Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence Summer Service of 6 July 1997 "Visions of the Future" David Mix Barrington ********************************* Order of meeting for summer service, 6 July 1997 "I like the silent church before the service begins..." -- Emerson CALL TO SILENCE Chime/Bell PRELUDE Prelude, Opus 28, no. 6 Chopin Norma Brown, piano WELCOME LIGHTING THE CHALICE *HYMN "Hail the Glorious Golden City" #140 READINGS Bellamy, Heinlein, Brin MOMENT OF REFLECTION OFFERTORY "Sweet Day" Vaughn Williams Court Canby Singers SERMON "Visions of the Future" David Mix Barrington SONG "The Lover's Ghost" Vaughn Williams Court Canby Singers READING Brin MOMENT OF RELECTION *HYMN "Jerusalem" (attached) POSTLUDE Tramerie, Opus 15, No. 7 Schumann Norma Brown, piano MOMENT OF RELECTION CHIME ****************************** READINGS: {The first reading is from Edward Bellamy. He is replying to a review of his utopian novel _Looking Backward_, which predicts a total transformation of society in the fifty years following the book's publication in 1887. The reviewer thought that 7500 years would be more plausible.} In 1759, when Quebec fell, the might of England in America seemed irresistable, and the vassalage of the colonies assured. Nevertheless, thirty years later, the first President of the American Republic was inaugurated. [...] In 1832, the original Antislavery Society was formed in Boston by a few so-called visionaries. Thirty-eight years later, in 1870, the society disbanded, its program fully carried out. These precedents do not, of course, prove that any such industrial and social transformation as is outlined in _Looking Backward_ is impending; but they do show that, when the moral and economical conditions for it are ripe, it may be expected to go forward with great rapidity. {The second reading is from Robert A. Heinlein's Guest of Honor speech to the 1941 World Science Fiction Convention:} We happen to live in a period of sudden and dramatic change in a good many of the things that happen to us. [...] I think that science fiction fans are better prepared to face the future than the ordinary run of people around them, because they believe in change. To that extent, I think that science fiction, even the most outlandish of it, no matter how badly it's written, has a distinct therapeutic value because _all_ of it has as its primary postulate that the world _does_ change. {The third reading is from the Afterword to David Brin's novel _Earth_, written in 1989 and set in 2039. Brin has just invited the reader to compare 1989 with 1939.} This is what makes half-century projections among the most difficult speculative novels to write. In order to depict a near-term future, say five or ten years ahead, a writer need only take the present world and exaggerate some current trend for dramatic effect. At the other end, portraying societies many centuries from now, the job is relatively easy also. (Anything goes, so long as you make it vaguely plausible.) But five decades is just short enough a span to require a sense of _familiarity_, and yet far enough away to demand countless surprises, as well. You must make it seem believable that many people who are walking around at this very moment would also exist in that future time, and find conditions---if not _commonplace_--- then at least normal. {final reading follows sermon} ********************************** SERMON: I spent a large portion of my youth in the future. I was a big science fiction reader, and my favorite author was Robert A. Heinlein. His juvenile novels usually featured a teenaged boy in some exotic but scientifically plausible future locale, like a colony on Mars or the academy for Space Cadets. By the end of the book, the apparently ordinary hero would win through to some kind of adult role in his world. But the most important thing to me was the projected future, with atomic-powered rockets to the planets, new political and social structures, and little details of daily life there, all established by offhand comments as the main plot proceeded. I wanted to grow up to live in that future, and as the space program marched through orbital flights to the moon landing, it looked like I might well see it. Most of today's "science fiction" is thinly disguised fantasy, often good light entertainment or even interesting as literature. But at its best science fiction can be both serious and important from a spiritual or religious point of view -- when it takes on the creation and exploration of plausible futures. Most of us will live many years into the future. What are we going to find, and where are we going to fit into it? How we view the future determines how we view the present. Some literary futures, like Orwell's _Nineteen Eighty-Four_, tell us "The future will be terrible, if we don't watch out." Traditional Christianity says "The future will be wonderful for you, if and only if you accept Jesus." Then there is utopian fiction, which says, "The future will be wonderful, and we're going to make it that way." One of my favorite examples of this last type is Edward Bellamy's novel _Looking Backward_. You may not have heard of it, but it was among the most popular American books of the late 1800's. In it, the rich young Bostonian Julian West falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in a utopian year 2000. A kindly doctor and his beautiful daughter explain that soon after his time, a great social tranformation took place in America, capitalism being replaced by the benevolent organization of the whole work force into a single industrial army. Material plenty and social harmony are guaranteed by a mix of nationalist fervor and clever market structures. For example, all workers receive the same wage (even after they retire at age 45) but the number of workers of each type is regulated by adjusting working conditions -- for example, coal miners have a very short work week and college professors a long one. Bellamy was specifically hoping that the people of his day would see that such a future was possible, and that the social stratification, labor conflict, and urban poverty of his own America could be changed. He had some success in attracting followers, some of them among our New England Unitarian predecessors, and wound up leading a "nationalist movement" that turned out to be a significant contributor to the political currents of populism and progressivism. We don't live in Bellamy's utopia today, but we did manage to get the forty-hour work week, regulation of industrial safety, and a substantial improvement in living standards. The problem with futures designed to be wonderful is a certain lack of plausibility. Christians and communists don't worry much about what life will be like after the Kingdom of God or True Communism has been achieved. (Though I can recommend Heinlein's fantasy novel _Job: A Comedy of Justice_ for an amusing view of daily life in a Christian Heaven.) Serious science fiction has to do better. If the future is to be like the present it will have good and bad aspects, and if our old problems have been solved we will have new problems. Robert Heinlein's basic view of the future is that it will be different and exciting, but that you will live in it, and it can be understood by thinking that you can do right now. He assumed that economics and politics would continue to drive events in the future, so in his stories it's quite common for the solution to one problem to _cause_ another directly. For example, Two scientists invent cheap solar power, and then have to give away their invention to keep it from being suppressed by the existing power companies. Great "roadcities" are built across the US, and the workers who maintain them threaten a strike. New psychological techniques are invented, and their first use is by a religious dictatorship controlling the US. But in every case his characters (whether teenagers or grumpy old men) are able to deal with the changes, learn how the world works, and master a small part of it. The imaginary future that's most familiar to many of us is the world of _Star Trek_, developed through four TV series and eight movies over the course of thirty years. The original idea of the series was to offer adventure in outer space as the starship _Enterprise_ sought out new life and new civilizations. But an important part of the show's appeal was that Earth (which the _Enterprise_ carefully avoided lest we have to consider some of the details) was posited as a place where the problems of the 1960's were solved -- no war, no racism, no material want. Of course, over time the shows have gotten more daring, so that there is now an ongoing rebellion against the homogeneity of the Federation, but _Star Trek_'s future continues to be an appealing and inspiring one. Some people out there view themselves as actively working to bring that distant future about. As we heard earlier, David Brin said that the hardest future to imagine is the one fifty years from now. The last future I want to look at today is his attempt to do just that, in his novel _Earth_. Writing in 1989, he needed to create a world of the year 2039 as a background for his main plot -- a world as similar and as different from 1989 as was the year 1939. (The main plot begins when humanity learns to create artificial black holes and accidently drops one into the middle of the planet. As you might imagine, a lot of things are changed beyond recognition by the end of the novel.) Brin's 2039 contains both good news and bad news. For the good news, there have been no major wars since the Swiss crisis of 2020, effective international treaties regulate weapons of mass destruction and major environmental effects, improved technology provides adequate food for ten billion people, and (in the US at least) cheap tiny TV cameras greatly improve law enforcement (at a considerable cost in privacy). The bad news: Global warming has flooded many coastal areas with millions of refugees resettled to new farms in northern Canada and Siberia. Many large wild animals are extinct in the wild and confined to "arks", energy has become very expensive, and more parts of the world are a lot more crowded. It's a rather balanced projection, though Brin says it's "about as optimistic a future as he can imagine". Just like today, many people in this future think that the planet is doomed, and many others think everything will work out. The novel shows us a wide range of people, each with their own opinions about their world -- among them scientists, engineers, an astronaut, three Indiana teenagers, and a Nigerian-Canadian ark employee who winds up getting tutoring in ecology from a Nobel laureate. So I've said that one's view of the future determines one's view of the present. What is the view of the future in _Earth_, and how might it help determine our view of the present? I'm talking about _Earth_ in a sermon because I find it to be a religious book in two main ways. It projects a future of religion, and it gives us some of the pieces we might use to construct what I would call "a religion of the future". First, the future of religion. Many of Brin's characters and offstage people belong to the largest new religious movement that has grown up between now and then, called "Gaianism". For some time now in our present various scientists (including Lynn Margulis of UMass) have observed that the Earth appears to regulate its temperature and the content of its atmosphere by feedback systems not unlike those in living organisms. The "Gaia Hypothesis" is the idea that the Earth, or at least the "biosphere" that is the sum total of all life on Earth, _is_ a living thing. For some people this is only a metaphor, but even now in New Age circles some take it more literally. The name "Gaia" is taken from the Earth goddess of Greek mythology, and "earth-centered" traditions from around the world have viewed the Earth as a conscious mother figure. (In fact our own UUA, at the behest of its many "neo-pagan" members, has officially recognized these traditions as one of the sources from which we draw our religious ideas.) Brin is not the first to see in this the germ of a new religious movement that could sweep the world like Christianity or Islam. Like Christianity, Brin's Gaianism takes many forms. There are fundamentalists determined to protect the Earth from its enemies, liberal reformists like the North American Church of Gaia, new rituals such as cleansing all man-made objects from a square meter of the Earth and making an offering of them, and endless doctrinal disputes. Does Gaia have a conscious mind for example? As it happens, events during the novel give this question an entirely new dimension, but you'll have to read the book to find out about that... With or without any belief in anything supernatural, it's hard to dispute the notion that the Earth has many of the traditional aspects of a deity, particularly the less personal, Source of Being deity that appeals to many Unitarian Universalists. She is bigger than we are. She provided necessary conditions for the lives of each of us -- one could say that She gave us life. Her complexity and beauty are either at or beyond the limits of our understanding. She can easily inspire awe and devotion, if not prayer and worship. Is Gaianism, then, my religion of the future? It provides one part -- the Earth is wonderful and sacred, and personal in the sense that each of us has the power to help it grow or to mess it up. It's a fine focus for environmental questions, whether a given thing is "good for the Earth" or not. At the same time, a religion of the future must include a belief in science and in critical thinking. As Heinlein said, we have to be mentally prepared for change, ready to question our assumptions and separate fact from opinion or faith. We have to apply critical thinking even to our love of the Earth, because environmental questions are complicated and often involve living things, parts of Gaia, on both sides. And finally, a religion of the future must include a belief in the future itself. There will be a future, and we as individuals can and will influence it, perhaps not as much as Vaclav Havel or Jacques Cousteau, but in our own way through the people and institutions we encounter. We often hear that the "earth-centered" Native Americans considered each of their decisions in terms of the effect it would have on the seventh generation following. Whether or not they did this, we can and should. Seven generations might just about take us to the world of the starship _Enterprise_. **************************** {The final reading is an excerpt from David Brin's novel _Earth_. It was originally written as a self-contained short story, and gives what one could call a religious view of our present as seen from Brin's future.} Elvis roams the open interstates in a big white cadillac. It has to be him. How else to explain what so many flywheel-bus and commuter-zep riders claim to have seen... that plume of dust trailing like rocket exhaust behind something too fast and glittery to be tracked with the naked eye? Squint and you might glimpse him behind the wheel, steering with one wrist while fiddling the radio dial, then reaching for that never-ending, always frosty can of beer. "Thank you, honey," he tells the blonde next to him as he steps on the accelerator. The roar of V-8 power, the gasoline smell of freedom, the rush of clean wind blowing back his hair... Elvis hoots and lifts one arm to wave at all true Americans who still believe in him. Certain chatty Net-zines are rife with blurry pictures of him. Snooty tech types claim the photos are fakes, but that doesn't bother the faithful who collect grand old TwenCen automobiles and polish them, saving up for that once-a-year spin down the highway, meeting at the nearest Graceland Shrine for a day of chrome and music and speed and glory. Along the way, they stop at ghostly abandoned gas stations and check for signs that he's been by. Some claim to have found pumps freshly used, reading empty but still somehow reeking of high octane. Others point to black, bold, fresh tire tracks, or claim his music can be heard in the coyotes' midnight serenade. Elvis roams the open interstates in a big white cadillac. How else to explain the traces some have found, sparkling like fairy dust across the fading yellow lines? A pollen of happier days... the glitter of rhinestones.