governments (US, Soviet, etc.) that possessed
nuclear weapons. For me the subterfuge of such a nuclear holocaust made it
possible to deal in a plausible manner with the otherwise unlikely possibility
that such a category of people had a fundamental change of heart.
Confronted on a daily basis with the incredible destruction
and suffering caused by the weapons they had helped design, these scientists
and technicians decided to found a society functioning along the principles
of a new form of participatory democracy, embodied in scientifically designed
protocols of coordinated group decision making, or cogdem for
short. In keeping with the background of its creators, this highly advanced
system of arriving at decisions at all levels of the Terran society is facilitated
by a Coordinating Computer Complex, briefly referred to as CCC by
the newly emerging Terran nation. There was no Internet when I envisaged
CCC in 1974, but it was already very clear that such a gigantic complex of
interconnected computers was technically feasible.
CCC mediates a grass roots form of participatory democracy,
in which any individual in a given community can initiate a proposal, and
then participate creatively in the democratic process of having that proposal
analyzed and debated prior to its eventual ratification, in its original
or a modified form, by that entire community. In such a technologically and
socially advanced society the need for “leaders” disappears, and therefore
nobody is in danger of being misled––a frequent phenomenon in totalitarian
as well as democratic contemporary societies.
Indeed, having lived under both communist and capitalist
regimes, I had come to realize that in many fundamental respects their differences
pale by comparison with their similarities when it comes to the way ordinary
citizens are treated by those at the top of the social pyramid. It is the
existence of a hierarchical structure reflecting differences in power and
privilege, rather than the ideology supporting that structure, that conditions
the many undesirable aspects of the social injustices of which Wells and
other progressive intellectuals were so critical during the pre-World War
II era. Whether that power emanates from a party apparatus, as in communist
countries, or from an economic and political elite, as in capitalist countries,
does not matter as much as that it exists, and that it is exerted in an overt
or in a surreptitious manner at all times, with the great majority of the
population being its unwitting and helpless victims.
This fact is illustrated in Memoirs of the Future
by the other country that emerged from the ashes of the Last War in the Southern
Hemisphere, where the destruction was not as pervasive as in the Northern
Hemisphere, so that old forms of social organization have survived. This
country is called the Free World Federation, or FWF for short, since it has
two political parties that rotate in the seats of political power. Their
political programs display differences in the rhetoric employed, and the
personalities of their charismatic leaders are usually quite distinct, so
that the illusion of political choice is maintained. However, in FWF a counterpart
of CCC, called Centro, is used by the Freeworld oligarchy to monitor and
control all working individuals through computer-integrated bank accounts,
centralized employment records and other bureaucratic devices, coordinated
by means of social security numbers assigned to each citizen from the moment
of birth. Furthermore, all FWF mass media, and in particular Tri-Di (3-dimensional
TV), are systematically used to subliminally condition each working individual
to obedience to authority and hatred of Terran values, while perpetually
projecting skillfully designed illusions of the “good life” and of “freedom
and democracy” through Tri-Di newscasts and popular entertainment programs.
Thus, in FWF the art of PR has reached its zenith: by means of Tri-Di indoctrination,
political virtual reality has become all-pervasive, and the FWF masses react
with Pavlovian predictability to the rhetorical cues of their economic and
political masters. Lulled into complacency by subliminal “brainstuffing”
techniques, these masses appear “happy” with their lot, having been anesthetized
by massive doses of Tri-Di entertainment which they devour whenever they
are not working.
This is a “utopia for the rich” of the type presented
by Wells in his novel When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)––which he might
have updated had he witnessed post-World War II political developments, and
especially the new methods and tools used by contemporary media in manipulating
public opinion. It is more difficult, however, to see how a society like
the Terran one can function without being dominated by individuals who possess
a greater drive for personal power than the rest.
In Terra this problem is solved by a universal educational
process that begins right after birth. One of its two main ingredients is
empathy training, meant to instill in each individual a keen sensitivity
towards his fellow human beings by employing all the educational tools at
the disposal of the Terran civilization. Thus, for a change, science and
technology is used to achieve social harmony rather than to impose the will
of a privileged minority on the rest of the population, as is the case in
FWF. However, for cogdem to function as a source of socially creative proposals,
one needs individuals who are not only cooperative, but also independent-minded.
Hence the complementary ingredient of the basic Terran educational process
is its self-reliance training, which encourages individualism and
the taking of initiatives in a social setting in which cogdem represents
the only means by which community decisions are arrived at all levels.
It can be argued that, sooner or later, sharp differences
between the innate abilities of individuals would eventually lead to the
domination of a minority over the majority, and the reemergence of a hierarchical
structure in some new guise. Terrans solve this problem by genetic engineering,
meant to endow individuals with a great variety of traits which greatly vary
from individual to individual, but are all deemed to be socially equally
desirable, so that a dynamic social equilibrium is maintained between individualism
and cooperative behavior.
Wells might have approved of this application of genetic
engineering, though it evokes distasteful images of Huxley’s Brave New
World. The reader is therefore directed to pp. 178-189 of Memoirs
of the Future (whose revised and up-dated version was published in 2001
by Cross Cultural Publications of Notre Dame, Indiana, and is available from
www.amazon.com, www.bn.com and other online booksellers). There the various
ethical aspects of genetic engineering are discussed in the context of a
verbal confrontation between three of its main characters.
In Wells’ early scientific romances science is used primarily
for villainous purposes, but in his Men Like Gods (1923) and The
Shape of Things to Come (1933) science is depicted as a savior of mankind.
However, science itself is morally neutral: it simply provides mankind with
choices which otherwise it would not have had. Hence in my futuristic novel
Memoirs of the Future the positive as well as the negative potentialities
of various scientific discoveries are examined. This strategy is continued
in its sequel Dawn of the New Man: A Futuristic Novel of Social Change
(available from www.amazon.com, www.bn.com
and other online booksellers), where the aspirations
of the Terran society are investigated, and the task of reforming FWF is
presented in the kind of dramatic form which is in the spirit of some of
Wells’ best known science fiction.
Acknowledgement. The author would like to express his thanks to Professor
W. Warren Wagar who, as a leading expert on H.G. Wells, provided many insightful
comments on the first draft of this article.