Tomorrow Happens (15 page)

The Martians' ardent climb grew manifestly amorous as the sun rose in piercing brilliance, warming our chilled bones. I was near the end of my endurance, sustained only by the excitement of observing Frenchmen and women fighting back with ingenuity and rare unity. But as the Martians scaled the tower—driven by urges we can guess by analogy alone—I began to doubt. My scheme was simple, but could it work?

I conferred with the dark Italian who supervised the connections.

"Potentials? Voltages?" He screwed up his face. "Who has had-a time to calculate. All I know, M'sewer, iz that we got-a plenty juice. You want-a fry a fish, use a hot flame."

I took his point. Even at comparatively low voltages, high currents can destroy any organism. A mere fraction of an ampere can kill a man, if his skin is made a reasonable conductor by application of water, for example. Thus, we took it as a sign of a higher power at work, when the bright sun fell behind a glowering black cloud, and an early mist rolled in from the north. It made the tower slick beneath the orange lamps we had festooned about it.

And still the Martians climbed.

It was necessary to coordinate the discharge of so many batteries in one powerful jolt, a mustering of beta rays. Pyrotechnicians had taken up positions beside our command post, within sight of the giant, spectral figures which now had mounted a third of the way up the tower.

"Hey Verne!" The American shouted, with well-meant impudence. "You're on!"

I turned to see that a crowd had gathered. Their expressions of tense hope touched this old man's heart. Hope and faith in my idea. There would be no higher point in the life of a fabulist.

"Connect!" I cried. "Loose the hounds of electrodynamics!"

A skyrocket leaped forth, trailing sooty smoke—a makeshift signal, but sufficient.

Down by the river and underneath a hundred ruins, scores of gaps and switches closed. Capacitors arced. A crackling rose from around the city as stored energy rushed along the copper cabling. I imagined for an instant the onrushing mob of beta rays, converging on—

The invaders suddenly shuddered, and soon there emerged thin, high cries, screams that were the first sign of how much like us they were, for their wails rose in hopeless agony, shrieks of despair from mouths which breathed lighter air than we, but knew the same depths of woe.

They toppled one by one, tumbling in the morning mist, crashing to shatter on the trampled lawns and cobblestones of the ironically named
Champs de Mars
. . . marshalling ground of the god of war, and now graveyard of his planetary champions.

The lesser machines, deprived of guidance, soon reeled away, some falling into the river, and many others destroyed by artillery, or even enraged mobs. So the threat ebbed from its horrid peak . . . at least for the time being.

As my reward for these services, I would ask that the site be renamed, for it was not the arts of
battle
which turned the metal monsters into burning slag. Nor even Zeus's lightning, which we had unleashed. In the final analysis, it was
Aphrodite
who had come to the aid of her favorite city.

What a fitting way for our uninvited guests to meet their end—to die passionately in Paris, from a fatal love.

What will the future be like?

The question is much on people's minds, and not only because we've entered a new century. One of our most deeply human qualities keeps us both fascinated and worried about tomorrow's dangers. We all try to project our thoughts into the future, using special portions of our brains called the prefrontal lobes to mentally probe the murky realm ahead. These tiny neural organs let us envision, fantasize, and explore possible consequences of our actions, noticing some errors and evading some mistakes.

Humans have possessed these mysterious nubs of gray matter—sometimes called the "lamps on our brows"—since before the Neolithic. What has changed recently is our effectiveness at using them. Today, a substantial fraction of the modern economy is devoted to predicting, forecasting, planning, investing, making bets, or just preparing for times to come. Which variety of seer we listen to can often be a matter of style. Some prefer horoscopes, while others like to hear consultants in Armani suits present a convincing "business case."

Each of us hopes to prepare for what's coming and possibly improve our fate in the years ahead. Indeed, this trait may be one of the most profound distinctions between humanity and other denizens of the planet, helping to explain our mastery over the world.

Yet, it is important to remember that a great many more things might happen than actually do. There are more plausibilities than likelihoods.

One of the most powerful novels of all time, published fifty years ago, foresaw a dark future that never came to pass. That we escaped the destiny portrayed in George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, may be owed in part to the way his chilling tale affected millions, who then girded themselves to fight "Big Brother" to their last breath.

In other words, Orwell may have helped make his own scenario not come true.

Since then, many other "self-preventing prophecies" rocked the public's conscience or awareness, perhaps helping us deflect disaster. Rachel Carson foresaw a barren world if we ignored environmental abuse—a mistake we may have somewhat averted, partly thanks to warnings like
Silent Spring
and
Soylent Green
. Who can doubt that films such as
Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach
, and
Fail-Safe
helped caution us against dangers of inadvertent nuclear war?
The China Syndrome, The Hot Zone
—and even
Das Kapital
—arguably fit in this genre of works whose credibility and worrisome vividness may help prevent their own scenarios from coming true.

Whether these literary or cinematic works actually made a difference or not can never be proved. That each of them substantially motivated large numbers of people to pay increased attention to specific possible failure modes cannot be denied.

As for Big Brother—Orwell showed us the pit awaiting any civilization that combines panic with technology and the dark, cynical tradition of tyranny. In so doing, he armed us against that horrible fate. In contrast to the sheeplike compliance displayed by subject peoples in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, it seems that a "rebel" image has taken charge of our shared imaginations. Every conceivable power center, from governments and corporations to criminal and techno-elites, has been repeatedly targeted by Hollywood's most relentless theme . . . suspicion of authority.

(Can you cite even a single popular film of the last forty years, in which the protagonist does not bond with the audience by performing some act of defiance toward authority in the first ten minutes?)

These examples point to something bigger and more important than mere fiction. Our civilization's success depends at least as much on the mistakes we avoid as the successes that we plan. Sadly, no one compiles lists of these narrow escapes, which seem less interesting than each week's fashionable crisis. People can point to a few species saved from extinction . . . and our good fortune at avoiding nuclear war. That's about it for famous near-misses. But once you start listing them, it turns out we have had quite an impressive roll call of dodged bullets and lucky breaks.

Learning why and how ought to be a high priority.

History is a long and dreary litany of ruinous decisions made by rulers in all centuries and on all continents. No convoluted social theory is needed to explain this. A common thread weaves through most of these disasters; a flaw in human character—self-deception—eventually enticed even great leaders into taking fatal missteps, ignoring the warnings of others.

The problem is devastatingly simple, as the late physicist-author Richard Feynman put it: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."

Many authors have railed against the cruelty and oppression of despots. But George Orwell focused also on the essential
stupidity
of tyranny, by portraying how the ferocious yet delusional oligarchs of Oceania were grinding their nation into a state of brutalized poverty. Their tools had been updated, but their rationalizations were essentially the same ones prescribed by oppressors for ages. By keeping the masses ill-educated, by whipping up hatred of scapegoats and by quashing free speech, elites in nearly all cultures strove to eliminate criticism and preserve their short-term status . . . thus guaranteeing long-term disaster for the nations they led.

This tragic and ubiquitous defect may have been the biggest factor chaining us far below our potential as a species. That is, till we stumbled onto a solution.

The solution of many voices.

Each of us may be too stubbornly self-involved to catch our own mistakes. But in an open society, we can often count on others to notice them for us. Though we all hate irksome criticism and accountability, they are tools that work. The four great secular institutions that fostered our unprecedented wealth and freedom—science, justice, democracy and markets—function best when all players get to see, hear, speak, know, argue, compete and create without fear. One result is that the "pie" we are all dividing up keeps getting larger.

In other words, elites actually do better—in terms of absolute wealth—when they cannot conspire to keep the
relative
differences of wealth too great. And yet, this ironic truth escaped notice by nearly all past aristocracies, obsessed as they were with staying as far above the riffraff as possible.

Orwell saw this pattern, perhaps more clearly than anyone, portraying it in the banal and witless justifications given by Oceania apparatchiks.
¹

How have we done with his warning? Today, in the modern neo-West, even elites cannot escape being pilloried by spotlights and scrutiny. They may not like it, but it does them (and especially us) worlds of good. Moreover, this openness has helped prevent the worst misuses of technology that Orwell feared. Though video cameras are now smaller, cheaper and even more pervasive than he ever imagined, their arrival in numberless swarms has not had the totalitarian effect he prophesied, perhaps because—forewarned—we act to ensure that the lenses point both ways.

This knack of holding the mighty accountable, possibly our culture's most unique achievement, is owed largely to those who gazed at human history and saw the central paradox of power—what's good for the leader and what's good for the commonwealth only partly overlap, and can often skew at right angles. In throwing out some of the rigid old command structures—the kings, priests and demagogues who claimed to rule by inherent right—we seem to be gambling instead on an innovative combination: blending rambunctious individualism with mutual accountability.

Those two traits may sound incompatible at first. But any sensible person knows that one cannot thrive without the other.

The Orwellian metaphor is pervasive. On disputative web sites like Slashdot, every third posting seems to blare warnings about "Big Brother," as adversaries scream "this is just like
1984
!" whenever something vaguely bothersome turns up (e.g., wall-sized tv screens, personality tests for high school students, the cat-brain camera).

Is government the chief enemy of freedom? That authority center does merit close scrutiny . . . which we've been applying lately with unprecedented ardor. Meanwhile other citizens worry about different power groups—aristocracies, corporations, criminal gangs, and technological elites. Can anyone justifiably claim exemption from accountability?

Orwell's metaphors have been expanded beyond his initial portrayal of a Stalinist nightmare-state, to include all worrisome accumulations of influence, authority or unreciprocal transparency. Elsewhere
²
I discuss the role that righteous indignation plays in helping to create what may be the first true social immune system against calamity. All four of those great social innovations mentioned above, that fostered our unprecedented wealth and freedom (science, justice, democracy & free markets), are based on harnessing this network of suspicion through vigorous and competitive application of mutual accountability. It may not be nice, but it works far better than hierarchical authority.

These "accountability arenas" function well only when all players get fair access to information.

Technological advances like the Internet may help amplify this trend, or squelch it, depending on choices we make in the next few years. The implications of burgeoning information technology may be enormous. Soon the cognitive powers of human beings will expand immensely. Memory will be enhanced by vast, swift databases that you'll access almost at the speed of thought. Vision will explode in all directions as cameras grow ever-smaller, cheaper, more mobile and interconnected.

In such a world, it will be foolish ever to depend on the ignorance of others.

If they don't know your secrets now, there is always a good chance that someone will pierce your veils tomorrow, perhaps without you ever becoming aware of it. The best firewalls and encryptions may be bypassed by a gnat-camera in your ceiling or a whistle-blower in your front office. How can you ever be sure it has not already happened?
³

Some businessfolk, like Jack Stack (author of
The Great Game of Business)
, see the writing on the wall. By using open-book management, they reduce costs, enhance employee morale, foster error-detection, eliminate layers of management, speed their reaction time, and learn how to do business in ways that make it irrelevant how much their competitors know.

Companies that instead pay millions trying to conceal knowledge will strive endlessly to plug leaks, yet gain no long-term advantage or peace of mind. Because the number of ways to leak will expand geometrically as both software and the real world grow more complex. Because information is not like money or any other commodity. It will soon be like air.