1985 (35 page)

But what we fear from the future is not new solid bodies but war and tyranny.

Which function by means of solid bodies. Is there going to be a tyranny in the United States – not a tyranny of the syndicates, like the British one, but a good old-fashioned Orwellian Big Brother?

If it happens, it will happen through war.

Is there going to be a war – not the little contained wars of which we have, on average, two a year, but a really big Second-World-War-type war?

Your compatriots Doctors Kahn and Wiener, of that Hudson Institute which was looking after the year 2000 for us, give us a table which shows how limited and total wars tend to form into a time pattern. An alternation of eras devoted to the two kinds of war, like this:

1000–1550 limited war – feudal, dynastic

1550–1648 total war – religious

1648–1789 limited war – colonial, dynastic

1789–1815 total war – revolutionary nationalist

1815–1914 limited war – colonial, commercial

1914–1945 total war – nationalist, ideological

And since 1945 we've had thirty-odd years of limited wars conducted for various, often spurious, reasons – territorial, anticolonial, ideological, what you will. If history really follows a pattern of alternation, we can't have an indefinite period of limited wars. We have to break out on a world scale once more sometime. Consider that thirty years is the longest period the modern world has had without a global war. Perhaps our economic troubles, the inexplicable yoking of recession and inflation for instance, stem from the fact that we don't know how to run a peace economy. War economy is different – we have precedents. I've dreamed of a Malthusian world war conducted with conventional weapons – one that can only break out when the world's planners realize that the global food supply is not going to feed the global population. Instead of famine and riot we have a pretence of nationalist war whose true aim is to kill off millions, or billions, of the world's population. I even wrote a book in which Enspun fights Chinspun –

What are those, for God's sake?

The English Speaking Union and the Chinese Speaking Union. The third great power is Ruspun, and you know what that is. Actually, the war is made up of local extermination sessions called battles, in which men fight women. A real sex war. And then the cadavers are carted off to be processed into canned food. The recent bout of enforced cannibalism in the Andes proves that human flesh is both edible and nourishing, despite the new dietetic taboos which condemn it as so much poison. The processed human flesh is sold in supermarkets and called Munch or Mensch or something. People will eat anything these days.

Seriously, though
.

In a way I was, am, being serious. That kind of war would be a just war and a useful one. But the world will have to wait till the year 3000 to see it. As for the new world war that's waiting in the womb of time, a healthily developed foetus, who can say what will spark it, how destructive it will be? We've already played at this war in film and fiction,
indicating that there's a part of us that desperately wants it. What nonsense writers and filmmakers talk when they say that their terrible visions are meant as a warning. Warning nothing. It's sheer wish fulfilment. War, somebody said, is a culture pattern. It's a legitimate mode of cultural transmission, though the culture transmitted is usually not the one we expect –

How?

To take a trivial example, popular Latin American song and dance flooded North America and Europe in the forties and after because of the need of the United States to make Latin America a ‘good neighbour' – we know how much sympathy for the Nazis there was in the Argentine, for instance. This meant that we all had to see
The Three Caballeros
and Carmen Miranda, dance congas and sambas, sing
Brazil
and
Boa Noite.
To be less trivial, Americanization of both Japan and Germany could best come about by defeating them and confining their post-war industrial production to pacific commodities. Soviet Russia transmitted her brand of Marxist control to Eastern Europe. War is the speediest way of transmitting a culture, just as meat-eating is the speediest way of ingesting protein. It used to be possible to see war as an economic mode of exogamy on a large scale – transmit your seed and produce lively new mixes, avoid the weary incest of perpetual endogamy which is the dull fruit of peace. The greatest war picture of all depicts the Rape of the Sabines. War uses international politics as a mere pretext for fulfilling a deep need in man, which he's scared of admitting because he doesn't like to relate the enhancement of life to the meting out of death.

The Third World War?

It could start anywhere. It will pose as an ideological war. It will use conventional weapons. It will end in a truce with a million men and women dead but the great cities untouched. Flesh is cheap and is growing cheaper all the time. Great cities contain valuable artefacts, which cost dear and had better not be bombed. Computers for example. We've read so many scenarios about the next war; you don't want another. What interests me is how a species of totalitarianism could come about in the United States through uneasiness about the enemy at the gates. A communist revolution in Mexico, helped by the Chinese, might set America dithering, looking for spies, deploying her immense cybernetic and electronic resources to keep citizens under surveillance. The
enhanced power of the presidency, the temporary dissolution of Congress. Censorship. Dissident voices silenced. And all in the name of security. No war is necessary, only the threat of war and, in good Orwellian style, the notion of an enemy, actual or potential, can be the device for justifying tyranny. Orwell was right there. War is the necessary background to State repression. War as a landscape or weather or wallpaper. The causes don't matter, the enemy can be anybody. When we think of a future world war, we get quickly bored with working out the causative details, since these could literally be anything. India drops a bomb on Pakistan. An East German coup breaks down the Berlin Wall. Canada resents American capital and American military installations and tells the US to get the hell out. You remember how H. G. Wells made the Second World War start? He wrote a book in the middle thirties called
The Shape of Things to Come
, a history of the future and mostly, as it had to be, absurd. But he had the war start in 1940 on the Polish Corridor, which was astonishingly accurate. A Polish Jew is eating a hazelnut, and a bit lodges in a back hollow tooth. He tries to get the fragment out with his finger, and a young Nazi interprets the grimace as a jeer at his uniform. He fires a shot. The Jew dies. The war starts. That the causes of war are so vague, that the priming incident is so trivial – don't we have here a proof that we want war for the sake of war?

I was born in 1951, but I had a vivid dream the other night about the First World War. Not about battles. I was in a London restaurant and there was a calendar on the wall showing the month to be February and the year 1918. The place was crowded, and I was sitting drinking tea, very weak tea, at a table where two ladies were talking. They were dressed in the style of the time as I've seen it in films and photographs – the décor of the dream was amazingly accurate. One of the ladies said something like, ‘Oh, when will this terrible war be over?' Of course I knew exactly when. I very nearly said: ‘11 November this year,' but held myself back just in time. That isn't the point of the dream, though. The point is that I
felt
the period. I could smell the under-arm odour of the ladies, the dust on the floor. The light bulb seemed to belong to that period and no other. When I consider the future, I don't care much about the generalities – the type of government and so on. I want something more existential, the quality of quotidian living – Do you understand me?

I understand you very well. If dreams can't do it for you, novelists and poets ought at least to attempt it. Here we are in this room in this flat in London. The year is 1978. I've worked in this room since 1960, and it
hasn't changed much. The desk and chair are the same, also the carpet, which was tattered enough, God knows, when I first laid it down. It should be possible to hang on to this furniture, if not this typewriter, until the year 2000. Unless there's a wholly destructive fire, or unless the town planners pull down this block of flats, there's a sort of guarantee that things in this room will remain as they are. I, of course, may be dead, but these dead things will outlive me. So, you see, we're already in the future. We leave this room and go into other rooms. How much else will be the same? The television set, I'm pretty sure, will have been replaced many times over by 2000.

I saw a photograph of President Carter and his First Lady watching television. They were looking at three programmes at the same time. It struck me that that would be the pattern of future viewing. In the United States, certainly with so many channels, it seems a pity to confine yourself to one. We'll learn the gift of multiple viewing. And listening. This will be a definitive change in our modality of response to a stimulus –

But there'll be no change in our assumption that the domestic TV screen will be the chief source of entertainment and information. The death of big-screen cinema, and the substitution of big-screen television. More and more newspapers closing down. Stereoscopic vision? Expensive, for a long time. That's going to be the trouble with a great number of innovations – price. I don't see money going very far. I don't see a real grip on inflation, even by the end of the century. Unless a new Maynard Keynes comes along. I think that governments are going to make the price of drink and tobacco prohibitive, to save us from ourselves, but that they're going to permit the free sale of harmless stimulants and depressants. Something like Aldous Huxley's soma –

What do you see on your wide screen?

Old movies. Two or three at a time, as you suggest –why not?
Casablanca
and
Emile Zola
and something silent, like Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
. New movies lacking in overt violence, but candid as to the sexual act, which will be presented to the limit. Arguments in the press, and on talk shows, about the difference between the erotic and the pornographic. Also news. Industrial unrest, inflation, pump-priming (that means our total war may be coming). Kidnapping and skyjacking by dissident groups. Micro-bombs of immense destructiveness placed in public buildings. More thorough frisking at airports and at cinema entrances and on railroad stations – indeed, everywhere: restrictions on
human dignity in the name of human safety. New oil strikes, but the bulk of the oil in the hands of the Arabs. More and more Islamic propaganda. Islamic religion taught in schools as a condition for getting oil. The work of finding a fuel substitute goes on. Gasoline very expensive. Jet travel on super Concordes, swift but damnably expensive. Life mostly work and television.

And outside the house where you sit watching it?

Old buildings coming down, more and more high-rises. All cities looking the same, though lacking the raffish glamour of old Manhattan. Not many people in the streets at night, what with uncontrollable violence from the young. Women in trousers and men in kilts – not all, of course. Yves St Laurent makes kilts cheap and popular, arguing that men are not anatomically fitted for pants, though women are.

And what will 2000 smell and taste like?

The air
has
to be cleaner. It's a sign of grace on the part of America that America is aware of pollution, whereas so much of Europe, Italy for instance, pollutes without knowing or caring. England got a terrible shock in 1951, when smog killed off not only human bronchitics but prize exhibits at the Smithfield Cattle Show – cows and bulls worth far more than mere human beings. This mustn't happen again, so London was made into a smokeless zone. London air is breathable now, which it wasn't in the time of Dickens, and fish are returning to the Thames. When we're shocked sufficiently, then we're prepared to act. The air of the future will smell of nothing. Alas, food will increasingly taste of nothing, except additives. The steady decline of the taste of food, which I've marked since boyhood (I
remember
what the food of the twenties tasted like), goes on. The human body will become a better-cared-for instrument, but it will be less dedicated to pleasure than the syphilitic body of the Renaissance. Even the pleasure of sex has diminished, since there's so much of it available. Sex to me, as a young man, was unattainable caviar. Now it's hamburger steak and children of ten are allowed to eat it. The permissive age will last through 2000, and films and magazines will work hard at devising new variations on the basic copulatory theme. There's a limit, I should think. There's a law of diminishing returns. Abortion will be cheap and easy. A gloriously apt correlation between the disposability of the foetus and the availability of sex, since both proclaim the cheapness of human flesh.

Religion?

The Christian ecumenical movement will have reached its limit, meaning that Catholicism will have turned into Protestantism and Protestantism into agnosticism. The young will still be after the bizarre and mystical, with new cults and impossible Moon-type leaders. But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour. G. K. Chesterton published a novel called
The Flying Inn
at the beginning of this century, in which he fantastically depicted an England flying the star and crescent, with drink forbidden and two men and a dog rolling a barrel of rum round the roads, in constant danger from the Muslim police, trying to keep the memory of liquor alive. I see a distinct possibility of the fulfilment of the vision, say about 2100. Supernature abhors a super-vacuum. With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam.

I'd say that universal communism is a greater likelihood
.