Francis Bacon: The New Atlantis.
Kimberly Hurd Hale: Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in the Foundation of Modern Political Thought. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.
Francis Bacon follows in the wake of Machiavelli’s repurposing of political philosophy and of politics at the service of the mastery of Fortune animated by the desire for acquisition of rule. Bacon adds the indispensable ‘modern’ nuance: That this mastery must be achieved by means of the conquest of nature, which underlies the verdicts of Fortune. Men can effect the conquest of nature “for the relief of man’s estate,” as Bacon famously put it, by means of empirical experimental science, with which he would replace what he regards as the brilliantly misdirected efforts of Scholasticism, in its efforts to reconcile the speculative philosophy of Aristotle with the teachings of Scripture. Bacon rejects Aristotelian natural science and the spiritual content of Christianity while, as Hurd puts it, “co-opting” one element of Christianity, its “compulsion toward universal charity” as “essential for the acceptance of modern science by the public.” Bacon’s final book, The New Atlantis, sketches the portrait of a new regime dedicated to that (as moderns came to say) project.
In the body of his written works, Bacon wanted The New Atlantis to be placed immediately after his Sylva Sylvarum, a work on natural history. Uniquely among his writings, The New Atlantis is a fiction. It takes the natural science of the Sylva Sylvarum and ‘projects’ it into an imagined regime that deploys such science as both the purpose and the method of political rule.
The narrator describes a sea voyage from Peru, its intended destinations China and Japan. But the ship and its crew sailed at the mercy of the wind, of nature. Driven off course, they ran out of food; they prayed, and their prayers seemed to have been answered when they sighted land—a “good haven” occupied by “a fair city,” “not great indeed, but well built.” The inhabitants initially refused to permit them to land, instead sending a party of eight out to the ship. After interviewing them briefly, they permitted the crew to come ashore for sixteen days to resupply themselves with water and food and to obtain materials for repairing their vessel. It transpired that the city residents knew the classical languages and used Christian symbols on their official documents, a seeming combination of classical and Christian motifs that suggest the Scholastic intellectual horizon the European sailors knew, however dimly, from church in their native Spain. Acting in a spirit of reciprocity, the ship officers offered pistols as a sign of friendship, but the city man “took them not, and would scarcely look at them.” It will transpire that they possessed more impressive weapons of their own, and quite likely regarded the gesture as a bit like offering beads to ‘savages.’
Three hours later, another delegation arrived, asking the crew, “Are you Christians?” After having the shipmates swear they were not pirates, the city representative granted them permission to land. The eminent man in the boarding party expressed concern about any diseases the men may have and was reassured that any diseases they suffered were not infectious. He provided them with a fruit that evidently had medicinal properties. The same man refused the pistols the shipmates again offered, explaining that he already had a salary and did not want to be “paid twice.” Another man might say ‘bribed,’ but even the word seemed not to exist in the citizen’s usage. They were taken to the Strangers’ House, receiving a civil welcome from the townspeople who gathered along their route. Of the 150 sailors, seventeen were ill. During their three-day quarantine, they were fell fed; the sick men were given more of the medicinal fruits and a course of medication. During this initial period, the narrator, the captain of the ship, delivered a speech to his men, telling them to be on their best behavior, to “reform [their] own ways”—presumably, to restrain themselves from acting like sailors on shore. They “promised me to live soberly and civilly.”
The Strangers’ House has a governor, a Christian priest, who brought word that they had permission to stay six weeks, with the possibility of an extension of their stay. He told them that they were the first residents of the House in 37 years. In still another gesture of hospitality, the government would defray all their costs. He set down one prohibition: Do not go more than a mile and a half beyond the walls of the city without permission. The sailors wondered at “this gracious and parentlike usage.” “It seemed to us that we had before us a picture of our salvation in heaven, for we that were awhile since in the jaws of death were now brought into a place where we found nothing but consolations.” The men thought “we were come into a land of angels.” The city residents seemed both benevolent and superhuman to them, and they found themselves (it is implied) happily in the status of children under the welcome authority of wise, even godlike fathers. That is, instead of the usual adventurers’ tale of civilized men encountering savages, the narrative begins to look like the reversal of such, an instance of primitive Europeans ‘discovering’ a superior people
Hence the name of the city, Bensalem. Traditionally held to mean “possession of peace,” Jerusalem combines the Hebrew shalem, completeness, with jeru, ‘they will see the awe.’ Combined, then ‘Jerusalem’ means ‘they will see the completeness in awe.’ Zechariah 8:3 describes Jerusalem as the City of Truth, God’s dwelling-place on earth. ‘Bensalem’ combines completeness with the Hebrew word for ‘son,’ and so, ‘Son of Completeness.” Jesus of Nazareth is surely the Son of Completeness, and the sailors asked the priest/governor of Strangers’ House who their apostle was—who brought Christianity to this isolated island—he was pleased to tell the story. In 20 A.D., the islanders saw a “pillar of light” one mile offshore. One of “the wise men of the society of Salomon’s House” saw that this was the “Finger” of God, a miracle. He saw the Completeness in awe. God left the islanders an ark with both the Old and New Testaments in it; the New Testament hadn’t yet been written down for the churches in the West. There was also a letter from Bartholomew, a servant of Jesus Christ, promising “salvation and peace and good will from the Father and the Lord Jesus.” Each one of the diverse collection of islanders—they included Hebrew, Persians, and Indians—could read these documents “as if they had been written in his own language.” “And thus this land was saved from infidelity,” the governor concluded.
The sailors assured the governor that they thought of this “rather as angelical than magical,” godly not satanic. And they wondered how it is that the islanders know about Europe but Europeans know nothing of Bensalem. He explained that “three thousand years ago,” approximately 1,400 BC, ocean-going travel was much more extensive than it is today. Many nations visited the island, which may account for the origin of its ethnic diversity. At that time, Atlantis existed, as described in Plato’s Timaeus and Crito. Atlantis was located in what is now called America on a hill that could be ascended like a “ladder to heaven”; it had a temple and a palace. Its King, Altabin, was “a wise man and a great warrior.” The city perished in a deluge, which explains why the natives of North America today are “a thousand years at least from the rest of the world” in their civilization. Since Atlantis was the island’s chief trading partner, the islanders lost much of their commerce with the outside world while navigation declined in the other parts of the world, perhaps because they were ruined by wars or because they declined in “a natural revolution of time.”
In the ensuing centuries, the islanders maintained their navigational capabilities and resumed their shipping. But they preferred to “sit at home.” This policy was instituted by the wise King Solamona, who ruled about 1,900 years ago, approximately 300 B.C. Solamona was the lawgiver of Bensalem, “a divine instrument thought a mortal man.” That is, Bensalem’s laws were framed by a man named after Jerusalem’s proverbially wise king. In China, the prohibition against foreign travel has been “a poor thing and hath made them a curious, ignorant, fearful, foolish nation.” But Solamona’s policy has had a different effect because he ordained that any foreign visitors be treated so well that they would not want to return to their native countries. Only thirteen—the symbolic number of atheism—have done so, and “whatsoever they have said could be taken where they came but for a dream.”
Solamona also ordained the establishment of Salomon’s House, which contains a natural history that the original Hebrew Solomon wrote, lost to other nations. If this New Jerusalem is also the New Atlantis, it combines Christian wisdom with the wisdom of natural science, ascribed not to the Greeks but to a wise Hebrew. Salomona then founded the College of the Six Days Works,” dedicated to “the finding out of the true nature of all things”—advancing natural science beyond the bookishness that might have restricted it, had the new Solomon, Salomona, rested satisfied with merely conserving the knowledge of his namesake. [1] Nor was Salomona content to ignore any scientific discoveries in other parts of the world. He set a policy of sending missionary expeditions to be carried out by Fellows or Brethren of Salomon House. At any given time, three such persons will be voyaging abroad, gathering knowledge of “affairs and state” in other countries, with special interest in the sciences and the arts, particularly manufactures and inventions—what we now call the applied sciences or technology, a word that combines ‘art’ and ‘reason’ or knowledge. “Thus, you see,” the governor told them, invoking the ‘seeing’ of Jerusalem as it relates to ‘Solomonic’ natural science, “we maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor any other commodity of matter but only for God’s first creature, which was Light, to have light (I say) of the growth of all parts of the world.” Light is the first principle of nature. Understand the first principles of science as seen in scientific discoveries found everywhere (is nature not universal?) and you will maintain the advantages you received from possessing the only surviving account of Old Testament natural science and from the first available written version of the New Testament. Writing permits the Bensalemites to preserve what they have learned, while forging ahead with new research. Light also recalls the Pillar of Light, the supposedly miraculous Giver of the three sacred (but also natural) books, a miracle carefully interpreted by the Brethren of Solomon’s House.
“We were all astonished to hear so strange things so probably told,” the narrator recalls. “We took ourselves now for free men” (although in fact they were well restrained); we “lived most joyfully,” meeting with men of “such humanity and such a freedom and desire to take strangers, as it were, into their bosom as was enough to make us forget all that was dear to us in our own countries,” for “if there be a mirror in the world worthy to hold men’s eyes, it is that country.” That is, the Bensalemites’ policy of hospitality toward strangers—a seductive hospitality that makes strangers forget their homelands and to want to stay—alters the Platonic-Socratic notion of learning as ‘remembrance,’ learning described as a recollection of the ‘forms’ or ‘ideas,’ which men, sunk in their bodies and in the customs of their cities, have ‘forgotten’ and can only recover through a dialectical ascent from the ‘cave’ in which they can only see the shadows of physical idols on the walls, far from the natural light of truth. The forward-looking natural science of Bensalem proceeds by a forgetting of the political caves of the diverse sailors by the sailors. But would the sailors ascend to the light of truth sought by the Brethren of Solomon’s House? Or would they merely luxuriate in the benefits of the technologies discovered by the Brethren?
The Brethren culled two of the voyagers from the rest, inviting them to a ceremony called the Feast of the Family, “a most natural, pious, and reverend custom” which shows the nation of Bensalem “to be compounded of all goodness,” the narrator exclaims. All goodness consists, as he had already learned, of a reconciliation of natural science and religion, of the Solomon met in the Old Testament with the Solomon revealed in his lost book. A Feast of the Family, paid for “by the state,” is “granted to any man that shall live to see thirty persons descended of his body alive together, and all above three years old.” That is, the Feast rewards generativity, longevity, and healthy offspring—natural vigor. The Father of the Family, called the Tirsan, is attended by all family members. During the attendant ceremonies he serves as a judge, settling “any discord or suits between any of the family,” in keeping with shalem or completeness, a term reminiscent of shalom or peace. The governor of the city executes “by his public authority the decrees and orders of the Tirsan,” although these are seldom disobeyed, “such reverence and obedience” do the Bensalemites “give to the order of nature.” That is, the Bensalem regime’s combination of Biblical piety and natural science tends to make piety reinforce science. What Bensalemites ‘see in awe’ is the completeness of an island at peace, thanks to the wise application of scientific knowledge.
The Tirsan also designates one of his sons to live with him in the Tirsan’s house; the son’s title is “Son of the Vine.” That is, the practice of conventional aristocracies, primogeniture, inheritance of the father’s estate by the firstborn son, is replaced by the rational or quintessentially natural principal of choosing the son worthiest in his father’s judgment. The Son of the Vine is the son of nature, a natural version of a biblical Son of God. Perhaps nature replaces God in Bensalem? The Feast features a ceremonial hymn praising Adam and Noah, who peopled the world, and Abraham, Father of the Faithful; here, the Faithful duly celebrate natural generativity, and indeed the Bensalemites “say that the King is debtor to no man but for propagation of his subjects.” They add thanksgiving for our Savior. The Tirsan blesses his descendants, one by one, in the name of “the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, and the Holy Dove,” thereby combining natural, familial piety with Christianity, understood first of all as the rule of peace, of shalom.
After this, the narrator next met with Joabin, a Jewish merchant. It is noteworthy that the audiences granted to the voyagers moves from many to few to one. Jews, we learn, are left “to their own religion” in Bensalem. The Christianity of the city tolerates them, and why not? Solomon himself was a scientist, according to the book held at Salomon’s House. The graciousness is reciprocal. Unlike Jews elsewhere, Bensalemite Jews “give to our Savior many high attributes, and love the nation of Bensalem extremely.” That is, the Jews of Bensalem are Bensalem’s Jews, patriotic Bensalemites and admirers, if not worshippers, of Jesus. The narrator praised the Feast of the Family to Joabin, saying, “I had never heard of a solemnity wherein nature did so much preside.” This insight shows that the rulers of Bensalem have chosen well the man they’ve singled out for unique treatment. He understands the regime, at least on the simplest level.
For his part, Joabin praised Bensalem as the most chaste nation in the world in body and in mind. Here, as the narrator has witnessed, the natural family is indeed respected and fostered in the manner commanded by God. He criticized European brothels and marriage customs. In Bensalem, he said, there are no brothels, no homosexuality, and no polygamy. Joabin promised an opportunity to see not only a natural father but a Father of Salomon’s House, who was returning from a twelve-year voyage as one of the scientific (not proselytizing and religious) missionaries to foreign countries. The Brethren were evidently also Fathers—Brethren amongst themselves, ruling Fathers of the people? There is the nature of the body and the nature of the mind. Ordinary fathers are fathers of the body, generating offspring under the grateful eye of the King, ruling by choice, by reason, insofar as they judge intrafamily disputes and select their successor. The Brethren who are Fathers of the mind may have a far more comprehensive, complete, ‘shalem-ic’ status.
The returning Father did indeed invite the narrator to a private audience, after courteously meeting, then politely dismissing, the other foreigners. He began with a benediction and a promise: “God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have. For I will impart unto thee, for the love of God and men, a relation of the true state of Salomon’s House.” He outlined what he would say, “to make you know the true state of Salomon’s House,” repeating the last phrase for heuristic emphasis. God and love of God, love not merely of neighbor but of men, men everywhere, issue in knowledge, not so much knowledge of God or neighbors but (as will soon become known) of nature. Like Aristotle, the Father considered knowledge of a thing to entail knowledge of four causes: the ‘final’ cause or purpose of the thing (“the end of our foundation”); the ‘efficient’ or first cause (“the preparations and instruments we have for our works”); the ‘formal’ cause (“the ordinances and rites which we observe”). But in place of the ‘material’ cause—for example, the elements comprised in a compound—the Father substituted what might be called a ‘locomotive’ cause, the energy seen in the thing. For Salomon’s House, this consists of “the several employments and functions whereto our fellows are assigned.” The reason for this substitution can be seen in the purpose of Salomon’s House: “the knowledge of Causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” The Fellows of Salomon House intend to overcome material causes with human functions founded upon the human knowledge that can be acquired through intelligently directed human action. To use language Bacon uses elsewhere, they will experiment on nature, torture her to force her to reveal her secrets, conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate.
The locomotive causes of Salomon’s House are extensive. In deep caves (not natural but dug by men), “remote alike from the sun and heaven’s beams and from the open air,” they coagulate, indurate, refrigerate, and conserve bodies, produce new artificial metals, and even to cure some diseases, prolonging the lives of “some hermits who choose to live there.” They also experiment with soils and compound cements in the caves,” as “the Chineses do their porcelain,” although we have them in greater variety, and some of them more fine.”
Opposite this, the “Lower Region,” the Bensalemites had built the “Upper Region,” with its high towers, some set on mountains so that the highest extend three miles into the sky. These might recall the Tower of Babel, but unlike the systems of philosophy and perhaps of religion that center human intelligence on words, these towers also serve as sites of action, experiments in isolation, refrigeration, conservation, astronomical bodies and meteorological forces. The towers also have their resident hermits, “whom we visit sometimes, and instruct what to observe.”
Finally, there is the “Middle Region” of this man-made universe, not so much geocentric as anthropocentric. On it we have “great lakes both salt and fresh, whereof we have use for the fish and fowl” and for experimenting with the effects of earth, air, and water on “natural bodies.” We have desalinization and resalinization pools (surely of interest to the English, living on their island in the ocean). We also experiment with what much later generations would call ‘alternative’ energy: water power, wind power. They do experiments on chemicals—producing, among other things, the “Water of Paradise,” an elixir “very sovereign for health and prolongation of life,” along with medicines. Bacon’s mentor, Thomas Hobbes, identified the ruling passion of human beings as the fear of violent death. Salomon’s House aims at curing human bodies and, to the extent proven possible by experimentation rather than by prophecy or speculation, ‘curing’ or at least warding off death itself.
The Fellows also use the Middle Region agricultural experiments—for grafting and inoculating plants to cause them “to come up earlier or later than their seasons, and to come up and bear more speedily than by their natural course they do.” We also make them bigger, their fruits more appealing than they are naturally. “We have also have means to make divers plants rise by mixtures of earths without seeds, and likewise to make divers new plants differing from the vulgar, and to make one tree or plant turn into another.” That is, the Fellows of Salomon’s House have conquered the natural ‘kinds’ God ordains in the Garden, mastering the limits of nature. As for the animals, we keep them in “parks and enclosures…not only for view or rareness but likewise for dissections and trials, that thereby we may take light what may be wrought upon the body of man.” Godlike, we can resuscitate “some that seem dead in appearance.” We can kill, too, using the animals to test poisons “and other medicines.” Animals are useful to learn more about the techniques of surgery. As with plants, we can make them bigger or smaller, more fruitful or less, and we can produce new “kinds” of them, too. “Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand of what matter and commixture what kind of those creatures will arise.” Those saltwater and freshwater pools stocked with fish enable us to perform similar experiments on them.
The Fellows have learned to manipulate all the bodily senses. We stimulate taste with new drinks, breads, meats; we stimulate sight by altering light and learning about precious stones, fossils, and minerals. We can alter sound with several technologies, including hearing aids. We can appeal to the sense of smell with manufactured perfumes. Regarding the body as a whole, we conduct experiments on furnaces and other heating technologies and use engine houses for the development of submarines and flying machines. Nor do we restrict our experiments to mineral, vegetable, animal, and human matter. We address the mind in the mathematics house within the Salomon House complex and we also debunk the “deceits of the senses”—conjurors’ tricks and optical illusions. The Father hints that these are the real bases of so-called miracles. We could perform such illusions ourselves, but “we do hate all impostures and lies,” and have “severely forbidden” such activities to “all our Fellows, under pain of ignominy and fines.”
They don’t entirely reject impostures and lies, or at least concealments, when it comes to their foreign policy. Twelve Fellows are selected to voyage to foreign countries, in ships flying false colors to avoid identification of their origin. These men bring back books, abstracts, and plans of experiments from these places. “These we call the Merchants of Light”—perhaps in truth more like pirates, since there is no mention of any fair exchange for the materials gleaned, although I may be a reader of too suspicious a cast. This, at any rate, is Bensalem’s approach to commerce, which aims exclusively at what the Fellows of Salomon’s House consider the true riches, the riches of the human mind.
Meanwhile, back in Salomon’s House itself, there are those more ominously named “Depradators,” who collect records of the experiments culled from foreigners. The “Mystery Men” gather “all the experiments of all mechanical arts, and also of practices which are not brought into arts.” The “Pioneers or Miners” actually try these new experiments and the “Compilers” organize the data from the experiments, “to give better light for the drawing of observations and axioms out of them.” The “Dowry Men” or “Benefactors” consider these experiments, “cast[ing] about how to draw out of them things of use and practice for man’s life, and knowledge as well for works as for plain demonstration of causes, means of natural divinations, and the easy and clear discovery of the virtues and parts of bodies.” “Then, after divers meetings and consults of our whole number to consider to consider of the former labors and collections, we have three that take care, out of them, to direct new experiments of a higher light, more penetrating into nature than the former. These we call Lamps.” The “Inoculators” conduct the experiments so ordained. The Fellows avoid sinking into an exclusively ‘applied’ science by designating three of their number to “raise the former discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms.” These ‘theoretical physicists,’ as it were, are the “Interpreters of Nature.”
Salomon’s House thus has its carefully ordered regime. This includes not only the Fellows but also “novices and apprentices” who insure that “the succession of the former employed men do not fail.” That is, this regime has its own form of royal succession or aristocratic primogeniture, evidently based not on bloodlines but capability. There are many “servants and attendants, men and women.” All “take an oath of secrecy for the concealing of those which we think fit to keep secret, though some of those we do reveal sometimes to the state and some not.” If, someday, they were to learn how to split the atom and weaponize the energy released, the discoverers and inventors themselves would decide whether to share this knowledge with the day-to-day rulers of Bensalem. In this important sense, then, the Fellows of Salomon’s House rule Bensalem, constituting a sort of ‘deep state’ of natural philosophers or scientists.
The fourth, ‘formal’ cause of Salomon’s House, its ordinances and rites, consists of two exhibition galleries. In the first we exhibit “patterns and samples of all the more rare and excellent inventions”; in the second we exhibit statues of “all principal inventors” and discoverers, including “your Columbus,” who sailed from the narrator’s native Spain. In the Politics, Aristotle deprecates the practice of rewarding reformers of the laws and institutions of the polis. In The New Atlantis, the Father lauded not so much political reformers but ‘reformers’ of human knowledge. Since advances in human knowledge might lead to political reform or even revolution, the Fellows evidently take some care in selecting the knowledge they release to the ‘civilians.’ They visit Bensalem’s major cities, revealing “such new profitable inventions as we think good” and also declaring “natural divinations of diseases, plagues, swarms of hurtful creatures, scarcity, tempests, earthquakes, great inundations, comets, temperature of the year, and divers other things,” adding “counsel thereupon what the people shall do for the prevention and remedy of them.” Natural-philosophic revelation replaces divine revelation; natural prophecy replaces divine prophecy; natural providence replaces divine providence.
Not to seem to neglect piety, the Father mentioned “certain hymns and services” observed by the Fellows in which they praise and thank God “for his marvelous works,” asking also for “his aid and blessing for the illumination of our labors and the turning of them into good and holy uses.” One of those holy uses, the Father announced, concerned the narrator. “God bless thee, my son”—the narrator has been adopted—and “God bless this relation [i.e., this narrative] which I have made. I give thee leave to publish it for the good of other nations, for we here are in God’s bosom, a land unknown.” This marks an apparent change in Salomon House’s foreign policy. The Father thus deputized his new ‘son’ not as a merchant of light but a messenger of light, the light that emanates from the methods of experimental natural philosophy, with its reconception of both nature and of man’s place in it. There is no record that he gave the narrator a navigational chart whereby voyagers from other nations might come to visit Bensalem. And, given the careful policy of disseminating scientific knowledge firmly in place, the Father may not have worried much about other nations attacking or eventually dominating the greatest empire of knowledge in the modern world.
As Kimberly Hurd Hale remarks, in his attempt to coordinate theory and practice, natural philosophy and what we would call applied science, including technology, Bacon failed in the short term but succeeded (in many ways spectacularly) in the long term. As an experimental scientist, he didn’t amount to much, and although his “tenure as Lord Chancellor is perhaps the closest the world has come to witnessing a philosopher king,” he “attempt to guide the political development of England failed,” his reputation tarred by accusations of corruption. Nonetheless, “his political and philosophical influence resonate through the centuries,” far beyond the borders of England. Machiavellian politicians, builders of the modern state, aspirers to the mastery of Fortuna, found ready use for Baconian scientists, aspirers to the conquest of nature. In their turn, the scientists have found in the modern state protection for and support of their research. The symbiosis makes sense, as Bacon was a careful student of Machiavelli, (even as Hobbes was a careful student of Bacon, and Locke of Hobbes); in the spirit of modernity, no philosopher in this line left his predecessor’s work unrevised, and indeed Machiavelli himself was a careful student, and reviser, of ‘the ancients,’ whose “wisdom” Bacon himself extolled, with some irony.
Hale’s own innovation in scholarship is to claim that the New Atlantis, which “initially reads as a utopian tale,” actually serves as a warning against the possible excesses of “scientific rule,” a regime quite “removed from the type of society he advocates elsewhere.” The book, his only work of fiction, “expresses both his great hope and his deep reservations” about his own ‘project.’
Like Machiavelli, Bacon knows “that Christianity and Christian charity have irreversibly changed the world. Science offers a way to channel the charitable compulsions of Christian Europe into a less destructive path,” the path of religious warfare, which Europeans would continue to trod for several generations after Bacon’s death. If the mythical Atlantis described by the ancients ended in telluric catastrophe, the New Atlantis might not, if the natural forces which wiped out its forebear could be tamed, and if the religious forces that threatened to inundate could be made to subside. Hale contends that Bacon also thinks “that modern science could easily sink modern society beneath the seas,” that the modern solution to the theologico-political crisis of modernity might itself ignite an equal or worse crisis, which could only be managed by attending to the wisdom of the ancients, judiciously revised. As she puts it, “Bacon recognized that modern science would irreversibly change political society; the New Atlantis shows us what that society could become without a strong commitment to liberal principles,” including political liberalism or republicanism, “and philosophical questioning,” now primarily in the form of scientific experimentation.
Hale first looks as the old Atlantis, as sketched by Critias in Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. In the Timaeus, Socrates meets at night with Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates, along with an unnamed fourth person. Critias begins a speech about Atlantis, defeated long ago in a war with Athens. He “pauses for Timaeus to give a speech about the origin and nature of the cosmos” before resuming his speech in the dialogue named after him. “His speech concerns the structure and regime of the city of Atlantis”; Critias never gets around to narrating the war. Since Hermocrates never offers a speech, and since he played a role in the impending, disastrous war Athens waged against Hermocrates’ “native Sicily,” Hale suggests that the now imperial Athens military defeat, narrated by Thucydides, parallels the defeat of imperial Persia by the old Athens, the history narrated by Herodotus. Hermocrates’ ‘missing’ speech would be spoken by Thucydides, who “argues that stasis is impossible in politics,” even as it permeates nature, according to Timaeus’ speech. In his dialogues, Plato himself frequently “chang[es] the horizon and show[s] philosophy how to adapt to political reality in a way that allows it to shape political reality.”
Timaeus is no “true philosopher” but a knower, lacking “the erotic yearning toward truth” that animates the philosopher’s soul. He is at home in the polis, unlike Socrates, the persistent questioner. Timaeus is a lecturer, and Socrates here a listener, a learner who wants to hear speeches describing how the regime he outlined in his dialogue the Republic will look if it were realized in practice, and thus subjected to motion. If it must change, what will it change into? In the end, according to what we learn in the dialogues, it will turn into the regime described in the Laws, a regime less just but more “robust” than the regime of the Republic, which can be sustained only so long as it remains a ‘city in speech.’ The real, imperial Athens is about to endure a great motion—the greatest the world has ever seen, according to Thucydides—and it will not end as well as the regime of the Laws, with its more modest and realistic adjustments to the city in speech.
Critias, chronicler of the old Atlantis, is no Thucydides. He is a poet telling a traditional tale “passed down through his family from Solon,” the founder of Athens, not a philosophic historian narrating the events of a real war. “Critias embodies the love of one’s own,” the handed-down traditions of his own family and city, “that makes the Republic‘s city impossible,” as it identifies wisdom “with the memory of one’s own past, rather than philosophical striving,” identifying “the good with the old.” This is not simply to denigrate poetry. In telling the story of Atlantis, Solon tells a myth, the stuff of poetry; as a “consummate statesman,” Solon “does not disparage poetry” any more than Plato does, not only in packing his dialogues with such stories but in portraying the life of philosophical striving in dialogues, in dramas, not in treatises. “Poetry is extremely powerful, especially when woven with reason and truth,” as Bacon evidently understands in his own turn to storytelling about the new Atlantis.
Critias tells the story of Solon’s meeting with Egyptian priests. Although Solon initially “tries to impress the learned priests by reciting the events and genealogy of human beings after a devastating flood,” the priests deprecate this effort as childish because such natural disasters “erase vestiges of ancient ways.” The Greeks know how to rebuild, how to innovate, but they “need myths to teach them piety and prudence”; they “lack ancient wisdom,” which Egypt has retained—Egypt, the land of the changing, flooding Nile, but also of the prudent use of the Nile and its rhythms for agriculture. Plato takes the priests’ point. Not only Greeks, but most men everywhere need civic myths because they, like children, do not have “fully developed reason.” Therefore, “political philosophers,” as distinguished from the childlike natural philosophers who preceded Socrates, “must employ myths if they are to educate the city.” In this, however, he surpasses the Egyptian priests in prudence. The priests believe that their myths are historically true, that their “wisdom is knowledge of the historical past and truth is pure facts.” They describe the myth of Phaethon as symbolic of “the movement of heavenly bodies and the periodic outbreak of wildfires, while completely missing the lesson of the myth: those who seek to rule to prove their wisdom and excellence will cause the destruction of themselves and their societies.” Plato suggests that the priests’ “scientific analysis of myth” because “it ignores the larger truth conveyed by the myth and because scientific-philosophical discourse is devoted to discovering truth, and thus should not be used in the service of interpreting myths.” Natural philosophers or scientists are literal-minded, all too literal-minded, as “the literal truth or falsity of a myth is irrelevant” to the more important question of “whether or not the myth is helpful or harmful to the young” in years and the young in mind.
The natural philosophers of Salomon’s House diverge from both of these courses. Uninterested in educating their citizens in science, they “use their scientific understanding to create myths and miracles.” “There is no possibility of philosophic education in Bensalem,” Hale contends, although it would be more accurate to say that there is no possibility of a general philosophic education there, since someone has educated the Fathers of Salomon’s House. The Fathers are “both scientists and priests” who “do not merely regulate religion,” as the philosophers in Plato’s city in speech do, but “actively create it.”
Critias describes Atlantis as “an alliance of kings who rule over a wide-spread empire.” The Athens that defeats it is a self-governing polis whose statesmen make alliances with other Greek city-states on an as-needed basis—the foreign policy of the philosopher-kings of Plato’s city in speech. Athens defeated imperial Atlantis (even as the real Athens defeated imperial Persia), but both succumb to the overwhelming natural disaster, the flood. Critias, an aristocrat “who helped overthrow Athenian democracy,” hopes to “legitimize Socrates best regime by showing that not only could it exist, but a form of it has existed in the past,” in old Athens. Plato and his Socrates doubt it. Critias’ poetizing unrealism becomes obvious when he claims that the topic of war is more difficult to discuss than the origin of the cosmos, Timaeus’ topic. In upholding the love of his own, familial piety, he sharply departs from the Guardians in the city of speech, who don’t know their own children, hold their wives in common, unrealistically (because unnaturally) placing “civic virtue above love of one’s own.” He understands neither natural science nor Plato’s ironic political philosophy; he is unrealistic about nature as a whole and unrealistic in his interpretation of Platonic political philosophy, which produces a regime that Critias’ beloved Athens cannot embody, as Critias hopes, because no polis can ever embody it. Critias is no more a philosopher than Timaeus. He serves Plato’s purposes in showing “how a man inclined to politics and open to philosophy can become a tyrant,” a man who will overturn the democratic regime of contemporary Athens.
Critias’ Atlantis is a hereditary monarchy, prosperous, and dedicated to technological progress, which “ensured that they were twice as prosperous as if they had relied on the gods and nature alone.” Hale pauses to observe that too many harvests will deplete the soil, although she does not observe that the Bensalemite scientists have remedies for such hazards. She also observes that the Atlantean monarchs, “relentlessly progressive,” did “not seek stasis, unlike Bacon’s Solamona.” But does Bensalem’s founder really seek stasis, or rather controlled progress? At any rate, Critias holds that “human nature is not oriented to virtue, it is oriented to luxury,” and he worries that the slow inundation of virtue by the flood of naturally luxury-loving human beings must finally ruin a city. But he “fails to address the possibility of a regime that can cultivate virtue in the people.” “He seeks virtue, but he does not understand how virtue is achieved in political society.”
Hale suggests that Bacon sees and accepts Plato’s ironic teachings about utopias dreamed up by natural philosophers and politicians who get both nature and politics wrong. Unlike Aristotle, “Plato does not argue that men are political animals; men form political associations because nature does not fulfill all their needs. Anti-Aristotelian, but Platonic Bacon’s attempt to overcome nature in the service of human progress is merely an extension of this idea.” But is it? Would Plato, or Plato’s Socrates, or Plato’s Athenian Stranger, regard the project of overcoming nature scientifically, with a new form of natural philosophy, as any more plausible than the attempt to overcome, as distinguished from moderating, nature in the city in speech’s quest to fully instantiate the idea of justice? Granted, that “the ideal city of the Republic will always be misunderstood and corrupted by political men seeking to glorify themselves or their cities”; granted, that “philosophers are always in danger of aiding tyrants”; granted, that “a political philosophy that understands these dangers can be found” in Plato’s account of Atlantis. The question Hurd wants to answer in the affirmative, that such a political philosophy can also be found in Bacon’s account of the old and especially the new Atlantis, is the one to which she now turns.
“Bacon does not disparage the Christian virtue of charity; he rather reinterprets it to support a much more robust, self-interested Christianity,” one fully consistent with the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Like Machiavelli and the Tudor dynasty of his own time, Bacon “approves of a Christianity that is molded to serve the best interests of the political state.” He will ‘nationalize’ Christianity, divide and conquer it, while at the same time replacing Christian Aristotelianism with the “new learning.” (“He vehemently opposes the Schoolmen.”) In this, “his project is far more comprehensive, more ambitious, than that of Machiavelli,” the “scope of his imperial ambitions” far wider. Machiavelli would master Fortuna; Bacon would master nature. Also unlike Machiavelli, Bacon would not attempt to wipe out the regimes of ‘the few’ in favor of regimes of the one or the many. He wants “a highly structured class society, one where philosophers serve as the educators and advisors of princes.” He will replace the old aristocracies of Catholic priests and feudal grandees with a new aristocracy of natural philosophers. Although at times Hurd describes Bacon as a republican, he is no James Madison, no democratic republican. He wants aristocratic republics, ruled by a new aristocracy. Bacon understands that “science, a wholly undemocratic enterprise, is forever beholden to the public for support and resources. Public opinion matters in scientific research; therefore, it is essential that scientists study the public,” develop a new political science, lest they suffer the fate of Socrates.
Bacon therefore regarded dissimulation as “the mark of a wise statesman.” A philosopher-statesman might then turn to poetry, “a product of imagination,” as the mode “best suited to make the harsh truths of political life palatable to society.” As Bacon teaches in his Advancement of Learning, some things are secret because they’re hard to know, others because “they are not fit to utter.” “Wisdom without rhetorical skill is useless for those engaged in public life”; the existence of a public requires publicity—in any regime, no matter how many or how few rule it. In this, he resembles the God of the Bible and His Solomon, who wisely work invisibly, but also Plato. Even while making his “break from the ancients” he uses “tools he learned from Plato,” very much including the practice of poeticizing harsh philosophic lessons. Further, with his experimental science he proposed a sort of neo-Socratism, confessing knowledge of his ignorance while insisting that the experimental “torture” of nature, making her reveal her secrets, will advance knowledge far more effectively that Socratic dialectic, which shares the ‘verbalism’ of the Scholastics even as it rejects their claim to encyclopedic knowledge, “replacing dialectic with induction.” Experimentation goes beyond induction, however, by torturing nature to compel her to reveal her secrets. This isn’t far removed from mastering Fortuna by beating her down, one might add. Bacon proposes to combine Socratic inquiry with a decidedly Machiavellian ’empiricism’ and ambition. This nonverbal core of reality will be coated with soothing and even inspiring words. In this way he can rival religious teachings by the same appeal to the imagination the Bible and Christendom’s many great poets deploy. “Poetry, when grounded in solid reason and utilized by careful philosophers, can be a powerful aid to science.”
“Providence” may be “man’s ability to mimic God’s power and manipulate natural law to the point of altering human nature.” In doing so, “Bacon collapses the ancient distinction between techne and wisdom.” In his Wisdom of the Ancients, Bacon re-tells the story of Daedalus, suggesting that “envy can be neither controlled nor exploited in the service of progress.” This evidently contradicts the teaching of the New Atlantis, which has the fellows of Salomon’s House treating one another as colleagues in both their research and their ruling of the general population through the putative rulers. This indicates “that a society such as Salomon’s House is simply not feasible. Scientists are human, and possess a human nature.” One might wonder, however, for how long they will possess such a nature. Might they not experiment upon themselves? Make themselves more like the God whose providence they intend to usurp? Hurd insists that “Bacon’s plan, unlike that of the Bensalemites, does not require the forcible or involuntary alteration of ordinary citizens,” much less alteration of the scientists themselves. Rather Hurd considers the science of Salomon’s House to be “a deliberately unrealistic portrait of scientific achievement,” one that, “unfortunately, many of Bacon’s intellectual heirs failed to recognize” as “impossible” to realize. “Bacon cannot be responsible for our own failure to appreciate his warning.”
“The uncertainty of all knowledge, including scientific knowledge,” which is in principle perennially revisable, “helps explain the necessity of liberalism for Bacon’s project.” “Liberalism prevents tyranny enacted in the name of ‘truth.'” It also sets scientists free to pursue the truth wherever their experiments lead them. Hence, Hurd argues, Bacon’s approval of Joabin. As a merchant, Joabin participates in international trade and its attendant “dissemination of information.” Hurd holds such trade inconsistent with the Salomon House Fathers’ careful control of information. Bacon thus “shows us…that modernity must be constantly vigilant; science can be tempered by liberty, but a tendency toward despotism may be unavoidable.” To counter this, “an adjustment of Bacon’s project is the only hope for political philosophy,” which must “reclaim our contemplative philosophy by engaging in contemplative philosophy.” Yet Joabin poses no threat to the Bensalemite regime in the eyes of that regime. He says and does nothing to undermine it. “Bacon’s revolution may have humanitarian aims, but it is not humanitarian at its core.” If not, then why is his picture of Bensalem a warning from Bacon? Granted, it may serve as a warning to those who do not share his philosophic purposes.
Hale therefore proceeds to a consideration of the text itself, in an attempt to show that Bacon imbeds such a warning in it. She begins by examining “the structure and working of the ruling institution” in Bensalem, Salomon’s House. “If I am correct in surmising that Bacon wishes to indicate Bensalem as a false utopia rather than a model society, then the evidence must be present in the life of Bensalem’s citizens.” “How well [do] the scientists understand political rule and how capable” are they “of shaping a robust regime”?
If most visiting sailors in Bensalem, including these, remain there, forgetting their homes and families like the Lotus eaters of the Odyssey, does that mean Bensalem is bad (as Homer evidently thinks of the Lotus eaters’ condition) or good? Hale says it is bad, claiming also that Bacon thinks so, too. “If the Bensalemites are living in a state of oblivion, their society will be stable but it will also be devoid of any individual liberty or classical virtue,” at least among the ‘civilians.’ “Political scientists” typically regard “the best society” as a balanced combination of “stability, power, and individual liberty.” “If Bacon is to be taken seriously as a political thinker, one must assume that his perfect society would strive toward this elusive balance,” as Bensalem surely does not. This is a humane and reasonable judgment, but why must we assume that Bacon concurs? Does Bacon want to be taken seriously as a political thinker by us on any other terms but what seem to be his own?
Hale accurately recounts the history of Bensalem, cut off from the rest of the world initially not be its own choice but by telluric catastrophe. Under those new conditions, Bensalem chose isolation from the rest of the world. “Bensalem chose political stasis,” a choice made “by their most celebrated king, Solamona.” Solamona did decreed change, changes wrought by the natural philosophers of Salomon’s House. These would be carefully introduced to the lower orders of Bensalemite society in accordance with the judgment of those philosophers. Hale expects that political science, controlled by the philosophers, might also change the regime, over time. So it might, but again that will be determined by the philosophers; they are, after all, scientists, who insist on rigorously controlled experimentation. If so, Hale observes, “the people [will] not have become more philosophically enlightened.” Indeed not, but does that trouble Bacon? “The attempt to force a static politics and conquering science to coexist is a powerful indication that Bensalem’s project will fail” because he inserts “an independent, obscure government” into the regime. But how independent is it? It seems to be under the thumb of the philosophers. Will they “independent” governor or governors eventually rebel against the philosophers, as the Guardians might someday do in the regime of Plato’s Republic? Perhaps so, but does Bacon want them to? And, if Baconian natural philosophy, undergirding Baconian political science, is as effective in merging theory and practice as Bacon evidently wants it to be, will Bensalem not continue to look more like a much more efficient form of contemporary communist China than like contemporary England? And if, as Hale argues, Bacon indicates elsewhere a sympathy for republicanism, what kind of republicanism does he want? Commercial republicanism, to be sure, but democratic? Or ‘aristocratic’/scientific? Or even a ‘mixed-regime’ republic, with the few enjoying substantially more authority per person than the many? To put it another way, as much as Bacon may prefer Plato to Aristotle, Plato no more understands philosophy in terms of experimental science than Aristotle does.
Hale excellently brings out the religious side of Bensalem, with its revisions of Christianity. The sailors ran out of food in six months, having provisioned themselves for a year—a result of poor planning, lack of self-control, or perhaps their inability to control nature, if they were becalmed or thrown off course. They offer prayers to God, who, as Hale notes, “showeth his wonders in the deep,” in the oceans, according to Psalm 107. “If man is to imitate God, as the scientists of Salomon’s House intend, he must have similar power.” As far as the sailors are concerned, Bensalem comes close enough, rescuing them from death. “The Christianity of Bensalem is a practical Christianity,” and the sailors are ready converts to it. The narrator of the story evidently numbers among them, and the Fathers of Salomon’s House think so, too, designating him as the one who did not escape to tell thee, dear reader, but who was released to tell thee.
Practical Christianity, Hale acutely observes, may be seen in the garments worn by the governor of the Strangers’ House, where the sailors first stay. “Dressed in blue, with a white turban bearing a red cross,” he would have been immediately recognizable by Bacon’s readers as wearing the colors of “the flag of St. George, worn by English Crusaders” in their mission “to spread Christianity and European hegemony throughout the world.” “The governor is no mere state official, however. He is by office the governor and by vocation a Christian priest. This mixture of political authority and religious importance brings to mind Thomas More, whose Utopia serves as a foil for Bacon’s New Atlantis.” Under Bacon, as under the Machiavellian Tudors, the modern state will institute an established church independent of More’s Catholic Church; that church will become part of a new ‘church militant,’ the ‘church’ of modern science. The new religion preaches “brotherly love and the good of the sailors’ souls and bodies,” aiming to “alleviate suffering and poverty, which will enable ordinary people to better serve their church and king.” As Hale puts it, with a touch of irony, “If science can provide physical comfort to the public then the public will see science as a tool of God”; under such circumstances, “the idea of ‘doing God’s work’ takes on a slightly different meaning.” Indeed so.
And so, as Hale rightly says, the Feast of the Family rewards procreation not virtue, materialism not spirituality. “There is no apparent harmony between the intellectual scientists and the constantly breeding populace.” None, apparently, but then perhaps there is, from the standpoint of the natural scientists. After all, who built those immense caverns and towers, those wide pools, those grand implements of scientific experimentation? If “the state sets the rules for the Feast, funds the Feast, and lends its authority to the enforcement of the father’s wishes,” then “the whole idea of the Feast is a mockery of the natural order of the family” and the “happiness” that serves as both “a justification and a moral grounding for the boundary-pushing science conducted by Salomon’s House” departs substantially from Christian joy or happiness as understood by Aristotle. Machiavelli is more than willing to depart, to set sail for other shores. Is Bacon?
Hale finds in the name of the friendly merchant Joabin an allusion to Joab, King David’s nephew “and an important captain of David’s army.” Joab turns away from vengeance against David’s rivals in the house of Saul, “relinquishing his claim to revenge” and thereby “enabl[ing] David to unite Israel. That is, under the Bensalem regime, Jews have reunited with Christians under the auspices of the new ‘Christianity.’ Although “Joabin’s status as a merchant” may or may not “mark him as a member of the ruling class of scientists,” as Hale argues, he, and the commerce he practices, are aligned with the regime of the scientists, claiming that it was Moses, “by a secret cabala,” who “ordained the current laws of Bensalem,” despite the overarching story that Bensalem’s lawgiver was Salomona. Such, perhaps, are the ways of reconcilers.
Joabin’s teaching on marriage and chastity conforms to the regime of the new Jerusalem in which the teachings of Moses and Jesus have been redirected to new purposes. “The foundation of Bensalem’s chastity depends on self-regard,” not on regard for God. Bensalemites regard chastity as “a vice in relation to its consequences,” not “the body is a work of God and must be treated as a temple,” as “borrowed property.” “Bensalem has taken the morality of Christianity to heart, while dispensing with the cosmological motivations behind the moral code,” to say nothing of the spiritual motivations. Bensalemite chastity requires the improvement of human nature by scientific methods, not by the work of the Holy Spirit. Hale thinks that the need for rearing children puts a limit on such ‘improvement.’ “Bacon’s acknowledgement of the insurmountable bonds between parent and child,” seen in the Feast of the Family, “is an admission that all of nature cannot be conquered.” But need it be, if the core of Bacon’s project, including a new regime to go with the new philosophy and the new religion, is to be instituted? “It seems clear that a people consumed solely with the production of children at the expense of the state will not be capable of self-government.” Unquestionably so, but does Bacon’s republic, as distinguished from Madison’s republic, entail self-government among any but the few? It is indeed the case that “Salomon’s House is the defining feature of Bensalem’s society,” its ruling body par excellence.
How does it rule? Primarily by satisfying the differing desires of the few and the many. “Either the threat of coercion and memory of past coercion are enough to keep the citizens of Bensalem orderly, or the scientists of Salomon’s House have managed to alter human nature”—purging it of “pride, jealousy, ruthlessness or simple stubbornness,” promoting peaceful order but also eradicating the “dynamic competition that lies at the heart of political life” and, Hale maintains, “incapable of defending itself culturally and militarily against a society guided by intelligent self-interest and civic virtue.” For the latter task, “Salomon’s House needs a political scientist in its midst” (“I believe that person to be Joabin”) but this will not bring Bensalem to resemble “the enlightened, rational, secular society envisioned by the founders of the modern scientific project.” This is undoubtedly correct. Bacon is no democratic republican and therefore no ‘Enlightenment’ man in the sense propounded by European intellectuals in the next century. Will it be able to defend itself against such societies? Hale doubts it, although at present “Salomon’s House is a stronger military force than Europe, and will not tolerate European aggression.” The issue would depend upon the maintenance of decisive technological superiority over any rival or set of rivals. Such superiority might be military, but it might also be seductive, Lotus-eating appeals to visiting envoys.
A Father of Salomon’s House enters the part of the city where the narrator and the other sailors are staying, either returning from abroad or simply coming down from Salomon’s House. He enters on horseback, reaffirming his superiority to all who see him. Dressed in garments and carrying implements denoting religious authority, he is followed by the officers of the trade guilds; “Salomon’s House incorporates both religion and trade into its scientific endeavors.” Hale charges that the presence of such oligarchs, who “organize complaints against the government and establish common pricing and standards,” amounts to “an acknowledgment that economic injustice, or at least economic conflict, is present in Bensalem’s economy.” Their presence, and the general orderliness of Bensalem society, also suggests that these complaints are resolved. Hale asks, “the people are well-fed, but are they happy?” Even if “happiness for many people could very well be comprised of physical comfort and relaxed sexual mores,” but there evidently remains nothing of “the longing for the rare, the beautiful, and the great,” at least among those who are not natural scientists. “Bacon’s tale shows what unregulated science can accomplish, and it also hints at what is lost in such a world.” This begs the question, does Bacon mind? If ordinary people are satisfied, and the extraordinary among them rise to fellowship in Salomon’s House, is Bacon content with that regime?
The Father’s speech to the narrator begins with a promise to reveal “the true state of Salomon’s House,” its regime. The purpose of the regime is not to glorify God, as the Governor of the Strangers’ House had claimed, but to know the causes and secret motions of things in order to “enlarg[e] the bounds of Human Empire to the effecting of all things possible.” While “Plato expresses wonder at an incomprehensible whole,” Bacon “rejects the idea of incomprehensibility altogether,” collapsing “Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge.” Given this task, especially given the experimentalism it entails, and given the fact that “Bacon could not know where modern technology might lead,” either the Father “has too much assurance in his ability to control science” or “his absolute political control makes science less dangerous.” Since “science in a republic is a very different creature than science in a monarchy,” and “capitalism likewise drastically changes the way technology will be used,” Hale doubts that such control will be possible. Again, this depends upon the nature of the republic—specifically, upon how democratic it is. There is no indication that it is anything but aristocratic. As Hale later states, Salomon’s House resembles a modern scientific version of the Nocturnal Council described in Plato’s Laws.
Salomon House’s substantial control over nature enables the natural philosophers to attempt to replace God by empowering them to prolong life indefinitely, thereby increasing their authority over the many, less inclined to risk death in rebellion if human rulers are the sources of their hope for perpetual life. The natural philosophers, like God, can rule minds as well as bodies, “choos[ing] to share what to share with the public and with the government” and are “very effective in deceiving human senses.” The natural philosophers can even “create life out of nothing, the ultimate challenge to God’s authority.” Indeed, they can simulate life, including human life, having designed robots, a point that leads Hale to “wonder about the strangely affected behavior of the people of Bensalem.” Is Bensalem animated not by a noble lie but an ignoble lie? Can the natural scientists “guard against the lie in their own hearts”? “The evidence suggests that the scientists of Salomon’s House think man can be God’s equal, practically speaking.” Hale does grant Bacon superiority over many of his successors. “Truth is not an unmitigated good and technology cannot be allowed to proliferate without guidance. This is the essential point of Bacon’s thought that is missed by modern science.”
Having learned all this, “the narrator kneels before the Father,” who adjures him to spread the good news of modern natural philosophy to the world. The narrator, if not Hale, is a convert. But why would a modern natural philosopher want to exercise such charity toward his subjects, let alone foreigners? “Perhaps it is as simple as the compulsion to put knowledge into practice.” After all, “the pursuit of scientific knowledge and the knowledge of their power,” taken together, “are the sources of their pleasure.” This, Hale says, obscures the “future tyranny inherent in modern science.” She considers the Bensalem regime and the fate of its people “tragic,” its tragedy potentially “the tragedy of England if thinkers like Bacon do not rise to the occasion” and warn of the dangers of such a regime, and if “the terrible potential of technology and charity cannot be controlled” despite the “best efforts” of such thinkers. She doesn’t believe it can be controlled, once Bensalem “is exposed to the outside world” and the natural philosophers can no longer “control the flood of information to the people.” “Bacon’s tale demonstrates how carefully English scientists must foster liberty, while still seeking to persuade the public about the virtues of science. His plan only works if two conditions are met. First, science must be virtuous. Second, the people must be able to recognize virtue when they see it.” Warrants for pessimism, indeed, whether Bacon actually advocates or expects the advent of a democratic form of republicanism as the consequence of modern natural philosophy.
Accordingly, Hale devotes a chapter to sketching the effects of Bacon’s philosophy on “his closest successors.” The young Thomas Hobbes knew Bacon, sharing his intention “to use modern science to improve the comfort and security of man.” Hobbes does much more to describe the political institutions of a modern, centralized state, his “mighty Leviathan”—a “liberal” or commercial monarchy, not a republic, liberal in its political economy if not in its political form. Founded in 1660, England’s Royal Society resembles a Salomon’s House but without the political ambitions. Although ‘the moderns’ have adopted Baconian science, “modern political society did not follow the course hoped for by Bacon.” This was especially the case in France, as “few movements in modern political history express the great hope and great danger of the Enlightenment more clearly than the French Revolution,” preceded by the philosophic thought of the marquis de Condorcet (to say nothing of the marquis de Sade) who eventually fell victim to the Jacobin Terror. The Jacobins were too impatient, lacking the patience of the true scientists’ experimentalism. “Condorcet and his fellows could into control the beast they created,” having divorced Baconian science from what Hale takes to be Baconian philosophy in its ‘politic’ dimension. One might add, more specifically, that the philosophes were egalitarian to a degree Bacon would not admit and, very much to her credit, Hale does acknowledge this: “While Bacon hinted at science’s compatibility with republicanism, Condorcet attempts to make science democratic,” its progress “eventually lead[ing] to total enlightenment and the perfection of human nature.” She then takes that back, remarking that “Condorcet acknowledges that science cannot be democratic, especially in a large society.” Perhaps she means that the natural philosophers will undemocratically lead the way to democracy, rather as Marx holds out proletarian dictatorship as the means to the future abolition of all socioeconomic classes. This would be consistent with another of Condorcet’s proposals, familiar to our own contemporaries: “an international association…formed to pursue things like a universal language” and similar ‘good works’—a Salomon’s House writ large. Hale has her doubts. As she politely remarks, “Even among allies, the idea that sovereign nations would forgo the economic and military benefits stemming from such research clearly indicates that Condorcet is working from a conception of human nature unfamiliar to any previous thinker.”
What prevails today? “Natural science is now almost wholly based in experimentation, while political philosophy has so lost sight of the question of the nature of the whole that its students can barely understand the actions and consequences of science. Philosophers cannot effectively guide the political regulation of scientists, because philosophers have either accepted science’s primacy or refuse to accept science’s intractability.” Bacon’s successors have “failed to grasp how comprehensive and careful the reform of philosophy and politics had to be.” “Condorcet and his contemporaries attempted to overthrow the old society in the name of science; they dismissed Bacon’s warnings about the dangers of unmooring society from tradition,” of despising the religious rites and symbols the Fathers of Salomon’s House take such care to preserve. “Bacon’s successors could not keep his project anchored in tradition and the lessons of Plato’s philosophy, too seduced by the promise of modern technology to heed his warnings,” too unready to use Bacon’s “decidedly unscientific tool, namely poetry,” humanely to conceal the harshness of modern science even as it is deployed to alleviate human suffering. “Affecting political policy without compromising genuine philosophical questioning,” including self-questioning and self-rule, “requires extraordinary rhetorical skill.” “Bacon possessed such skill,” but do we?
Note
- For an example of a learned man in an almost exclusively ‘bookish’ university, see Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.
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