The Power of Necessity and -Earth Abides-

I've been procrastinating over making this post for days.

I finished George R. Stewart's Earth Abides several days ago and have been debating with myself over how to approach talking about it here. I could give little summaries of how the book handles gender, race and spirituality, as there is a lot of material on those issues that are dealt with in surprising ways. This was my original plan: fueled by the powers of scholarly initiative, I was going to bestow upon the internet a gem of literary analysis and then bask in my creation. I would glory in how well I had overcome the procrastination that always overtakes me during my writing projects, and feel that this blog was serving its purpose and that with very little effort, I was well on my way to literary badassery.

Clearly, this didn't happen.

And I have to admit that maybe baby steps are a good idea.

So what I'm going to do instead, after having succumbed to procrastination, is talk about how Stewart addresses that old adage that necessity is the mother of invention (or in this case, the force that prods humanity into creativity and innovation when all we really seem to want to do is exert just enough energy to be comfortable). A little summary is required for this.

Ah, and by the way, keep in mind that the book was originally published in 1949.

Stewart's apocalypse is very tidy. Humanity is almost completely wiped out by a mysterious disease in about a week and a half. Civilization handles it well, or at least, America does, keeping order and quickly burying bodies up until the point when there is no one left alive to do the burying. The result of this approach is that the survivors have all the benefits of civilization at their disposal without having to wade through mountains of corpses: They have access to canned food, clothing, weaponry, cars, gasoline, an endless landscape of homes to choose from, and even electricity and running water for a good while. Stewart spends a lot of time describing the decay of the monuments of civilization, including the return of natural wildlife and the eventual deaths of kept animals who have been bred to require human care for their survival. His narrator, Isherwood Williams, is a graduate student who is twenty when the disease wipes out most of the human race. The novel follows Isherwood's life from that point until his death as an old man.

What makes all of this interesting is that Isherwood is alone in his need to keep alive the knowledge and ideologies of America before the disease. He attempts repeatedly to impart the knowledge and values of his civilization onto the younger generations born to him and the other adult survivors, with little to no success. Eventually Stewart writes Isherwood as accepting of the fact that the future generations are not going to bring the world back to what it was, that the world is going to change, that the people in it are going to change, and that ensuring their survival after the supplies left behind by the "Old Timers" runs out, is all that he can really give them.

Necessity and its relation to human creativity plays an enormous role in Isherwood's failure to re-animate the pre-disease world. Part of this has to do with the way Stewart writes this apocalypse. That an almost infinite number of supplies are still undisturbed in all the department and grocery stores in the 1950's America Stewart describes, means that regular hunting and even gardening is unnecessary for survival. Canned food and the occasional hunting of a cow provide the survivors of Isherwood's small community with all the sustenance they need, and all other supplies are available in abundance in the myriad of abandoned stores. Electricity and running water are shown to be mere conveniences whose absence can be easily adapted to, and with or without them, children are born and new generations flourish completely disassociated from the way of life Isherwood grew up with.

The children growing up with this disconnect from Old World knowledge and lifestyles play a pivotal role in the eventual loss of that knowledge and those lifestyles, but the perpetrators of the initial loss of information are the adult survivors of the disease. They, as parents, adults, and as people who remember what life was like pre-apocalypse are the only ones in a position to make the world they came from seem relevant to the new generation. The reality for Isherwood's community, however, is that the ideologies and knowledge of the 'time before' are no longer relevant for the adult survivors, and part of the reason they have become irrelevant is because that knowledge is no longer necessary for their survival.

The link between creativity, innovation and survival revealed here is what really interests me. It comes with a heavy suggestion in Earth Abides that the mechanism that truly binds 'civilization' together is not some inherent rightness, or even religious predestination, but the fact that, while living in such a pervasive system, human survival within it depends on the maintenance of that system through tacit agreement with its laws and many organizations. It is also held in place by the sheer quantity of people who live within it, and once the majority of those people are gone, the system itself is no longer relevant because it can only operate at its previous scale. Stewart presents this irrelevancy partially through the size of Isherwood's community. At its largest, the group is not more than forty people, and those people are all eventually intermarried, so that they become more of a family group than a collaboration of strangers bound together by law. The complexity of government is not necessary in such a small group when the resources needed for survival and comfort are so readily available, and so, with the exception of Isherwood, the other adults are content to live off of the remnants of the past. Without their participation, the knowledge is lost, and the human world changes accordingly.

Civilization, then, and specifically in the context of Earth Abides, American Civilization, is not a sacred permanence. It is an object of utility whose function changes or becomes irrelevant once it outlives its usefulness in relation to the human beings who give its very existence meaning. Stewart reveals that what dictates the endurance of a civilization and all the ideologies and knowledge that comes with that civilization, is how effective it is at maintaining the lives and relative comfort of the people who form it. If there is another way of ensuring that comfort and survival, the old ideologies disintegrate, and the human experience of social life changes.

And I seem to have gone off on a tangent about civilization rather than talking about the relationship between creativity and comfort in a post-apocalyptic world. I keep getting more ideas the longer I work on this and it is preventing me from posting! So I think I will end this post for now, and live to blog more about Earth Abides another day.