The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Why H.G. Wells’ ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ Has Arrived Today CYNTHIA CHUNG “It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental to the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. “ – H.G. Wells’ in “Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought” 1901 In “ The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution ” (published in 1933), H.G. Wells writes of the future predicting, rather optimistically, that there will be another world war in just a few years, followed by epidemic and famine. In this  fictional  future, war...

  An Unfamiliar World John Michael Greer Last month’s post  on the future of warfare in the deindustrial era mentioned in passing one of the most significant factors changing the world we know to one that most of us have never even imagined. That factor is demographics: in particular, the immense shift now under way from growth to contraction in human numbers worldwide.  Nearly everyone alive today grew up hearing about the population boom; it requires a major shift in mental gears to adjust to the imminence of the population bust. A twentieth century problem. It fascinates me that so few people have grasped that this is happening, and even fewer have any sense of what it implies.  I still field comments tolerably often from readers who are convinced that overpopulation is the biggest threat our species faces. (Admittedly most of those readers belong to my generation, and we grew up in a media culture saturated with such ideas.)  That human population is near a ...