In December of 1945, H.G. Wells, afflicted with diabetes and cancer, published Mind at the End of Its Tether, a tiny nonfiction book that outlined his vision of humanity’s decline. He had explored a similar theme a half century before. In his 1895 novel The Time Machine, his narrator visits the last season of Earth, where the only activity is that of a grotesque crablike creature, clambering from a waveless sea under a dim and unmoving red sun. That creature, presumably, is what will be left of complex life in the far future, when the sun is dying and the earth is tidally locked into daylit and dark sides.
Cancer and diabetes weigh heavily on the mind, but in Tether Wells maintains a modicum of objectivity despite his maladies. His focus is on the human world he so temporarily lives in.
He postulates that humanity is spent. It lacks the intellectual and emotional equipment to live in the complex ecosystem of ideas it has created.
With luck, he says, a new species will come along and replace humans before they turn everything they touch into a trashbin fire.
Wells says the human mind cannot comprehend that its history has no relation to current events. Nor can it understand that what it considers progress is only decay and futility.
It’s a grim valedictory, one dense, a bit scattered, and written in near-opaque language. When I first read Mind at the End of Its Tether, I decided that Wells had succumbed to dementia. Humanity might have been obsolete, I thought, but so was the mental acuity of H.G. Wells.
I sat down one morning last week and reread the book’s entire 37 pages. I know now that there was nothing wrong with the mind that wrote it in 1945. Wells does use language as a shield against the horrors of the Blitz and the death camps of the Nazis—they must have been front and center for thinking people in England at the time, and throwing stilted and hard-to-understand language at them must have been a strategy for sanity. But what Wells prophesied is not obsolete. It’s the world we live in.
The idea of human civilization being inadequate to its predicament, and the even scarier idea that cause has ceased to have any relation to effect, now seem depressingly right on. Whole populations can exist apart from reality, now that political parties have been founded on the principle of denial, lies have become what passes for human discourse, and paranoia has become the cognitive duct tape that keeps millions of personalities from littering fragments of themselves across the landscape.
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Do our perceptions come from the inside or outside? Does our imminent demise color our judgment instead of focus our attention? These are questions we all will face, and it’s tempting to look at H.G. Wells, and anyone else looking at death in the rear-view mirror (labeled OBJECTS MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR), as wanting to turn their personal ends into the end of the world.
In previous iterations of this blog, I’ve mentioned Shatov, Dostoyevsky’s unpleasant and appropriately named character in The Possessed. Shatov so despises the world that he destroys it by killing himself.
Works for him, I’ve noted, but it’s a line that doesn’t do justice to its own truth. Suicide comes close to being the ultimate violence, because it really does destroy a world, and almost always more than one. A complex ecosystem of imagination, memory, and narrative, one with millions of moving parts, is smashed. Its deliberate destruction starts a chain reaction that destroys other worlds, on and on and on. A contagious grief wrecks the work of lifetimes and turns human experience to ashes.
(If you’ve noticed that dictators almost always come to a bad end, it’s because the process of making your outside into a larger replica of your inside isn’t really complete until you kill yourself and a bunch of other people. Think of that when you call Putin a smart man, or vote for Donald Trump.)
The evidence against seeing H.G. Wells as old, sick, and cognitively tired is that his lifetime of writing made him a trained observer of the world around him. He was looking closely, as he always had, at Great Britain. He had witnessed its passage through two disastrous wars, wars that destroyed its place at the center of civilization and removed any religious and moral authority from its empire. He had watched the curve of British confidence hit a peak and then a steepening downslope. His scientific education had acquainted him with geological time, the laws of thermodynamics, and the fallacy of thinking that you could establish single causes for single effects. Quantum physics had come up with the Uncertainty Principle, and the Nazis had illustrated what happened when you tried to force the world to obey singular human intention.
Near death, Wells was as careful and accurate an observer of the world as he had ever been. His last book was an attempt to preserve his sanity, and sanity required that he accept the end of humanity as the price of civilization.
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These blog posts have been my own grim valedictory. Let me assure you that I’m not dying or demented at this point.
It is, however, a bit disturbing to find that a writer I once thought was deep into dementia makes perfect sense to me these days. On the one hand I experience beautiful spring mornings in Sawtooth Valley. There’s gas in the car, food in the refrigerator, enough wood in the woodpile to last until May, snow to ski on the north-facing slopes. On the other, there is the Internet and its coverage of Israel, Ukraine, China, and North Korea, its distribution of the cloud of lies that passes for our political discourse, its support of a casualty-generating economic system, and a number of below-the-fold stories about a climate going through a phase-change.
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I still have enough faith in what I read and see on screens that I believe H.G. Wells when he says humanity cannot look to history for precedent. Weather forecasters, political pundits, lawyers, endocrinologists, engineers, bankers, car salespeople: these people can no longer predict what’s going to happen. All the swans in their worlds are black.
At some point this lack of predictability causes uncertainty about one’s own sanity. Predictability—historical cycles, a comfortably oscillating climate, the passage of seasons and generations—seems to be a component of sanity. That’s why a lot of professional predictors look a little wild-eyed these days, and why they keep violating the occupational taboo against saying, “This time it’s different.”
It's also why Julie’s and my snow shoveling, firewood cutting, backcountry skiing, visits to hot springs, summer hikes, and trips to Costco have all taken on the character of essential ritual. We go to the same places and do the same things, even down to having a standard shopping list when we magically transform into consumers at the city limits of Boise. It’s a way we can remain tethered to the world, which is way better than being tethered to a cult or political party.
Living where the Sawtooth peaks look the same as they did 70 years ago helps. Not believing everything you are told helps a lot.
To paraphrase H.G. Wells, the human mind cannot apprehend what comes over the internet. Spend enough time with screens and your own need for certainty will lead you to accept reality as whatever AI says it is. In the coming election season, lots of people will make that mistake. The result will be minds untethered from anything that exists out of cyberspace, which is to say that we will experience a mass psychosis and the death of consciousness.
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One precedent that doesn’t seem to be in any danger: species go extinct. New species replace them. Some species can go on for millions of years, but when evolution takes an illegal right turn into extractive capitalism and the subsequent modification of the earth’s atmosphere, extinction by waste products happens quickly. That’s what happened to the oxygen-producing cyanobacteria that were earth’s dominant life form 2.5 billion years ago. For them, oxygen was a toxic waste product. They produced enough of it to make it a component of the planetary atmosphere, which severely limited their habitat.
It can happen in an arena of any size. Put alcohol-excreting yeast in a bottle of grape juice and in a short while it will produce enough alcohol to kill itself.
In CO2-producing humanity’s case, the CO2 will allow the sun to heat the atmosphere enough to kill all the humans before they die of oxygen deprivation—a different process but the same result.
If you could have civilization without toxic waste products you might be able to draw a life-saving distinction between humans on the one hand and cyanobacteria and yeast on the other. But aside from becoming disembodied spirits, there is no way.
It appears we’re trying the disembodied spirit route. Let’s hope it works.