Quo Vadimus?

Quo Vadimus? by E.E. Fournier d'Albe

Quo Vadimus? considers humanity’s future by beginning with the apparent futility yet persistent fascination of astronomy: people seek in the stars an answer to “Whither?” Although the earth should remain habitable for millions of years, humanity’s survival depends less on changing physical conditions than on its own psychology. The race could perish through a collective Will to Die, declining procreation, sterility caused by disease, or destructive radiation, though science may avert most dangers. Its essential requirements are adequate food and the preservation of the procreative impulse; progress and happiness, while desirable, are secondary to continued existence. The author judges most of humanity still ignorant and driven by greeds, lusts, superstitions, and illusions, while an educated élite possesses a disproportionate share of knowledge and power. This division produces oppression, conflict, empires, and national rivalry. Humanity is unlikely to form a close federation unless confronted by an external enemy, yet international trade, communication, and the Postal Union point toward wider unity. The British Empire, the United States of America, France, and the Japanese Empire are imagined as a possible nucleus for a benevolent world leadership. Progress is declared real, accelerating, and generally directed toward fuller life and greater happiness. Improved health, education, working conditions, transport, picture theatres, wireless, and scientific discovery have enlarged modern life. Future forecasting must allow for unexpected inventions, but continued advances in communication and transport will reduce the limitations imposed by space, broaden experience, and allow nearly instant contact across the world while preserving privacy through greater individual control over social access. Clothing will become lighter, more adaptable to climate and activity, and expressive without abandoning its practical and social purposes. Housing will spread outward from crowded cities: widely separated homes with private grounds, translucent materials proof against heat and cold, artificial daylight, machinery replacing servants, and food preparations largely supplied by purveyors. Family life will remain indispensable because children require parental love and responsibility, though the State will supervise ill-disposed or incompetent parents more closely. Education will cease to be passive absorption from lectures and instead cultivate curiosity, independent reasoning, questioning, and the intellectual joy of discovery from early childhood. The future of labour will reject oppressive mastery and any division in which one class exists merely to serve another. Humanitarian feeling should make organized work cooperative, adventurous, and companionable. Private property and savings will persist, since bodily strength, tools, knowledge, and possessions are forms of capital; the aim should be to prevent wealth from creating misery rather than abolish it. Workers and contributors may share risks and rewards in collective enterprises, perhaps replacing wages with permanent interests in successful undertakings. Government will remain necessary to direct collective action and preserve order. Though democracy appears to rest on majority rule, effective policy is shaped by expert officials and advisers. Government should be treated as skilled and demanding work, while emigration and freer movement can restrain bad administration. Science will strengthen public order and established institutions. Over longer periods, world-wide communications, rapid travel, records of sights and sounds, an international auxiliary language, and the conquest of disease and distance will bind humanity together. War may eventually be recognized as a loss to every belligerent, though rivalry may take other and cruel forms. Within a century, the author foresees one government, free travel and commerce, united relief from calamity, control of animal, vegetable, and bacterial life, and medicine that prolongs efficient life while making death painless and undreaded. In a thousand years, the earth may be cultivated as a vast garden, its climate controlled, its internal heat used for energy, and even its interior made habitable. Humanity’s networks of communication, power, and thought may unify the planet into a sentient organism, with mankind as its “grey matter.” People may develop personal loyalty to the earth itself. Over still vaster ages, celestial dangers could provide an incentive for a planetary foreign policy, as humanity organizes to defend the earth and perhaps influence the solar system. This vision rests on the continued vitality of humanity, for love remains the force sustaining reproduction, courage, and devotion to an unborn future.

By E.E. Fournier d'Albe · First published 1910 · Genre: Futurology, Speculative Nonfiction, Social Philosophy · 13,327 words

First lines

Sitting at my desk by a cosy and up-to-date gas fire on a foggy day, with tufts of mist steadily rolling up from the swollen waters of the wise old Thames, I try to realize that I am travelling through space at a rate of over a thousand miles a minute, on board a minor planet in forced revolution round a vast white-hot globe nearly a hundred million miles away.

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futurology · speculative nonfiction · social prophecy · human evolution · future of humanity · astronomy and cosmology · scientific progress · human survival · extinction anxiety · population decline · eugenic thought · psychology of civilization

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