The War of the Worldviews

Yesterday marked the 67th anniversary of the famous Mercury Theater broadcast of War of the Worlds. It is known mostly (as certainly I learned it in my high school history textbook) for the way so many believed it was real. Less well-known is that even a rebroadcast by a Buffalo radio station in 1968, despite extensive promotion, still prompted phone calls to the station and law enforcement from panicked citizens wondering if it was real. Similar events have happened after other broadcasts in other countries. It still seems true that Americans, like people everywhere, are crippled by their attachment to the appeal to authority fallacy. If an Officially Credentialed Reporter, or a plausible facsimile thereof, says something, why then it must be true. This behavior is widespread even though a moment’s reflection would reveal that the absence of coverage on every other radio station, the scientific implausibility of the event, and other considerations make it unlikely that we really are being invaded by Martians. (The scientific-implausibility indictment might have been less controversial in 1938, when there was still a fresh memory of a scientific controversy over whether objects seen on Mars by telescopes were natural channels or man-made canals. But there was no excuse in 1968.)

And yet that lesson – of the danger of reliance on information producers in relatively uncompetitive markets (such as when most Official Journalists share similar political views) when those producers rely on credentials rather than performance for their authority – is not the only one I draw from the play (although it is a very important one). And in listening to a broadcast last night produced by WNYC I thought that in concentrating only on gullibility they too dismissed a lot of the messages that come from the 1938 broadcast, which was only intermittently faithful to the H.G. Wells story. Much of what was important to me was not so important to the WNYC narrator. Just as Steven Spielberg's recent movie reflected the concerns of our times, so too did the Orson Welles production.

The dialogue below is from the broadcast script at the 1938 script. The most compelling portion is a scene near the end in which Prof. Pierson of Princeton, who observed the initial gas plumes on Mars at the launch of the invaders, contemplates the fragility of humanity once the surrounding civilization is gone:

PROF. PIERSON

In writing down my daily life I tell myself I shall preserve human history between the dark covers of this little book that was meant to record the movements of the stars, but... to write I must live, and to live, I must eat... I find moldy bread in the kitchen, and an orange not too spoiled to swallow.
…
I venture from the house. I make my way to a road. No traffic. Here and there a wrecked car, baggage overturned, a blackened skeleton. I push on north.
For some reason I feel safer trailing these monsters than running away from them. And I keep a careful watch. I have seen the Martians... feed. Should one of their machines appear over the top of trees, I am ready to fling myself flat on the earth.
I come to a chestnut tree. October... chestnuts are ripe. I fill my pockets. I must keep alive.

While the professor does not appreciate it, it is ultimately the merchant who makes his life as a professor possible. He produces a thing of undeniable value called ideas, but is able to indulge in that luxury and still eat only because farmers run the farms that grow the food, farm workers harvest the food, truck drivers transport the food, and middleman merchants (often despised because all they seem to do is “mark things up”) figure out the most cost-effective way to get the food to people who will pay to eat it. All these things are valuable; none is produced so abundantly without the cooperation of the other members of society, whose conflicting wants and desires are coordinated by the market. But the professor (like many c. 2005) does not notice them even after they're gone.

Later, he runs into a survivor of the New Jersey National Guard after they were attacked by the Martians and their terrible machines:

PROF. PIERSON
Next day I come to a city... a city vaguely familiar in its contours, yet its buildings strangely dwarfed and leveled off, as if a giant had sliced off its highest towers with a capricious sweep of his hand. I reached the outskirts. I found Newark, undemolished, but humbled by some whim of the advancing Martians.
Presently, with an odd feeling of being watched, I caught sight of something crouching in a doorway. I made a step towards it... it rose up and became a man! — a man, armed with a large knife.

STRANGER
(OFF-MIC) Stop!
(CLOSER) Where do you come from?
PROF. PIERSON
I come from... from many places! A long time ago from Princeton.
STRANGER
Princeton, huh? That's near Grovers Mill!
PROF. PIERSON
Yes.
STRANGER
Grovers Mill... (LAUGHS AS AT A GREAT JOKE, THEN SOUNDS ANGRY)
There's no food here! This is my country... all this end of town down to the river. There's only food for one...
Which way are you going?
PROF. PIERSON
I don't know. I guess I'm looking for — for people.
…
PROF. PIERSON
Have you seen any... Martians?
STRANGER
Naah. They've gone over to New York. At night the sky is alive with their lights. Just as if people were still livin' in it. By daylight you can't see them. Five days ago a couple of them carried somethin' big across the flats from the airport. I think they're learning how to fly.
PROF. PIERSON
Fly?
STRANGER
Yeah, fly.
PROF. PIERSON
Then it's all over with humanity.
Stranger, there's still you and I. Two of us left.
STRANGER
Yeah... They got themselves in solid; they wrecked the greatest country in the world. Those green stars, they're probably falling somewhere every night. They've only lost one machine. There isn't anything to do. We're done. We're licked.
PROF. PIERSON
Where were you? You're in a uniform.
STRANGER
Yeah, what's left of it. I was in the militia — National Guard?... Heh! That's good! There wasn't any war... any more than there's war between men and ants!
PROF. PIERSON
Yes, but we're... eatable ants! I found that out... What'll they do with us?
STRANGER
I've thought it all out. Right now we're caught as we're wanted. The Martian only has to go a few miles to get a crowd on the run. But they won't keep on doing that. They'll begin catching us systematic-like — keeping the best and storing us in cages and things. They haven't begun on us yet!
PROF. PIERSON
Not begun?
STRANGER
Not begun! All that's happened so far is because we don't have sense enough to keep quiet... botherin' them with guns and such stuff and losing our heads and rushing off in crowds. Now instead of our rushing around blind we've got to fix ourselves up — fix ourselves up according to the way things are NOW. Cities, nations, civilization, progress... done.
PROF. PIERSON
Yes, but if that's so... what is there to live for?
STRANGER
Well, there won't be any more concerts for a million years or so, and no nice little dinners at restaurants. If it's amusement you're after, I guess the game's up.
PROF. PIERSON
What is there left?
STRANGER
Life! That's what! I want to live. Yeah, and so do you. We're not going to be exterminated. And I don't mean to be caught, either! Tamed, and fattened, and bred, like an ox!
PROF. PIERSON
What are you going to do?
STRANGER
I'm going on... right under their feet. I got a plan. We men as men are finished. We don't know enough. We gotta learn plenty before we've got a chance. And we've got to live and keep free while we learn, see? I've thought it all out, see.
PROF. PIERSON
Tell me the rest.
STRANGER
Well, it isn't all of us that are made for wild beasts, and that's what it's got to be! That's why I watched you... watched YOU.
All these little office workers that used to live in these houses — they'd be no good. They haven't any stuff in 'em.
They used to run... run off to work. I've seen hundreds of 'em, running to catch their commuter's train in the morning afraid they'd be canned if they didn't; running back at night afraid they won't be in time for dinner. Lives insured and a little invested in case of accidents.
Yeah, and on Sundays, worried about the hereafter. The Martians will be a godsend for those guys. Nice roomy cages, good food, careful breeding, no worries.
Yeah, after a week or so chasing about the fields on empty stomachs they'll come and be glad to be caught.
PROF. PIERSON
You've thought it all out, haven't you?
STRANGER
Sure... you bet I have! That isn't all. These Martians, they're going to make pets of some of 'em, train 'em to do tricks. Who knows? Get sentimental over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed... Yeah... and some, maybe, they'll train to hunt us!
PROF. PIERSON
No, that's impossible. No human being...
STRANGER
Yes they will. There's men who'll do it gladly. If one of them ever comes after me, why...
PROF. PIERSON
In the meantime... you and I and others like us... where are we to live when the Martians own the earth?
STRANGER
I've got it all figured out.
We'll live underground. I've been thinking about the sewers. Under New York there are miles and miles of 'em. The main ones are big enough for anybody. And there's cellars, vaults, underground storerooms, railway tunnels, subways...
You begin to see, eh? We'll get a bunch of strong men together. No weak ones; that rubbish — out!
PROF. PIERSON
As you meant me to go?
STRANGER
Well, I... gave you a chance, didn't I?
PROF. PIERSON
We won't quarrel about that. Go on.
STRANGER
Well... we've got to make safe places for us to stay in, see? Get all the books we can... science books. That's where men like you come in, see? We'll raid the museums, we'll even spy on the Martians.
It may not be so much we have to learn before — listen, just imagine this
four or five of their own fighting machines suddenly start off — heat rays right and left and not a Martian in 'em. Not a Martian in 'em, see? But MEN — men who've learned the way how. It may even be in our time.
Gee! Imagine having one of them lovely things with a heat ray wide and free! We'd turn it on Martians, we'd turn it on men. We'd bring everybody down on their knees!
PROF. PIERSON
That's your plan?
STRANGER
Yeah!
You, me, and a few more of us... we'd own the world!
PROF. PIERSON
I see...
STRANGER
(FADING OUT) Hey... hey, what's the matter?... Where are you going?
PROF. PIERSON
Not to your world!
Bye, stranger...

The soldier, true to his calling, wants to fight, to recover not just the trappings of civilization that his feeble fellow citizens so crave, but something more fundamental, freedom. But his desire quickly turns into a lust to “own the world,” and the professor is having none of it. Thus is humanity reduced to the only avenue left open to it (until the Martians fortuitously die, through no action of man and his dignity and ingenuity, from ordinary bacteria): skulking in the dark and hoping to escape detection by our new overlords.

It is, I suppose, a very 1930s story. The carnage of the Great War was still the dominant idea in Western life, and it and the Depression had destroyed any notion of progress (other than that offered, along with millions of corpses that were Lenin’s broken eggs, by the Soviet Union). Soldiers were people to be led by conquering demagogues, and businessmen were the sorts of people whose speculation destroyed the economy. Europe was sliding into fascism, which was the only place a military could ultimately take a nation. America, the nation reluctant to field a standing army just to intervene in Europe’s ongoing suicide, was receptive to the notion that there is only naked power or the professor’s vaunted “civilization.”

But in fact, as the soldier dryly notes, there is no civilization without order. Too much order leads to Hitler or Stalin, but too little leads backward to the Cro-Magnon. And, unbeknownst to either character, ultimately it is not the professor in isolation and not even just the soldier but all the ants “running to catch their commuter train” who make civilization possible, who allow us the luxury of sparing people to write books, teach at universities, compose symphonies and run nice restaurants.