THE PARALYSIS OF PESSIMISM
McCarthy, Abigail
THE PARALYSIS OF PESSIMISM ABIGAIL McCARTHY It is late September as I write, and one of the many primary days in an off-election year. On this elbow of Cape Cod--literally thirty miles out to...
...Bradbury once said, "Science fiction is a wonderful hammer...
...it has been part of the college sub-culture for thirty years or more...
...Perhaps it was .the cam'bination of the reading and the dark...
...An easy answer is that they have been alienated by Vietnam, Watergate, the exposure of bribery in high places and of the eorr, uption of institutions like the FBI and the CIA...
...But there are other partial answers...
...The growing importance of science fiction in its influence on thi~ught, or, better, on attitude towar~ life, was not ~ apparer}t until it re-entered the mainstream with books like George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New world...
...The most important 'writers off science fiotion thirty years ago were (Continued on page 671) 13 October 1978:646 Abigail McCarthM (cue'S) moralists in their way...
...I am not sure of his remedy but I know that one of my own was surely not the answer...
...Orwell, his editors tell us, was convinced that modern man was inadequate to cope with the demands of his history...
...he suggests, "makes New England winter evenings more bearable...
...The privileged among the young have fed on science fiction since childhood...
...There is some faint hope given in Aldous Huxley's afterthought a decade or more after he wrote Brave New World...
...Again it is the conventional wisdom to say that this trend is evidence of a thirst for mystery and transcendence in a culture in which so many do not believe...
...Perhaps...
...The most depressing effect of all is the thought that' its writers might be right a~bout human nature and the destiny of mankind-a thought in profound conflict with the spirit of Christianity and the principles of democracy, it goes without saying...
...I would say, rather, that, in its correspondence to the literary genre from which it sprang, it botrays a growing lack of faith in man and his possibilities--even a collective self.hatred...
...There is a great similarity between this choice and the varied experiments launched by young idealists in the '60s---,almost all of them doomed by their members' fragmented philosophy and inability to escape the framework of the larger world...
...Commonweal: 671...
...I suppose it ,is the coincidence of that memory with election day which makes me think that I have stumbled on one of the many undiscovered causes of a current political phenomenon...
...I intend to use it ~vhen and if necessary, to bark a few shins or knock a few heads, in order to make people leave people alone...
...the idea "that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other...
...When I came here to write one February I took to filling up the evenings by reading what my chi.ldren had left around the house, books like the works of Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Kurt Vonnegut...
...The dark has begun to close in early, reminding us late stayers that we draw on to the end of the year, to November and December when there are really no late afternoons, only early evenings...
...I became as acutely depressed as I have ever been in my lifetime...
...In this crud and clever little para, ble a wandering robot tries for centuries to find his way home to a far-off world...
...While uncompromising realism and introverted psychology dominated the mainstream of literature, the imaginative took refuge in sub-/ groups meant to entertain--westerns, gothics, detective and science fiction...
...I thought then that it was the concentrated effect of that kind of reading...
...Those long, long evenings will go on and on through January and February and early March...
...ve fiction as the newer writers prefer to call it--cannot escape an affliction of the spirit which makes it extremely diflicult to believe in the slogging, persevering, step-by-step effort _9 by which change is brought about in a democracy...
...A letter writer to this morning's Boston Globe recommends a concoction of hard cider and rum which, if mulled...
...I,n other words, man is irrelevant to his history...
...his undertakings have no rational purpose...
...Vonnegut's style makes the a,bsurd effective...
...And today, recalling my winter experience here, I wonder whether one might be that a genera.tion bred on science fiction---or speculati...
...The way in which later writers like Vonnegut play on these themes is illustrated by The Sirens o] Titan...
...Think how many editorials and articles lamenting creeping bureaucratic corrtrol have taken off w.ith reference to 1984...
...His creators and master.s cause the building of the pyramids and the Great Wail of China as signals and signposts 'for him...
...Religlen Religlen would be the conscious and intel...
...For, as sure as t, he election takes place, the analysts will be commenting within the w~ek on the .fact that so few people in the 34and-under age group bothered to vote...
...Once the cult of the few, it has become the cult of the many: witness the enthusiasm for movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters o/ the Third Kind, the revival of Star Trek...
...they are poets and artists, akin to the drug culture, dealers in nightmares and despair...
...There was purpose in that even though leaving people alone is far from the whole answer...
...Why the young fail to enter the political process is of great concern to political scientists and praotical politicians...
...To ground it in faith, hope and love...
...It is some measure of the effezt of the whole genre on the consciousness of the generation on whom the future depends...
...ligent pursuit of man's Final..End, the unitive knowledge of the!imman = ant . . ." and so on...
...And the "negative Utopias" of Orwel.l and Huxley have given way, in the meantime, to savage satire and black comedy ~f which Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange and Kurt Vonnegut's whole oeuvre are only the best known...
...Depressing is hardly the word for the effect of this fiction...
...They dealt imaginatively with subjects we were still generally unwilling to face like (as Isaac Asimov frequently reminds us) population ex.plosion, rocket ships, lunar exploration, atom!c bombs, radiation sickness and polluted atmosphere...
...Are we doing anything to make such a choice possible...
...On this elbow of Cape Cod--literally thirty miles out to sea--Septem'ber days are beautiful, but very sho~t...
...Huxley, commenting on Brave New World, said that it was written with...
...Today's best writers of specotative fiction, however, seem to have no moral view...
...Their effect is strange, Cape social workers say...
...Some people contentedly sew, carve, tinker, watch television or take up amateur theater, but others are made desperate and depressed...
...Ray Bradbury's classic, The MartZan Chronicles, not well known to the average reader but treasured by the aficionados, was teLling us, according to critic Clifton Fadiman at the time it was written, that "human beings are still mental and moral children who cannot be trusted with the terrifying toys they have by some tragic accident invented...
...He would offer the possibility of a sane choice . . . a community in which "economics would be decentratist and HenryGeorgian, politics Kropotkinesque cooperative, science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not . . . as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them...
...If he had it to write over again, he said, he thought he wou,ld offer a third alternative to his character, the Savage...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 20
