Yesterday's Tomorrows

A Historical Survey of Future Societies

W. H. G. Armytage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000512267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

First published in 1968, Yesterday's Tomorrows elucidates on the favourite occupation of man: forecasting the future. By man's predictions, he mirrors his own wish-fulfilments, displacements, projections, denials, evasions and withdrawals. These predications can take the form of countries of the imagination, 'mirror worlds' like Rabelais' Ever-Ever lands or the Erewhon of Butler. Alternatively, they may spring from panic, reflecting fear rather than hope, often manifesting themselves, in our technological age, as reports of 'flying saucers' or invasions from another planet. In either form, they provide philosophers, scientists, doctors and sociologists with material for evaluating man's future needs, offering both criticism of our present society, plans for our future, and release from tension and disequilibrium.

Professor Armytage shows in this book how such 'visions' can, and do, refresh minds for renewed grappling with the present by arming them with ideas for man's future needs. He indicates that, out of an apparent welter of futuristic fantasies, a constructive debate about tomorrow is emerging, providing us with operational models of what tomorrow could be. This book will hold special interest for students of philosophy and of English literature.

Chapter One THE MANTIC HERITAGE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003239802-1

I SYMBOLS AND ARCHETYPES

Since man began to extricate himself from being engulfed by his environment he has been devising a symbolic language—some call it myth—that both propitiates and accounts for the mysterious forces around him.¹ Perpetual ecdysis, or shedding of the mythical integument, has created from these explanations and propitiations a compost of science, history, and religion. These discarded explanatory and propitiatory myths contain memories of experiences undergone that are for ever evoked by the imagination of the Shaman, and his modern equivalents.² These modern equivalents have multiplied with contemporary environmental tensions, perhaps not as crippling as those of Cro-Magnon times. So interest in 'primordial images' or 'archetypes' mounts with the ever more intensive emphasis on planning man's future.

The first real optimistic interest in the future was exhibited by the Jews. Lacking a glorious past, their interest was held by a succession of prophets whose names and stories they cherished long after their death to serve as analogues for others. God, to them, was always unrolling his purpose, was always going to come and inaugurate his Kingdom. Even their history was prophecy in retrospect and the Pentateuch itself looks beyond Moses (c. 1200 B.C.), their first prophet, to the day when they would be the holy nation of God.

Their early prophets divined, foresaw, and proclaimed the country's mission (Torah) either individually, or in companies. One such company was led by Miriam, and chanted for victory at the Red Sea. Elijah added a new ethic to prophecy: a stern call to elevation above the animal. To preserve prophecies already made, and to disseminate the word more effectively, prophecy was written down.

The first of these 'literary' prophets was Amos (c. 765 B.C.), a shepherd who with Hosea (c. 735 B.C.) buoyed up the Israelites by a sense of mission during the Syrian wars. To their religious message Isaiah added a social component: denunciation of landgrabbing and luxury.³ This curious dialectic of prophecy and fulfilment whereby each fulfilment of the word of God announced a yet more decisive event⁴ so imprinted itself on history that, two millennia later, Voltaire could sardonically observe:

What I most admire in our modern compilers (of history) is the wisdom, the good faith, with which they prove to us that everything that happened anciently in the greatest empires of the world happened in order to afford instruction to the inhabitants of Palestine. . . Turks and Arabs came along simply to chastise this worthy people. It must be allowed that they have had an excellent education; never were there so many teachers.⁵

II APOLLO AND THE CHRESMOLOGUES

To descry what lay ahead, early Mediterranean peoples would climb mountains to look for new land, examine entrails to see if animals were diseased, observe the flight of birds for information about the weather, and con the surface of rivers for clues as to upcountry vegetation. These practices in time hardened into rituals, which clustered round the real source of illumination: the Sun god, Apollo, who, said Plato, 'sits at the very centre and navel of the earth to instruct the human race'. As the god of prophecy, poetry, and science his advice was invoked by oracles, which though originally independent, came under political influences of various kinds. A later priest of the oracle at Delphi, Plutarch, thought it would continue for ever⁶ to help mankind to find their way on this earth in the face of an unknown or threatening future.⁷ Sometimes it was not so much finding one's way as insuring oneself or bouncing one's ideas off an external auditor— a kind of precursor of psychoanalysis.⁸ This is why intuitive (atechnos adidaktos) was separate from indicative divination (entechnos technike).

As house physician at Mount Olympus—if one can so describe the lofty conclave of the Greek gods—Apollo was also the god 2 of healing. This, too, was apt symbolism, as forecasting was accelerated by the rise of medical science.

I hold [wrote Hippocrates], that it is an excellent thing for a physician to practise forecasting. For if he discover and declare unaided by the side of his patients the present, the past and the future, and fill in the gaps in the account given by the sick, he will be the more believed to understand the cases so that men will confidently entrust themselves to him for treatment. Furthermore, he will carry out the treatment best if he knows beforehand from the present symptoms what will take place later. Now to restore every patient to health is impossible. To do so indeed would have been better even than forecasting the future. But as a matter of fact men do die, some owing to the severity of the disease before they summon the physician, others expiring immediately after calling him in—living one day or a little longer—before the physician by his art can combat each disease. It is necessary, therefore, to learn the natures of such diseases, how much they exceed the strength of men's bodies, and to learn how to forecast them. For in this way you will justly win respect and be an able physician. For the longer time you plan to meet each emergency the greater your power to save those who have a chance of recovery, while you will be blameless if you learn and declare beforehand those who will die and those who will get better.⁹

The most influential seer in Periclean Athens was Lampo, who advised the founder of the New Greek Colony of Thurii and was a sort of political pamphleteer.¹⁰ Other chresmologues were Onomacritus, who advised Xerxes, and Diopithes who tried to prevent Agiesilaus becoming King of Sparta. The most famous of such advisors was Plato, who paid three visits to Syracuse. In the interval he put forward his theory of ideas—that intelligible form of a thing exists outside the sense world of its actuality, and that the supreme idea was that of the Good. A state, quite unlike that under Dionysius in Syracuse, took shape in his Republic, one of a series of dramatic dialogues in which he put forth such general ideas in ideological concreteness. Now Plato's theory of forms depended on his mathematics. To him God was a geometer, and his insights into the structure of generations of individuals, indeed his provision of a special relationship between individuals as members of a living organism, suggested to a recent writer that:

The brilliant development in the physical sciences [in the twentieth century] has tended again unconsciously by its own dialectic to confirm the Platonic intuition of form and measure everywhere. The building bricks of nature—electrons, neutrons, etc.—are measured, are constant in nature, and this fact indicates cosmic control. The discovery by Moseley of atomic number—a series of atomic forms repeated in nature everywhere—is evidence of the cosmic architecture which would have delighted the soul of Plato. There is now also an indication of a life-number—a radiating pattern of life forms. This order, even more obviously than atomic number, has reference to time.¹¹

So side by side with the impetus from medicine and mathematics, legend fostered belief in prediction. Calchas, the wisest soothsayer among the Greeks at Troy, explained how long the war would last, but died, according to one legend, when he was outprophesied by another soothsayer Mopsus, whose maternal grandfather had prophesied that Thebes would be victorious against the seven. Blind from the age of seven, this grandfather had been given in compensation the power of prophecy which was to last for seven or nine generations. His name, immortalised for us by Tennyson, Swinburne, and T. S. Eliot, was Tiresias.

III THE SIBYL

So unimaginatively operated was the official soothsaying of the Romans that Cato the Elder imagined a hartdspex laughing if he met a colleague of the craft. Cato advised readers of his book on agriculture not to consult either a haruspex or an augur, much less the quacks and Oriental prophets that flooded Rome in his day— the harioli and Chaldeans.¹² The augurs, however, took themselves seriously. Cicero, speaking as one of the craft, argued:

. . . that there is no nation, whether the most learned and enlightened or the most grossly barbarous, that does not believe that the future can be revealed, and does not recognise in certain people the power of foretelling it.

It is an ancient belief [he continued in his De Divinatione], that there exists within mankind an undeniable faculty of divination. The Greeks called it mantike, the capacity to foresee, to know future events, a sublime and salutary act that raises human nature most nearly to the level of divine power.

Clues to the course of action to be adopted by the state were provided by the book of the Sibyl. This was a collection of rhymes attributed to a wise woman of Cumae, and was believed to have been purchased by King Tarquin. Meticulously preserved, they were invariably consulted by the Quindecemviri before any political move was made. All access to them was only on the order of the Senate, supplemented with the help of two officials with a knowledge of Greek. Destroyed by fire in 83 B.C., the Sibylline books were reconstituted after the Senate had sent special envoys to places possessing Sibylline writings to produce a more authoritative edition. This was then deposited in the vaults of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, becoming such a buttress of the established order that conspirators like Lentulus had to manufacture others to confute them. Such 'false' oracles, in acrostics, for safety's sake, had such a wide circulation that Augustus destroyed nearly two thousand volumes of them in 12 B.C. The original official books he had re-copied and deposited in his new temple of the Palatine Apollo. Later a similar inspection and re-editing was ordered by Tiberius.

The spectacle of Apollo dashing from shrine to shrine—Delphi, Colophon, Xanthus, Claros, Delos, or the Branchidae (a family of temple keepers), to give advice on future action to the many who consulted him, amused Lucian. As a result he wrote his True History: the inspiration of a new type of mock prophecy or satire: a foretaste of Gulliver's Travels.¹³

For by Plutarch's time, ad hoc expedients had hardened into meaningless rituals of divination. Indicative divination studied phenomena like birds (ornithomancy), phrases (cledonomancy), entrails (hieromancy), fire (pyromancy), water (hydromancy) mirrors (cataptromancy) or the lot (cleromancy) as manifest by dice or pebbles (astragalomancy), the swing of the pendulum (dactyliomancy), quotations on slips of paper (rhapsodomancy), or use of vessels of water (lecanomancy).¹⁴ Intuitive divination relied on divine possession. Mantike, a third category, consisted of the interpretation of dreams (oneiromancy) or evoking the ghosts of the dead (necromancy).

IV VIRGIL THE OPTIMIST

The first Roman to entertain a hopeful or Hebrew view of the future was Virgil. Before his time it was held that the world was declining from a gold to a silver, then to a bronze, and then to an iron age. Thus Horace wrote:

Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
Aetas parentum peior avis tuilit
Nos nequiores, max daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem;

and Juvenal:

Nona aetas oritus peioraque saecutla ferri
Temporibus, quorum sceleri non invenit ipsa
Nomen et a nullo posuit natura metallo.

But Virgil held to the Hebrew view that man's true perfection lay ahead of and not behind him. This led to Virgil's fourth eclo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Preface Page
• 1 The Mantic Heritage
• 2 Extravagance to Extrapolation
• 3 The Debate Begins: from Noble Savage to Last Man
• 4 The Gothic Imagination
• 5 The Other Side
• 6 Bellamy and the Mechanical Millenarians
• 7 Superman and the System
• 8 The Disenchanted Mechanophobes
• 9 Virgils of the Dynamo
• 10 Sectarian Scientism
• 11 Surmising Forums
• 12 Operational Eschatologies
• NOTES
• INDEX