Degeneration of the Last Men

Degeneration of the Last Men is the gradual unmaking of a civilization whose highest mental and ethical capacities had once seemed secure. As the Sun grows hotter and its radiation damages the tissues on which those capacities depend, The Last Men lose not only health and communication but also their characteristic selflessness. Their final society becomes a striking reversal: a people committed to carrying life beyond its homeworld must undertake that duty while their own minds and institutions deteriorate.

Causes and Physical Decline

The crisis unfolds over centuries. The Sun first changes color and grows brighter and hotter; in the later account, its light is dangerously intense even through the cloud cover that has become normal. The intervening regions of the planet have been abandoned, while the poles endure violent weather and electrical storms. Hurricanes and storms have shattered large buildings, at times burying entire provinces beneath collapsed structures. The Last Men are forcing their planet outward from its former orbit, but this measure cannot keep the climate from becoming increasingly deadly, even near the poles.

The southern and northern polar communities initially maintained radio contact, but the south has heard nothing from the more distressed north for some time. The southern community’s own communications network is failing: it had established hundreds of stations for dissemination, yet fewer than twenty remain operational, mainly because too few people are able to staff them. Malignant tumours, which medicine cannot overcome, have reduced the southern population to a remnant despite the migration of tropical peoples to Antarctica. The account presents this decline as cumulative rather than sudden: prolonged exposure to exceptional stellar radiation progressively undermines both bodily survival and the capacities on which the society depends.

The Loss of Mind and Communion

The damage reaches beyond physical illness. The higher mental functions, attained by the most developed human species, are lost or disordered as their specialized tissues break down. The Racial mind disappears, and the Sexual group loses its mental unity. Three sub-sexes have already been exterminated through derangement of their chemical nature. Glandular disorders also produce anxieties and aversions that individuals recognize as unreasonable but cannot master.

Telepathy, once a normal means of communication, becomes so unreliable that The Last Men must return to vocal symbolism. Their exploration of the past, formerly part of their wider capacities, is now confined to specialists; even for those specialists it is dangerous, since it can cause disorders of temporal experience. These losses sever connections both among the living and with earlier history. A society that had understood itself through shared mental life can no longer rely on that common medium, and knowledge of the past becomes a hazardous and restricted practice.

Ethical and Social Disintegration

The neural decline also erodes the foundation of conduct. For millions of years, the dispassionate will had been universal and central to the society and culture of The Last Men. They had nearly forgotten that this ethical capacity depended on physiology. As the relevant neural centres deteriorate, they lose not only dispassionate worship but the ability to behave with ordinary disinterest toward others. Self-interest increasingly competes with concern for the community; envy, lack of charity, murder, and gratuitous cruelty, once unknown among them, become common.

At first, individuals treat these emerging impulses as absurd and suppress them with contempt. As the damage advances, however, restraint requires an exhausting moral struggle rather than arising readily. That struggle increasingly ends in failure. The account stresses the shock of this reversal: people who had regarded such impulses as signs of insanity now find themselves compelled to resist them, and sometimes unable to show even ordinary kindness to their neighbours. Injured friends’ expressions of astonishment and pity become a painful measure of how far familiar conduct has changed.

The community’s initial institutional response is to establish asylums, but they soon become overcrowded and burdensome. The insane are then killed; the attempt to separate the disordered from the healthy collapses when it becomes clear that, by the society’s former standards, everyone is impaired. No one can fully trust their own reason, and no one can safely trust another’s. This mutual suspicion compounds the communication failures caused by the decline of Telepathy.

Political Disorder and the Final Duty

A political constitution and legal system are devised to contain the discord, but they appear to worsen it. Order of a kind persists under an overworked police force, while professional organizers hold power and display the vices of bureaucracy. Their failures contribute to social revolution in two Antarctic nations. An increasingly irrational world government is preparing armaments to destroy them. Meanwhile, the breakdown of the economic order and the inability to reach the food factories on Jupiter add starvation to the crisis; some people exploit the shortages for private gain.

The narrative sets this disorder against the society’s recent past, when The Last Men regarded themselves as the flower of a galaxy. Its former achievements had depended on capacities now failing: technological abundance, for example, had once made monotonous labour unnecessary through machinery and extensive power. Earlier civilizations also faced resource limits. The First World State preserved fuel through deliberate economy, yet its civilization eventually collapsed when Antarctic coal ran out and it could not adapt. The later discovery that matter could be annihilated as a source of power, and the Fifth Men’s vast material command, mark other points in humanity’s technological history. These contrasts do not prevent the Last Men’s crisis: their immediate catastrophe is stellar radiation, and their advanced inheritance cannot restore damaged minds or guarantee social cohesion.

Even in decline, The Last Men continue the Scattering of the Seed, which has become their supreme religious duty and, in their understanding, humanity’s final task. Some regret that humanity did not choose suicide before its decline began, but they regard that escape as incompatible with the work already undertaken. They persist despite doubting whether the seed will flourish, or whether any new life will ultimately escape destruction by fire or advancing cold. Their commitment is therefore not grounded in confidence that the effort will secure lasting survival; it is a duty inherited from an earlier, more enlightened state.

Memory, Meaning, and the Ending

The account does not present the former ideals as fully recoverable. The Last Men look back on their earlier selves with wonder and misgiving, but cannot remember the glory they once associated with the Racial mind. Nor can they attain the individual serenity that had once seemed available in the face of tragedy. Their old assurance that a larger spiritual order could encompass disaster has become not merely inaccessible but almost inconceivable to them.

This estrangement gives the decline its final force. The Last Men retain the obligation to disseminate life while losing confidence in the values and mental powers that once made such a purpose intelligible. They see their private suffering and the public calamity as hideous, and the surviving account ends without resolving that judgment. The mission continues, but its meaning is no longer something the declining society can securely understand.