The Shape of Things to Come – Today Part 2

In part 1 of this blog, I looked at H.G. Wells’s novel The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, and examined what he got right and what he did not foresee.   

Wells and his own future

In real life, Wells was passionate about the creation of such a modern world state as he envisioned in the novel. In 1934, a year after its publication, Wells visited both Roosevelt and Stalin to judge how the two great leaders felt about his ideas for a world-state.

He went to America first. He found that Roosevelt was open to new ideas and prepared to put them into operation – he felt that the Roosevelts were unlimited people. But he worried that the absence of a sense of state in the country and the emphasis on the individual meant that the mechanism for implementing any new order was lacking.

When he subsequently visited Stalin in Moscow, he was impressed by Stalin’s readiness to discuss their respective points of view. But Stalin was not to be moved by his talk of a planned world and believed that ‘the movement of socialization in America was not a genuine proletarian resolution’. Wells (who had visited Russia before) also found that far from awakening to a wider world, the country was becoming enmeshed in the idea of Sovietic self-sufficiency.

At any rate, at the end of his visits to America and Russia, Wells reflected as follows:    

‘Though most of the people in the world in key positions are more or less accessible to me, I lack the solvent power to bring them into unison. I can talk to them and even unsettle them, but I cannot compel their brains to see.’

Irrespective of any flaws in Wells’s arguments and whether he was right or not, there is a deeper point here. There is an ominous sense of déjà-vu about the times we are living in today when compared to the 1930s. Yet in an era when global communication was far from the instantaneous medium that it is today, a private international figure with positive views about the political unification of the world was able to meet with and be taken seriously by the two most powerful men on the planet. One cannot imagine any individual getting even as far as that today.

Wells and the situation today

If Wells rose from his grave and surveyed the modern world, what would he make of the situation today? As was stated above, he would see a good deal that was uncomfortably reminiscent – in spirit if not in fact – of the pre-war days of the 1930s.  

In one respect, however, things are very different. Wells’s lament of his time was that there was no understanding of social processes and how things linked together in society – ‘there was no foresight and therefore still less could there be any understanding control’. The world could not get out of its difficulties because it had no idea of what it wanted to get out to, no objective. At least today there is far more understanding of social processes, as is evinced by the current structure for dealing with international affairs.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were established by the United Nations in 2015 to shape the development of the planet for the next 15 years and eliminate poverty by 2030. The SDGs were seen as something that all countries were expected to contribute to visibly and were written by consensus involving not just UN or government officials, but a much wider range of representatives from business, non-government organisations, civil society and so on.

Also in 2015, the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP 21) came up with the ‘Paris Agreement’ establishing some collective goals. Countries agreed to limit the rise in global temperatures to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to try to limit the rise to 1.5°C: beyond this level risks and consequences to the orderly evolution of human life become much more dangerous, and this precept has guided negotiations on the climate ever since. 

At the UN General Assembly in September, 2021, Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, presented a report, Our Common Agenda, published when the world was just over eighteen months into the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr Guterres stated that mankind was at an inflection point in history and that now was the time to renew the social contract between Governments and their people and within societies. There should be more long-term thinking and a transformation of education skills and lifelong learning. He also proposed a Summit of the Future to forge a new global consensus on what our future should look like, and what we could do today to secure it.

All this would be music to Wells’s ear. He would have remembered the failed World Economic Conference of 1933 and awaited the Summit with both eagerness and apprehension.  

The UN Summit of the Future took place between 19th and 22nd September 2024. As was discussed in the third part of my recent blog on the Summit, it was a chance to put the world on red alert. Instead, a chance for pivotal action passed into oblivion. From his celestial home Wells would have observed that, despite all the knowledge, awareness and facilities for communication, the conference failed to bring the world’s leaders towards unison, and they were still failing to see. He would be fearful that the sort of cataclysms he foresaw in the 1930s would have to come to pass before mankind would realise the need for a unified world state. He would mournfully remember the epitaph for himself that he had suggested as an addition to the warnings he had given in a preface to another of his works in 1921: “I told you so. You damned fools.”

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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