WHITE MARS (9 page)

'I will take these issues, which do not mirror our needs for a decent society and are impediments to such a society, one by one, although they are interrelated.

'Mistaken Historicism is a clumsy label for the problems of squaring a global culture with varied local traditions. The problems spring perhaps from conflating human history with evolutionary development. We are prone to conceive of deep cultural differences as merely an episode on the way to a universal consensus - a developmental phase, let's say, to an homogenous civilisation. Our expectation is that these various local traditions will die out and the global population become homogenised. This idea is patronising, and will not hold water much longer, as the days of Euro-Caucasian hegemony draw to a close.

'For example, we cannot expect the quarter of the terrestrial population that speaks a Chinese language to convert to English instead. Nor can we expect those whose faith is in Mohammed to turn into churchgoers of the Methodist persuasion. The Chinese and the Muslims may fly by airplanes manufactured in the United States for at least a few decades longer: that does not alter their inward beliefs in the superiority of their own traditions one whit.

'We observe the tenacity of tradition even within the European Union. A Swede may spend all his working life in Trieste, designing parts for the fridge wagons; he may speak fluent Italian and enjoy the local pasta; he may holiday on the beaches of Rimini. But, when it comes time to retire, he returns to Sweden, buys a bungalow in the archipelago, and behaves as if he had never left home. He soon forgets how to speak Italian.

'Our traditional roots are valuable to us. We may argue whether or not they should be, but the fact remains that they are. Nor are the arguments against them always valid.

'For instance, such roots are supposedly the cause of war. True, certainly they have been in the past. There were the Crusades, the Opium Wars against China, and so on and so forth. But modern wars, when they happen, are most frequently not between different civilisations but are waged among the same civilisations, as were the terrible wars in Europe between 1914 and 1918 and 1939 and 1945.

'The mistaken assumption that cultural differences are going to disappear and a single civilisation will prevail, perhaps in the manner of Mr. H.G. Wells's Modern Utopia, has precluded constructive intellectual thought on ways to ease friction between cultures which are, in fact, permanent and rather obdurate features of the world in which we have to live. The sorry tale of the conflict between Israel and Palestine is a recent example of the ill effects of Mistaken Historicism.

'If we could drop our Mistaken Historicism, we might establish more effective international buffers for intercultural relationships.'

At this point there was an important intervention by a small sharp-featured man with scanty white hair. He rose and introduced himself as Charles Bondi, a worker on the Smudge Project, whom we already knew was one of the prime movers of the scientific project.

'While I take your point about linguistic differences and religious differences and so forth,' he said, in a pleasant husky voice, 'these are all global items we have learned to put up with, and to some extent overcome. I believe it might be claimed that cultural differences are dying out, at least where it matters, in public relations. Certainly there is evidence of a fairly general wish to help them die out, or else we would have no revived United Nationalities.

'You could argue, indeed, that Mistaken Historicism was mistaken but is no longer. Don't we see a convergence in prevailing attitudes of materialism, for instance, in East and West - and all points in between? What we want is a new idea, something that overrides cultural difference. I believe that the revelations that the detection of a Smudge phenomenon will grant us could be that transforming idea.'

'We'll discuss that question when a Smudge has been identified,' I said.

'Smudge interception is vastly more likely than Utopia,' Bondi said, sharply. I thought it wiser not to answer, and continued with my list.

'We come next to Transcendics. I use the term rather loosely, not in the Kantian sense, but to mean the transcendence of humanity over everything else on the globe. Perhaps anthropocentrism would be a better word. Despite the growth of geophysiology, people by and large value things only as they are useful for human purposes. The rhinoceros, to take an obvious example, was hunted to extinction within the last forty years, simply because its horn was valued as an aphrodisiac. This splendid creature was killed off for an erroneous notion.

'But more widely we still use our seas as cesspits and our globe as a doormat. We take and take and consume and consume. We have a belief that we are able to adapt to any adverse change, and can survive and triumph, in spite of all the diseases that rage among us - in many cases diseases we have provoked through our ruination of the balance of nature. For instance when that vegetarian grazing animal, the cow, was fed meat and offal, bovine spongiform encephalitis infected herds and spread to the perpetrators of the crime.

'The myth of man's superiority over all other forms of life is, I'm bound to say, propagated by the Judaic and Christian religions. The truth is that the globe would thrive without human beings. If our kind was wiped from the earth, it would heal over in no time and it would be as if we had never been...'

At this point, reflection on the miseries we had created for ourselves on the beautiful terrestrial globe overcame me. I cried aloud in protest at my own words, knowing in my heart that, though we must make the best of our opportunities on Mars, Mars would never be the lovely place that Earth was, or had been.

Perhaps I should interrupt my narrative here to say that the hall in which we held our public discussions was dominated by a blow-up of one of the most extraordinary photographs of the Technological Age. Towering over us in black and white was a shot taken in 1937 of an enormous firework display. When the Nazi airship the
Hindenburg
was about to attach itself to a mooring mast, having flown across the Atlantic to the United States, its hydrogen tanks exploded and the great zeppelin burst into flame.

That beautiful, terrifying picture, of the gigantic structure sinking to the ground, may seem like the wrong signal to those who had crossed a far greater distance of space than had the ill-fated airship. Yet it held inspiration. It showed the fallibility of man's technological schemes and reminded us of evil nationalist aspirations while remaining a grand Promethean image. We spoke under this magnificent Janus-faced symbol.

But, for a moment, I was unable to speak.

Seeing my distress, Hal Kissorian, a statistical demographer and one of the stranded YEAs, spoke up cheerfully.

'We all have complaints against our mother planet, Tom, much though we love it. But we have to learn things anew, to suit our new circumstances here. Do not be afraid to speak out.

'Let me offer you and all of us some comfort. I have been looking into the computer records, and have discovered that only fifteen per cent of us Martians here assembled are the first-borns in their families. The great majority of us are later-born sons and daughters.'

There was some laughter at the apparent irrelevance of this finding.

Kissorian himself laughed so that his unruly hair flopped over his brow. He was a cheerful, rather wanton-looking, young fellow. 'We laugh. We are being traditional. Yet the fact is that over a great range of scientific discoveries and social upheavals which have changed mankind's view of itself, the effects of familial birth order have played their part.'

At calls for examples, Kissorian instanced Copernicus, William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, William Godwin with
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,
Florence Nightingale, The Lady with the Lamp', the great Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Marx, Lenin, Dreiser Hawkwood, and many others, all later-born progeny.

A DOP I recognised as John Homer Bateson, the retired principal of an American university, agreed. 'Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, makes more or less the same point,' he said, leaning forward and clutching the chair back in front of him with a skeletal hand, 'in one of his essays or counsels. He says that, among children, the eldest are respected and the youngest become wantons. That's the term he uses -wantons! But in between are offspring who are pretty well neglected, and they prove themselves to be the best of the bunch.'

This observation was delivered with such majesty that it incurred a number of boos.

Whereupon the retired principal remarked that dumbing-down had already settled itself on Mars.

'Anything can be proved by statistics,' someone called to Kissorian.

'My claim will demonstrate its validity here by our general contrary traits and our wish to change the world,' Kissorian replied, unperturbed.

'Our wish is to unite and change this small world,' I rejoined, and went on with my catalogue of the five partially concealed causes of global unhappiness.

'Our preconceived concept of mankind as master of all things prevents us from establishing sound institutions - institutions that might serve to provide worldwide restraints against the sort of depredations of which we have talked. Were it not for our anthropocentrism, we would long ago have established a law, observed by all, against the pollution of the oceans, the desecration of the land, and the destruction of the ozone layer.

'The myth that we can do anything with anything we like causes much misery, from the upsetting of climates onwards. As you all know, had we acted under that mistaken belief, Mars would now be flooded with CFC gases in an attempt to terraform it, had it not been for a good man as General Secretary of the UN and his few far-sighted supporters.

'Transcendics I regard as embodying something destructive in the character of mankind. For instance, the lust to obliterate old things, from buildings to traditions, which make for stability and contentment. Terraforming is just one instance of that intention. Yet new things have no rich meaning for us unless they can be seen to develop from the old. Existence should be a continuity.

'While I am no believer, I see the role of the Church - and its architecture - in communities as a stabilising, unifying factor. Yet from within the Church itself has emerged a retranslation of Bible and prayer into so-called plain language - a dumbing-down that destroys the old sense of mystery, reverence and tradition. We need those elements. Their loss brings a further challenge to family life.'

'Forget family life!' came a voice.

'Yeah, let's forget oxygen,' came a speedy rejoinder from my new supporter, Beau Stephens.

For some minutes an argument raged about the value of family life. I said nothing; I did not entirely know where I stood on the question; mine had been a strange upbringing. I held what I considered an old-fashioned view: that at the centre of 'family life' was the woman who must bring forth a new generation, and both she and her children needed such protection as a male could give. Undoubtedly, the time would come when the womb was superseded. Then, I supposed, family life would fade away, would become a thing of the past.

After a while, I called for order and returned to my list of discontents.

'Let's move on to the third stumbling block to contentment, Market Domination - another little item we have escaped here on Mars. We have all felt, since we came here, the relief of having no traffic with money. It feels strange at first, doesn't it?

'Money, finance, has come increasingly to dominate every facet of life on Earth, particularly the lives of those people who have least, who are at the bottom of a wasps' nest of economics. How can we claim that all men are equal when on every level inequalities exist?

'It became a shibboleth in the twentieth century that maximum economic growth would resolve human problems. Earning power outweighed social need, as the quest for greater profit failed to count the cost in civilised living.

'One way in which this happened was in the dismantling of welfare provisions, such as health care, pensions, child benefit, unemployment allowances.'

Mary Fangold interrupted. She stood tall and proud.

'Tom, I have been thankful to live on Mars, having to watch terrestrial affairs go from bad to worse. Perhaps the people there don't notice the decline. The dismantling of welfare provisions of which you speak has deepened a well of worldwide poverty. One result is an increase in many infectious diseases.

'We all know smallpox returned with the pandemic of about ten years ago. Cholera is rampant in the Pacrim countries. Many contagious diseases once thought all but vanished early in the century have returned. Fortunately those diseases do not reach Mars.'

'Sit down then!' someone shouted.

Mary looked towards the interruption. 'Bad manners evidently have travelled. I am making a reasonable point and will not be deflected.

'I would like everyone here to realise how fortunate we are. The encouraging medical statistics put out by terrestrial authorities are often drawn from the Megarich class, who of course have their own private hospitals, and whose orderly records make them easy subjects for study.

'There is at present a serious outbreak of multiple drug resistance, notably of VRE, or vancomycin-resistant-enterococci, particularly in the ICUs in public hospitals. This is caused in part by the over-employment of antibiotics, while the synthesis of new and effective antibiotics has been falling off. Many thousands of people are dying as a result. Hundreds of thousands. Intensive Care Units are breaking down everywhere on Earth.