Combat Diary  11

Chapter 1

 (This article appeared originally in Fortean Studies 5, editor Steve Moore)

 Fort's Fat Monks

 Part 1: The Scientist as Hero

  In Thomas Carlyle’s book, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, published in 1841, Carlyle talks of the Priest, Prophet, Poet, and King as heroes in history. He notes that their characters and destinies were built almost entirely of raw historical process-manipulation;[1][1] the most successful heroes taking good care not to allow themselves to be seen in any framework which showed them as mere human beings. Like most leaders, almost all used intimidating style-contructs to convince, influence, and sometimes even entertain: images from art and life range from 19th century studio-photo-montage showing Pallas Athene surrounded by cherubs holding telescopes, abacus, and dividers, to popular images of T. E. Lawrence in traditional Arab dress, although pre-war pictures showing a Chaplin-moustached Adolf Hitler as an armoured knight on a white charger, were rapidly withdrawn, in the face of the embarrassment of all concerned.

   [1][1] - In this same sense, our own age created the Star as God, the Star having need of no physical existence at all, except in terms of pixels, film-grain, suggestion-stuff, or advertising-concentrate, the post-industrial building materials.

            Charles Fort uses the word “era,” rather than “media,” meaning that spatio-temporal cultural medium through which experience is controlled and evaluated. Although he does not use the word “media,” Carlyle shows that, nevertheless, the “era” frameworks of castles and courts, tournaments, processions, elaborate rituals and religious ceremonies, were pre-electric historical “media,” and their design-structure ensured that the particular “hero” (or heroine) was only seen in settings which inspired awe, and not a little fear. Though he spoke of “some merely scientific Theorem of the Universe,” Carlyle was just too early for the scientist in his full role, and of course far too early for the Media Personality and the Film Star, but it would have been interesting to see what he would have made of the scientist. The first thing that might have caught his sharp eye is that the scientist, in contrast to the traditional heroes of his book, lacks all socio-anthropological and literary-artistic visibility. From, say, Aubrey’s Brief Lives to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and onwards to Harold Nicholson’s Diaries of the 1930s, through to TW3, hardly a single scientist is even considered worth a line of satire, parody, still less is he considered as a source of worth-while information. The scientist as a major social figure is not even gossiped about; not even his love-life seems worthy of attention. Gilbert and Sullivan, who satirised the major features of their society, also ignored science completely, and in Michael Goodwin’s Anthology of extracts from the first fifty volumes of The Nineteenth Century,[2][2] spanning the years 1877-1901, the word “science” hardly makes an appearance. Neither is any scientist represented in James Aitken’s collection,[3][3] English Letters of the XIX Century, or in W. E. Williams A Book of English Essays,[4][4] whose selection ranges from the 16th to the late 19th century. Truly, Williams does mention Francis Bacon, but leaves out Bacon’s influential scientific works, preferring his essays on Studies, Ambition, and Travel. Again, in Mrs. Laurence Binyon’s monumental collection[5][5] of no less than 104 writers of the 19th century, there is not a single piece of scientific writing included, not even Michael Faraday’s celebrated Chemical History of a Candle, the wonderful Cosmos by von Humboldt, The Senses of Insects by Forel, or Humphry Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy. This extraordinary power of science to disguise itself by implicit exclusion as an historical process is such that not even Nineteenth Century Studies[6][6] by Professor Basil Willey, a brilliant and influential book, includes a single scientist. For scholars of that stature to consider 19th century science as a cultural element not worthy of inclusion in any analysis of the structure of the mind of what we now consider to be the first “great century of science,” is quite astonishing. Even as late as a book published by Hamish Hamilton in 1941, (Decade 1931 1941, a “commemorative anthology”), there is not a single scientific reference, though the entire fate of Mankind was soon going to be effected by what was going off in the laboratories.

              In the early 19th century, such astute social observers as Lamb and De Quincey, both of whom bridged two centuries, hardly mentioned science. Much later writers, as late inheritors of the Romantic tradition, were all influenced by virilent anti-scientific arguments put forward by Keats in particular[7][7] such as those in Lamia, which was a definitive statement of the prevailing view of the time.[8][8] The “touch of cold philosophy” will:

 “...clip an Angel’s wings  Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,  

                          Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -  

                          Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made  

                          The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.”

              Over one hundred years later, for major writers of fiction, such as D. H. Lawrence, the position had hardly changed: “‘Knowledge’ has killed the sun, making it a ball of gas, with spots; ‘knowledge’ has killed the moon...How are we to get back Apollo and Attis, Demeter, Persephone, and the halls of Dis?”[9][9]

 But if modern literary writers run from science, at least Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth stood on their clever philosophical heads to try and reconcile “fact” with “fiction.” In his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge, constructing his celebrated distinctions between “fancy” and “imagination,” could write that fancy: “...has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites.” As such, the fancy is merely a “mode of Memory,” contrasting with that “secondary imagination,” that transforming faculty whose “organic” power, in changing vital perceptions, changes matter itself, and:

   “...dissolves, diffuses, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”[10][10]

 This “transforming” element of course allied itself completely with Wordsworth’s view in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (which he wrote with Coleridge). There, Wordsworth spoke of the “meddling intellect,” and though he was later to salute Newton in Book iii of The Prelude, there, Newton’s face is “silent,” and he “voyaged through strange seas of thought alone.” Shaped by such strong driving influences, similar ambiguous attitudes later abounded. Matthew Arnold,[11][11] the very epitome of the 19th century liberal educator, for whom the body of the forms of all knowledge constituted almost a religion in itself, who corresponded with Darwin, and who pleaded for a more “scientific politics” in Literature and Dogma, could yet say, most defensively: “It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who siezes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakespeare.”[12][12] The philosophic problem of science was, and still is, the same; put vulgaris, it is the view that a mass moving along an inclined plane is all No. 52 buses, and not a particular No. 52; a particular No. 52 might contain a tramp being sick over the back-seat, an addict trying to exit via the luggage compartment, and two skinheads fighting to the death on the stairs. The experiential value of such edifying and singular uniqueness gives such a combination of anomalous and hardly repeatable events an almost sacred power over any view of the statistical average of all the journeys of all masses representing all possible No. 52 buses over all possible inclined planes. This latter view has come to be mythologised as a “cold” view of experience, but it was born in days when expert professionally-prepared editions of Newton’s work other than Optics and the Principia were hardly available. Had his letters and his notebooks been published, those Romantic poets in particular who regarded Newton as a cold mathematical fish, perhaps would have been both pleased and surprised.

              In the context of this separation between fact and fiction which gave the 19th century such trouble, the achievement of Charles Fort stands along with that of Whitehead. Both these men were the first writers after Coleridge to see fact and fiction as strong and weak versions of myth. As with all classically simple solutions, it took a European culture rather an indordinate length of time to work that out. Between Matthew Arnold and Charles Fort, there is almost a silence amidst “literary” writers as regards the matter/spirit debate in relation to the rapidly evolving physical sciences. Thus Browning, Swinburne, Rossetti, the alert Ruskin, the far-sighted William Morris, as well as countless politicians and philosophers and theologians, were all oblivious to wired forces which were to marginalise eventually their classically-oriented literary and artistic culture. If Coleridge drew his images from the whole corpus of evolving scientific knowledge, the generations which succeeded Arnold, in not recognising alone that the world had a new force which could penetrate walls, did not create a single worth-while literary metaphor drawn from such fantastic concepts. The scientific debates of the Romantic poets and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein were, almost unbelievably, the last of such debates in the sense of a powerful poetic analysis of matter and idea, and after 1830 (when with the exception of Wordsworth, all the major Romantic poets were dead), Literature had begun the long retreat into its own interior which continued through The Wasteland to Waiting for Godot and beyond Generations after Coleridge and Mary Shelley, we look in vain for literature reacting to the new phenomenon of radiation, the concepts behind electro-magnetism, or the new particle physics, just as today we look in vain for a literary response to computers and the space-age, the latter now rather long in the tooth. Thus in Sartre’s existentialist sense, the writers are no longer engage; and Percy Shelley’s protesting screams and Byron’s savage anarchy shrank to Rimbaud’s nihilism, and the decadence of the theYellow Book.

              We thus have a paradox; towards the end of “the great scientific century,” as the strength of science grows massively throughout Europe, at the same time, it becomes culturally almost invisible.When it is seen, if seen at all, it is rather in the spirit of Jules Verne in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), and Rudyard Kipling in The Board of Aerial Control (date?) both of whom saw science as a mere manifestation of bizarre intellectual eccentricities. Somewhat scorning the powerful intellectual attacks on science by such German philosophers as Neitszche, writers writing in English no longer sought battle. Those who were aware of the tremors of approaching threat were few, and expressed their fear almost unconsciously. Such writers were G. K. Chesterton, who did to a certain extent, attack the combination of big business and technology in The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), and like Lewis Carroll (C.L. Dodgson), in Alice in Wonderland, Chesterton sounded a warning note in his Defence of Nonsense, about cleaning up the world rather too quickly.[13][13] It is typical of the age that Dodgson, though a mathematician (he was known chiefly for his work on algebraic theory, just as was the self-taught George Boole), was apparently unaware, in his leisurely Attic view, of science by and large. Generations after George Boole’s death in 1864, his specialised algebra, created in similar academic isolation (he taught at Queen’s College, Cork, all his life), to that of Dodgson, was to form eventually the basis of modern digital computing. Thus, just as with the 19th century astronomers, there was no kind of industrial pressure on either Dodgson or Boole (or the equally self-taught Faraday), to produce socio-industrial “solutions,” and in the case of Dodgson, we are left to wonder what would have resulted if there had been! Similarly, there was no rich and rapid social or intellectual fluidity whereby Boole’s mind might profitably have met with Babbage (1792-1871) and his extraordinary computing machines, or Faraday show his self-wound induction coils to George Stephenson. The dream of having a Babbage mechanical computer, powered by Faraday’s cell-powered induction coils, working with Boole’s logic, and mounted on board one of George Stephenson’s engines could have been realised, though what a dream-like creation that would have been!

              But the 19th century, until it quickened rapidly towards its end, was just not the kind of society to achieve that level of co-ordination. In order to understand the mind of that time from this angle, modern ideas of co-operative professionalism, of democratic planning, of industrial pace and urgency, have to be dispensed with.

              Such separate and closed developments ensured that even as late as 1900, therefore, there was still hardly a writer who showed any influence in their work of the revolution in the physical sciences, or the new ideas in mathematics and physics.George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) was a most singular exception; she expresses tremors of new intellectual excitements[14][14] in Daniel Deronda, and in her essay, The Progress of the Intellect[15][15] complains of “physical science” being “perversely ignored in our social organisation, our ethics and our religion.” However, by and large, the new intriguing speculations about the nature of time and space had to wait for Wells, who for the most part, presented them in a very enthusiastic and positive light,[16][16] and Fort, who did exactly the opposite in The Book of the Damned (1919).

              Therefore though scientific and technological manifestations themselves were gradually becoming visible, for most writers, science still had not happened, and it was left to scientific outsiders such as Wells and Fort to take the first long looks at scientific culture. In this sense, it is indeed a pity that Eliot and Pound, who above all poets, made poetry once more analytic and discursive, did not look at science, which somewhat subtracts from their renowned “modernism,” and to a certain extent, puts them in the same camp as the kinds of poets they were in reaction against, such as Newbolt, Noyes, and Watson.[17][17] Though successful within their own terms, when these writers looked at science (when they ever looked at all), their considerable powers were stilled; they look askance, quizzically, just as members of General Haig’s staff might have stared with puzzlement and some fear and not a little regret, at the sight of the first tanks. Like those officers again, perhaps some of these writers thought that mechanical, optical, and electrical curiosities would go away, being mere temporary affectations, the products of low-caste alleys, rather than that high romantic dream which signified England and Empire. Though the Great War Poets in general, and Eliot and Pound in particular, had certainly trashed this dream by the time of The Wasteland (1922), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), respectively, none saw science as a totally new cultural horizon.  

              After World War 2 there was hardly any difference in this respect. Though men of great talent existed, such as Durrell, Fowles, and Golding, literary fiction in particular failed completely to respond to genetics, computers, or just what was on trial at Nuremberg, or what had happened a Los Alamos. There was also a complete failure to react to the new techniques of implicit social control, just as their was a failure to respond to such in the late 19th century, and in the period between the two World Wars. Whilst it is not to be expected that literary fiction respond with a knee-jerk to every historical change, nevertheless, in its remaining passive, there is every evidence of that “massive failure of nerve” of which Norman Mailer speaks in his seminal post-war essay, The White Negro (1956). Literature of significance simply has to take a moral stance, otherwise the fears of what Churchill called a “perverted science,” running out of all moral control may well be realised:  

               “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilised history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality, could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonoured, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilisation - that civilisation founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of cause and effect - in the middle of an economic civilisation founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.”[18][18]

              Prophetically, in this sense, time and again in Fort’s books there is the annoyance that inspirational time has come to a stop in that nothing is being done about what he saw as outrageous and nonsensical scientific claims in the way of criticism, or opposition. He once said that in forty years of daily searching, he had not yet come across a sighting of Father Christmas in his sleigh, high in the sky with his reindeer team. In forty years of reading, this present writer has yet to find a single example in literary fiction (apart from Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon) of even a passing reference (never mind anything else), to what happens when a current-carrying wire comes near another wire, a more plausible target perhaps, than Santa Claus. Yet this single phenomenon, discovered by Michael Faraday,[19][19] is the basis of almost the whole of 20th century civilisation. Without the 240 volts 13-amp, 50 Hertz cycle (whose maintenance alone keeps major nations always within sight of bankruptcy), available at the reading-lamp socket, all relationships, and visions, philosophy and aesthetics, would collapse back to the cave-mouth within the time between two lost commercial breaks.

              Thus apart from bleats from a religious establishment whose nerve failed completely towards the end of the Victorian era, science was sociologically unusual in that it did not generate a strong counter-culture. But then, as now, science, unlike religion, was never very happy proselytising; it might go through some dumb-democratic show of seeming to be, but then, as now, it needed only a small, professional, very low-profile elite trained to the highest possible standards. Just like modern national armies, this elite neither needed nor wanted the big semi-trained proletarian battalions.

              It is the unquestioned power of such cultural invisibility which most angers and annoys Fort’s Narrator. Though the 18th and 19th centuries contained the entire corpus of both the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, in Literature and the Arts it is as if the latter had never existed. Yes, there such isolated instances such as Turner’s painting, “The Fighting Téméraire,” and “Steam and Speed.” There is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, (1818) some passages of Dickens, and a few 18th century paintings of burning slag-heaps and fuming chimneys, but not even in Frankenstein (a good fit to our criteria), is there discussion of hardware and ideas, except for some rather obscure references to Galvani’s magnetic investigations. True, much later on in the 19th century, and very early into the 20th, in the work of Arnold Bennett and J. B. Priestley, there is some sense emerging of techno-industrial time beginning to quicken its pace in the northern industrial centres, and of course, we have the glaring exception of Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885), the best fit to our criteria. But apart from the much later D. H. Lawrence, none of these works amount to a full-bodied literary/artistic reaction to science and industrialisation. As far as Literature getting to grips with contemporary realities went, the prevailing atmosphere just after the Great War is summed up by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who, in his introduction to a post-war edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse, urged all “difficult” “modern” writers to forget their intense dissatisfaction with all and everything, and think of Agincourt.  

              That great creative talents in literature avoided science is most curious. Scientific constructs and implications were not present, presumably, in any of their conversations: their letters, articles, lectures, and reported opinions certainly have no scientific content. By the 1930s, the new technology was becoming massively visible on land, and sea, and in the air, but Auden, Isherwood, and Spender, for example, were all equally oblivious to it. There were warnings far too late about what Fort called a “darkness of scientists” in the work of C. S. Lewis, particularly in his novel, That Hideous Strength (1945), but again, Lewis hardly enters into technological discussions, and this particular book is not rated as high as his others probably because it related to the modern world, and not some distant fantasy-land. If Isherwood looks at the newly-appearing electricity pylons in the poem Pylons in the early 1930s, and Auden notices the mail-train, these glances were cursory, hardly functional in any visionary sense; rather are such things seen as Kipling glanced briefly at the technology of ship’s engines in McAndrew’s Hymn (1893), and after the Great War, noted the lines of derelict tanks parked outside Bovington Camp. Hence these writers saw these new shapes as the curious forms of rare and intellectually isolated animals, rather than things which contained the new analogues of a coming age.[20][20]

              It is also astonishing that almost none of these fine writers ever thought about the use of the newly-evolving shapes and ideas, if only for the sake of minting quite new metaphors. Largely, they retreated to inturned bohemianism, aesthetics, neo-Edwardian romanticism, historical and religious mysticism, fustian nationalism, sexual peculiarities, class-nostalgia, children’s worlds, and that good old British literary stocking-filler of the Home Counties, the pastel shades of yesteryear. Then as now, there was certainly a reluctance to fight, or analyse (still less utilise imagistically), the hum of dynamos, the changing shape of aircraft, the hiss of pistons, the smell of oil and petrol, the chattering of relays, and the air filling with broadcast waves. Perhaps both science and technology were moving at such a hapless pace, they could hardly be brought into discursive focus as linked historical processes at all, most probably because compared with most changes in a conventional historical continuum, these changes were almost instantaneous. When Harold Nicholson tells of dining with such important figures as Leslie Hore-Belisha[21][21], the civilian founding-father of the British Royal Armoured Corps,[22][22] and Liddell Hart,[23][23] men who certainly were technologically informed, he does not report his conversations with them. Similarly, such leading writers as George Bernard Shaw and J. B. Priestley turned their heads half-towards something they hardly understood, and Shaw, bleating half-enthusiastically about a limp form of scientific socialism, was to be duped completely by Soviet propaganda, as were many of the young men around him, including those who were later to betray their country.

              Even the brilliant Leavis, one of the sharpest critical minds of his time, in his celebrated evaluation of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1874-6),[24][24] does not even bother to discuss the very important scientific themes and images in that novel,[25][25] and although he himself rather off-handedly praises George Eliot’s “luminous” intelligence, for the influential critics David Cecil and Oliver Elton, this “intelligence” was something of a damaging liability, if only that it could so easily transform itself into those subversive energies the like of which George Eliot was partial.  

              When works appeared eventually which did recognise scientific influences, they were received with that same suspicion which has always greeted displays of raw intellectual power in the English novel. Brave New World (1932) and 1984 (1949) are still referred to as “novels of ideas,” which is apparently a neat way of distinguishing them from “literary fiction” proper, to use that quaint, almost Pre-Raphaelite term. Though library shelves are lined with works which discuss these books, no critic has, even today, analysed their themes in terms of these being involved essentially with the fundamental inner nature of technology, science, and media. Just as with the work of Kafka or Borges, these two novels are judged aesthetically, in terms of stylistics, which, particularly in the case of Borges, is a neat and rather decadent way of avoiding that mathematical and scientific context without which Borges is almost incomprehensible. Similarly, there has been no critical examination of the technological content of Rolfe’s Hadrian VII, the various devices in Huysmans’ Against Nature, or indeed the technical processes described by H. G. Wells, in The Diamond Maker. Whilst given that a writer of fiction must succeed artistically first and foremost, any such achievement must be seen as function of external context, otherwise the aesthetic achievement itself is considerably diminished. The aesthetic movement itself, in drawing purely upon itself, became ideologically incestuous and socially and politically impotent.

              Another example of this same sort of thing is the lack of critical attention to the job (dread word to aesthetes!) Winston Smith does in 1984. When we first meet him, he is receiving information on a “telescreen,” meaning, in the only terms knowable to Orwell, a cathode-ray screen.[26][26] This present writer, in the course of reading many critical essays on 1984, has yet to see any understanding of what this means in terms of its visionary importance. Literary critics in particular avoid hardware as if it were the very curse; they still talk of fabric, texture, landscape, and architecture, not potential, system, graph, pulse, circuit, orbit; switch; in this, most still speak as if Chatsworth House were only half-complete, the Old Curiosity Shop was open for business by the stable-yard, and Alexander Pope was still being dragged off whores “for the sake of his health.” Thus it appears that C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” are still alive and well, but still not talking to one another.When on rare occasions they manage to smile at one another, the result is usually a blushing disaster. The scientist, becoming rather dewy-eyed, speaks of “beauty,” “harmony,” and “moral order” being revealed by the arts (when more often than not, the arts reveal no such things), and the artist speaks uneasily of mathematics and computers revealing “design” and “ordered patterns” (when more often than not, these things reveal the exact opposite). If either party is aware of the destructive, anarchic, and subversive nature of real inspiration and intelligence, neither appears bound to say so. Charles Fort would probably agree that the reasons for these mutual concealments would form a list longer than any list of the ravaged virgins of Antiquity.

              It is most chastening to think that after Chaucer,[27][27] history had to wait over 500 years before it had, in H. G. Wells, a literary writer who had an all-round grasp of the science and technology of his age, for these were subjects even Shakespeare ignored, despite the hot-house of such influences around him. Wells, like Fort, envisioned the future product/media society, and the new influences that society would produce, but though Wells was, quite unlike Fort, on the whole enthusiastic about science, often his feelings were mixed. Unlike Verne and Kipling (to whom the idea of “selling” anything, particularly a technological product, would probably have been quite incomprehensible), Wells knew that the camera-obscura gunsight of the tank-like fighting machines of The Land Ironclads (1903), Monson’s flying machine of The Argonauts of the Air (1895), and also Gibberne’s Nervous Accelerator, will all appear inevitably upon the market. This latter potion (which speeds up time for the recipient), will appear, moreover, complete with the doubtful trapping of “coloured labels,” apparently the most vulgar commercial crime Wells could conceive of in this very last golden hour of doomed English simplicity and innocence. But Gibberne’s friend, speaking like the eternal government scientist, solves the problem in the eternal fashion by passing the moral buck, which in 1901, was indeed prophetic:  

 “Like all potent preparations, it will be liable to abuse. We have, however, discussed this aspect of the question quite thoroughly, and we have decided that this is purely a matter of medical jurisprudence and altogether outside our province. We shall manufacture and sell the Accelerator, as for the consequences - we shall see.”[28][28]

              If writers and critics of the inter-war period didn’t really like or understand science and scientists, the feeling was mutual. The renowned Marxist geneticist of these years, J. B. S. Haldane,[29][29] believed science and communism were a complete unity, the first major great historical success of rationalism. To him, serious writers were members of an decadent “artistic” class: they had become directionless, non-participating shadows in corners, good for a penny-dance or two, essentially culture-gypsies in decay, just as were the occultists and the capitalists. Haldane’s rather too triumphant view prevailed for a time, and was considerably influential both before and after his death. He was, of course, writing within a certain very 19th century tradition, well represented by the equally renowned biologist, T. H. Huxley (1825-1895). Huxley expressed his view of “myth” equally forcibly, and sounding rather like Charles Fort with his tongue in his cheek, he wanted any devils around to have full documentation:

              “I do not know of any body of scientific men who could be got to listen without the strongest expressions of disgusted repudiation to the story of the devils entering a herd of swine...scientific ethics can and does declare that the profession of belief in them, on the evidence of documents of unknown date and of unknown authorship, is immoral.”[30][30]

              It was only short step from these accusations of intellectual “immorality” to eugenics, that pseudo-science which the Nazis later embraced. Here is Sir Francis Galton,[31][31] who coined the word itself (which was originally, before he changed it, the chilling word viriculture), writing in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883): “Energy is the capacity for labour. It is consistent with all the robust virtues, and makes a large practice of them possible.” Galton makes no mention of those wonders which come about through people doing nothing at all in particular, neither with body nor brain. He continues, in worsening vein: “no energy at all is death; idiots are feeble and listless...it does not seem reasonable to preserve sickly breeds for the sole purpose of tending them, as the breed of foxes is preserved solely for sport...” The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography says that Galton’s theory of eugenics was “misunderstood.” It is more likely that it was understood only too well. If his theory had been applied, neither Christy Brown the novelist, nor Professor Hawking the scientist, would have seen the light of day.

              It is disappointing to find that such views were also held by H. G. Wells, who said in Anticipations: “Right thinking people should check the procreation of base and servile types...all that is ugly and bestial in the souls and bodies of men.”[32][32]But such was the faith in Science the Liberator that Sir Richard Gregory could speak in Discovery: the Spirit and Service of Science,[33][33] of the “holy flame of wisdom” which “burns brightly in a scentific mind,” and whose “rays are diffused for the benefit of mankind.” In this he was in accord with Herbert Spencer saying “Science alone can give us true conception of ourselves.” In this he was also in accord with Lenin, who wrote: “The sole property of matter - with the recognition of which materialism is vitally connected - is the property of being objective reality, of existing outside our cognition.”[34][34] But what eventually emerges from these glowing, and confident views and predictions is a corpse or a cripple, which is what usually emerges after any politically-correct interrogation, of which the countless graves of the 20th century bare witness.

              Many of the scientists mentioned here are now seen as giants, but in their own time, they were almost unknown, and the populace at large were unaware of the plans for their fate which were evolving in the minds of such men: “Nobody seems to have conceived of this coming of power, and nobody had calculated its probable consequences” says Dick, the central character of Wells’ The New Machiavelli (1911). Had there been a healthy counter-culture, had there been more writers such as Fort, who had the brainpower and the courage to attack science, things might have been very different. An earlier example of such separate cultural development is given by Lord Morley, who, in his Life of Gladstone, describes how, in 1877, Gladstone met Darwin, but had no idea who he was. Similarly, Louis Philippe asked “Who is Cuvier?” when told that the most celebrated scientist in France (renowned naturalist, and founder of comparative anatomy and palaeontology) was dead. Similarly, Louis Philippe’s successor, Napoleon III, had not heard of Claude Bernard, the eminent phsyiologist. This is in perfect accord with the question asked frequently by the aristocratic circles in Stendhal’s Scarlet and Black, as to how a person earning less than a certain amount, can think significantly about anything at all. Looking back over the better part of the 19th century, Sir Richard Gregory could write,[35][35] in 1916:

   “All the benefits of modern civilisation are due to the achievements of science or inventions based upon them; but neither the multitude nor its masters are familiar with the names of the men whose work has provided the comforts of the present day. If you seek fame and riches, enter not upon a scientific career; for they are easier won in politics or commerce or many other walks in life.”

              This view of the scientist as a very special being, priest, lover, and saint, far superior to any other piece of mortal clay, is evident by the way scientists are in the habit of praising themselves, their profession, both explicitly and implicitly, casting themselves alone in a transcendental role as crusading warriors in a war between bad (“fantasy”) and good (“fact”). That no-one else (especially governments, popular leaders, and the populace at large) appeared to notice this self-selected role, did not change in any way the appetite of definitely phallocentric scientists of a pre-Freudian age for seeing themselves as romantic warriors in a kind of holy war. Within this self-produced, self-directed role, “Nature” was seen often as a dangerous and betraying female, sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, a female whose secrets are to be teased out by the most subtle of intellectual seductions. But sometimes “Nature,” that “ancient libertine” as Dick in The New Machiavelli calls her, “refuses to co-operate in her own undoing.” One is left to wonder whether proper scientific objectivity would have been preserved had one of the few women scientists spoken of her inspirations in terms of seducing male deities, whether good-looking or not! But whatever it looks like, after the seduction is over, this medusa-like snake-spirit is to be killed. This archetypal battle even raises the spirits of the dour T. H. Huxley, as he speaks of “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact,” which is a lot more rousing than when he speaks of “science as organised common sense.” Others were far more flexible and subtle. The puritanical view of “reality” being ugly and cold was not held by Darwin; Professor R. Meldola reports that he saw Nature as a fickle woman, saying that Darwin said to him personally that Nature “will tell you a direct lie if she can.” To this suspicion and even hatred of women, others added religious and mythological elements together with a work-ethic. Here is Herbert Spencer:

 “Devotion to science is a tacit worship - a tacit recognition of worth in the things studied; and by implication in their cause. It is not a mere lip-homage, but a homage expressed by actions - not a mere professed respect, but a respect proved by the sacrifice of time, thought, and labour.”  

              Part 2 of Fort’s Fat Monks, Oersted and Objectivity will appear in the July  2003 edition of the Combat Diaries   

 Chapter 2 & 3  click here