150th Birthday of H.G.Wells - Part III

    For the third time I dedicate a third part for the same author, the others authors who deserved three parts were: Charles Dickens and Dante Alighieri. The first summary was published in 2003 at https://www.academia.edu/400254/_Human_Rights_and_Public_Accountability_in_H._G._Wells_Functional_World_State_. The second was published at http://thewire.in/67634/hg-wells-social-predictions/

           As has long been acknowledge, H.G.Wells was one of the twentieth century insistent advocates of a world state. From the publication of Anticipations in 1901 to his death in 1946, Wells evolved a political vision which rejected nationalism and advanced global political institutions. In this chapter an aspect of Wells's thinking and which has been relatively neglected by scholars : the role of human rights protection and government accountability. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Wells saw an opportunity to embark in a practical way upon his project for world unity. This possibility he called the 'Rights of Man' campaign and it was first raised during the discussion of allied war aims in the first few months of the conflict. By 1939 Wells came to realise in The New World Order, when he wrote: "The more highly things are collectivised the more necessary is a legal system embodying the Rights of Man". In promoting human rights, Wells felt a part of that democratic tradition going back to the Magna Carta and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. There would be no possibility of a static society being created because, through the charter of human rights, the actions of the world state would be constantly challenged, not only defending human rights but being used as a legal mechanism to reinterpret those rights continually in a changing world. In order to achieve the acceptance of the "Rights of Man" worldwide, the humanistic tradition of Britain, France and the U.S.A. would have to be extended to the whole world. With the outbreak of the Second World War, and particularly after 1941 when nazi-fascism and communism ranged their forces against each other, Wells realised the need for in-built guarantees which would protect the rights of individuals and minority groups throughout the world and which would allow a popular voice to directly influence the bureaucracy. Thus, in relation to his world state project, the 'Rights of Man' campaign was aimed at establishing a check to power strong enough to prevent political repression and authoritarian excesses. Wells hoped the 'Rights of Man' would be a bulwark against the totalitarian usurpation, an usurpation he saw increasing around the world: "Throughout the whole world we see variations of this subordination of the individual to the power. Phase by phase these ill-adapted governments are becoming uncontrolled absolutisms, they are killing that free play of the individual mind which is the preservative of human efficiency and happiness. The populations under their sway, after a phase of servile discipline, are plainly doomed to relapse into disorder. Everywhere war and economic exploitation break out, so that those very same increments of power and opportunity which have brought mankind within sight of an age of limitless plenty, seem likely to be lost again, or may be lost forever, in an ultimate social collapse." (Wells[1940]79-80) Wells's opposition to tyranny at this time shows a lasting interest in the protection of fundamental human rights which he demonstrated during the First War with his plea for a human rights charter for colonial peoples, and in the interwar period when, for example, he condemned censorship by the BBC, and was seen 'mingling with hunger marches during the great depression, to deter the police from baton-charging them.' Wells's 'Right of Man' aimed not only at preventing the abuses of power that had been so rifle throughout the interwar period but also at setting in place a guarantee that the world-state dogma could not be turned into a monolithic tyranny through bureaucratic unaccountability. Wells first advocate the 'Rights of Man' in a letter printed in the newspaper The Times in October 1939, he also published a version of the rights in almost all of his books between 1940 and 1944 with slight amendments from draft to draft. Education was also central to Wells's cosmopolitan philosophy. By insisting on the right to knowledge and information for all throughout life, the declaration was enshrining the principle of Wells's Permanent World Encyclopaedia, a mechanism by which all the world's citizens would have access to all knowledge through the micro-photographing of texts and objects, and universal access to microfiche machines. All registration and records about citizens shall be open to their private inspection. "All dossiers shall be accessible to the man concerned and subject to verification and correction".  This clause, although greatly truncated, remains unaltered in principle and becomes merged with clause eight in the final draft. These rights were recognised as fundamental by Wells. He enshrined them in his Five Principles of Liberty as the principle of privacy. In the final charter these principles are condensed thus: 'Secret evidence is not permissible, statements in administrative records are not evidence unless they are proved. A man has the right to protection from any falsehood that may distress or injure him.'

             Many of H.G.Wells's futuristic prophecies have come true, but the one on which his heart was most set, the establishment of a world state, remains unfulfilled. No writer is more renowned for his ability to foresee the future than H.G.Wells. His writing can be seen to have predicted the aeroplane, the tank, space travel, the atomic bomb, satellite TV and the worldwide web. Yet for all these successes, the futuristic prophecy on the establishment of a state world, remains unfulfilled. He envisioned a government which would ensure that every individual would be as well educated as possible, have work which satisfy them, and the freedom to enjoy their private life. His interests in society and technology were closely entwined. Wells's political vision was closely associated with the fantastic transport technologies that Wells is famous for. The Outline of History (1919) claimed to be the first transnational history of the human race, telling the story of human beings from our early evolution. In the hope that his readers would, on learning of the common origin, outgrow the idea of the nation state. While controversially received, The Outline of History was Wells's best-selling book in his own lifetime. Today, given the role that national identity continues to play in human being's efforts for greater self-determination, the prospect of Wells's world state seems even less likely. One surprising legacy remains, however, from Wells's forecasts of a better future for humankind. Letters from Wells to The Times led to the Sankey Committee for Human Rights and Wells's The Right of Man, argued that the only meaningful outcome for the war would be the declaration of human rights and an international court to enforce them. The influence of Wells's work is clear in the U.N. 1948 Declaration of Universal Human Rights. These rights now have legal force, so are perhaps Wells's most significant prophetic aim. While Wells is remembered more now for his science fiction than his ideas of world government, the political Wells still might something to teach us. While political leaders of various stripes use nationhood as a way of putting barriers between human beings, Wells's message of our shared origin, universal human rights and international co-operation might suggest to us a direction for a more hopeful future.

150th Birthday of H.G.Wells - Part II

               The tribute to H.G.Wells goes on. This post is a summary of four articles. The first was published at https://www.britishcouncil.in/father-science-fiction-h-g-wells. The second was published at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/20/ali-smith-celebrates-hg-wells-role-creation-un-declaration-of-human-rights. The third was published athttp://www.gradesaver.com/author/hg-wells. The fourth was published at http://www.hyperink.com/Major-Themes-And-Symbols-In-The-Time-Machine-b930a15

              H.G.Wells was a British author four-time Nobel Prize nominee and a journalist. And his work as a science fiction writer created a legacy, which is still felt to this day. Wells is frequently described as the 'father of science fiction'. John Clute, sci-fic historian, describes Wells as the most important writer in the genre's history. He has influenced countless writers, including Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke. Wells was an extraordinary prolific author. He worked to establish fictional techniques that authors still use today. 'The Time Machine', for example, popularised time travel as a narrative tool. Wells also wrote popular non-fiction. 'The Outline of History' was a bestseller, and prompted a renewed interest in world history in popular culture. Wells is remembered today for his substantial output of science fiction writing, but also as a champion for human rights and a better society.

           H.G.Wells wrote several classic, visionary novels about the very worst consequences a past and a present can have on a future, and a great deal of what he wrote, though it takes fantasy form, has come to pass, with stunning corollaries with his own time, the time after him, with our own time, and presumably with the as-yet-unwritten time ahead of us too. So, what did the visionary choose to do, at the latter end of his life, when he was in his 70s, the man who had seen and foreseen so much, in his fiction and his political writing, including tanks, global warming, aerial flight and bombardment, visible mass surveillance, invisible mass surveillance, modern germ warfare, radio, TV, video, the internet, the atom bomb, laser beams? What did the far-seeing man do, the man who had been invited to meet and advise both Roosevelt and Stalin, who had worked on ways, in his latter years, to "release a new form of government in the world", a power "without tyranny", one "to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality"? He wrote and published in 1940, a book called The Rights of Man. He helped form and sustain PEN, where an internationality of writers would come together and think the world, and fight for and protect each other's freedom to write and to read, He helped form and sustain the National Council for Civil Liberties, to monitor and fight for the freedoms that human beings need, and that weak or bullying governments who want all the power will always want to mess with. Above all, Wells believed that what we needed to do was make and ratify as law an international declaration of human rights. Wells's drafts were closely followed in the eventual drawing up of the wording for the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, shortly after his death in 1946. Since 1896, when he was a young man writing The Island of Doctor Moreau, a book about the beast in the human, he had been interested in how at the mercy of the random or self-serving lawmakers we are. In the first year of the second world war, remembering how little the League of Nations had been able to "banish armed conflict from the world", he published The Rights of Man as a call for "a profound reconstruction of the methods of human living". His question, in 1940 was: what are we fighting for? His answer: "a declaration of rights for the common welfare...a code of fundamental human rights which shall be made easily accessible to everyone". His initial draft included most of the things you can still find in our current Human Rights Act, and is especially strong on rights to privacy and dismissal of secrecy. "All registration and records about citizens shall be open to their personal and private inspection. There shall be no secret dossiers in any administrative department." He knew that, as Jose Saramago puts it in his novel Seeing : "rights are not abstractions, they continue to exist even when they are not respected". "There is no source of law," Wells says, "but the people, and since life flows on constantly to new citizens, no generations of the people can in whole or in part surrender the legislative power inherent in mankind."

             Wells was born into poverty in Britain in 1866, and he was not shy about glorifying his lower-class beginnings. He later won a scholarship to what is now part of the Imperial College of Science and Technology. Before the advent of his later works, Wells cultivated his literary potential as both student and educator. Wells's first novel, The Time Machine (1895) was written to relive his poverty. It serves as a harsh critique of capitalism. In the novel, a man travels to the future and finds a nightmarish dystopia in which two distinct species have evolved from the ruling and working classes. The novel struck a chord with Victorian England, a heavily industrialized country of haves and have-nots, and it became a success. Wells soon turned his attention to inflamatory and often contradictory politics. He preached socialism whenever he could, though he later rejected it. He was a stainch supporter of World War I, calling it "the war that will end war", but after World War II found the war-ravaged world he departed in 1946 more horrifying than any of his fictions. Wells became as major player in the political landscape as a writer could become.

              The major themes in the classic The Time Machine are: Class Distinction and Opression - Wells was a child of parents who had worked in wealthy households as servants, so from a young age he was aware of the difference between the classes. It is this observation, as well as his experiences of what class distinction could mean, that led him to explore the theme in this book.The Nature of Man - the time traveler, as the protagonist and hero, represents the inquisitive and constantly questioning mind of man. He feels the need to explore the world and believes that in time, man will have evolved beyond the petty problems experienced in contemporary times. The time traveler is certain that we will experience the wonder of a more evolved future man. At first, he believes his vision has been fulfilled when he encounters the Eloi people,  but they are nor what they seem. they have not evolved, man will instead devolve. they have oppressed the Morlock people to the point of turning them into nocturnal creatures. Here Wells is suggesting that man's nature is to use power over others even if it will eventually damage both, his own future and that of the human race. The Morlock, on the other hand, represent the result of what happens when man is oppressed for too long, he becomes a sickly person. The major symbol is the time machine. The machine is a symbol that Wells uses to explore's man own influence over his destiny and to suggest that man has some control over whether or not we will end up in the future. He creates the machine, expecting to find incredible technological and cultural advances when he arrives in the future. But instead, he finds that the world is quite different than he expected. He hope that with the knowledge of the future he has seen and now shared, man might be able to make changes in the present in order to avoid the horrible future that will otherwise be man's destiny.