Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
WB Yeats, "The Four Ages of Man"
The bigger they come, the harder they fall, said a poet long ago; and liberal capitalism climbed so high and fell so hard that it split humanity in two. Civilisation on Earth is a wreck; civilisation on the planets shows signs of losing its humanity altogether. Perhaps what is still most human about the immortals on the satellites and space stations (apart from our cultivation of the traditional aristocratic vices) is our endless lament about what might have been, if humanity had been a little wiser, its leaders a little more far-sighted, the system as a whole more restrained in its gobbling ambitions.
But this is foolishness. Many social systems have been founded on deliberate restraints, from the abstinence of hunter-gatherers in order to suppress their birth-rates, to Tokugawa Japan's abandonment of firearms to preserve the samurai order. But liberal capitalism by its very nature could know no limits on technological advance, and few on social behaviour.
If there was any chance of such restraint, the combination of capitalism with democracy undermined it. Human society in its latest, capitalist form, joined earlier societies—like the aborigines of Tasmania or Anglo-Saxons after the fall of Rome—which experienced a big technological and cultural regression. In the case of the Saxons, the regression was voluntary. They could have imitated the Franks and gone to live in the Roman cities, but they didn't want to. Capitalism's regression was not, however, voluntary. And, because by the start of this millennium capitalism was the world, it took the world with it. There were no Byzantines or Arabs to cherish civilisation.
Every cultural, economic and political system ever created by mankind sooner or later met a challenge which it could not overcome, and which led to the creation of something new. (The alternative is atrophy—which is what we immortals now face, as our lives stretch beyond the human capacity for love, for loyalty, even for basic human reactions.) Most systems were defeated by the defects of their strengths. For the capitalist system to have accepted severe restraints on wealth creation, so as to slow down social differentiation and climate change, would have been to defy its own nature. It would have been as impossible for capitalism to do this as it was for the Confucian system in China to accept western liberal capitalism in the 19th century.
In any case, it was neither climatic disaster, nor the pace of technological change, nor over-population, nor social revolt which finished off capitalism—and pre-lapsarian humanity with it. What destroyed the system was the prospect of a change in the nature of humanity itself—the transformation of the wealthiest human elites into what is, in effect, a new species. And this gift was one which very few human beings at any time would have rejected—the glorious, deadly gift of life. It was the seizure of this gift which brought about what has been called "the second fall" (from the Judaeo-Christian founding myth).
A belief has grown up among those immortals who still retain an interest in our human antecedents that all this might have been prevented by communism or some other form of collectivism stemming from 19th and 20th-century ideologies. This is in my view profoundly mistaken. The only thing which could have preserved pre-lapsarian humanity would have been a fundamental rejection of consumerist materialism. Communism was only another, much less successful version of "modern" materialism.
*****
Thanks to the high proportion of the world's richest people living in the US at the time of the fall, most of us immortals are descended from humans living in that region; only Americans combined the wealth and technology to escape up the gravity well to the safety of the orbiters. Both for this reason and because the US was at the heart of human civilisation throughout this period, it is natural that much of our analysis of the catastrophe should focus on the nature of the US, and the way it exercised its power from the end of the second world war in 1945 to the greater middle eastern wars which began in 2032.
If any country in history seemed to have the right to feel pleased with itself, it was the US at the turn of the millennium. It had played the key role in defeating the great political evils of the 20th century, and the adoption of its economic and political model brought greater material wellbeing to large parts of humanity. The defeat in Vietnam was behind it; those in the middle east were decades in the future. This period has looked to us since to have been unbearably cynical, greedy and selfish—but western elites were fairly altruistic by comparison with other periods.
Nevertheless, the first signs of trouble were already appearing at the end of the 20th century. There was growing economic differentiation, especially in the US, where most of the new wealth went to a tiny section of the population. The greater efforts necessary for middle-class families to maintain their incomes led to the progressive mobilisation of the entire female workforce and the erosion of the family, the only fundamental social building block developed by homo sapiens. Above all—the first shadow of the fall—there was a rising crisis in health care, whether state or private, as funds were swallowed by increasingly expensive treatments, especially for the rising numbers of elderly and in the battle against mutating viruses.
All this built up only very slowly; very slowly, then terribly fast, so that within a few years of the end it still seemed that a "democratic rally" mixed with new technology could rescue the system. In the first decades of the new millennium, the system's tenacity was shown by the crises it overcame. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s set off the process which eventually led to the disintegration of Indonesia and the deaths of 6m people, but caused only a hiccup in the west. (You won't recall hiccups—a mild pre-lapsarian human digestive disorder.)
The "great correction" of 2007 was more serious. In itself, the stock market crash caused by the plunge in internet and software shares was just an overdue correction, with limited direct effects on the western economies. It wiped out most of the companies in this sector, but—as with railways in the 1870s or automobiles in the 1930s—overall technological development proceeded unaffected.
Indirectly, however, the effects of the crash were considerable. Rising unemployment contributed to a new wave of US protectionism, and tensions over Taiwan and the disintegration of North Korea ensured that this would be directed particularly at China. Chinese companies serving their internal market had suffered severely from its opening to western competition; now those which concentrated on exports to the US began to collapse. This crippled domestic political support for liberalisation and fuelled a new wave of anti-American nationalism.
Meanwhile, the US-led order in the middle east had begun to crumble, as population growth put increasing strain on water supplies and jobs, while the fall in demand for oil reduced incomes. The conditions imposed by Israel on the new Palestinian state were so harsh as to make it unviable. Widespread rioting led to its collapse in 2019, a new Israeli military occupation, and a new wave of Jewish settlement. This in turn led to new terrorist attacks on the US. Not until more than 30 years later did a Muslim terrorist group succeed in carrying out a really catastrophic attack in the US; but even the limited sarin atrocity in New York in 2027, apparently planned from Afghanistan, was enough to bring on a US military intervention in that country.
The latter operation was surprisingly successful, though the use of robot devices, while it reduced US casualties, also produced several horrors and embarrassments. After thousands of animals belonging to friendly tribes had been wiped out by robots when the beasts strayed near US positions, the robots were reprogrammed to attack only bipeds. This however led to the destruction of General Talcott's headquarters, when a force of Mujahedin reached the perimeter disguised as goats.
*****
Spectacular as they were, the wars in the middle east, and the terrorism they spawned, were really only epiphenomena. Swelling up behind them was the real crisis stemming from the nature of the new liberal, capitalist and pseudo-democratic world order. This order, and above all the new universal world media, showed American upper-class lifestyles to the world, thereby driving people who would previously have been satisfied with very little into a frenzy of ambition and acquisition. The effect of showing such lifestyles without being able to offer them had already been seen in the black ghettos of the US in the last decades of the 20th century; this pattern now repeated itself across the world.
Meanwhile, the elites had been liberated by technology from attachment to any particular society. Indeed during these decades the once powerful idea of "national citizenship" gradually became leached of any real meaning (a process exacerbated by mass immigration without assimilation). The new elites needed the masses neither as soldiers nor workers, and for many decades did not seem threatened by their feeble and inchoate protests, and so had no need to contribute to any "common good"—just at a time when new technology made tax evasion all too simple. When a particular society revolted or disintegrated, its elites simply moved to one of the great western metropolises where a large proportion of their wealth was already stored. Meanwhile, the disproportion between legal punishments for elite crimes and those of the masses returned to 19th or even 18th-century levels, undermining belief in the idea of a common and objective justice.
Food crises caused by a mixture of over-population and ecological devastation were held in check by the development of new genetic crops—though with colossal setbacks caused by the emergence of universal plagues and blights. As the global population stabilised at 11.5 billion around 2050, hopes were expressed that a mixture of new technology, higher living standards and the absence of war between the great powers had in fact won the race against crisis.
And so they might, had it not been for global warming. Except in south Asia, the direct physical effects of this were not as great as forecasts predicted. Some countries were even strengthened by the challenge, as the common threat led to new feelings of solidarity and common purpose in the US, and in China the neo-Confucian state rediscovered its ancient raison d'être in the struggle against the rivers.
The Indian subcontinent however was almost certainly doomed whatever happened. When Pakistan collapsed into revolution as a result of the US intervention in Afghanistan (on top of the effect of drought), India too was destabilised, and domestic relations between Hindus and Muslims deteriorated. The continual failure to achieve economic take-off sapped support for all the big parties. As the elite retreated behind security walls, the middle class in north India turned to a consoling religious fascism, as did huge numbers of rural migrants driven from their farms by the drying up of the Ganges and Brahmaputra.
So tolerant of disorder and misrule was the old India that it could have staggered on for years. But as the peasants of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were driven by drought into the cities, they ran straight into the Bengalis and Bangladeshis moving up from the delta, as the sea levels rose. By the 2080s, some 600m people had left their homes, the Bangladeshi state had collapsed, and the Indian one had become a phantom. In the last Indian democratic elections (described by a magazine called The Economist as "convincing evidence that worries about the future of democracy and the free market in developing countries are exaggerated"), the Yadav militias of Bihar "voted" using the noses and ears of Bengalis as ballots. As refugees surged to and fro, generating one ethnic or religious conflict after another, the subcontinent entered the Manthan-yug, the Time of Churning. By the early 23rd century the population had sunk to as little as one-eighth of the 2.2 billion who had lived there in the mid-21st century.
The Indian debacle (and others in poor, low-lying areas throughout the world) meant that just as western countries were diverting more of their resources to building their own flood defences, they had to raise new defences against the tide of human migrants too. The flood defences themselves were rather successful: of the main US cities, only Miami and New Orleans had to be completely evacuated. However, the effects of immigration, and the measures taken against it, were to worsen ethnic relations across the developed world. The most discontented elements were not the resentful ethnic minorities in Europe, nor the underclass in the US, but the residue of the white lower middle classes in the US, who saw their security threatened by better-educated migrants from the Indian subcontinent.
*****
The contours of the eventual collapse of US democracy were therefore visible a century or more before the fall. Initially, the new demands of the battle against the floods bucked the trend, by reviving traditional skills and virtues. But such virtues had taken a beating from so many decades of hedonism. And the deepening of the economic and ecological crisis towards the end of the century coincided with the invention of the most powerful addiction ever known to mankind—virtual reality, better known at the time as "the feelies" from an early 20th-century work of prediction. (My grandfather, Anatol Lieven II, was an early victim of this technology, in the 2040s. He starved to death, aged 85, a look of beatific vacancy on his face, while attached to a programme which gave him the impression that he was a Russian nobleman at the court of Catherine the Great.)
In the long run, this technology was to transform the lives of both post-lapsarian humanity and the immortals. It provided the core of most future artistic endeavour, rescuing many of them from the moribund state into which they had fallen in the course of the 20th century. Virtual realities such as the recreation of the natural scenes of pre-Columbian America (developed for "Mad Tom" Goltz, the shaman warlord of Montana from 2277-2294) soothed the suffering of generations of Americans after the fall.
Even more important was the role of virtual reality in paving the way for transmigration theory and its technological offshoots in the 25th century. The ability to project human intelligence and personality into the bodies of other creatures began to heal the gulf in consciousness which had opened at the dawn of human intelligence. In the form of techno-shamanism, it also helped create a new human religion with the most ancient of all human roots.
All this, however, was in the future. By the 2080s, so severe were the economic effects of widespread addiction to the feelies, and so evil some of the programmes being offered, that a comprehensive ban was tried. (The combination of the experiences on offer and the advances in chemical aphrodisiacs led to this era being called the Priapic age.) The electronic equipment needed for the feelies meant that the ban on them was more successful than either of the previous US attempts at banning harmful pleasures: the prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s and of narcotics until the 2060s. But for that reason, the effects of the ban in terms of social resentment and violence were even greater than the gangster wars of the 1920s or the drugs battles of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The police shut down the public feeliedromes, but did not have the manpower to raid the homes of the wealthy—who in any case could buy exemptions. The masses felt deprived of this wonderful form of escapism just as their worsening economic circumstances gave them much from which to escape.
The result was the wave of riots and pogroms, beginning in 2087, in which mobs wrecked and looted wealthy suburbs. Typically, the mobs consisted both of religious extremists aiming to destroy "the devil's tentacles," as they called the feelies, and more straightforward elements, aiming to loot feelies for their own use. What was new was that the rioters united whites and blacks, as well as Christians and Muslim—the latter had themselves been subjected to savage pogroms in the 2040s following the biological terrorist attacks by the Habbibullah group. Similar riots took place in many other countries.
The bizarre cruelty displayed by many of the rioters can be partly explained by the influence of the feelies themselves, many of which resembled the worst aspects of popular entertainment in imperial Rome. This was only the last stage in a long process of the moral degeneration of popular culture, beginning with the spread of television in the 1950s. Erotica, pornography and, at the extremes, sadistic violence, had already made big advances through the popularity of film and video in the 20th century.
More important in driving the violence was a mixture of economic hardship, declining social status and social and psychological displacement. This was reminiscent of the factors which helped to produce communism and fascism in the 20th century; but added to old patterns of anomie was the general dissolution of families during the Priapic age, leading to feelings of isolation and loneliness which no human society could long have endured. Thus, the religious revolt which brought down the US system in 2146 was preceded the year before by the Great Wind, a tornado which destroyed Omaha and was inevitably seen by believers as representing the wrath of God.
The feelie riots at the end of the 21st century were the first internal blows in the upheaval which led to the fall. But the most important cause of the fall was genetic engineering. The breakthrough to "immortality" was not as sudden as is sometimes thought. It was preceded by decades of economic, social and medical change which created an immense gulf between the elites and the masses in developed countries, and between the developed countries and the rest. In many parts of the world, "democracy" had always been a sham. By the end of the 21st century this was generally true in the developed countries as well, or was at least perceived to be so.
Thus in 2110, on the eve of the fall, a mixture of advances in medical and genetic technology ensured that the average life expectancy of the wealthiest five per cent of the US population had risen to 127 years (in England, 2.3 per cent of the population had life expectancies over 120 years; in Brazil, the figure was 0.9 per cent, in Egypt, 0.6). The concentration of money into health and life extension also meant that about 65 per cent of the richest 10,000 Americans were now executives, doctors or scientists in the health and genetic engineering fields.
The vastly greater life expectancy of the wealthy was not simply caused by their ability to afford costly anti-ageing treatments, but by their ability to isolate themselves from the various new plagues and mutated drug-resistant old viruses and bacteria now raging round the world. In particular, the spread of these viruses meant that public (or cheap privately insured) hospitals were liable to become death traps.
By the 2070s, hospital-borne drug-resistant diseases had brought infant mortality in Europe back to its 1850 levels. The general level of health was still well above pre-20th century levels, and in the less developed parts of the world most people accepted their new sufferings with the same fatalism with which they had endured the old. But in developed countries the masses, and especially the middle classes, regarded state-guaranteed health services as their democratic right; they had become part of the "moral economy" on which the democratic capitalist system rested.
The strain on public health services was to some extent offset by the enormous progress made in developing cheap preventive medicine against common diseases such as cancer, stroke and heart disease. Nonetheless, the average life expectancy of 80 per cent of the US population had stabilised at about 65 years, a little more than half the life-span of the rich. In China, average life expectancy for the mass of the population was 55, in Brazil 47. By this time no reliable figures were available for what had been the countries of the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa. These declines had been prefigured more than a century before, in the steep decline of Russian birth-rates after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the wrecking of its public health system (when male life expectancy dropped from 66 to 59 years). The nostalgia of Russians and other former Soviet peoples for their lost benefits was one reason why—despite economic recovery in the early 21st century—the new capitalist order never really stabilised, whether in democratic or authoritarian form.
*****
In 2112 came the announcement by the Clinton Corporation that its laboratories had achieved Full Body Regeneration (FBR)—what appeared to be immortality. Initially dismissed as an advertising ploy for a minor extension of existing treatments, the claim was accepted by most scientists over the next five years. This process had been almost achieved in the 2030s, but research was interrupted after the first experiments on human subjects led to horrific cancers. (Of course, as we now know, nothing remotely approaching "immortality" is actually possible for the body or mind of homo sapiens. Repeated regenerations every 50 years or so eventually destroy the integrity of the whole system, and after about 300 years—in many cases sooner—a variety of degenerations sets in. Moreover, as we know from the great majority of the immortals who spent their first decades on 21st-century Earth, inadequate education and imagination eventually leads to the undermining of physical and psychological resistance by terminal ennui. The first recorded example of this condition was the case of the former Texan oil millionaire Walter Hackenfurz, who lapsed into incurable cretinism on the second Mars orbiter in 2372, after watching the same game of baseball some 16,000 times.)
Predictably, the first action of governments round the world was to issue strict bans on FBR; equally predictably, these were immediately violated, beginning with the elderly rich approaching the end of their lifespans. Because FBR was only an extension (with one important difference) of existing approaches, it was very difficult to prevent it without dismantling the entire technology of life extension to which the world's elites were now firmly attached. As word of the evasions spread, so did mass unrest.
Electorates in the developed countries began to insist that "immortality" be offered to all, and governments came to power with this as their programme. In a few states like Switzerland and Sweden, with a titanic effort of social solidarity and national unity, something like this was achieved. Even there this did not hold true for the huge number of immigrants; and in Estonia, an attempt to exclude the long-suffering Russian minority paved the way for the third and last revolution in Russia itself.
Religious movements all over the world began to mobilise their followers in defence of divinely-ordered humanity; and as it became evident that most would have to live and die as humans whether they liked it or not, their numbers swelled. Christian extremists launched a deadly hail of attacks against regeneration clinics, following the pattern set by the Companions of the Divine Image in the middle east, the Self-Sacrificers of Japan, and the Humanists of France. In 2146 a huge crowd of Christian fundamentalists crying "Long live death" stormed the Capitol in Washington, resulting in most federal institutions moving to Boulder, Colorado.
Meanwhile, the simultaneous lash of ecological, social and economic disintegration and the western promise of regeneration had set huge populations on the move. In 2149, war erupted in the Balkans as the Turkish army attempted to shoot its way into EU medical benefits. In 2152, after an estimated 90,000 Mexicans and Central Americans had been killed by minefields and automatic guns on the US-Mexican border, these defences gave way, almost literally buried under the corpses. The southern US dissolved into anarchy. (The main Hollywood feelie studios got out just in time, and moved to Bournemouth, in England. The climate of southern England then was sub-tropical, before the shift in the Gulf stream plunged western Europe into Canadian temperatures.)
Faced with the need for total national mobilisation, the US executive attempted to issue a new ban on regeneration, but this was rejected by the ageing US Senate. The next day, the 82nd airborne division dissolved Congress and later that year replaced the last US president, Mee Mee Bush IV, with a military council. Other units followed suit, and North America slid rapidly into a whirlpool of rival military clans, from the Mormons of Utah to the Bush Baptists of Alabama and the Theban Legion of San Francisco.
Like their equivalents elsewhere in the world, most of these devoted themselves with grim determination to the destruction of the regeneration clinics and the extermination of their beneficiaries, easily identifiable by the leathery, faintly orange appearance of their skin. They also set themselves to destroy any society which had succeeded in making regeneration widely available. Japan was devastated by a nuclear strike by US Baptists in 2178, and the consequent Japanese retaliation, though limited, was enough to reduce North America to a state of barbarism from which it has never recovered.
The revived convention that rulers had to be ritually sacrificed, or kill themselves, on completion of office, was begun by the Emperor of Japan in 2145. This did not encourage the search for administrative talent. Moreover, knowledge of impending death meant that rulers, not unnaturally, developed an ever greater desire to enjoy themselves while in office. Boris Williams, the dictator of Boston, is believed to have had 150 human and about 500 electronic and cyborg "concubines" before his death in 2386.
It may seem surprising that, with 22nd century instruments of mass control at their disposal, the world's elites should have allowed themselves to be overthrown and deprived of immortality in this manner—although some did fight very hard. One of the best crowd control programmes was launched by the cyber corporations of the Pacific north-west, which bombarded crowds with pacifying electronic brainwave manipulations derived from 20th-century musicals, notably The Sound of Music. This temporarily saved the local corporate elites, but reduced 11m people to a state of imbecility. In Texas the oil cartel sprayed crowds with aphrodisiac nerve gas, while the sky was covered with giant pornographic holograms.
In the end, however, the earthly defences of the immortals were undermined by two main factors. The first can be summed up in the old saying, "Who shall guard the guards?" It proved quite impossible to extend the promise of regeneration to most policemen, soldiers and National Guardsmen in the US, let alone in poorer countries—and sooner or later they revolted against their masters. More important was that some at least of the immortals did not need to stand and fight—or we should not be here. Seeing what was to come, several corporate and academic groups and national leaderships had made sure that regeneration was on offer to the crews of the main planetary and lunar bases and satellites, and of the spaceships which served them. As chaos on Earth intensified, people who could buy or commandeer a craft fled up the gravity well to the other worlds.
We immortals have a tendency—rooted partly in guilt—to see human history before the fall simply as a chronicle of greed, myopia and folly. We would do better to take as our approach to homo sapiens and his fall the words of an American 20th-century black leader WEB Du Bois, about the world of the old American south which went down in the first US civil war: "It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and the best. All this is bitter hard..."
We should remember this as we cut ourselves free from our solar system and set out for new worlds. For if at some stage in our travels we encounter an alien and higher civilisation, then—like our human ancestors of the capitalist era—we too will be faced with a challenge to which our system of life is incapable of responding. A glorious challenge in many ways, perhaps, transforming and liberating for some, but also a catastrophe for many and the end of everything that we have known. Then we too will echo the words of the Prophet, repeated in the last encyclical of the Catholic Pope in Rome as the fires rose around him in 2153: "An End is come, the End is come, it watcheth for thee, behold it is come. The morning is come unto thee, oh thou who dwelleth in the land."
