Technopoly (5 page)

In expressing this idea, Kepler was taking the first significant step toward the conception of a technocracy. We have here a clear call for a separation of moral and intellectual values, a separation that is one of the pillars of a technocracy—a significant step but still a small one. No one before Kepler had asked why planets travel at variable rates. Kepler’s answer was that it must be a force emanating from the sun. But this answer still had room in it for God. In a famous letter sent to his colleague Maestlin, Kepler wrote, “The sun in the middle of the moving
stars, himself at rest and yet the source of motion, carries the image of God the Father and Creator.… He distributes his motive force through a medium which contains the moving bodies even as the Father creates through the Holy Ghost.”

Kepler was a Lutheran, and although he was eventually excommunicated from his own church, he remained a man of sincere religious conviction to the end. He was, for example, dissatisfied with his discovery of the elliptical orbits of planets, believing that an ellipse had nothing to recommend it in the eyes of God. To be sure, Kepler, building on the work of Copernicus, was creating something new in which truth was not required to gain favor in God’s eyes. But it was not altogether clear to him exactly what his work would lead to. It remained for Galileo to make visible the unresolvable contradictions between science and theology, that is, between intellectual and moral points of view.

Galileo did not invent the telescope, although he did not always object to the attribution. A Dutch spectacle-maker named Johann Lippershey was probably the instrument’s true inventor; at any rate, he was the first to claim a license for its manufacture, in 1608. (It might also be worth remarking here that the famous experiment of dropping cannon balls from the Tower of Pisa was not only
not
done by Galileo but actually carried out by one of his adversaries, Giorgio Coressio, who was trying to confirm, not dispute, Aristotle’s opinion that larger bodies fall more quickly than smaller ones.) Nonetheless, to Galileo must go the entire credit for transforming the telescope from a toy into an instrument of science. And to Galileo must also go the credit of making astronomy a source of pain and confusion to the prevailing theology. His discovery of the four moons of Jupiter and the simplicity and accessibility of his writing style were key weapons in his arsenal. But more important was the directness with which he disputed the Scriptures. In his famous
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
, he used
arguments first advanced by Kepler as to why the Bible could not be interpreted literally. But he went further in saying that nothing physical that could be directly observed or which demonstrations could prove ought to be questioned merely because Biblical passages say otherwise. More clearly than Kepler had been able to do, Galileo disqualified the doctors of the church from offering opinions about nature. To allow them to do so, he charged, is pure folly. He wrote, “This would be as if an absolute despot, being neither a physician nor an architect, but knowing himself free to command, should undertake to administer medicines and erect buildings according to his whim—at grave peril of his poor patients’ lives, and the speedy collapse of his edifices.”

From this and other audacious arguments, the doctors of the church were sent reeling. It is therefore astonishing that the church made persistent efforts to accommodate its beliefs to Galileo’s observations and claims. It was willing, for example, to accept as hypotheses that the earth moves and that the sun stands still. This, on the grounds that it is the business of mathematicians to formulate interesting hypotheses. But there could be no accommodation with Galileo’s claim that the movement of the earth is a fact of nature. Such a belief was definitively held to be injurious to holy faith by contradicting Scripture. Thus, the trial of Galileo for heresy was inevitable even though long delayed. The trial took place in 1633, resulting in Galileo’s conviction. Among the punishments were that Galileo was to abjure Copernican opinion, serve time in a formal prison, and for three years repeat once a week seven penitential psalms. There is probably no truth to the belief that Galileo mumbled at the conclusion of his sentencing, “But the earth moves” or some similar expression of defiance. He had, in fact, been asked four times at his trial if he believed in the Copernican view, and each time he said he did not. Everyone knew he believed otherwise, and that it was his advanced age, infirmities,
and fear of torture that dictated his compliance. In any case, Galileo did not spend a single day in prison. He was confined at first to the grand duke’s villa at Trinità del Monte, then to the palace of Archbishop Piccolomini in Siena, and finally to his home in Florence, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1642, the year Isaac Newton was born.

Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo put in place the dynamite that would blow up the theology and metaphysics of the medieval world. Newton lit the fuse. In the ensuing explosion, Aristotle’s animism was destroyed, along with almost everything else in his
Physics
. Scripture lost much of its authority. Theology, once the Queen of the Sciences, was now reduced to the status of Court Jester. Worst of all, the meaning of existence itself became an open question. And how ironic it all was! Whereas men had traditionally looked to Heaven to find authority, purpose, and meaning, the Sleepwalkers (as Arthur Koestler called Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo) looked not to Heaven but to the heavens. There they found only mathematical equations and geometric patterns. They did so with courage but not without misgivings, for they did their best to keep their faith, and they did not turn away from God. They believed in a God who had planned and designed the whole of creation, a God who was a master mathematician. Their search for the mathematical laws of nature was, fundamentally, a religious quest. Nature was God’s text, and Galileo found that God’s alphabet consisted of “triangles, quadrangles, circles, spheres, cones, pyramids, and other mathematical figures.” Kepler agreed, and even boasted that God, the author, had to wait six thousand years for His first reader—Kepler himself. As for Newton, he spent most of his later years trying to compute the generations since Adam, his faith in Scripture being unshaken. Descartes, whose
Discourse on Method
, published in 1637, provided nobility to skepticism and reason and served as a foundation of the new science, was a profoundly religious man. Although he saw
the universe as mechanistic (“Give me matter and motion,” he wrote, “and I will construct the world”), he deduced his law of the immutability of motion from the immutability of God.

All of them, to the end, clung to the theology of their age. They would surely not have been indifferent to knowing when the Last Judgment would come, and they could not have imagined the world without God. Moreover, the science they created was almost wholly concerned with questions of truth, not power. Toward that end, there developed in the late sixteenth century what can only be described as a passion for exactitude: exact dates, quantities, distances, rates. It was even thought possible to determine the exact moment of the Creation, which, as it turned out, commenced at 9:00 a.m., October 23, 4004
B.C
. These were men who thought of philosophy (which is what they called science) as the Greeks did, believing that the true object of investigating nature is speculative satisfaction. They were not concerned with the idea of progress, and did not believe that their speculations held the promise of any important improvements in the conditions of life. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton laid the foundation for the emergence of technocracies, but they themselves were men of tool-using cultures.

Francis Bacon, born in 1561, was the first man of the technocratic age. In saying this, I may be disputing no less an authority than Immanuel Kant, who said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement of civilization. Perhaps. But it was Bacon who first saw, pure and serene, the connection between science and the improvement of the human condition. The principal aim of his work was to advance “the happiness of mankind,” and he continually criticized his predecessors for failing to understand that the real, legitimate, and only goal of the sciences is the “endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” He brought science down from the heavens, including mathematics, which he conceived of as a humble
handmaiden to invention. In this utilitarian view of knowledge, Bacon was the chief architect of a new edifice of thought in which resignation was cast out and God assigned to a special room. The name of the building was Progress and Power.

Ironically, Bacon was not himself a scientist, or at least not much of one. He did no pioneering work in any field of research. He did not uncover any new law of nature or generate a single fresh hypothesis. He was not even well informed about the scientific investigations of his own time. And though he prided himself on being the creator of a revolutionary advance in scientific method, posterity has not allowed him this presumption. Indeed, his most famous experiment makes its claim on our attention because Bacon died as a result of it. He and his good friend Dr. Witherborne were taking a coach ride on a wintry day when, seeing snow on the ground, Bacon wondered if flesh might not be preserved in snow, as it is in salt. The two decided to find out at once. They bought a hen, removed its innards, and stuffed the body with snow. Poor Bacon never learned the result of his experiment, because he fell immediately ill from the cold, most probably with bronchitis, and died three days later. For this, he is sometimes regarded as a martyr to experimental science.

But experimental science was not where his greatness lay. Although others of his time were impressed by the effects of practical inventions on the conditions of life, Bacon was the first to think deeply and systematically on the matter. He devoted much of his work to educating men to see the links between invention and progress. In
Novum Organum
he wrote,

In this passage, we can detect some of Bacon’s virtues and the source of his great influence. Here is no sleepwalker. He knows full well what technology does to culture and places technological development at the center of his reader’s attention. He writes with conviction and verve. He is, after all, among the world’s great essayists; Bacon was a master propagandist, who knew well the history of science but saw science not as a record of speculative opinion but as the record of what those opinions had enabled man to do. And he was ceaselessly energetic in trying to convey this idea to his countrymen, if not the world. In the first two books of
Novum Organum
, which consist of 182 aphorisms, Bacon sets out nothing less than a philosophy of science based on the axiom that “the improvement of men’s minds and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing.” It is in this work that he denounces the infamous four Idols, which have kept man from gaining power over nature: Idols of the Tribe, which lead us to believe our perceptions are the same as nature’s facts; Idols of the Cave, which lead us to mistaken ideas derived from heredity and environment; Idols of the Market-place, which lead us to be deluded by words; and Idols of the Theater, which lead us to the misleading dogmas of the philosophers.

To read Bacon today is to be constantly surprised at his modernity. We are never far from the now familiar notion that science is a source of power and progress. In
The Advancement of Learning
, he even outlines the foundation of a College for Inventors that sounds something like the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. Bacon would have the government provide inventors with allowances for their experiments and for traveling. He would have scholarly journals and international associations. He would encourage full cooperation among scientists, an idea that would have startled Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, who used some of their genius to devise ways of concealing their work from one another. Bacon also believed that scientists should be paid well to give public lectures, and that informing the public of the utility of invention was as important as invention itself. In short, he conceived of the scientific enterprise as it is conceived today—organized, financially secure, public, and mankind’s best weapon in the struggle to improve his condition and to do so continuously.

As I have said, Bacon is the first man of technocracy, but it was some time before he was joined by the multitude. He died in 1626, and it took another 150 years for European culture to pass to the mentality of the modern world—that is, to technocracy. In doing so, people came to believe that knowledge is power, that humanity is capable of progressing, that poverty is a great evil, and that the life of the average person is as meaningful as any other. It is untrue to say that along the way God died. But any conception of God’s design certainly lost much of its power and meaning, and with that loss went the satisfactions of a culture in which moral and intellectual values were integrated. At the same time, we must remember that in the tool-using culture of the older European world, the vast majority of people were peasants, impoverished and powerless. If they believed their afterlife was filled with unending joy, their lives on earth were nonetheless “nasty, brutish and short.” As C. P. Snow remarked, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, which was the fruit of Baconian science, was the only hope for the poor. And if their “true Deity became mechanism,” as Thomas Carlyle said, it is probable that by then most people would not have traded their earthly existence for life in a godly,
integrated tool-using culture. It didn’t matter if they would, since there was little use in lamenting the past. The Western world had become a technocracy from which there could be no turning back. Addressing both those who were exhilarated by technocracy and those who were repulsed by it, Stephen Vincent Benét gave the only advice that made any sense. In
John Brown’s Body
he wrote: