A Comfortable Demise
Sometimes certain books just sort of seem to fall into your hands, out of the blue, and resonate. Maybe it was the C.S. Lewis endorsement on the back of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1954 sci-fi novel Childhood’s End that initially caught my interest when I picked it up off the table in the graduate school floor at Oklahoma State University, but the first few pages of the book were more than enough to pull me in.
Science fiction is often treasured for its capacity to prophesy future hopes and horrors, and of course we have our classic examples: Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Bradbury’s short but poignant Fahrenheit 451. These books are all in the current conversation about technology, government overreach, and social decay, and for good reason, but certain other dystopias merit consideration in the discourse, too. Not that the book or its author are in any way obscure, of course. Arthur C. Clarke is known as one of the most famous science fiction writers of the past century, penning works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he wrote in tandem with Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay of the iconic film of the same name. Childhood’s End is one of his earlier novels, and therefore slightly eclipsed by his later books, and before picking it up, I had never heard of it. That should change. It bears a storyline that I think overlays fairly evenly, at least metaphorically, with the contemporary talk of the town: Technological progress in general, and perhaps even artificial intelligence in particular. It’s a novel that asks the question: Should certain things be more important to humanity than its own comfortable existence?
The novel takes place a century ahead of Clarke’s time of writing, meaning, not very far from today, and opens with the appearance of mysterious ships from outer space that hover over Earth’s largest cities—London, New York, Paris, etc. These aliens, referred to as the Overlords, don’t show themselves for decades for fear of overwhelming the humans, but entirely change the way the nations of the world behave. Humans can’t fire nukes at the ships because of the potential retaliation, so an uncertain diplomacy forms between the newly coordinating nation states and this bizarre new species, which has laid silent claim over Planet Earth. While the Overlords never force control over the human population, their mere presence and intellectual, technological, and military superiority forces the world into submission. It is as if an atomic bomb is hanging over everyone’s head, so they have no choice but to cooperate with each other. Weirdly, in Clarke’s estimation, this kind of unforced submission…works. Global war and poverty vanish. The nations of the world keep their geographical boundaries but lose their individual sovereignty. World citizens can teleport all over the planet with high-tech flying machines. The economy produces abundance. Crime plummets. Everything is “good.” Until, of course, it’s not.
Clarke isn’t afraid of including long passages of overt exposition in his book, telling the reader what’s going on in society. In describing the “Golden Age” of humanity, he writes,
When they destroyed the old nations and the way of life man had known since the beginning of history, they swept away many good things with the bad. The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments.
If this sounds like a familiar picture, maybe it’s because this is the kind of civilization that technology futurists like to offer us. This is a world where human labor is no longer needed, where leisure reigns, and in which the economy is humming and booming with goods and services. AI, of course, represents a major fixture in this new world picture; it’s the next big tech revolution, the behemoth poised and ready to eat up the old ways. Big tech companies assume that AI will automate countless jobs and roles held by humans. We are also reminded that past technological upheavals mediated similar types of job disruptions. We don’t have cabby drivers anymore for a reason, and most grocery store checkers are now substituted with self-checkout stations. Automated systems have been with us for a long time now, but never in this kind of magnitude. Clarke even imagines something like Door Dash in this same section of the novel: “One would normally expect to dial Food Central, wait five minutes, and then get whatever meal had been selected.”
The question we are dealing with today is similar to the one posed in Clarke’s novel: So what? If technology can give us more leisure and ease, why not? I, for one, don’t hate technological progress and think that I would be a hypocrite to claim to be as I type this on my new MacBook Neo!
However, I do think that if we are not careful, we lose something essential when the ease and comfort afforded through technology becomes the ultimate goal of our existence. We end up losing “life” itself.
Childhood’s End is a really weird book. It takes a turn that I personally didn’t expect but maybe should have given the title. All I’ll say is that these Overlords are serving another master known as the Overmind, a mysterious entity with an odd agenda of its own. Let’s just say the agenda isn’t bent on preserving human individuality and dignity. The goal in mind is a bit more collectivistic, a bit more psychic, and a bit more ethereal and robotic. The children of Earth are impacted by this dark agenda first, hence the title: They miss out on childhood. They don’t go through natural development.
This strange but resonant little book made me wonder if we as a species, while not currently controlled by mysterious alien forces (that we know of, at least), are always tempted to avoid the long, arduous path toward maturity and virtue. We are always trying to skip the developmental stage and cut right to ease and enlightenment. Ironically, though, we remain helpless children when we offload all of our efforts to the machines we’ve made, or the devices that have been given to us and designed to addict, confound, and pacify.
Towards the end of the novel, a group of artists, scholars, and other writers try to preserve what’s best about culture through a project called New Athens, which, as the name suggests, tries to imagine what the old Athens might look like if it were scientifically and technologically advanced. I thought this project was going to represent a much more subversive and powerful fulcrum point in the novel, but it sort of fizzles out in the end, leaving us with quite a depressing picture of the inevitable. A Benedict option of knowledge storing doesn’t end up working in the novel; nothing human is preserved.
Bleak and bizarre as this novel is, the principle it rests on is worth contemplating. The aliens were sent to save humanity from nuclear destruction (the novel was written in 1954, less than a decade after atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) but ends up delivering it to a peaceful but perhaps no less disturbing demise. The reader is forced to reckon with the notion that humanity is just a minor blip in a long and vexing cosmic dance, headed towards uncertain ends. If anything, it should teach us that settling for comfort and stagnation could threaten our spiritual lives, dilute our creativity, and turn it into mere consumption. Clarke makes little mention of religion in Childhood’s End, but I couldn’t help but think of the words of Jesus when I finished the novel: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36, KJV).
Peter Biles is the author of several books of fiction, including the story collection Last November. His stories and essays have appeared in The American Spectator, Plough, and RealClearBooks, among many others. He authors a literary Substack blog called Battle the Bard and writes weekly on trending news in technology and culture for Mind Matters.
