A lecture Olaf Stapledon prepared in his Liverpool years — on the internal evidence of its notes, in the early 1930s; one sheet is University Club, Liverpool notepaper, and no date, venue or audience is recorded — re-set as an essay. The argument, structure, and emphases follow his manuscript notes sheet by sheet; the prose is editorial — connective sentences, examples, and asides in his manner that the notes do not contain. For exactly what is his, word for word, see the source-bounded reading edition; for his notes beside the reconstructed prose, the side-by-side reconstruction.
No sheet records a venue, an audience, or a date. The one piece of physical evidence is notepaper: sheet 10 — and the final archive sheet — carry the printed letterhead of the University Club, Liverpool, which places the manuscript in Stapledon's Liverpool milieu without recording a delivery. The dating is inference, marked "c." accordingly: the project's lecture concordance places the set at c. 1931–1934 — its thematic entries say c. 1932 — from "how will England emerge from this crisis?" (the early-1930s crisis), a pre-war frame throughout, and the absence of any atomic material.
The manuscript (Liverpool University Library OS/F13/34) is twelve sheets, two of them letterhead with no lecture text. A paler pencil supplies whole sheets (the evolutionary ladder of sheet 3; the closing program of sheet 11) and revisions elsewhere — evidence of more than one working session, though for what occasion the second layer was made is unknown. Sheet 2 preserves a self-correction: "anticipation becomes commoner & more far-reaching" is queried and revised to "not more far-reaching? but commoner". Sheet 9 writes "(b)" for a second argument and stops; whatever it was to contain is lost or was never written. Three struck false starts (two of them disputed readings) are acknowledged in this edition but never voiced.
The argument builds from a parable — the boy who refused arithmetic because he felt "no obligation to the future 'I'" — to a psychology of foresight: we care for a future only when imagination has made it ours, so "the improvident are to be got at by appeal to imagination". An evolutionary ladder of anticipation and five grades of interest in the future culminate in the claim the concordance treats as this set's centre: "Today, men scoff at loyalty to Man / but it emerges, inevitably". A ten-step scale of futures, from the missile too near to blink at to the running-down of the universe, then reframes the question, and the notes end with a program: avoid wrecking the future, learn to think in terms of Man, form an ideal of what Man should do with himself — and a last line on world organisation and eugenics.
In the corpus, the concordance places sheet 4's loyalty genealogy in the two-loyalties thread as "the human half of the later two-loyalties doctrine, argued as developmental necessity", and sheet 11's ideal — "produce beings capable of richer experience" — in its threads on the Other and on man-as-instrument: the species' task stated prospectively. Sheet 11's closing line, "Practical world organisation & eugenics — eliminate deficients", the concordance calls "the bluntest eugenic sentence in the speaking corpus, closing an otherwise gradualist argument"; its synthesis finds the eugenic thread franker on the platform than in print at this early date and more cautious by the end (1948: "danger of unwise eugenics, 'messing about'") — a development in itself, and in the humane direction. This edition keeps the line as written.
What is not known: where and to whom the lecture was given, or whether it was given at all; the year; what the dangling "(b)" was to argue; and what the red "87" filing mark records.
When I was a boy they tried to teach me arithmetic. I said, in effect, "I do not want it; I have no use for it." They replied, "Some day you will be sorry." And my answer was, "Perhaps — but now I do not want it." I felt no obligation whatever toward that future "I" of twenty years on. Even the "I" of tomorrow was uninteresting; the "I" of an hour hence was apt to be a mere nuisance.
They said I was foolish. But I thought I was being merely sensible, practical, realistic. Why should I bother about an "I" which I did not actually feel as "I"? I could not realise it or imagine it; it was simply somebody else. Yet I soon learned to bother about the "I" of tomorrow, and of next year, and of ten years hence; and now I find myself bothering about a still more remote "I".
The upshot is worth stating carefully, for everything else hangs on it. We do not bother about a future self until we have already come to feel that future self as in fact ourselves. If we wish to move the improvident, then, we must appeal chiefly to the imagination. It is little use reasoning with them from the bare assumption that the present "I" and the future "I" are identical; the identity is precisely what they do not feel.
Notice, too, a distinction. Much conduct serves the future without anticipating it. Consider our own eating: we seldom eat in order to live; we eat because the spirit moves us, or from an habitual response to the dinner bell. The act is biologically serviceable, but no future is consciously envisaged. Much of the behaviour of men and animals is of this kind. But some animals do genuinely anticipate — Köhler's apes discovered solutions to problems in order to get food. In the course of evolution, anticipation certainly becomes commoner; whether it also becomes more far-reaching I hesitate to say — perhaps the safer claim is: not more far-reaching, but commoner.
The evolution of foresight
Sketch, very roughly, the evolution of our awareness of the future. First come creatures that live only in the present — no memory, no anticipation: an eternal present. Even in dogs one wonders whether there is real memory, or only something sketchy; and a bird's nest-building is not real anticipation, but a merely pleasurable activity, like our response to the dinner bell. Second, with the ape-men, gleams of real memory and anticipation appear: preparing for tomorrow, perhaps even storing. Third, primitive peoples make boats, houses, earth walls, dams; they store food for the winter, raise tumuli, organise expeditions against their enemies. Fourth, the barbarians prepare on the great scale, under the shadow of death: mummies, pyramids, tombs, palaces, temples. Fifth, civilised men build roads, aqueducts, castles, harbours, and undertake trading expeditions that run over many years. Sixth, modern men carry out large public works — the Suez Canal, great schemes of drainage and irrigation, afforestation (in which we are still very backward), electricity schemes such as the Shannon — and scientific research.
And still we are very short-sighted. We seldom look further than a few years ahead.
Five grades of interest
Distinguish, next, the grades of development of interest in the future. First, the primitive, momentary "I", aware of neither future nor past. Second, the "I" that recognises its future theoretically — the child — but cannot be bothered with it. Third, the "I" that actually prepares for its own future: for tomorrow, for next year, or systematically throughout life. Fourth, the "I" that recognises a future beyond its own life, but cannot be bothered with it. Fifth, the "I" that prepares for a future beyond its own life — for its children; for its firm, its craft, its college, its profession; for its nation or city; or for the human race.
These stages represent levels of imagination and intelligence; and from each level, the one below seems stupid and the one above madly idealistic. But as our apprehension increases we conceive wider loyalties. The child scoffs at loyalty to its own future self, yet that loyalty inevitably emerges. Today men scoff at loyalty to Man; but it emerges, inevitably — as the world becomes unified and as knowledge increases. Barring accidents, my notes add; and the caution deserves its place.
What governs the reach of our interest
What factors govern this development? First, the bare apprehension that there is a future at all: memory gives me my past; what was present is now past, and there is a new present; and from this succession I come to expect an infinite series of new presents — which is what we call the future. Second, our apprehension is limited by our power of imagining the circumstances to come: in boyhood we cannot imagine much of manhood, either what it will feel like or what its circumstances will be. Third, interest in the future beyond our own lives depends partly on parental impulses — toward our own children, or extended toward the future population — and partly on the clarity of our vision: the more doubtful the whole prospect, the less we are concerned. Fourth, interest in the "future of society" depends on how far the present lets us foresee it. And finally, we are never interested in "futurity" in the abstract, but always in the future of some object — myself, my children, my group, my nation, the world; and the reach of interest depends on the object's prospect of life. The momentary self has no prospect. The ordinary "I" is interested up to its death. A college may have decades before it; a nation, centuries; mankind, millions of years.
Near futures and far
So much for our interest in the future. Now consider future events themselves, and classify, roughly, the near and the far.
The nearest future of all is a fraction of a second away: the missile already approaching the eye, too late even to blink. Then the very near, measured in seconds: the tennis ball coming toward one; the shell has burst — will a splinter get me? Then quarter-hours and hours: am I going to bore you before this lecture ends? Shall I catch the train home? Then days, weeks, months: how to pay the January income tax? Then years and decades: how to educate one's children, how to establish them for life, how to provide for one's old age — and how will England emerge from this crisis?
Then centuries and thousands of years: what happens when the oil is exhausted, and the coal? Then hundreds of thousands and millions of years, when we are clear of the previous ice age. Then hundreds of millions, when all existing mountains are worn flat and the next mountain-forming age has come. Then millions of millions, when the earth is uninhabitable. And at last, millions of millions of millions of years — when the universe has run down completely.
What ought to concern us
Which of these futures do concern us, and which ought to? Each of us is chiefly concerned with his own future, near and far: what shall I do tomorrow, how shall I meet next year's problems, how shall I meet old age? Many are concerned with the future of their children — education, career. All of us are concerned, as citizens, with the future of the nation, though mostly we cannot do much about it save through mass movements of opinion. And all of us ought to be concerned with the future of humanity. The individual act is ineffectual on that scale; but massed opinions and massed acts are important, and public opinion does control public policy — in the long run.
And note this: the future of Man reaches much further than the future of any nation. Man is older than the nations and will outlast them. But in a comparatively near future the good of one nation may conflict with the good of Man; policies which would preserve a nation might harm mankind as a whole — either soon, or in the long run.
Should we bother about Man?
There are arguments against bothering. Humanity, it is said, is too diverse, too vague, too unreal to appeal to us. The races have nothing in common and cannot get in touch with one another; English and French will never agree; East is East and West is West; the Chinese eat birds' nests.
To this the answer is double. First, the world is in fact becoming more and more one — not yet in political organisation, but in common interest and common culture; nations can no longer afford to be exclusive. Second, the present races will not last for ever. In a thousand years the nations and races will not be those that now exist.
[Editorial note: at this point the notes write "(b)" for a second argument against bothering — and stop. Whatever it was to be, no surviving sheet states it, and this essay does not invent it.]
What can we do?
What, then, can we actually do about the future of Man? First, we can avoid the acts that would jeopardise it, or wreck such civilisation as we have: a really destructive war; the waste of oil and nitrates; the undermining of human nature itself, whether by misguided social policy or by misguided biological control.
Second — and this, I should say, is our chief task at present — we can learn to think and feel in terms of Man, and in terms of a long future. That is: use our imaginations; familiarise ourselves with the idea "Man", as the boy had to familiarise himself with the idea of his own manhood.
Third, we can begin to form an ideal of what Man should do with himself: to produce beings capable of richer experience — of profounder knowing, finer feeling, more reasonable will — each self-harmonious; to produce very diverse and original beings, not stereotyped ones; beings, nevertheless, in perfect accord with one another; and a society of just the right size and form to secure both organisation and freedom. Further ideals will emerge.
Fourth, the notes end, there is the practical work: world organisation and eugenics — "eliminate deficients."
[Editorial note: that last phrase is quoted as the manuscript has it, and the essay ends where the notes end. The project's lecture concordance calls it "the bluntest eugenic sentence in the speaking corpus, closing an otherwise gradualist argument", and traces the trajectory across the platform record: frankest here, c. 1932, and most guarded in 1948, when the Interplanetary Man notes warn of "unwise eugenics, 'messing about'" — a development in the humane direction, documented rather than retouched.]