The Future Of Humanity

St Paul wrote that he did not understand why he did the evil that he did not intend to do and did not do the good that he did intend to do. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil is not between groups of people but within each individual. A spokesperson for the future utopian society in William Morris's News From Nowhere says that of course social change was violent because what peace was there among those poor deluded wretches of the twentieth century? - or words to that effect. At the end of HG Wells's The Shape Of Things To Come, a radical transformation of social and environmental conditions is beginning to produce a new kind of human being, healthy, intelligent and inquiring, the opposite in every respect of their frightened and deluded twentieth century ancestors. The premise of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History is an organization that tries to tackle head on the "protean enemy" of psychological conflicts rooted in primitive resistance to civilization. It is unfortunate that the Psychotechnic Institute fails and is overthrown early in this future history but its aims seem to have been achieved in the much later Galactic civilization.