1THE NEW PROMETHEUS
Socialists and Spiritualists in the Age of the Machine
If there is any period one would desire to be born in,—is it not the Age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. —Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837)
At Brussels, the wind whipped off the North Sea and through the rooming house where Jenny Marx passed the first weeks of 1848. She would have preferred to stay in Paris, but the iron laws of history, represented here by the collusion of the Prussian and French police, had cast her and Karl onto this bleak, blank-skied Eurasian shore.
Life with Karl Marx was never dull. He was a short man of excess energy, intellect, and hair, with a bantam’s barrel chest, a scholar’s wit, and a piercing, metallic voice that was a little too loud. Jenny had no money and three children to feed, but there was still hope, the last surprise in Pandora’s box. Karl’s father, a wealthy lawyer, had just died, and an inheritance was in the offing. So too, Karl promised, was the revolution in human consciousness.
“Until now, men have constantly had false conceptions of themselves, about what they are or what they ought to be.” Men had invented ideas of God and illusions of a “normal man” whose body existed only as the vessel of his soul. They had bowed to these idols, and to the priests who curated them and the kings who protected them. Fortunately, the faculty that had led men to create and worship these spectral authorities now allowed men to see through them. Scientific knowledge of the physical world stripped Man of all illusions, religious, moral, and philosophical. The bedrock of Nature was the hard truth that Marx called “historical materialism.”
Marx believed that the forms of human society came not from God but from technology. From the hand ax of the Neolithic hunter to the first civilizations, from the ancient empires to the medieval guilds, the surface patterns of class, power, and property reflected deeper currents: the creation, ownership, and use of technology. If, Marx argued, these forces of production evolved, then so must everything else. When Samuel Morse had tested his telegraph with the biblical inquiry, “What hath God wrought?” he had confused cause and effect. Man had always wrought everything in his world, God included. And now Man’s latest historical movement, the bourgeois age of capital and democracy, steam engines and telegraphs, was crashing to its inevitable end.
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“But what is most interesting,” Lady Constance Rawleigh tells her guests, “is the way in which man has been developed. You know, all is development. The principle is perpetually going on. First there was nothing, then there was something; then—I forget the next—I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came—let me see—did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last. And the next change there will be something very superior to us—something with wings. Ah! that’s it: we were fishes, and I believe we shall be crows.”
Lady Constance has been reading The Revelations of Chaos. It is “all science”: everything is explained by geology and astronomy. The stars are churned into light from “the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese,” and the planets form and disintegrate in this cosmic dairy. “You see exactly how everything is made; how many worlds there have been; how long they lasted; what went before, what comes next.” Man is adrift in the monstrous vista of evolutionary time, a transient life-form, a work of unknown authorship, a species fated to eclipse. “We are a link in the chain, as inferior animals were that preceded us: we shall in turn be inferior; all that will remain of us will be some relics in a new red sandstone. This is development. We had fins; we may have wings.”
Lady Constance is a fiction from Tancred, Benjamin Disraeli’s novel of 1847. The real Revelations of Chaos was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) by Robert Chambers, a Scottish publisher and geologist. Chambers published it anonymously to protect his business and his reputation. More than a decade before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, “development” theory was familiar enough for Disraeli to spoof it in fiction. Yet the wider the commonplaces of development theory spread, the thinner they became. Every scientific doctrine speaks the language of its time, and in explaining grants cultural license: the image of Copernicus’s heliocentric universe served the cult of the Sun King as well as the cause of individual Reason. But development, the idea that would be renamed “evolution” in the 1850s, was especially volatile. For if everything was evolving, then nothing could be permanent. There was no fixed hierarchy, no Great Chain of Being with God at one end and insects at the other, “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.” There was only change, and the chain of development was its record. The world might have been “created at one cast,” but its contents had not. Existence was not a fixed state of being but a fluid, uncertain process of “becoming.”
For the scientific and commercial society, evolutionary thinking would fill the role that God had played in the Christian worldview: the creator and prime mover, the master idea and moral explanatory. Where the ancient bonds and boundaries failed, evolution would legislate anew. The ethics of evolution would often resemble the Christian eschatology they replaced. For social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, change meant “progress,” and specialization a purposeful movement toward perfection. This ideal would permeate the age so fully that even those who defied it would not deny it but endorse it by heresy. Disraeli’s Tancred, appalled by Lady Constance’s meaningless universe, searches for a “new crusade.”
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Copyright © 2022 by Dominic Green
