The Shape of Things to Come – Today: Part 1

Introduction

Not nearly enough attention is paid today to H.G. Wells, one of the giants of foresight. What is distinctive about his novel The Shape of Things to Come is that it imagines the future from the perspective of someone writing in the 1930s and looking back on history from the year 2106. What is even more interesting is the fact that the first half of the time period imagined in the book has already passed. What lessons can be learnt today from what he wrote? In the first part of this blog, I shall consider what he got right and what he did not foresee.

The Shape of Things to Come and the short-term future

In his summary of the situation in the early 1930s, Wells refers to the World Economic Conference in London in 1933. The opening speeches of King George V and the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, effectively said that if the conference failed there would be world disaster. Yet things did not change, and Wells was right about the inability of politicians of his day to get out of the habit of old thinking. He was right that the tensions between nation states looking after their own interests in the absence of any ‘global sovereign’ power to keep order would lead to societies dissolving into antagonisms. He was right that the failure of the economic and financial system existing at the time would contribute to the breakdown of world order. He was right that this would lead to a war which would once again be a war of attrition in which all out victory became the ultimate aim. He was right that the flashpoint that led to international war was the tension between Germany and Poland. However, this would not have been difficult to consider at the time of writing.

However, he was wrong in imagining that over the next thirty years this would lead to social disintegration and that epidemics followed by a pandemic would lead to world collapse and the conditions for the possibility for a Modern State Movement led by a World Council.

And what he did not foresee – and what he hoped his Modern State would prevent – was that after this ‘second world war’, another version of the old system of realigned and recreated nation states would emerge with a nominally sovereign ‘United Nations’ in place of the ‘League of Nations’ above them. A reconstituted financial system bearing many of the hallmarks of the system that preceded it also returned. And while Wells was fully aware that man was utterly reliant on the natural world, he did not expect mankind to become a threat to the very environment on which it depended.

Eerily, if we take stock of the world just before the SARS-COV-2 pandemic struck, we were in a remarkably similar position to the world presented by Wells just before a pandemic struck that. There had been another financial crash (in 2008) from which we were still emerging. Indebtedness and inequality were serious issues: matters which Wells had referred to as ‘monetary inadaptability’ and ‘disorganisation through increased productivity’ and money being a means to an end, not a thing in itself. National interests were once again being put before global interests: power blocks had become tectonic plates jostling against each other. Issues that it was understood needed action on a global scale were looming large such as environmental degradation and climate change. Once again there were a lot of political speeches, but not enough long-term action.

It has been established that to all intents and purposes Covid-19 was caused by mankind pressing too hard against his natural environment, and it has already been realised that if we don’t pull back worse will follow. His imaginary influenza and cholera epidemics that were the ‘first scouts of the pandemic which was in preparation for a disunited humanity’ seem remarkably prescient.

The Shape of Things to Come and the long-term future

However, there was also much that he overlooked and much that is highly debatable the further he gets into the future. For example, the protagonists who lead the struggle for the modern world state in the book are self-selected and coercive. The idea that a modern world state will arrive through its fitness for human intelligence at some point in the future – through a sort of self-righteous moral force – seems quite unrealistic.

Of course, the further he gets away from his own day, the less accurate he can be with his timelines. However, the ‘collective mentality of science’ – he singles out the biological, mineralogical and meteorological sciences – certainly offers the possibility of eventual abundance for mankind and be the precursor of increased mental capacity and longevity. (What he didn’t take into account was the need to temper invention and innovation with restraint to avoid breaching environmental limits, although it’s interesting that he does foresee a time when man will be able to alter ‘the composition and movement of the atmosphere’.) He takes it as far as the leisure society where ‘two and a half years of compulsory public service’ would be virtually the sole work obligation expected of anybody. (It is interesting to note that in his seminal work Small is Beautiful published in 1973, E F Schumacher calculated that human beings only spent 3½% of their time on actual production then!) He raises the issue of universal employment – in the sense of purposive activity – and ‘universal purchasing power in the face of continuing industrial efficiency’. Questions are being asked today about technological developments causing mass unemployment, and the role of universal basic income.      

He believed that if mankind was to break free into a modern world state, this would necessitate a unification of the world not just across politics and culture, but across race, religion and in some way language. He was acutely aware of the importance of social and educational forces in trying to achieve this.

But there was no mechanism for getting from the old to the new, and perhaps the most alarming thing about Wells’s story is his use of the pandemic, because it is this cataclysmic event that causes the old order to be swept away and allows for the possibility of a new order to be created from scratch.  If this is the only way to generate necessary change, the outlook for mankind is grim indeed.

In part 2, I shall consider how Wells went about applying his thinking to his own future and speculate on what he would make of the situation today.

Written by Tony Diggle, SAMI Associate and member of the H.G. Wells Society. He writes in a personal capacity.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily of SAMI Consulting.

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay