Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon (the top 100 crime novels of all time .TXT) 📗
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moment of the cosmos. And with unreasoning passion we strove constantly
to peer behind each minute particular event in the cosmos to see the
very features of that infinity which, for lack of a truer name, we had
called the Star Maker. But, peer as we might, we found nothing. Though
in the whole and in each particular tiling the dread presence
indubitably confronted us, its very infinity prevented us from assigning
to it any features whatever.
Sometimes we inclined to conceive it as sheer Power, and symbolized it
to’ ourselves by means of all the myriad power-deities of our many
worlds. Sometimes we felt assured that it was pure Reason, and that the
cosmos was but an exercise of the divine mathematician. Sometimes Love
seemed to us its essential character, and we imagined it with the forms
of all the Christs of all the worlds, the human Christs, the Echinoderm
and Nautiloid Christs, the dual Christ of the Symbiotics, the swarming
Christ of the Insectoids. But equally it appeared to us as unreasoning
Creativity, at once blind and subtle, tender and cruel, caring only to
spawn and spawn the infinite variety of beings, conceiving here and
there among a thousand inanities a fragile loveliness. This it might for
a while foster with maternal solicitude, till in a sudden jealousy of
the excellence of its own creature, it would destroy what it had made.
But we knew well that all these fictions were very false. The felt
presence of the Star Maker remained unintelligible, even though it
increasingly illuminated the cosmos, like the splendor of the unseen sun
at dawn.
THE COMMUNITY OF WORLDS
I. BUSY UTOPIAS
THERE came a time when our new-found communal mind attained such a
degree of lucidity that it was able to maintain contact even with worlds
that had passed far beyond the mentality of terrestrial man. Of these
lofty experiences I, who am once more reduced to the state of a mere
individual human being, have only the most confused memory. I am like
one who, in the last extremity of mental fatigue, tries to recapture the
more penetrating intuitions that he achieved in his lost freshness. He
can recover only faint echoes and a vague glamour. But even the most
fragmentary recollections of the cosmical experiences which befell me in
that lucid State deserve recording.
The sequence of events in the successfully waking world was generally
more or less as follows. The starting point, it will be remembered, was
a plight like that in which our own Earth now stands. The dialectic of
the world’s history had confronted the race with a problem with which
the traditional mentality could never cope. The world-situation had
grown too complex for lowly intelligences, and it demanded a degree of
individual integrity in leaders and in led, such as was as yet possible
only to a few minds. Consciousness had already been violently awakened
out of the primitive trance into a state of excruciating individualism,
of poignant but pitifully restricted self-awareness. And individualism,
together with the traditional tribal spirit, now threatened to wreck the
world. Only after a long-drawn agony of economic distress and maniac
warfare, haunted by an increasingly clear vision of a happier world,
could the second stage of waking be achieved. In most cases it was not
achieved. “Human nature,” or its equivalent in the many worlds, could
not change itself; and the environment could not remake it.
But in a few worlds the spirit reacted to its desperate plight with a
miracle. Or, if the reader prefers, the environment miraculously
refashioned the spirit. There occurred a widespread and almost sudden
waking into a new lucidity of consciousness and a new integrity of will.
To call this change miraculous is only to recognize that it could not
have been scientifically predicted even from the fullest possible
knowledge of “human nature” as manifested in the earlier age. To later
generations, however, it appeared as no miracle but as a belated
wakening from an almost miraculous stupor into plain sanity.
This unprecedented access of sanity took at first the form of a
widespread passion for a new social order which should be just and
should embrace the whole planet. Such a social fervor was not, of
course, entirely new. A small minority had long ago conceived it, and
had haltingly tried to devote themselves to it. But now at last, through
the scourge of circumstance and the potency of the spirit itself, this
social, will became general. And while it was still passionate, and
heroic action was still possible to the precariously awakened beings,
the whole social structure of the world was reorganized, so that within
a generation or two every individual on the planet could count upon the
means of life, and the opportunity to exercise his powers fully, for his
own delight and for the service of the world community. It was now
possible to bring up the new generations to a sense that the world-order
was no alien tyranny but an expression of the general will, and that
they had indeed been born into a noble heritage, a thing for which it
was good to live and suffer and die. To readers of this book such a
change may well seem miraculous, and such a state Utopian.
Those of us who had come from less fortunate planets found it at once a
heartening and yet a bitter experience to watch world after world
successfully emerge from a plight which seemed inescapable, to see a
world-population of frustrated and hate-poisoned creatures give place to
one in which every individual was generously and shrewdly nurtured, and
therefore not warped by unconscious envy and hate. Very soon, though no
change had occurred in the biological stock, the new social environment
produced a world population which might well have seemed to belong to a
new species. In physique, in intelligence, in mental independence and
social responsibility, the new individual far outstripped the old, as
also in mental wholesomeness and in integrity of will. And though it was
sometimes feared that the removal of all sources of grave mental
conflict might deprive the mind of all stimulus to creative work, and
produce a mediocre population, it was soon found that, far from
stagnating, the spirit of the race now passed on to discover new fields
of struggle and triumph. The world-population of “aristocrats,” which
flourished after the great change, looked back with curiosity and
incredulity into the preceding age, and found great difficulty in
conceiving the tangled, disreputable and mostly unwitting motives which
were the main-springs of action even in the most fortunate individuals
among their ancestors. It was recognized that the whole
pre-revolutionary population was afflicted with serious mental diseases,
with endemic plagues of delusion and obsession, due to mental
malnutrition and poisoning. As psychological insight advanced, the same
kind of interest was aroused by the old psychology as is wakened in
modern Europeans by ancient maps which distort the countries of the
world almost beyond recognition. We were inclined to think of the
psychological crisis of the waking worlds as being the difficult passage
from adolescence to maturity; for in essence it was an outgrowing of
juvenile interests, a discarding of toys and childish games, and a
discovery of the interests of adult life. Tribal prestige, individual
dominance, military glory, industrial triumphs lost their obsessive
glamour, and instead the happy creatures delighted in civilized social
intercourse, in cultural activities, and in the common enterprise of
world-building. During the phase of history which followed the actual
surmounting of the spiritual crisis in a waking world the attention of
the race was of course still chiefly occupied with social
reconstruction. Many heroic tasks had to be undertaken. There was need
not only for a new economic system but for new systems of political
organization, of world-law, of education. In many cases this period of
reconstruction under the guidance of the new mentality was itself a time
of serious conflict. For even beings who are sincerely in accord about
the goal of social activity may disagree violently about the way. But
such conflicts as arose, though heated, were of a very different kind
from the earlier conflicts which were inspired by obsessive
individualism and obsessive group-hatreds.
We noted that the new world-orders were very diverse. This was, of
course, to be expected, since biologically, psychologically, culturally,
these worlds were very different. The perfected world-order of an
Echinoderm race had of course to be different from that of the symbiotic
Ichthyoids and Arachnoids; and this from that of a Nautiloid world, and
so on. But we noted also in all these victorious worlds a remarkable
identity. For instance, in the loosest possible sense, all were
communistic; for in all of them the means of production were communally
owned, and no individual could control the labor of others for private
profit. Again, in a sense all these world-orders were democratic, since
the final sanction of policy was world-opinion. But in many cases there
was no democratic machinery, no legal channel for the expression of
world-opinion. Instead, a highly specialized bureaucracy, or even a
world-dictator, might carry out the business of organizing the world’s
activity with legally absolute power, but under constant supervision by
popular will expressed through the radio. We were amazed to find that in
a truly awakened world even a dictatorship could be in essence
democratic. We observed with incredulity situations in which the
“absolute” world-government, faced with some exceptionally momentous and
doubtful matter of policy, had made urgent appeals for a formal
democratic decision, only to receive from all regions the reply, “We
cannot advise. You must decide as your professional experience suggests.
We will abide by your decision.”
Law in these worlds was based on a very remarkable kind of sanction
which could not conceivably work successfully on Earth. There was never
any attempt to enforce the law by violence, save against dangerous
lunatics, such as sometimes occurred as throw-backs to an earlier age.
In some worlds there was a complex body of “laws” regulating the
economic and social life of groups, and even the private affairs of
individuals. It seemed to us at first that freedom had vanished from
such worlds. But later we discovered that the whole intricate system was
regarded as we should regard the rules of a game or the canons of an
art, or the innumerable extra-legal customs of any long-established
society. In the main, everyone kept the law because he had faith in its
social value as a guide to conduct. But if ever the law seemed
inadequate he would without hesitation break it. His conduct might cause
offense or inconvenience or even serious hardship to his neighbors. They
would probably protest vigorously. But there was never question of
compulsion. If those concerned failed to persuade him that his behavior
was socially harmful, his case might be tried by a sort of court of
arbitration, backed by the prestige of the world-government. If the
decision went against the defendant, and yet he persisted in his illegal
behavior, none would restrain him. But such was the power of public
censure and social ostracism that disregard of the court’s decision was
very rare. The terrible sense of isolation acted on the law-breaker like
an ordeal by fire. If his motive was at bottom base, he would sooner or
later collapse. But if his case had merely been misjudged, or if his
conduct sprang from an intuition of value beyond the range of his
fellows, he might persist in his course till he had won over the public.
I mention these social curiosities only to give some illustration of the
far-reaching difference between the spirit of these Utopian worlds and
the spirit which is familiar to readers of this book. It may be easily
imagined that
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