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8/11/2019 Futures Volume 4 issue 4 1972 [doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2872%2990055-9] I.F. Clarke -- 5. Prelude to predicti…
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358 Prophets and Predictors
Prophets and
A series of articles that expose the
Predictors
theme that utopian and social fiction
has always responded to the society of
its day and its needs.
5. PRELUDE TO PREDICTION:
Andreae Kepler Campanella
I. F. Clarke
TH
course of utopian and predictive
literature during the seventeenth cen-
tury is a convincing demonstration
of the profound and permanent con-
nections between the aspirations and
the anticipations of an age. The hope
of better things to come that marked
Bacon’s jVew Atlantis was also charac-
teristic of the ideal states and imaginary
voyages of the period; for one of the
primary consequences of the unpre-
cedented sequence of scientific and
geographical discoveries - Columbus,
Magellan, Kepler, Galileo, Vesalius,
Harvey-was a change in the way in
which the Europeans regarded their
world. As scientific knowledge advanced
and evidence for the social utility of
the sciences increased, a new climate
of expectation developed.
The episode of Galileo’s
Sidereus
Jfuncius
of 1610 was typical of the
times. It began when Galileo used the
newly invented telescope to observe
the night sky and was astounded by
what he saw: “Stars in myriads which
have never been seen before and which
surpass the old previously known stars
in number more than ten times”.
The shock-waves of Galileo’s twenty-
four page report affected all Europe.
It was in every sense a sudden revela-
tion of a new world; and so the
English ambassador to Venice wrote
at once to James I with: “The strangest
piece of news that he hath ever yet
received from any part of the world
;
Professor Clarke is Head of the English Studies
Department, University of Strathclyde, UK.
which is the annexed book come
abroad this very day) of the Mathe-
matical Professor at Padua, who by
the help of an optical instrument
which both enlargeth and approxi-
mateth the object) invented first in
Flanders and bettered by himself,
hath discovered four new planets
rolling about the sphere of Jupiter,
besides many other unknown fixed
stars; likewise the true cause of the
Via
Lactae so
long searched; and lastly,
that the moon is not spherical but
endued with many prominences, and,
which is of all the strangest, illuminated
with the solar light by reflection from
the body of the earth, as he seemeth
to say”.
In revealing that the moon was
“full of hollows and protuberances just
like the surface of the earth itself”,
Galileo provided information and in-
centive for speculations about the
possibility of life in other worlds. The
Dominican friar,
Tommaso Campa-
nella,
sent Galileo an enthusiastic
letter in which he discussed the
likelihood that the moon and the
planets might be inhabited and that
their inhabitants might be wiser than
the peoples of earth. The German
astronomer, Kepler, went further. He
enlarged on several of Galileo’s theories
in his Dissertatio cum Numcio Sidereo
suggesting that the lunar shadows
might be caused by buildings, arguing
that the moons of Jupiter must be
inhabited,
and thinking forward to
the day when “men not afraid of the
vast emptiness of space” would make
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The ideal city of sixteenth
century science: the view of
Campanefla’s City of the Sun.
The ampfe promenades and
arcades are designed for the
recreation and instruction of
the Solarian inhabitants.
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Prophets and Predictors
361
the journey to other worlds. The
process
of extrapolation had com-
menced.
Kepler added the new information
provided by Galileo to his own ideas
about the moon. He started from the
then known facts and deduced a series
of possibilities about the existence of
lunar creatures; and all these were
written into the Somnium the first
truly scientific fantasy of space travel,
composed in 1611 and published post-
humously in 1634 by Kepler’s son.
As the Latin title makes clear, this
brief story was presented in the form
of a dream in which the narrator
describes how benevolent daemons are
able to transport human travellers, “in
four hours at the most”, from our
planet to the lunar world of Levania.
But there the fantasy ends and for the
rest of the story Kepler writes as a
man of science. In one extraordinary
passage he seems to think in terms of
universal gravity half a century before
the publication of Newton’s Principia.
He relates that, when his cosmic
voyagers are well on their way to the
moon,
their passage grows easier,
“because on such a long journey the
body no doubt escapes the magnetic
force of the earth and enters that of
the moon, so that the latter gets the
upper hand”.
When the voyagers reach the moon,
they find an imagined world shaped
by the precise scientific deductions of
Kepler. The long lunar nights and
days alternate between temperatures
“fifteen times hotter than our Africa”
and searing nights of snow and ice.
It is a land of “very high mountains
as well as very deep and wide valleys
Yet it is all porous and, so to say,
perforated with caves and grottoes
everywhere, and) these recesses are
for the inhabitants the principal pro-
tection against heat and cold”. In
keeping with the astronomical know-
ledge of 1611 Kepler had deduced that
there must be an atmosphere on the
moon and that the peculiar lunar
conditions would make for rapid growth
and a short life. It is a world of gigantic
snake-like creatures with “no fixed
abode, no established domicile. In the
course of one of their days they roam
in crowds over their whole sphere.
Some use their legs, which far surpass
those of our camels; some resort to
wings”.
The evidence of the Somnium shows
how fact and fantasy had begun to
interact in the seventeenth century,
how a knowledge of science carried
over into rudimentary extrapolations.
In fact, it is clear that Kepler’s space
story like the science-based ideal
states of Bacon, Andreae, Campanella,
Joseph Glanvill) marked the first
stages in a new technique of pre-
diction that was to develop into the
first forecasts of the future in the
eigheenth century. These ideal states
started from basic assumptions about
the capacity and the utility of the
sciences; and together they signal the
emergence of a hope that, by taking
scientific thought, mankind would
learn to control nature. So, the German
Lutheran minister, Johann Valentin
Andreae, published his Christianopolis
in 1619, convinced that religion and
science would between them ensure a
stable, prosperous and progressive so-
ciety. This vision of the Christian City,
illuminated by right religion and sup-
ported by true science, is a true image
of the future; for Andreae describes
in the here-and-now style of utopian
fiction a pattern of life that had not
yet appeared in Europe. This is most
apparent in the enthusiastic description
of the laboratories for the study of
metals, minerals, animals, and plants.
The end of science is the advantage of
mankind; and this idea appears most
clearly in the pre-eminence given to
the study of mathematics. As Andreae
says
:
“If you consider human need
there is no branch of knowledge to
which the study of mathematics)
does not bear some help of first impor-
tance. If you consider the undertakings
FUTURES December 972
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362
Prophets and Predictors
of man’s mind, you will discover that
man struggles almost with infinity, in
this one direction, and worms his
way far into the secrets of progression”.
Those prophetic words found an
echo in the ideal state of another
enthusiast, Tommaso Campanella, who
wrote the first draft of his Cittri de1
Sole in 1602 and published the final
version in 1623. Campanella’s ideal
city is another picture of the future-the
verbal image of an ordered, dedicated
and progressive society. The greater
part “is built upon a high hill, which
rises from an extensive plain; it is
divided into seven rings or huge
circles named from the seven planets,
and the way from one to the other of
these is by four streets and through
four gates that look toward the four
points of the compass”. Level by level
there are arcades and promenades for
the citizens, and the walls of each
circle are covered with instructive
paintings. The designers of ideal states
are always the most thorough of
planners. Campanella made every inch
work for the common good: “On the
interior wall of the first circuit all the
mathematical figures are conspicuously
painted-figures more in number than
Archimedes or Euclid discovered-
marked symmetrically and with the
explanation of them neatly written and
contained in a little verse On the
exterior convex wall is, first, an im-
mense drawing of the whole earth,
given at one view. Following on this
there are tablets setting forth for
every country the customs both public
and private, the laws, the origins, and
the power of the inhabitants”. And
so the work of instruction goes on
from one level to another, ending in
the uppermost circuit “wherein are
painted all the mechanical arts with
the several instruments for each and
their manner of use among the different
nations”.
Facts and objects-paintings and
museums-are typical of the seven-
teenth century utopias. They looked
forward to a better organised world in
which useful knowledge would be
available to those who could use it;
for in a time of increasing scientific
knowledge,
when scientific journals
did not exist and there were no syste-
matic arrangements for the exchange
of scientific information,
the more
prescient could foresee the immense
benefits to be gained from the collec-
tion, collation and dissemination of
useful knowledge. For example, a brief
utopian passage in the Anatomy OJ
Melancholy outlines Robert Burton’s
plan to
“have certain ships sent out
for new discoveries every year, and
certain discreet men appointed to
travel into all neighbour kingdoms by
land, which shall observe what arti-
ficial inventions and good laws are in
other countries”.
The same idea ap-
pears in Abraham Cowley’s
Proposition
for the Advancement of Experimental Philo-
sophy. Cowley would have four itinerant
professors sent to Asia, Africa, and the
Americas,
“there to reside three years
at least, and to give a constant account
of all things that belong to the
learning and especially the Natural
Experimental Philosophy of those
parts”.
The central theory behind these
utopian visions of change and improve-
ment was the argument from the
evidence of things achieved. Men like
Campanella belonged to the new race
of horizon-watchers for whom the
future represented boundless oppor-
tunity. They knew, as Campanella
said, that their age had seen “more
history within a hundred years than
all the world had in four thousand
years before”. And by ‘history’ Cam-
panella meant material progress, for
he went on to talk of ‘ the wonderful
inventions of printing and guns and
the use of the magnet”. Campanella
knew that a new sequence of develop-
ment and discovery had begun. The
great hope was that there would be
new inventions and discoveries and
that one day mankind would break
FUTURES December 1272
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Alternative Futures 363
free from all burdens and limitations.
For this reason the utopian writers of
the seventeenth century kept close to
the conditions of their times and for
the most part they wrote of desirable
improvements in the major necessities
of life-agriculture, medicine, educa-
tion, industry,
and communications.
In one utopia, the anonymous con-
tinuation of Bacon’s .New Atlantis the
author describes a large agricultural
research ‘college’, attached to a univer-
sity, which works on soil fertility
problems-“the quickening of Nature
by art”. In Andreae’s Christianopolis
the medical profession is far advanced:
the doctors have cures for the worst
diseases and special provision for the
mentally ill. In Campenella’s Cittci
del Sole when the citizens go out to
work in the fields, “they use wagons
fitted with sails which are borne along
by the wind even when it is contrary,
by the marvellous contrivance of
wheels within wheels”. The wish-
fulfilment element comes out even more
clearly in
the description of the
Solarian ships: “They possess rafts and
triremes, which go over the waters
without rowers or the force of the wind
but by a marvellous contrivance”.
Campanella’s
‘marvellous contriv-
ance’ was an act of faith in the power
of science to transform the condition of
mankind. In the Cittri de1 Sole and in
the other utopias there was a common
scheme for the conquest of nature-the
collection of facts, followed by a
vaguely described experimental pro-
cess, ending in valuable technological
improvements. The new attitude of
mind was progressive in the sense that
the utopians looked forward in hope
but without any clear idea of the way
in which their ambitions would be
realised. We know the rest of the story
and we also know what was hidden
from them-that,
said, “Progress is
utopias”.
as Oscar Wilde
the realisation of
Alternative
An occasional Futures
column which
examines current disillusionment with
futures
the generally accepted Western notion
of progress and reports experiments
which indicate alternative directions.
CHINA: A NEW SOCIETY IN THE MAKING
Derek Bryan
AT the “Movement for Survival” semi-
nar held at Imperial College, London
in 1972, one of the speakers said that
the developed countries had set “a
standard of extravagant consumption
that has become a model for the rest
of the world”-a statement that, as far
as China ie, at least one-third of the
rest of the world) is concerned, is the
Mr Bryan is chairman of the Society
or
Anglo-
Chinese Understanding. He served for many
years in the foreign service in China and is now
senior visiting lecturer in Chinese at the
Polytechnic of Central London UK.
exact opposite of the truth
:
thedeveloped
countries’ standard of consumption is
what the Chinese call a ‘negative ex-
ample’. Such conscious or unconscious
omissions of China have for over
twenty years been a commonplace in
the thinking of the Western intellectual
establishment and it is worth consider-
ing why this should have been so.
For over a century before the revolu-
tion of 1949, China-with the biggest
population, longest recorded history
and oldest surviving culture in the
FUTURES December 972
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