Ben Bova: The ‘Marching Morons’ show prescience of science fiction
By Ben Bova
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Whenever someone who disagrees with me hasn’t anything better to bolster his views, he says, “Ahh, you’re nothing but a science fiction writer.”
I usually reply, “Thank you.”
To me, being a writer of science fiction doesn’t mean that I’m a weird, off-the-wall nut case. To me, it means that I write fiction that tries very hard to show the real possibilities that we may face in the foreseeable future.
Science fiction writers have predicted just about every aspect of the world we live in, often in stories that were 10, 20, even 50 years ahead of their time. Space flight, nuclear power, population growth pressures, computers and all their ramifications, psychotropic drugs, even things as mundane as miniskirts and contact lenses were once science fiction.
The most prescient — and chilling — of all the science fiction stories ever written, though, is “The Marching Morons,” by Cyril M. Kornbluth, first published in 1951. It should be required reading in every school on Earth.
The point that Kornbluth makes is simple, and scary: dumbbells have more children than geniuses. In “The Marching Morons” he carries that idea to its extreme, but logical, conclusion.
Kornbluth tells of a future world that is overrun with dummies: men and women who don’t know anything beyond their own shallow personal interests. They don’t know how their society works, or who is running it. All they care about is their personal — and immediate — gratification.
The ancient Romans had a term for this: “bread and circuses.” Give the masses cheap food and entertainment and they’ll be content to let you run the country any way you choose.
In Kornbluth’s story, the people who are actually working — slaving, really — to keep society from falling apart altogether are a small group of very bright men and woman who labor in secret. They are horrified by the world of the morons, but they strive valiantly to keep the dumbbells from destroying themselves.
The dumbbells, meanwhile, are multiplying madly in blissful ignorance, intent on watching entertainment videos and buying automobiles that are all vroom and sleek looks.
Sound familiar?
I was reminded of “The Marching Morons” the other day as I was driving on U.S. 41, jammed with cars and trucks. A moron in a sports car was zooming in and out of traffic, trying to get ahead of the jam that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was like a scene of out of Kornbluth’s story.
Then I thought about the way that the automobile manufacturers advertise their wares. Ever since I could remember, cars have been sold to the public as symbols of sexual attraction or social status, not as transportation. What good is a 300-horsepower engine when you’re stuck in traffic that is crawling along at 20 miles per hour? Those ads are aimed at the morons, and they must be successful because Detroit’s been harping on that theme for generations.
Even cars that are engineered for fuel efficiency and economy are advertised for their “zoom-zoom.”
Look at the “reality” shows on television, or the prurient “investigations” into the sex lives of the rich and famous. Follow the political campaigns that give us smears and sound bites instead of issues and character.
We’re living among the Marching Morons. And it’s not getting any better. The aim of science fiction, at its best, is to show the possibilities of the future. Not merely the gadgets, but the kinds of lives we might be able to attain, the kinds of problems that we’ll have to solve, the kinds of opportunities that we might achieve.
Science fiction writers are not trying to predict the future. Most of them don’t believe that there is a “the future” to predict. The future isn’t inevitable and inescapable. It hasn’t been created yet. The future is built, instant by instant, by what we do here and now — and what we fail to do.
There are tons of science fiction stories that show myriads of possible futures. Some of those futures have come into being. Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons” is one of them. If more people had read that story half a century ago, perhaps we might have avoided some of the pitfalls that have led us to a moron-rich world today.
And therein lies the rub. Despite its power to illuminate the possibilities of tomorrow, science fiction is not read by most people. Perhaps it’s that word “science” that frightens them off: they think the stories are too difficult for them to understand. They’re not.
Perhaps the problem lies with the visual entertainment media: movies and TV. Let’s face it, most of Hollywood’s “sci-fi” has its origins in comic strips, not actual published science fiction. Many people don’t realize that the “sci-fi flicks” on both big and small screens are a far cry from the intellectual and emotional depth of real science fiction.
But I suspect that a major part of the problem is that most people don’t want to think hard about where we are and where we’re heading. They’re perfectly happy to watch TV pundits argue with one another. They follow the latest attack ads that politicians unleash on one another. But they don’t buckle down to thinking about what our problems are and how we might go about solving them.
Many people, I fear, believe they are powerless to make a change in the world. They accept things as they are, more or less. They complain, but they don’t work for change.
Me, I write science fiction, stories that attempt to show how we can change the world — for the better or for the worse. Most people don’t read science fiction because (I suspect) they’re afraid they’d have to do some thinking.
So here we are, with a new world of wealth and long life at our fingertips while the marching morons go their unthinking way and threaten to drown us.
As Stephen Sondheim said in his song, “Send in the Clowns”: “Don’t bother, they’re here.”
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Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of more than 115 books. His latest is “The Sam Gunn Omnibus,” a collection of stories about a scrappy, scandalous space entrepreneur. Dr. Bova’s Web site address is www.benbova.com.
© 2007 Bonita Daily News and The Banner. Published in Bonita Springs, Florida, USA by the E.W. Scripps Co.
