futures volume 7 issue 1 1975 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2875%2990034-8] i.f. clarke -- 5. any more...
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8/11/2019 Futures Volume 7 Issue 1 1975 [Doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2875%2990034-8] I.F. Clarke -- 5. Any More for the
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58
From
Prophecy to Prediction
From
Prophecy f.
serialised survey of the movement
to Prediction
o Ideas developments in predictive
fiction and first attempts to forecast
the future scientifically.
5. Any more for the time machine?
I. F. Clarke
Now that the recent articles on Marx
and Darwin have brought this series
to the end of the first year of publica-
tion it falls to the editor to inaugurate
a new year with a private prophecy.
The historians of the future he guesses
will describe the second half of the 20th
century as The Age of Reappraisal;
and the school-children of 2075
AD
if
their great-grandparents have been
successful will learn from their history
tapes that ecological pollution the
growth of population and all the other
problems of the old days obliged the
citizens of the late 20th century to
reconsider the relationship between
science and society. Today we are
going through the painful but salutary
process of saying goodbye to a set of
assumptions about the advantages of
uncontrolled technological development
and the certainty of continuing social
progress. The historians and social
analysts of our time-with the sublime
exception of the Hudson optimists-
have abandoned the simple faith of
their predecessors; and now that we
have most of us grown wiser after the
experiences of two world wars and of
world economic depressions it is no
longer possible to follow the example
of Neil Arnott Fellow of the Royal
Society and Physician Extraordinary to
I. F. Clarke is Chairman of the Department of
English Studies University of Strathclyde. He
received the Pilgrim Award for 1974 from the
Science Fiction Research Association of America
in recognition of his contributions to their field.
the Queen who summed up the
beliefs and expectations of 1861 in his
book A Survey of Human Progress In the
style of his time he promised to give
the reader an account of mankinds
advance from the savage state to the
highest civilisation yet attained. A
progress as little perceived by the
multitude in any age as is the slow
growing of a tree by the children who
play under its shade-but which is
leading to a new condition of mankind
on earth.
That emphatic statement like the
many histories of progress in the last
century was the natural and sponta-
neous revelation of an entirely new
attitude of mind that separates the
industrial civilisation of the 19th cen-
tury from the rest of human history.
The Arnott Proposition affects us still;
for we are the inheritors of very original
and immensely powerful ideas that
made the 19th century the first great
epoch of secular prophecy and-in the
last decades of the century-established
the base for modern developments in
social and technological forecasting.
In a clumsy but convenient phrase
the technological advances and the
many intellectual discoveries of the last
century generated a climate of expecta-
tion. Behind the evolutionary theories
of Darwin the political prophecies of
Marx and the innumerable forecasts of
the changes yet to come there was a
dominant sequential explanation for
the place and purpose of mankind upon
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The detailed study of ancient civilisations, which
began in the early 18OOs, confirmed the belief in
progress above).
Time to come right): the steamship
Great
Eastern like the other technological develop-
ments of the age, was a promise of great
advances yet to come.
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Time to come: the Schneider and Hersaut plan for
a Channel Bridge in 1889 was an acceptable engi-
neering project that promised straight-through
railway links between Glasgow, Paris, Moscow and
Constantinople.
Time to come: the vision of the future depended on
temperament and purpose. For H. G. Wells the hills
of England would one day carry gigantic wind
wheels . . .
for the American author of The
Last American
i1893
the future belonged to the Persians, who
would reconstruct their own idea of life in Ancient
Nhu-Yok.
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From Prophecy to Prediction 61
our planet-an explanation that em-
braced the past present and future of
the human race. The idea of progress
is a shorthand way of saying that many
different factors worked one upon the
other to promote a distinctly new
attitude to time and to mans place in
nature.
The major factor-constant
universal evident to all-was the range
of spectacular developments in tech-
nology; and an indication of what these
meant for the Victorians appears in a
boys book of 1876 Discoveries and
Inventions of the Twentieth Century. The
author Robert Routledge passed on
the wisdom of the elders to the young in
an enthusiastic account of the marvels
of science :
But so much have these things become in
the present day matters of course that it is
difficult for one who has not witnessed the
revolution produced by such applications of
science to realise their full imnortance. Let
the young reader who wishes to understand
why the present epoch is worthy of admira-
tion as a stage in the progress of mankind
address himself to some intelligent person
old enough to remember the century in its
teens; let him inquire what wonderful
changes in the aspect of things have been
comprised within ihe experience of a single
lifetime and let him ask what has broueht
about these changes. He will be told of The
railway and the steamship and the tele-
graph and the great guns and the mighty
ships of war.
As the young learned to perceive the
chain of cause and effect between
technological development and social
improvement the discoveries of the
geologists and the fossil-hunters worked
in parallel with the facts of engineering
enterprise to reinforce and enlarge the
idea of progress. And here again the
new knowledge established another
major difference between the 19th
century scheme of things and all the
philosophies of history that had served
all previous ages. Traditional teaching
for example had maintained that the
world was of recent origin; and al-
though foolish undergraduates still
laugh on hearing that Archbishop
Ussher had fixed the date of creation as
4004 BC they think more respectfully of
that one-time Chancellor of St Patricks
Dublin when they discover that
Malthus wrote in the Essay on Population
about the five or six thousand years
that the world has existed. That
venerable belief in the novity of the
world vanished in an explosion of
discoveries and theories which the
work of Baron Georges Cuvier and Sir
Charles Lye11 touched off. These two
remarkable men revealed the immensity
of the geological past and in doing this
they taught their contemporaries how
to become time-travellers. The French-
man applied his knowledge of com-
parative anatomy to the study of the
remote past and he revealed the nature
and workings of the extraordinary
creatures then being discovered in the
Paris rock formations. When Cuvier
was admitted to the French Academy
in 1818 the formal address of welcome
noted the methods by which he made
the past come to life: You have
recreated them in a manner of speak-
ing; and by penetrating to the depths
in which these bones were buried you
have travelled back with them through
the centuries.
Twelve years afterwards Sir Charles
Lye11 extended the work of Cuvier by
his publication of The Principles of
Geology a book which for once in all
truth can be called epoch-making.
Lye11 revealed the unbelievable anti-
quity of the planet by demonstrating
the various epochs in the long long
sequence from the teaming oceans of
the Cambrian to the arrival of the
primates in the Pleiocene. As the dis-
coveries of the palaeontologists changed
the mental perspective of the Victorians
the popularisers of science wrote books
for readers who were eager to make the
journey through the dark backward of
geological time. So the amateur
palaeontologist Thomas Hawkins be-
gan his Book of the Great Sea Dragons by
promising a trip to the age of the
dinosaurs : To wander across the
desert Continents of Time in search of
the bleached skeletons
of extinct
Nations; to remove from the dust of
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62
From Pro y to Predicti on
Oblivion the countless Generations
which have passed away from the Earth
for ever. What had caught the
imagination was the astonishing scale
of the evolutionary process; and the
excitement still comes through in a
publication of 1847
The Ancient World,
or ~ i ct~Tes~~e Sketches of Creati on. The
preface announces the intention of the
author which is to communicate in a
simple form to the general reader the
chief results of Geological Investiga-
tion. In the first paragraph of his first
chapter he begins on the scenario
written into the record of the rocks:
Long-very long ago-many ages
before the creation of Man this world
on which we dwell existed as the habi-
tation of living beings different from
those now tenanting its surface or
inhabiting the ocean which covers so
large a part of it. Later on as he
warmed to the task of reconstructing
the past he caused the dead bones to
come alive in imaginative descriptions:
Imagine then one of these monstruous
animals a P~es~os~~r~ ome sixteen or
twenty feet long with a small wedge-
shaped crocodilian head a long arched
serpent-like neck. . . Imagine for a
moment this creature slowly emerging
from the muddy banks and half walk-
ing half creeping along.
Thii animated description is one of
the many indicators that point to a
change in attitude and outlook that was
as profound and far-reaching as the
new way of regarding Europe and the
planet that followed on the discovery
of the Americas. The geologists and the
palaeontoiogists had opened up a new
world in the far-off past at the same time
as the achievements of the engineers
and the scientists revealed the other
new world that waited for all in the
future. Out of the discoveries and the
inventions there emerged a mental
geography that enabled the Victorians
to locate themselves and their nations
in a self-explanatory system. In fact
the illustrated magazines for the middle
classes and the ever-growing flood of
books for the newly literate masses
show that by the 1860s the evidence of
universal pro~ess~volutionary and
technological-had encouraged the
citizens of the industrial nations to see
themselves and their societies in a state
of perpetual motion. The idea of pro-
gress was a marvellous time-machine;
it allowed all to see nature and society
in the act of moving from the less perfect
to the more perfect.
The popularisers joined with the pro-
fessors in prophecies of the future. That
redoubtable defender of Darwin
Thomas Henry Huxley drew from the
evidence of the past the benign lesson
that thoughtful men once escaped
from the blinding influences of tradi-
tional prejudice will find in the lowly
stock whence man has sprung the best
evidence of the splendour of his
capacities; and will discern in his long
progress through the past a reasonable
ground of faith in his attainment of a
nobler future. Across the Atlantic an
undistinguished Missouri lawyer from
Platte City wrote with equal assurance
about an imagined meeting with his
heat-heat-band-daughter in 1980 :
The lady explained that, as science
progressed,
Man r d uoon sea and in air.
That storms Gere forbidden- e sea kept
at rest,
And seasons made titfid and fair;
That flowers and animals, far away
reared,
Were acclimated here and grew wild;
And a motor, much stronger than steam,
had appeared,
Yet cheap, economic and mild.
The dominant ideology of any age
shows itself most clearly in the instruc-
tion of the young; and the workings of
the universal consensus on the idea of
progress can be examined in two books
for juveniles of 1865. In Lhomme de@
cinq m s uns there is the standard
linking of past present and future. The
author gives a dramatic and episodic
account of the main stages in the evolu-
tion of human life beginning with the
first inhabitants of Paris and with
illustrations of mastodons roaming what
was later the Montmartre area; and he
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From Pro@ec~ to Prediction 63
closes with a chapter on the inventions
of the year 2865. Across the Channel,
for which the engineers had already
designed a tunnel, the author of
A
piston of wonde~f l naction
transmitted
the sacred doctrines of the race: there
is no limit to the grand dominion
man may in the end obtain.
And yet, despite the universal famili-
arity with the idea of the future, there
was remarkably little technological or
social forecasting before the end of the
century. At first sight it seems surprising
that during the period of accelerated
development between 1870 and 1900-
so many changes in warfare, armaments,
and technology-the Europeans and
the Americans were weII pleased with
fictional accounts---utopias, dystopias,
imaginary wars-that presented the
most likely pattern of future develop-
ments. There were reasons for this.
First, the major engineering enterprises
of the day came to the public in docu-
ments that were in effect technological
forecasts. Proposals for canals across
the Isthmus of Panama for steam com-
munication with India, and for the
improved navigation of Indian rivers
-like De Lesseps draft calculations for
the Suez Canal and Hector Horeaus
projection of a submarine railway
between France and England-all of
these contained estimates and forecasts
of the material and financial advantages
that would follow on construction.
Second, and much more important, the
general assumption that the march of
progress would go forward in the
known way, that the future would be
an improved model of 19th century
capitalistic and colonial society, sepa-
rated science from the social conse-
quences of technological development
in the thinking of most people before
the 20th century. For example, Pierre
Dronier in 1894 outlined his scheme for
a transatlantic air line in
La navigation
aerienne
and calculated that with his
new machines he could operate four
flights a month between New York and
Paris, carrying 100 passengers on every
Aight at a charge of 300 francs, But not
a word in all his arguments about the
changes that might follow on such a
development. In like manner another
forecast, Tw~~~ Cetitwy
~~~~tions,
published by George Sutherland in
1901, separated future developments
from their social consequences. He was
convinced that the submarine would
have a very limited part in warfare,
since it is hopeless to expect the eyes of
the sailor to see any great distance
under water. It would be the same in
the air:
Military aeronautics, ike submarine opera-
tions in naval warfare, have been somewhat
overrated. Visions of air-shipshovering over
a doomed city and devastating it with
miss dropped from above
are
mere fairy
tales. Indeed, the whole subject of aero-
nautics as an element in future human
progress has excited far more attention than
its intrinsic merits deserve.
These first essays in forecasting assumed
that, although there would be major
innovations in the future, the societies
that experienced these changes would
continue along the long established
lines of national history. Indeed, their
silliest but most sacred national songs
celebrated the fortunate union of the
nation with the idea of progress. The
many millions in the UK who sang with
such innocent gusto about the pre-
destined advance of the nation-
wider stiII and wider may thy bounds
be set-like their German counter-
parts hymning their nation-Deutsch-
land iiber alles-were the unknowing
victims of the 19th century myth: the
conviction that in an epoch of un-
precedented technological invention it
was still possible to pursue old-style
chauvinist interests without the risk of
catastrophe. The trap which the idea of
progress had set for them was that
their idea of the future was no more
than a projection of their past. They
had not read Edmund Burke who
wrote to a Member of the National
Assembly: You can never plan the
future from the past.
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