This past month I’ve been thinking a lot about an old Isaac Asimov short story I read way back in my youth. It was one of his earliest stories published, and he regarded it as his first significant story because he sold it to the legendary John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. The story was mainly about Science and the Public, but it has more than a little to do with politics and about diverging visions of the future.
The story is titled “Trends” and its narrator is looking back at the first moon shot in the year 1973. There is a lot of public opposition to the moon rocket, on the belief of many that sending rockets into space is somehow an impious meddling in God’s domain. One character warns the protagonist, the scientist responsible for designing the rocket, that the tide of History is against him. There has always been a conflict between the forces pushing for scientific progress and the expansion of knowledge and the forces resisting change and demanding a return to How Things Used To Be. Mankind has enjoyed a good century or so of Progress, but now the pendulum is swinging the other way, and the character gloomily predicts a century or more of Dark Ages as the forces of Ignorance take control.
His prediction seems to come true. As a group of protesters led by a religious demagogue surrounds the moon rocket, it explodes. Several protesters are killed by the blast and the demagogue is injured. The demagogue blames the scientist, who was also injured; (actually the explosion was cause by sabotage by one of the demagogue’s sympathizers); and he leads an angry mob to try to lynch him. The narrator is able to smuggle the scientist out of his hospital and to a remote farm where he can recuperate safely.
Within a week, Congress passes a law making rocket experiments a capital crime. The demagogue runs for office and his supporters gain control of Congress. They form a special bureau for the purpose of scrutinizing and controlling scientific research, ultimately banning all independent research. The demagogue dies a few years later, but his followers continue his crusade.
While this is going on, the scientist and the narrator have gathered as much money as they can scrape together and as many like-minded engineers as they can find, and have been working in secret on a new moon rocket. It takes them several years, but finally they complete the rocket and the scientist makes an illegal but successful trip around the Moon and back.
The scientist’s achievement captures the public’s imagination, and, discontented with the stifling government policies, popular sentiment swings against the forces of anti-science.
In the end, the hero tells the narrator that their friend, the pessimist who spoke gloomily about the pendulum of History, was mistaken. Yes, there are forces of Progress and Reaction opposing each other; but Asimov was an optimist and believed, to paraphrase someone else, that the Arc of History is Long and Bends Toward Science. And when the trend of History is going in a certain direction, there’s going to be a massive reaction to try and stop it. What the heroes of the story experienced was not the point at which the Pendulum swings towards Ignorance, but the last ditch effort of the Reaction to stop an inexorable swing towards Progress. They were not entering a New Dark Ages, but rather embarking on a New Era of Discovery.
I hope that will be the case with our current situation; and I think there are still forces in America that are pushing in the direction of Justice and Equality. We’ll have to endure some bad times, and we have to keep pushing, no matter which way the pendulum swings.