The Useless

In Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time (London, 1968), Malcolm Lockridge from the twentieth century enters a city of the Rangers in the late fortieth century:

"Around him pullulated the half-skilled, the useless, the uncaught criminals, with sleazy clothes over fish-belly skins. No one looked hungry - machine-produced food was issued free at one's assigned refectory - but Lockridge felt as if his lungs were being contaminated by the smell of unwashed bodies." (pp. 143-144)

It must be possible to wash people as well as to feed them?

"The masters fed them, sheltered them, clothed them, educated them, doctored them, thought for them. A gifted, ambitious man could rise high..." (p. 145)

Quoting these short extracts does not do justice to Anderson's description of a future society but, as usual, my aim is to encourage others to read or reread the novel - and, of course, I cannot quote it all.

While among the Rangers' antagonists, the Wardens, Lockridge thinks:

"...a better way can be made.
"Though not in this age. I see it quite plain. I see that bewildered old workman I knew, two thousand years ago, laid off because he couldn't handle a cybernetic machine. What do you do with your extra people?
"If you're a Ranger, you dragoon them into a permanent army. If you're a Warden, you keep them ignorant serfs..." (p. 166) 

In this novel, a better way is made a thousand years later, although we see even less of it. The person with authority whom Lockridge meets in the fiftieth century is "'[a] continental councilor" (p. 156), not a master or deity.

When Lockridge asks, "What do you do with your extra people?", it is clear that by "...you...," he does not mean society as a whole and in fact excludes the very people under discussion. This "you" means not mankind in general but a very small minority of managers or administrators making decisions for others.

Extra people? The useless? If the question is re-conceptualized as "What do we do with ourselves when our labor is no longer economically necessary?", then it can be re-formulated again as "How can society organize and allocate its resources to realize the potential of each of its members?" If people cannot avail of education and training to enable them to engage in scientific, creative, cultural and leisure activities, then we really should ask, "What are people for?"!

At least in this novel, some answer to these questions has been found a thousand years after the Wardens and Rangers.