A is for Asimov Part two
In a previous post I explored how our modern world of data
and algorithms was prefigured in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, written back
in the 1940’s. In this post I return to Asimov to see whether he has anything
to tell us about our society in the post-COVID era.
Introduction
When this country, and others, went into lock-down in March 2019
it came as a shock, partly because we moved so quickly from ‘it’s something
happening the other side of the world’ to having to close our society right
down. At the same time few of us had any idea how long it was going to last. A
ten week lock-down followed by a return to normal would not have had a long-term
effect on society; we would have quickly gone back to our old lives.
But that is not what happened. Instead, after a false dawn in
July and August, the virus came roaring back and hospitalisations and deaths
massively topped the previous peak. As it subsides again the vaccine promises a
way out. But a whole twelve months have passed since that initial shock. That
is a long enough period of time for us to acquire ingrained habits that won’t
just disappear overnight. These include; wearing masks in public, frequent
hand-washing and sanitising and thinking twice before getting close to another
person. As society opens up again those behaviours will, I feel, still persist.
The Robots of Dawn
But what has that to do with Isaac Asimov? One of his
strengths as a writer was to describe his imagined future societies in details
about everyday activities that enabled the reader to picture them. The
Foundation series famously described characters using pocket calculators and looking
at VDU screens, long before such things became part of our everyday lives.
Asimov also wrote a series of novels that described human society at the
beginnings of its push out to colonise deep space. At this point Earth was
heavily populated and people lived in huge underground cities; ‘the caves of
steel’. People had to live cheek by jowl. Privacy was limited and crowded
public spaces were the norm.
But Earth people had also begun to colonise other planets.
These colonies were known as the Spacer worlds. In many cases the planets were
adapted to suit humans; terraformed, as Asimov put it. The settlers, by
definition, were people who had to be individual, self-reliant and able to cope
with living in small numbers. Spacer societies had room to spread out, and for
various reasons, Spacer life expectancies became much longer than those of earth
people. They began to see Earth as potentially disease-ridden and unhealthy;
with more to lose from illness and death they took more trouble to avoid
infections.
Eventually they began to impose hygiene restrictions on Earth
people. A visitor to a Spacer world arriving from Earth would be subjected to
all sorts of indignities before being allowed to proceed on their way. All this
is well described in the novel ‘The Robots of Dawn’. A police detective from
Earth is invited to the planet Aurora to investigate a suspected crime, in the
face of disapproval from many Aurorans.
Elijah Baley enters the Spacer ship;
“he knew exactly what was coming and removed his clothes without
hesitation…..he would receive no other clothes until he had been thoroughly
bathed, examined, dosed and injected.”
He also becomes aware that the clothes they give are
designed to stop him being an infection risk:
“The sleeves of his blouse hugged his wrists and his hands
were covered by thin, transparent gloves…..He was being so covered, not for his
own comfort, he knew, but to reduce his danger to the Spacers”.
Later, whilst being welcomed into the home of an Auroran
citizen, Baley wonders how they deal with disinfecting things once he has left:
“what did they do with the chairs he sat in while in their
establishments, the dishes he ate from, the towels he used? Were there special
sterilising procedures? Would they discard and replace everything?”
Relevance to our lived experience now
This obsession with hygiene on the part of the Spacers is
extreme. But, in the wake of the pandemic, we are suddenly much more aware of
how infection can be spread and begin to question things we previously gave no
thought to. In the brief inter-regnum when we could visit shops I was in a
store with several floors. Riding the escalator I was about to grip the
handrail, but stopped myself. Should I be touching the rail now, or would that
be infectious? The next time you are somewhere with a bowl of peanuts on the
bar, would you be happy to dip your hand in? Do you hesitate before you grasp
any door handle, or pick up an item in the shop?
Another recent experience; we were in the supermarket
waiting to get to a packet of ham, waiting for the lady in front of us to move
on. Whilst we stood there she rifled through all the different packets, picking
some up and replacing them, going back and forwards on the shelves before
finally choosing a packet to go in her trolley. At his point I was thinking,
‘do I really want any of those packets?’
The pandemic has turned us all into Spacers now. We are
willing to go to great lengths to avoid infection and view our fellow human
beings as potential sources of it. Even when we get the all clear to hug each
other again, I guarantee we will all hesitate before doing so. I suspect we
will remain physically distant to some degree for some time to come.
After some time on Aurora, Elijah Baley admits to himself
that when he returns to Earth he may react like a Spacer and find Earth crowded
and dirty. He has acclimatised to the clean and hygienic feel of Aurora, as
well as its spaced out society. Earth makes a virtue of its crowded nature;
politicians talk of the ‘hum of humanity’ and the ‘buzz of brotherhood’ that
defines Earth. Sampling Spacer life, Baley begins to realise there are other
ways of doing things.
We have been here before of course. Victorian cities were
dirty, crowded, unhygienic breeding grounds for disease. Once we began to
appreciate the dangers we did something about it where we could and society
views and values changed. Cleanliness became next to godliness, an expression
of collective public spiritedness. As we come out of the pandemic, shifts in
attitudes are becoming apparent. Wearing a mask, sanitising frequently, having
the vaccine, all these are our modern outward signs of public-spiritedness.
There are dangers here. The well-off of Victorian cities,
who could afford clean spacious and ventilated houses with gardens attached,
could all too easily begin to decry and fear those who could not. Lack of
hygiene became a sign not of poverty but of lack of virtue. This allowed one
group of people to look down on another. We need to be careful that we do not
go down the same road and demonise those who cannot be as distanced or as
pristine as the rich.
In Asimov’s story,
Baley encounters Keldren Amadiro, who is an Auroran Nationalist. He sees
Spacers as superior to Earth people and Aurorans as superior to other Spacers.
“Individualists Mr Baley. Individualists!”
“Our society is founded on that. Every direction in which
the Spacer worlds have developed further emphasises our individuality. We are
proudly human on Aurora, rather than being huddled sheep on Earth”.
Amadiro is an example of those who define themselves by
looking down on others, a trap we would do well not to fall into. As we come
out of lockdown and start to meet each other again, we will all have to navigate
the re-establishment of contact with others, but it doesn’t have to be at the
cost of our basic humanity.
Despite being invited into the home of Santorix Gremionis,
an Auroran who he hopes may be relevant to the case he is investigating, Baley
is aware of a distance between them:
“Baley noted that Gremionis kept a certain distance. There
seemed to be a repulsion field- unseen, unfelt, unsensed in any way- around
Baley that kept these Spacers from approaching too closely, that sent them into
a gentle curve of avoidance when they passed him.”
I don’t know about you but that seems like an accurate
description of what happens when I go for a walk at the moment. When people, or
two groups of people, approach each other, there is a delicate ballet of
movement that keeps the two parties apart. So are we going to stay that way
from now on? That is one of the interesting questions that we will have to
grapple with. The arc of the story tells how the Earthman gains an appreciation
of Spacer sensibilities whilst the Aurorans re-evaluate their prejudices about
Earth people. At the beginning of the book, when Baley meets Han Fastolfe, the
scientist who has invited him to the planet, he proffers his hand to shake, a
common enough gesture on Earth but awkward for Fastolfe:
“With calculated suddenness, he thrust out his hand at
Fastolfe. Fastofle hesitated perceptibly. Then he took Baley’s hand, holding it
gingerly-and not for long- and said, ‘I shall assume you are not a walking sack
of Infection, Mr Baley”.
Asimov continues to speak to us
That little scene, intended to highlight the way Auroran’s
view Earth people, seems, in the light of the pandemic, to be a perfect
description of our own interactions in the near future. In this, as in many
other things, Isaac Asimov, though ostensibly writing Science-Fiction, is seen
to be a chronicler of human beings first and foremost. As such, I believe he
repays the effort of reading him by shining a light on our present just as much
as our future. Of course, OUR present was the future when the books were
written, which is also food for thought!
