But Lord of the Flies presented no danger to the living organisms found in its vicinity. Even the flies, in the end, were not harmed.
11
With the arrival of autumn — on the calendar only, because the sun stood as high above the desert as it had in August — I renewed my efforts, though I cannot say that it was with renewed vigor, on the code. What was considered, in the Project, the greatest success — and which definitely was that, from the technological point of view — the synthesis, that is, of Frog Eggs — I not only neglected in my theorizing, but actually ignored, as if of the opinion that that singular product was illegitimate. Those who had created it accused me of having an irrational prejudice, a personal aversion toward the substance, ridiculous as that sounded. They also suggested — Dill, for one — that the somewhat theatrical pomp and circumstance with which the people of both research teams treated the “nuclear mucilage” had caused in me a coldness toward Lord of the Flies itself; or that I resented the fact that the empiricists had added to one mystery, that of the code itself, a second, the mystery of a material whose purpose was unknown.
I did not agree. The Romney Effect, too, had increased our ignorance, but in it I saw — at least then — a chance of getting at the attitude of the Senders, and thereby at the very content of the message. In the hope of enriching my imagination, I studied a multitude of papers on the history of reading the genetic code of man and the animals. At times it seemed to me, obscurely, that a parallel of the phenomenon confronting me was the “doubleness” of every organism, in the sense that an organism is both itself and the medium of information addressed, causally, to the future, since to its descendants.
But what could one do with such an analogy? The arsenal of conceptual ways and means that the era had to offer seemed to me appallingly bare. Our knowledge has grown to gigantic proportions only as far as man, not the world, is concerned. Between the cumulative, explosive, spearheading expansion of instrumental technologies and the biology of man there arises, before our eyes, an inexorably increasing gap; it divides humanity into a front line of foragers of information, with rear guards and reserves, and the abundant masses blessed with equilibrium because their heads are stuffed with informational pap, no less prefabricated than the variety made for the digestive tract. Now is beginning a great anthill proliferation, because the threshold has been crossed — exactly when, no one knows — beyond which the store of accumulated knowledge can no longer be encompassed by any single mind.
Not so much to amass still more knowledge as first to invalidate its vast deposits in those areas where less important and therefore superfluous information lies — that seems to me to be the first duty of contemporary science. The technologies of information have created, supposedly, a paradise in which anyone who desires to can know everything; but this is a complete fiction. Selection, tantamount to resignation, is as unavoidable as breathing.
If humanity were not being constantly goaded, provoked, and kindled by the local mutual gnawings of nationalisms, by collisions of interests (often more apparent than real), by surfeits concentrated at certain points on the globe alongside concentrations of want (yet surely by now we have the capability, in principle at least, among all our technological arts, of resolving such contradictions) — humanity, perhaps, might finally realize the extent to which these small, bloody fireworks, operated at a distance by the nuclear capital of the Superpowers, blind it to what meanwhile is taking place “by itself,” what runs loose and is under no control. Politics views the globe exactly as it did in the preceding centuries (but now translunar space is included) — as a chessboard for contests. But all along, that board has been surreptitiously changing; it is no more a stationary ground, a foundation, but a raft, afloat and splintering under the blows of unseen currents that are carrying it in a direction in which no one has been looking.
Forgive me this flight of metaphor. But, yes, futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Hermann Kahn made Cassandra’s profession “scientific,” yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable. The search for the ultimate weapon has turned scientists into seekers of a philosophers’ stone that differs from the alchemists’ dream in one respect only, that it definitely exists. The reader of futurological papers has before him graphs and tables printed on glossy paper and informing him as to when hydrogen-helium reactors will appear and when the telepathic property of the mind will be harnessed for commercial use. Such future discoveries are foreseen with the aid of mass pollings of the appropriate specialists — a dangerous precedent, in that it creates the fiction of knowledge where formerly it was generally conceded that there was complete — but complete — ignorance.
One has only to look through the history of science to reach the most probable conclusion: that the shape of things to come is determined by things we do not know today, and by what is unforeseeable. The situation has been complicated in a new way by a “mirror pas de deux,” since one side of the world has been obliged to copy, as accurately and as rapidly as possible, everything that has been done by the other in the field of armaments. And often it is impossible to tell who takes a certain step first, and who merely imitates it faithfully. The imagination of humanity has become, in a sense, frozen in place, transfixed by the vision of atomic annihilation — which, however, has been sufficiently evident to both sides for them to abort its materialization. The fascination with scenarios of the thermonuclear apocalypse, written by strategists and scientific advisory councils, has paralyzed minds to such an extent that no attention is paid to other — and who knows if ultimately not more dangerous — possibilities hidden in progress. Because the state of equilibrium is continually being undermined by new discoveries and inventions.
In the seventies, for a while, the ruling doctrine was the “indirect economic attrition” of all potential enemies; Secretary of Defense Kayser expressed this with the maxim “The thin starve before the fat lose weight.” The competition-duel in nuclear payloads gave way to a missile race, and that in turn led to the building of more and more expensive “antimissile missiles.” The next step in the escalation was the possibility of constructing “laser shields,” a stockade of gamma lasers which would line the perimeter of the country with destroyer rays; the cost of installing such a system was set at four hundred to five hundred billion dollars. After this move in the game, one could next expect the putting into orbit of giant satellites equipped with gamma lasers, whose swarm, passing over the territory of the enemy, could consume it utterly with ultraviolet radiation in a fraction of a second. The cost of that belt of death would exceed, it was estimated, seven trillion dollars. This war of economic attrition — through the production of increasingly expensive weaponry that thereby placed a severe strain on the whole organism of government — although seriously planned, could not be carried out, because the building of super- and hyperlasers turned out to be insurmountably difficult for the current technology. This time merciful Nature, her own inherent mechanisms, saved us from ourselves; but this was, after all, only a fortunate accident.
Such was the global thinking of the politicians and the strategy of science dictated by it. Meanwhile, the entire historical tradition of civilization had begun to come apart on us, like the cargo of a ship rocked too violently. The great historico-philosophical concepts impaired at their foundations, the great syntheses based upon values inherited from the past, were turning into brontosaurs doomed to extinction; they would be shattered on the unknown shore of the next discoveries to come into view. There was now no longer any power, or any monstrousness, hidden in the bowels of the material world that would not be dragged out onto the scene as a weapon the moment it showed itself. So in reality we were playing not with Russia, but with Nature herself, because it was Nature and not the Russians that determined what discovery would next be bestowed upon us; and it would have been madness indeed to think that we were the apple of Nature’s eye and that she would provide us only with those things which would promote the survival of the species. Any chance of the appearance, on the scientific horizon, of a discovery that would guarantee our total supremacy on the planetary scale would spur efforts and investments, because whoever reached that goal first would become the undisputed leader of the globe. People commonly spoke of this. But how could one believe that the weakened opponent would submit passively to the yoke imposed on him? No, this entire doctrine was self-contradictory, amounting to, at one and the same time, the destruction of the existing balance of forces — and its constant renewal.