futures volume 8 issue 1 1976 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2876%2990098-7] i.f. clarke -- 10. the image...

8/11/2019 Futures Volume 8 issue 1 1976 [doi 10.1016%2F0016-3287%2876%2990098-7] I.F. Clarke -- 10. The image of th

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68

From Prophecy 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 scientifically.

10. The image of the future 1776-1976

I. I?. Clarke

IN FIV months time the people of the

United States will celebrate the 200th

anniversary of the occasion when the

last British decided to become the first

Americans. And in the course of the

bicentennial celebrations many orators

will be taking their audiences on a time-

trip to that moment when Thomas

Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of

Independence the sacred clause: We

hold these truths to be self-evident, that

all men are created equal. The occa-

sion is important enough for this series

on the idea of the future to look back-

ward to that year when a congress of

once-loyal subjects of a British monarch

chose to create a different future for

themselves and for their new nation.

In those days, when the Hudson

was an unpolluted river and men still

spoke of an institute in the l h-

century sense established law, custom,

or usage),

the educated minority

believed that the truths of nature and

the powers of ideology could change

the direction of human history. So,

Thomas Jefferson applied the radical

theories of the age-HelvCtius, Locke,

Rousseau-to the situation of some

24 million colonists east of the Appala-

chians; for he was convinced that an

idealised political scheme would un-

doubtedly change society for the better.

And to this day the national motto of

a vastly enlarged United States repeats

I. F. Clarke is Chairman of the Department of

English Studies, University of Strathclyde,

Scotland. He is the author of The Tale

of bhe

Future

(London, Library Association, 1970) and

Voices

~~~~h~s~~~gar

(London, Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1966).

that expectation, still promising some

200 million citizens the beatitude of a

Navus Ordo Seclorum.

To look backward at those far-off

events of 1776 is to realise how the

novel anticipatory practices of Atlantic

society have grown out of the prophetic

powers of ideology and the enticing

predictions of technology. Indeed, in

the life and thoughts of Thomas Jeffcr-

son it is possible to observe the first

stirrings of those powerful expectations

of future change that have ever since

encouraged all who would make the

world fit their ideal schemes. More-

over, Jeffersons hopes for a better

political order were supported by his

equally powerful hopes for an improve-

ment in the material conditions of the

human race. And so, having prophe-

sied a happier life for the citizens of his

new state, Jefferson turned with equal

readiness to forecasting the coming

conquest of the air. As soon as he had

analysed the latest reports on the first

balloon ascents in 1783, he wrote to a

cousin in Virginia about the late

discovery of traversing the air in bal-

loons

;

and he predicted that the

inventions of the Montgolfier brothers

would have immense consequences for

mankind

:

traversing deserts, countries

possessed by an enemy, or ravaged by

infectious disorders, pathfess and inac-

cessible mountains; the discovery of

the pole which is but one days journey

in a balloon from where the ice has

hitherto stopped adventurers.

In looking backward over the last

200 years it becomes apparent-first-

FUTURES February 976


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. . .

and the technological power

of Victorian industry decided

his vision of the cities of the

future


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Early images of the future here from 1851) often dwelt on the hoped-for conquest of the air

By 1910 the image of the future had developed to include

intercontinental air travel

In The egums Fortune Jules Verne enlarged on his

forebodings about the lethal capacity of nineteenth-

century technology..

.


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From Prophg to Prediction 71

that the accepted image of the future

is the product of a dominant mood and

-second-that

this

amalgam of

material ambitions and social philoso-

phies is reinforced by a constant output

of prophecies and predictions about the

shape of things to come. The first

evidence for this view appears in the

period between 1770, when the Boston

mob pushed the colonies towards

independence by attacking a British

garrison, and the outbreak of the

France-German War of 1870 which

inaugurated the modern age of vast

conscript armies and constant innova-

tion in military technology. During

those hundred years the astounding

advances in science and technology,

the rapid growth in populations, the

expansion of the great industrial cities,

the steady rise in the level of literacy, the

constant improvement in world com-

munications-all the unprecedented

changes strengthened the dominant

idea of progress; and this found faithful

expression in the popular notion of an

extrapolatory curve taking off from

Point Zero, before the invention of the

steam engine, and soaring up towards

the discoveries of an infinite, ever-

improving future.

From about 1870 onwards a number

of original thinkers-Darwin, Marx,

Herbert Spencer, and Georges Sorel-

provided a theoretical base for the

universal experience of social and

technological progress. In different

ways their doctrines of progress and

evolution seemed to point towards the

future that awaited mankind and, in

doing this,

their theories provided

more than sufficient reason for the

political actions that are still working

their effects throughout our world.

So, Marx described the inevitabie

proletarian revolution that Lenin was

destined to exploit; Darwin presented

certain clear-cut ideas about the struggle

for existence that Hitler transformed

into the murderous racial myth of the

Aryan supermen

;

and Georges Sorei

eIaborated his singular thesis on the

necessity of violence that continues to

reverberate throughout established

society.

During the same period a new

form of predictive fiction took on the

task of imagining the best possible

patterns of future existence; and this

popularising activity enlarged the myth

of a perpetual and beneficent process

of development

through grandiose

images of great human achievements in

time to come. These have carried the

proud banner of progress from the

triumphs of Victorian technology in

Jules Vernes prophetic vision of space

travel in

Autour de

la

lune

in 1870 to

the promise of even greater glories in

Kubricks film, 2001 A Sace Ulysses.

Although it is fashionable schoIar-

ship to ignore Vernes stories or to

write them down as simple wish-fulfil-

ment fantasies-as if fantasy has no

significance-the immense popular suc-

cess of his tales of ocean-going sub-

marines and marvellous flying machines

shows that they were a perfect response

to the psychological conditions of the

new urban civilisation. Their prospec-

tive visions confirmed the general

expectation of continual progress. For

proof of this, there is the evidence of

the men whom Verne set on the road to

invention and discovery. The pioneer of

the modern submarine, Simon Lake, and

his contemporary who did so much for

the progress of aviation, Santos Dumont,

have stated that their reading of Verne

inclined them inevitably to the careers

they chose. Further, after reading

Vernes first space travel stories, a

young Russian mathematician, Kon-

stantin Tsiolkovsky, experienced the

beginning of a life-long interest in

rocket propulsion :

The first seeds of the idea were sown by

that great fantastic author Jules Verne; he

directed my thought along certain channels.

Then came a desire and after that the

work of the mind.

By 1895 Tsiolkovsky was at work on

the mathematics of the possibilities

of a jet ship as the most feasible means



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72 From Prophecy to Prediction

today for interplanetary travel outside

the earthsatmosphere. Finally, in 1903,

the famous paper on Theexplorationof

space with reactive devices appeared

in print; and what had been an image

of the future in the 1860s advanced

that much nearer to realisation.

The secret of Vernes success was

his gift for creating epic stories that

projected striking images

of 19th-

century achievement. His heroes are

decided individuals-scientists or engin-

eers-and they succeed in all they do

by force of will and power of intellect.

They are at once the reflection of a

social ideal and the assurance of

continuing success in the great war

against nature; they represent the

highest point reached by 19th-century

optimism in works of fiction. Towards

the end of that century, as Vernes

fiction began to decline, H. G. Wells

appeared to take his place-a keener

mind, much more alert to the complex

problems of urban society, and given

to constant speculations about the most

varied possibilities in rational existence.

His work marks a shift in the imagina-

tion, a turning from the simpler success

stories of Victorian technology to the

problems of planning a coherent world

society. In a succession of most original

stories he generated striking images of

future change-variations on Dar-

winism, on the lethal potentialities of

technology, on the opportunities for

creating a better social order.

Wells became the favourite prophet

of his age, because he had an excep-

tional capacity for converting the

forward-looking and generally hopeful

ideas of his time into dramatic images

of future change. Planted in his fiction

are most of the major problems and

possibilities with which our planet is

still

engaged-the consequences of

human inventiveness, the need for a

planned environment, the hope of a

rationally devised, self-regulating

society in which all men will be good,

happy, and wise. But, like all men,

Wells did not have the final solution

to the problem of human happiness;

and it is a judgement on him and his

times that, although his classic fantasies

of time and space continue to delight

readers throughout the world, his more

optimistic ideas enjoy no more than a

brief half-life in such simple-minded

projections as 2001-A Space Odyssey.

In that truly marvellous film the old

faith lingers on in the implicit proposi-

tion that technological progress equals

world peace and planetary prosperity.

Ever since the First World War,

that great divide in planetary history,

the image-makers have provided very

different pictures of human destiny.

That is, as soon as men had discovered

the unforeseen and disastrous conse-

quences of the new military technolo-

gies, there was a movement away from

the romantic belief in uniform moral

progress to the equally irrational expec-

tation of the doom to come. For, in the

natural synchronism that seems to

govern

human history, every age

develops its own characteristic images

of the future. So, in a most appropriate

way, the first of the new prophets

appeared in the last days of imperial

Germany; and,

in a letter of 13

December 1913, the herald of the new

apocalypse,

Oswald Spengler, wrote

that the nations of Europe waited

(like the Roman soldier whose bones

were found in front of a door at

Pompeii) with full knowledge of the

coming catastrophe, heroic and hope-

less. Nine years later he published the

results of his massive research and long

musings on the course of human history

in his classic work of image-building,

The Decline of the West. In the manner

of H. G. Wells he looked at the great

powers of technological progress and

social philosophy; but unlike Wells his

chilling message was that the peace of

1918 would not bring peace, that the

great wars would continue throughout

the 20th century, and that the peoples

of Europe were moving towards the

truly Teutonic destiny of the final

Giitterdammerung.


futures volume 8 issue 1 1976 [doi 10.1016%2f0016-3287%2876%2990098-7] i.f. clarke -- 10. the image...

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