Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon (bts book recommendations .txt) 📕

THE COMMUNITY OF WORLDS

I. BUSY UTOPIAS

THERE came a time when our new-found communal mind attained such a

degree of lucidity that it was able to maintain contact even with worlds

that had passed far beyond the mentality of terrestrial man. Of these

lofty experiences I, who am once more reduced to the state of a mere

individual human being, have only the most confused memory. I am like

one who, in the last extremity of mental fatigue, tries to recapture the

more penetrating intuitions that he achieved in his lost freshness. He

can recover only faint echoes and a vague glamour. But even the most

fragmentary recollections of the cosmical experiences which befell me in

that lucid State deserve recording.

The sequence of events in the successfully waking world was generally

more or less as follows. The starting point, it will be remembered, was

a plight like that in which our own Earth now stands. The dialectic of

the world’s history had confronted the race with a problem with which

the traditional mentality could never cope. The world-situation had

grown too complex for lowly intelligences, and it demanded a degree of

individual integrity in leaders and in led, such as was as yet possible

only to a few minds. Consciousness had already been violently awakened

out of the primitive trance into a state of excruciating individualism,

of poignant but pitifully restricted self-awareness. And individualism,

together with the traditional tribal spirit, now threatened to wreck the

world. Only after a long-drawn agony of economic distress and maniac

warfare, haunted by an increasingly clear vision of a happier world,

could the second stage of waking be achieved. In most cases it was not

achieved. “Human nature,” or its equivalent in the many worlds, could

not change itself; and the environment could not remake it.

But in a few worlds the spirit reacted to its desperate plight with a

miracle. Or, if the reader prefers, the environment miraculously

refashioned the spirit. There occurred a widespread and almost sudden

waking into a new lucidity of consciousness and a new integrity of will.

To call this change miraculous is only to recognize that it could not

have been scientifically predicted even from the fullest possible

knowledge of “human nature” as manifested in the earlier age. To later

generations, however, it appeared as no miracle but as a belated

wakening from an almost miraculous stupor into plain sanity.

This unprecedented access of sanity took at first the form of a

widespread passion for a new social order which should be just and

should embrace the whole planet. Such a social fervor was not, of

course, entirely new. A small minority had long ago conceived it, and

had haltingly tried to devote themselves to it. But now at last, through

the scourge of circumstance and the potency of the spirit itself, this

social, will became general. And while it was still passionate, and

heroic action was still possible to the precariously awakened beings,

the whole social structure of the world was reorganized, so that within

a generation or two every individual on the planet could count upon the

means of life, and the opportunity to exercise his powers fully, for his

own delight and for the service of the world community. It was now

possible to bring up the new generations to a sense that the world-order

was no alien tyranny but an expression of the general will, and that

they had indeed been born into a noble heritage, a thing for which it

was good to live and suffer and die. To readers of this book such a

change may well seem miraculous, and such a state Utopian.

Those of us who had come from less fortunate planets found it at once a

heartening and yet a bitter experience to watch world after world

successfully emerge from a plight which seemed inescapable, to see a

world-population of frustrated and hate-poisoned creatures give place to

one in which every individual was generously and shrewdly nurtured, and

therefore not warped by unconscious envy and hate. Very soon, though no

change had occurred in the biological stock, the new social environment

produced a world population which might well have seemed to belong to a

new species. In physique, in intelligence, in mental independence and

social responsibility, the new individual far outstripped the old, as

also in mental wholesomeness and in integrity of will. And though it was

sometimes feared that the removal of all sources of grave mental

conflict might deprive the mind of all stimulus to creative work, and

produce a mediocre population, it was soon found that, far from

stagnating, the spirit of the race now passed on to discover new fields

of struggle and triumph. The world-population of “aristocrats,” which

flourished after the great change, looked back with curiosity and

incredulity into the preceding age, and found great difficulty in

conceiving the tangled, disreputable and mostly unwitting motives which

were the main-springs of action even in the most fortunate individuals

among their ancestors. It was recognized that the whole

pre-revolutionary population was afflicted with serious mental diseases,

with endemic plagues of delusion and obsession, due to mental

malnutrition and poisoning. As psychological insight advanced, the same

kind of interest was aroused by the old psychology as is wakened in

modern Europeans by ancient maps which distort the countries of the

world almost beyond recognition. We were inclined to think of the

psychological crisis of the waking worlds as being the difficult passage

from adolescence to maturity; for in essence it was an outgrowing of

juvenile interests, a discarding of toys and childish games, and a

discovery of the interests of adult life. Tribal prestige, individual

dominance, military glory, industrial triumphs lost their obsessive

glamour, and instead the happy creatures delighted in civilized social

intercourse, in cultural activities, and in the common enterprise of

world-building. During the phase of history which followed the actual

surmounting of the spiritual crisis in a waking world the attention of

the race was of course still chiefly occupied with social

reconstruction. Many heroic tasks had to be undertaken. There was need

not only for a new economic system but for new systems of political

organization, of world-law, of education. In many cases this period of

reconstruction under the guidance of the new mentality was itself a time

of serious conflict. For even beings who are sincerely in accord about

the goal of social activity may disagree violently about the way. But

such conflicts as arose, though heated, were of a very different kind

from the earlier conflicts which were inspired by obsessive

individualism and obsessive group-hatreds.

We noted that the new world-orders were very diverse. This was, of

course, to be expected, since biologically, psychologically, culturally,

these worlds were very different. The perfected world-order of an

Echinoderm race had of course to be different from that of the symbiotic

Ichthyoids and Arachnoids; and this from that of a Nautiloid world, and

so on. But we noted also in all these victorious worlds a remarkable

identity. For instance, in the loosest possible sense, all were

communistic; for in all of them the means of production were communally

owned, and no individual could control the labor of others for private

profit. Again, in a sense all these world-orders were democratic, since

the final sanction of policy was world-opinion. But in many cases there

was no democratic machinery, no legal channel for the expression of

world-opinion. Instead, a highly specialized bureaucracy, or even a

world-dictator, might carry out the business of organizing the world’s

activity with legally absolute power, but under constant supervision by

popular will expressed through the radio. We were amazed to find that in

a truly awakened world even a dictatorship could be in essence

democratic. We observed with incredulity situations in which the

“absolute” world-government, faced with some exceptionally momentous and

doubtful matter of policy, had made urgent appeals for a formal

democratic decision, only to receive from all regions the reply, “We

cannot advise. You must decide as your professional experience suggests.

We will abide by your decision.”

Law in these worlds was based on a very remarkable kind of sanction

which could not conceivably work successfully on Earth. There was never

any attempt to enforce the law by violence, save against dangerous

lunatics, such as sometimes occurred as throw-backs to an earlier age.

In some worlds there was a complex body of “laws” regulating the

economic and social life of groups, and even the private affairs of

individuals. It seemed to us at first that freedom had vanished from

such worlds. But later we discovered that the whole intricate system was

regarded as we should regard the rules of a game or the canons of an

art, or the innumerable extra-legal customs of any long-established

society. In the main, everyone kept the law because he had faith in its

social value as a guide to conduct. But if ever the law seemed

inadequate he would without hesitation break it. His conduct might cause

offense or inconvenience or even serious hardship to his neighbors. They

would probably protest vigorously. But there was never question of

compulsion. If those concerned failed to persuade him that his behavior

was socially harmful, his case might be tried by a sort of court of

arbitration, backed by the prestige of the world-government. If the

decision went against the defendant, and yet he persisted in his illegal

behavior, none would restrain him. But such was the power of public

censure and social ostracism that disregard of the court’s decision was

very rare. The terrible sense of isolation acted on the law-breaker like

an ordeal by fire. If his motive was at bottom base, he would sooner or

later collapse. But if his case had merely been misjudged, or if his

conduct sprang from an intuition of value beyond the range of his

fellows, he might persist in his course till he had won over the public.

I mention these social curiosities only to give some illustration of the

far-reaching difference between the spirit of these Utopian worlds and

the spirit which is familiar to readers of this book. It may be easily

imagined that