Summary
H.G. Wells writes his own version of Plato’s Republic laying out the process required to make humanity 2.0 otherwise known as the ‘New Republican’. Abandoning hope of finding absolute answers on any questions social, political or ethical, Wells decides to view life in its essence as a succession of births. If this be so, then how might we improve this succession and make it the best process possible? Wells has a plan, and he spends the next 10 chapters walking the reader through how a new republican would be welcomed into life, early education and eventually seated into the greater world of society. His ideas touch on many areas of life, sex, literature, and parenting styles.
Thoughts
Ironically in Plato’s Republic the zenith of society was a philosopher, while in Wells’ Republic it is the writer. Overall, the style of the book was dry, and often seemed to lack force. In fact, later on Wells himself would say about this book:
my style at its worst and my matter at its thinnest, and quoting it makes me feel very sympathetic with those critics who, to put it mildly, restrain their admiration for me.
The ideas themselves were interesting at points. I specifically liked an idea around elections where officials would be elected by a randomly selected jury that was just big enough to be representative. This jury would be given several weeks to research and interview the perspective candidates before coming to their decision. I am sure in practice this would run into roadblocks, but I like the idea in principle. Secondly, I found his views on eugenics to be interesting, written before WW1 the pall around eugenics hadn’t manifested, in fact the idea seemed almost obvious. After all, if we can select our cows for milk production, and our chickens for their egg laying capacity why not our children? Wells’ response is that “we don’t know exactly what we want, and we know even less about what is required to get there”. Using beauty as a possible variable the would-be eugenicist might want to select for, he makes the argument that there are many types of beauty that would be incongruous if mixed and it is not obvious that mixing selected beautiful people would result in better results than how humans currently conduct mate selection. When it comes to something as complicated as the human organism it is probably best to be cautious when changing a system that has been working for untold eons. He does make suggestions that we could work towards negative eugenics, but only in the clearest of cases where certain illness have been exhaustively proven to be highly heritable or predictable. This is what appears to be taking place in Iceland, where nearly one hundred percent of pregnancies with positive tests for Down syndrome were terminated. Of course, he would argue for earlier intervention where parents who already have these types of diseases would be sterilized or in some other way limited from reproduction. This to, has since had an extremely sketchy history, yet the problem in its fundamental state remains for modern societies. What do we do with the information we have? Overall, I would not recommend this book as it wasn’t that original of a work in such a well-trodden literary genre.