Learning from the Future
The other day I came across a book, published in Spanish in 2021, called Covid-19: Narrativa Mexicana Joven Sobre, Desde y Contra la Pandemia, which I roughly translated as “Stories by young Mexican writers about, since and against the pandemic.” The “since” puzzled me, because in 2021 the pandemic was far from over (it still is), but the pandemic is a moving target, and it’s hard to know what verb tense to use when writing about it.
I bought the book because I wanted to know how Covid has affected people now in their twenties and thirties differently from the way it has affected those of us in our seventies?
For one thing, my generation worries about being killed by Covid (the Boomer Remover). This younger generation has to contend with the prospect of living with its consequences – isolation, fear, uncertainty, loneliness – for the rest of their lives. My generation agreed with Sartre’s observation that “Hell is other people.” Grizel Delgado, writing from Berlin, turns that notion on its head: “Hell Is (No) Other People.” Gerardo Lima Molino asks what happens when a virus crops up that politicians insist doesn’t exist? We end up, he says, “living in an invisible, liminal, fantastical state, like something imagined by Jorge Luis Borges or José Emilio Pacheco.”
There is a certain sense of fighting off despair in the essays, a defiance that makes the mere act of writing seem like a moral victory. In “Dystopian Literature Makes Me Feel Better,” Daniela L. Guzmán argues that even scarifying post-apocalyptic novels can be optimistic, because we can read them as warnings of what could happen if we continue on our present disastrous course. And even when the worst happens, the human spirit survives. She recognizes, of course, that we rarely, if ever, learn anything from them. Post-apocalyptic novelists are the Cassandras of our age.
She examines the work of two science-fiction writers: the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin – whose trilogy, Remembrance of Earths Past, posits the takeover of Earth by an alien race (an old trope made new) – and David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, which envisions, among other things, a future inhabited by “fabricants,” clones of enslaved peoples from the South Pacific that might (but probably won’t) save the world.
Guzmán finds solace in these novels. “We don’t know if a better world will emerge after Covid,” she writes, “but these works…tell us that there can be continuity of the human experience. Perhaps through our writing,” she adds, “by imagining these horrific scenarios, these dark moments, a kind of awakening will occur.”
Perhaps. It’s interesting, though, that in none of the works she mentions does the apocalypse occur as the result of a pandemic. Would a pandemic caused by an infectious disease teach us something different from one resulting from a collapse of technology? The failure of machines is a relatively predictable (maybe inevitable) and focused eventuality (like the dying of my old Mercury Bobcat, which not even a CarVI could have kept on the road). Pandemics seemingly come from nowhere (a bat? a lab?) and spread randomly: you can’t get away from them by selling your SUV and going off-grid.
There are a number of futurist novels set in worlds that have been devastated by diseases not unlike Covid-19. In Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse, for example, the world has been depleted by a disease so all-consuming that none of the survivors know what it was, let alone what to learn from it. And in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, in which the world collapses from something called Georgia Fever, the few survivors wander about trying to locate (usually in order to avoid) other survivors. There’s not a lot of hope for the continuity of human experience left at the end of these novels. When the dust settles, hardly anyone is left to say they’ll try to do better next time.
In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as in much of Atwood’s work, what we can learn from the future is that we should have paid more attention to the past. A mysterious virus has left all but a handful of women incapable of bearing children. Here, the continuity of the human experience depends on a fertile few. But instead of honouring and revering these women as the sacred vessels on which their survival depends, their society enslaves them, turns them into breeding machines to serve the men who rule the country of Gilead.
Sound familiar? Something similar to Gilead has already existed: it was called the American South. After 1808, when the U.S. Congress enacted the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves, Southern landowners, who still needed a steady supply of field workers, found another source of slaves: they turned the female slaves they had into baby machines, forcing them to breed slaves the way horse-breeders bred horses.
Guzmán quotes a passage from Cloud Atlas expressing the notion that “our lives do not belong to us; we are united with others from the past and the present, and we form our future selves from both the criminality and goodness we encounter.” Which side we choose to acknowledge is up to us. In the wake of the pandemic, she says, after surviving “a world that changes on a daily basis, what we need may just be this: a little continuity and a bit of faith in ourselves.”
I’m with her in hoping we choose goodness over criminality. The precedents aren’t encouraging, but is it ever too late to learn from the future?