futures volume 8 issue 4 1976 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2876%2990131-2] i.f. clarke -- 13. science...

8/11/2019 Futures Volume 8 Issue 4 1976 [Doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2876%2990131-2] I.F. Clarke -- 13. Science and Soci…

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350

From ~r~~~~c~ o Prediction

rom Prophecy

A serialised survey of the movement

to Prediction

of ideas, developments in predictive

fiction, and first attempts to forecast

the future scienti~cally,

13. Science and society

:

proshecies and medictions

J. I

1840-1940

I. F. Clarke

TIE Law of Subsequent Adjustment1

is not limited to the various branches of

engineering; it has special relevance to

the dynamics of human society. Myths,

dominant beliefs, sacred creeds, cus-

tomary roles, social ideas of every

kind-these have directed human

actions ever since the Stone Age

people first sent their dead into the

hereafter with a ritual sprinkling of red

ochre. And today, in the new Steel Age

of modern times, the great technological

societies of our planet are busily

engaged in writing special amend-

ments to the idea of progress which

once had the authority of universal

law.

For a century and a half, from

Watt’s invention of the separate con-

denser to the outbreak of the First

World War, it was held that science

plus representative government would

ensure the prosperity and the primacy

of the major industrial nations. The

core of this conviction was the daily

evidence of the fruitful union between

science and society. For one enthu-

siastic observer of 1852 this meant a

new order of existence:

No one can contemplate the unexampled

progress

of science within the present

I. F. Clarke is Chairman of the Department

of English Studies, University of Strathclyde,

Scotland. He is author of 7he Tale

of the uture

(London, Library Association, 1970) and

Voices Prophesying War (London,

Oxford

University, Press, 1966).

century without feeling that a new epoch

has commenced in the history of our race.2

By 1885 that confident belief had

become so much part of the general

thinking that an eminent writer found

it sensible to begin his study of Civil-

is n and Progms

with the pronounce-

ment: “In the present work I propose

to trace the great laws of Civilisa tion

and Progress”. And 100 pages later he

presented science as the primary agent

of human progress:

It is Science that, by its application to life,

has destroyed the two great scourges of the

early world, famine

and pestilence, or

greatly diminished their frequency and

severity. It is Science that, by its application

to the arts, has given us all the comforts,

conveniences, and luxuries of life. It is

Science that, by its effect on religious

dogmas, has indirectly gone a long way in

destroying those religious persecutions,

those international hatreds, and religious

wars, which the modern world regards

with almost as much horror as the pestilence

itself.s

A generation later, in the appalling and

entirely unexpected conditions of trench

warfare, the millions who had been

brought up in the old faith in science

soon discovered the terrifying difference

between theory and practice. And as

soon as that lesson in the uses and

abuses of technology had sunk in,

many original writers made it their

business to review the relationship

between science and society. Like the

Norns in the Twilight of the Gods they

FUTURES Auqust 976



Another German, Anton LUbke, forecast great

technological developments in his Technik und

Mensch im

J a h r e 2 000 1927 )

And British forecasts right and below) looked

forward to similaradvances in world communications



From Prophecy to Prediction

353

spun the threads of past, present, and

future; and some of them foretold that

the abrupt break between past and

present would inevitably lead to the

End of Empire, the End of our Time,

even to the Decline of the West as the

ominous title of Spengler’s gloomy

prophecy had it.

From 1920 onwards the debate

about the consequences of the First

World War was summed up in phrases

that have since become familiar signals

in any discussion of the rational use of

scientific discoveries-the impact of

science on society, the pace of progress,

the challenge of the future, technology

and social change, the need for plan-

ning. At the same time, the tale of the

future went through a rapid and total

transformation. The once common

prophecies of the

technological

paradise-to-come and the many confi-

dent visions of a triumphant technology

changed to admonitory accounts of a

future time when human folly has

destroyed all life on earth. Thus the

inescapable logic of science had obliged

all to face the problems of living in

great industrial societies; and, in a

most appropriate way, in a world

united more closely than ever before by

the communication technologies, the

most characteristic and imaginative

responses came from different coun-

tries in Europe. The new prophets

devised

most

effective,

symbolic

revisions for the idea of progress; and

these, in one way and another, were

variations on the Spengler proposition:

“Faustian man has become the slare of

his creation

His number, and the

arrangement of life as he lives it, have

been driven back by the machine on to

a path where there is no standing still

and no turning back”.*

The earliest ima~native adjustment

to the 19th-century expectation of

constant progress was R.U.R. which

Karel Capek presented for the first

time at the National Theatre in

Prague in 192 1. That famous play was

the start of many variations on the idea

that technology has tempted mankind

to play the part of the sorcerer’s

apprentice. The robots in R.U.R.

represented a world gone mad with the

desire for absolute power over nature;

and Capek continued this intensely

moral theme into his first novel,

Factory for the Ahsolzlte of 1922, where he

used his projected development of

atomic energy to pass on the message

that human beings matter more than

ideas. In his second novel, Krakatit of

1924, Capek presented a young

engineer, eager for life and power, who

invents a most lethal new explosive. As

Capek told H. G. Wells later on,

K’rakatit was

“a novel about explosive

stuffs and dreams and human passions

and God”.

In Capek’s view mankind

has to choose what it wants from

nature; and that choice is always a

question of good or evil.

The political commissars in Russia,

however, knew the difference between

good and evil; and in 1924 they

withheld from their comrade citizens

all knowledge of a book that had just

appeared without their permission

in

an English translation in New York.

This was We, a celebrated projection of

life in an authoritarian regime; and the

author was Yevgeny Zamyatin who

had begun his career as a naval

architect of great ability. When the

October revolution put an end to ship-

building in Russia (and many other

things as well) Zamyatin took the

opportunity to pursue his life-long

interest in writing. In 1920, as the Red

army was pressing forward on all

fronts, Zamyatin began work on his

vision of life in The One State. For the

purpose of the demonstration the

citizens of the 26th century are seen

to enjoy a standard of living that is

positively utopian; but for the reader of

the 20th century there is a most

evident and frightening contrast

between material well-being and the

state control of the individual.

Zamyatin put the issue between

science and society in a most forceful

FUTURES August 976



354 From Prophecy t o Predict i on

way by showing how an advanced

technology-listening devices, mass

communications, aeroplane snoopers-

could provide the most refined instru-

ments for managing an obedient,

regimented society. The symbol of this

dark paradise is the Green Wall, which

divides the uncontrolled abundance of

nature from the mechanical regularity

of the technological utopia. As the

narrator puts it: “Man ceased to be a

wild animal only when we built the

Green Wall, when we had isolated our

perfect machine from the irrational,

hideous world of trees, birds, animals”. 5

Into that unquestioning, conformist

Eden of the future Zamyatin injects a

knowledge of good and evil. The

uncertain Adam who makes the great

refusal is D-503; and his love affair

with the beguiling Eve, I-330, marks

the start of a personal rebellion against

The

Hourly Commandments, the

precepts of the Personal Hours, and the

puritanical limitations of the Sexual

Day. As one would expect from a man

of Zamyatin’s technological com-

petence, the elements of his morality

story operate within a clearly defined

pattern. The formula begins with

D-503: he represents the perfection of

scientific knowledge, since he is the

chief designer of the Integral, the great

spaceship which is meant to extend the

rule of The One State across the

galaxy. Like the Lucifer of another

dispensation, D-503 is ready to

abandon his heaven in order to pursue

his own desires. This symbolic situation,

with its clear references to a lost

paradise, is Zamyatin’s way of pre-

senting the central issue as a choice

that has to be made between the

unquestioned material benefits of the

technological state and the undoubted

private emotional needs of the human

being. The logic of the argument,

however, does not allow for the second

chance of expulsion from paradise; and

the essential message of the story comes

over when the Benefactor sends for

D-503. Zamyatin makes his meaning

quite clear, since he presents the ruler

of The One State in the image of Lenin

as “a bald-headed, a Socratically bald-

headed man”. His message is that an

absolute state desires absolutely to

control its citizens.

“I ask you”,

says the Benefactor, “what

have men, from their swaddling-clothes

days, been praying for, dreaming about,

tormenting themselves for? Why, to have

someone to tell them, once and for all, just

what happiness is-and then to weld them

to this happiness with chains”.

Zamyatin had devised the classic myth

of the modern technological state, and

for that reason other writers were

content to follow his example. First,

there was Aldous Huxley who took up

the subject of technology and society in

Brave New Worl d

in 1932 ; and with a

studied gesture to the reader he chose

an epigraph for his famous story from

The End of Our Time

in which the

Russian social philosopher and theo-

logian, Nicolas Berdiaeff, had written:

“It is possible that a new age s already

beginning, in which cultured and

intelligent people will dream of ways to

avoid ideal states and get back to a

society that is less ‘perfect’ and more

free”. This theme dominated the

imaginative anticipations of the 1930s;

it was the verdict of a declining

confidence in the enthusiastic sup-

positions of Jules Verne and the

Wellsian visions of the technological

world state. The world was learning

the hard way that man cannot live by

technology alone; and that belief

provided fruitful ideas for the new

medium of the film, especially for RenC

Clair’s sardonic picture of state and

citizen in

A nous la liberte’

of 1934 and

for Charlie Chaplin’s even more

powerful statement of the condition-

of-man question in

M odern Times

in

1936. The intention of the new myth

makers was to get outside the closed

circle of progress and technology so that

they could make radical statements

about their society. Olaf Stapledon put

this new imperative with uncomprom-

FUTURES August 976



From Prophecy to Prediction

355

ising clarity in the preface to his most

original story of Last and First Men:

To romance of the future may seem to be

indulgence in ungoverned speculation for

the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled

imagination in this sphere can be a very

valuable exercise for minds bewildered

about the present and its potentialities.

Today we should welcome, and even study,

every serious attempt to envisage the future

of our race; not merely in order to grasp

the very diverse and often tragic possibilities

that confront us, but also that we may

familiarise ourselves with the certainty that

many of our most cherished ideals would

seem puerile to more developed minds.’

That proposition of 1930 was charac-

teristic of the reactions to the immense

changes that had followed on the First

World War; for all those many changes

put a requirement on the prophets and

the predictors to describe what lay in

waiting for the world. In consequence,

there was a rapid increase in forecasts

of every kind-from the social, political,

and economic to predictions of the

coming advances in the new techno-

logies of the aeroplane, electricity, and

wireless communications. One of the

first economic studies was that just and

generous book, The Economic Conse-

quences of the Peace, in which John

Maynard Keynes

condemned

the

“policy of reducing Germany to servi-

tude for a generation, of degrading the

lives of millions of human beings, and

of depriving a whole nation of hap-

piness”. He ended his book with these

prophetic words for the Europe of

1919:

“For the immediate future

events are taking charge, and the near

destiny of Europe is no longer in

the hands of any man. The events of

the coming year will not be shaped by

the deliberate acts of statesmen, but by

the hidden currents, flowing continu-

ally beneath the surface of political

history, of which no one can predict the

outcome”.*

What would the future bring? One

answer came from Henry Ford in the

book he produced with the help of

Samuel Crowther in 1926; and in the

penultimate paragraph of Today and

Tomorrow he said his last words with

pragmatic finality: “No man can say

anything of the future. We need not

bother about it. The future has

always cared for itself in spite of our

well-meant efforts to hamper it”. But

the world could not agree with this

model-T view of human society; and

the forecasts went on pouring from the

presses in Europe and the USA, as

more and more writers made it their

business to predict the most probable

course of future developments. By the

1930s the first determined essays in

futurology had begun. One writer of

1933 put the now familiar argument

for planning, arguing that “the material

resources of the earth, though consider-

able, are not unlimited, and that the

cost of an unplanned society, in terms

of irreplaceable minerals and of

organic resources which, though not

irreplaceable, are of slow growth, is

ruinously high”.9

In 1934, the Dean of

Princeton University produced n

Primer for Tomorrow in which he showed

that science and technology are the

major forces in modern society.

In 1935 the outstanding argicultural

scientist, Sir Daniel Hall, gave the Rede

Lecture to

the

University of

Cambridge; and for his theme he chose

the title, The Pace qf Progress, giving his

audience the latest information on the

great matter of science and society:

No longer is it a sound basis for Government

to assume that life will be carried on in the

near future as it has been in the immediate

past. It has become a commonplace that the

march of science is no longer wholly

beneficial,

but is developing aspects

destructive of

our

accustomed economy.10

By the mid 1930s many of our con-

temporary practices in forecasting had

begun to show themselves in an annual

and growing output of social, economic

and technological forecasts

:

Clifford C.

Furnass, The Next Hundred Years (1936)

;

H. J. Muller, Out of the Night: a

Biologist’s View of the Future (1936) ; Sir

FUTURES August 976



356 From Prophecy to Prediction

Josaiah Stamp,

The

Science of Social

Arljustment (1937) ; Max Lerner, It is

Later Than You Think (1938). The

objective of all these writers was

admirably set out by the American

writer,

Waldemar Kaempffert, who

opened his

Science Today and Tomorroze,

(1939) by saying that his reason “for

predicting, as well as attempting to

elucidate, lies in the growing interest

that the public displays in the social

implications of science. . . Indeed, a

whole literature on what is called ‘the

impact of science on society’ has been

produced within the last decade”.ll

In this way writers on both sides of the

Atlantic established a common style of

forecasting; but by 1940 it was left to

the Americans, and James Burnham in

particular, to carry on the new

practices of futurology. Burnham was

more than equal to the task, and in

The Managerial Revolution of 1941 he

presented a famous thesis on the

development of the managerial society.

Amongst many things he predicted

“the division of the new world among

three super-states. The nuclei of these

three super-states are, whatever may be

their future names, the previously

existing nations, Japan, Germany, and

the United States”.12

Circum@ice, si Monumentum requiris 13

otes and references

1. E. R. Laithwaite, “The law of subse-

quent adjustment”, Futures,

7 (4),

August 1975, 293-301.

2. M. A. Garvey, The Silent Revolution, or

the Future Effects of Steam and Electricip

@on the Condition of Mankind

(1852),

page 1.

3. John Beattie Crozier, Civilisation and

Progress (1885),

page,

116. Crozier was

an influential writer in his time. The

Encyclopedia Canadiana reports that he

was “the first native of Canada to be

recognised as their peer by the foremost

British savants of his day”.

4. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the

West, 2 volumes, translated by Charles

Francis Atkinson, volume 2 (London,

Allen and Unwin, 1926)) page 504.

5. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by

Bernard Guilbert Guerney (London,

Jonathan Cape, 1970), page 85.

6.

Ibid,

page 259.

7. Olaf Stapledon, First and Last Men

(London, Methuen, 1934), page v.

8. John

Maynard Keynes, Economic

Consequences of the Peace (London,

Macmillan, 1920), page 278.

9. L. A. Fenn, The Project of a Planned

World (London, Williams and Norgate,

1933), page 2.

10. Sir Daniel Hall,

The Puce of Progress

(Cambridge,

Cambridge University

Press, 1936), page 7.

11. Waldemar Kaempffert, Science Today

and Tomorroze, (New York, Viking Press,

1939), page 1.

12. James

Burnham,

The Managerial

Revolution (Harmondsworth, Penguin,

1962), page 165.

13. Richard Barham, on the tomb

of Sir

Christopher Wren, in “The Cynotaph”,

Ingoldsby Legends, 1847 (London, Grant

Richards, 1901), pages 25-31.

FUTURES August 976

futures volume 8 issue 4 1976 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2876%2990131-2] i.f. clarke -- 13. science...

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