Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon [top rated books of all time .TXT] 📗
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automatically by tapping from the communal drug-pipes whatever chemicals
were needed for correct physiological balance.
Even in the case of broadcasting itself the human element would no
longer be needed, for all possible experiences would have been already
recorded from the most exquisite living examples. These would be
continuously broadcast in a great number of alternative programs.
A few technicians and organizers might still be needed to superintend
the system; but, properly distributed, their work would entail for each
member of the World Broadcasting Authority’s staff no more than a few
hours of interesting activity each week.
Children, if future generations were required, would be produced
ectogenetically. The World Director of Broadcasting would be requested
to submit psychological and physiological specifications of the ideal
“listening breed.” Infants produced in accordance with this pattern
would then be educated by special radio programs to prepare them for
adult radio life. They would never leave their cots, save to pass by
stages to the full-sized beds of maturity. At the latter end of life, if
medical science did not succeed in circumventing senility and death, the
individual would at least be able to secure a painless end by pressing
an appropriate button.
Enthusiasm for this astounding project spread rapidly in all civilized
countries, but certain forces of reaction were bitterly opposed to it.
The old-fashioned religious people and the militant nationalists both
affirmed that it was man’s glory to be active. The religious held that
only in self-discipline, mortification of the flesh, and constant
prayer, could the soul be fitted for eternal life. The nationalists of
each country declared that their own people had been given a sacred
trust to rule the baser kinds, and that in any case only the martial
virtues could ensure the spirit’s admittance to Valhalla.
Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored
radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now
turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they
needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial
ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an
opiate and a spur. By every method of propaganda they sought to rouse
the passions of nationalism and racial hatred. They created, in fact,
the “Other Fascism,” complete with lies, with mystical cult of race and
state, with scorn of reason, with praise of brutal mastery, with appeal
at once to the vilest and to the generous motives of the deluded young.
Opposed to all these critics of radio-bliss, and equally opposed to
radio-bliss itself, there was in each country a small and bewildered
party which asserted that the true goal of human activity was the
creation of a worldwide community of awakened and intelligently
creative persons, related by mutual insight and respect, and by the
common task of fulfilling the potentiality of the human spirit on earth.
Much of their doctrine was a re-statement of the teachings of religious
seers of a fine long past, but it had also been deeply influenced by
contemporary science. This party, however, was misunderstood by the
scientists, cursed by the clerics, ridiculed by the militarists, and
ignored by the advocates of radio-bliss.
Now at this time economic confusion had been driving the great
commercial empires of the Other Earth into more and more desperate
competition for markets. These economic rivalries had combined with
ancient tribal passions of fear and hate and pride to bring about an
interminable series of war scares each of which threatened universal
Armageddon.
In this situation the radio-enthusiasts pointed out that, if their
policy were accepted, war would never occur, and on the other hand that,
if a world-war broke out, their policy would be indefinitely postponed.
They contrived a worldwide peace movement; and such was the passion for
radio-bliss that the demand for peace swept all countries. An
International Broadcasting Authority was at last founded, to propogate
the radio gospel, compose the differences between the empires, and
eventually to take over the sovereignty of the world.
Meanwhile the earnestly “religous” and the sincere militarists, rightly
dismayed at the baseness of the motives behind the new internationalism,
but in their own manner equally wrong-headed, determined to save the
Other Men in spite of themselves by goading the peoples into war. All
the forces of propaganda and financial corruption were heroically
wielded to foment the passions of nationalism. Even so, the greed for
radio-bliss was by now so general and so passionate, that the war party
would never have succeeded had it not been for the wealth of the great
armorers, and their experience in fomenting strife.
Trouble was successfully created between one of the older commercial
empires and a certain state which had only recently adopted mechanical
civilization, but was already a Great Power, and a Power in desperate
need of markets. Radio, which formerly had been the main force making
for cosmopolitanism, became suddenly in each country the main stimulus
to nationalism. Morning, noon and night, every civilized people was
assured that enemies, whose flavor was of course subhuman and foul, were
plotting its destruction. Armament scares, spy stories, accounts of the
barbarous and sadistic behavior of neighboring peoples, created in every
country such uncritical suspicion and hate that war became inevitable. A
dispute arose over the control of a frontier province. During those
critical days Bvalltu and I happened to be in a large provincial town. I
shall never forget how the populace plunged into almost maniacal hate.
All thought of human brotherhood, and even of personal safety, was swept
away by a savage blood-lust. Panic-stricken governments began projecting
long-range rocket bombs at their dangerous neighbors. Within a few weeks
several of the capitals of the Other Earth had been destroyed from the
air. Each people now began straining every nerve to do more hurt than it
received.
Of the horrors of this war, of the destruction of city after city, of
the panic-stricken, starving hosts that swarmed into the open country,
looting and killing, of the starvation and disease, of the
disintegration of the social services, of the emergence of ruthless
military dictatorships, of the steady or catastrophic decay of culture
and of all decency and gentleness in personal relations, of this there
is no need to speak in detail.
Instead, I shall try to account for the finality of the disaster which
overtook the Other Men. My own human kind, in similar circumstances,
would never, surely, have allowed itself to be so completely
overwhelmed. No doubt, we ourselves are faced with the possibility of a
scarcely less destructive war; but, whatever the agony that awaits us,
we shall almost certainly recover. Foolish we may be, but we always
manage to avoid falling into the abyss of downright madness. At the last
moment sanity falteringly reasserts itself. Not so with the Other Men.
3. PROSPECTS OF THE RACE
The longer I stayed on the Other Earth, the more I suspected that there
must be some important underlying difference between this human race and
my own. In some sense the difference was obviously one of balance. Homo
sapiens was on the whole better integrated, more gifted with common
sense, less apt to fall into extravagance through mental dissociation.
Perhaps the most striking example of the extravagance of the Other Men
was the part played by religion in their more advanced societies.
Religion was a much greater power than on my own planet; and the
religious teachings of the prophets of old were able to kindle even my
alien and sluggish heart with fervor. Yet religion, as it occurred
around me in contemporary society, was far from edifying.
I must begin by explaining that in the development of religion on the
Other Earth gustatory sensation had played a very great part. Tribal
gods had of course been endowed with the taste-characters most moving to
the tribe’s own members. Later, when monotheisms arose, descriptions of
God’s power, his wisdom, his justice, his benevolence, were accompanied
by descriptions of his taste. In mystical literature God was often
likened to an ancient and mellow wine; and some reports of religious
experience suggested that this gustatory-ecstasy was in many ways akin
to the reverent zest of our own wine-tasters, savoring some rare
vintage.
Unfortunately, owing to the diversity of gustatory huma? types, there
had seldom been any widespread agreement as to the taste of God.
Religious wars had been waged to decid whether he was in the main sweet
or salt, or whether his preponderant flavor was one of the many
gustatory charac ters which my own race cannot conceive. Some teachers
insist ed that only the feet could taste him, others only the hands 01
the mouth, others that he could be experienced only in the subtle
complex of gustatory flavors known as the immaculate union, which was a
sensual, and mainly sexual, ecstasy induced by contemplation of
intercourse with the deity.
Other teachers declared that, though God was indeed tasty, it was not
through any bodily instrument but to the naked spirit that his essence
was revealed; and that his was a flavor more subtle and delicious than
the flavor of the beloved, since it included all that was most fragrant
and spiritual in man, and infinitely more.
Some went so far as to declare that God should be thought of not as a
person at all but as actually being this flavor. Bvalltu used to say,
“Either God is the universe, or he is the flavor of creativity pervading
all things.”
Some ten or fifteen centuries earlier, when religion, so far as I could
tell, was most vital, there were no churches or priesthoods; but every
man’s life was dominated by religious ideas to an extent which to me was
almost incredible. Later, churches and priesthoods had returned, to play
an important part in preserving what was now evidently a declining
religious consciousness. Still later, a few centuries before the
Industrial Revolution, institutional religion had gained such a hold on
the most civilized peoples that three-quarters of their total income was
spent on the upkeep of religious institutions. The working classes,
indeed, who slaved for the owners in return for a mere pittance, gave
much of their miserable earnings to the priests, and lived in more
abject squalor than need have been.
Science and industry had brought one of those sudden and extreme
revolutions of thought which were so characteristic of the Other Men.
Nearly all the churches were destroyed or turned into temporary
factories or industrial museums. Atheism, lately persecuted, became
fashionable. All the best minds turned agnostic. More recently, however,
apparently in horror at the effects of a materialistic culture which was
far more cynical and blatant than our own, the most industrialized
peoples began to turn once more to religion. A spiritistic foundation
was provided for natural science. The old churches were re-sanctified,
and so many new religious edifices were built that they were soon as
plentiful as cinema houses with us. Indeed, the new churches gradually
absorbed the cinema, and provided non-stop picture shows in which
sensual orgies and ecclesiastical propaganda were skilfully blended.
At the time of my visit the churches had regained all their lost power.
Radio had indeed at one time competed with them, but was successfully
absorbed. They still refused to broadcast the immaculate union, which
gained fresh prestige from the popular belief that it was too spiritual
to be transmitted on the ether. The more advanced clerics, however, had
agreed that if ever the universal system of “radio-bliss” was
established, this difficulty might be overcome. Communism, meanwhile,
still maintained its irreligious convention; but in the two great
Communist countries the officially organized “irreligion” was becoming a
religion in all but name. It had its institutions, its priesthood, its
ritual, its morality, its system of absolution, its metaphysical
doctrines, which,
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