350 From ~r~~~~c~to Prediction

From 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
Watts 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 Future
(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 1976
In a famous early film, Metropolis of 1926, Fritz Lang developed the theme of the despotic society and
the need to rise against that despotism
Another German, Anton LUbke, forecast great
technological developments in his Technik und
Mensch im J ahr e2000( 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 Spenglers 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 sorcerers
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,
Krakatit was a novel about explosive
stuffs and dreams and human passions
and God. In Capeks 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 1976
354 From Prophecy to Prediction
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 Zamyatins 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 Zamyatins 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 World 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 is 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
Clairs sardonic picture of state and
citizen in A nous la liberte of 1934 and
for Charlie Chaplins even more
powerful statement of the condition-
of-man question in Modern 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 1976
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
Biologists View of the Future (1936) ; Sir
FUTURES August 1976
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
Notes 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 1976