On the Failure of Scientific Prophecy

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Arthur C. Clarke, Failure, Prophecy, science, science fiction, Technology, The Sentinel

Continuing an earlier discussion of the cultural and religious hopes placed on technologies, a few thoughts inspired by a recent re-reading of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1983 short-story collection The Sentinel, which contains stories written from 1946 to 1979:

Outside of the clear and simple pleasure of watching a master doing what he does best (and my criticisms here aside, Clarke was a master of hard science fiction, undoubtedly one of the all-time greats), what strikes the reader (at least this reader) about this early collection is Clarke’s persistent tendency to overestimate both the significance of new technological developments and the pace of scientific advancement.  Even the simplest developments hold the power to alter the world fundamentally, and almost always for the better.

To take but a single example, in the gripping and disquieting story ‘Rescue Party’, the development of the helicopter brings about the end of almost all the great cities, which seems laughable decades later (indeed, when faced daily with the average automobile driver’s lack of skill and discretion, the thought of the helicopter as ‘universal transportation’ is enough to cause nightmares). Since the story was written in 1946, urbanisation has continued apace and more and more rural land is dedicated to massive farming and ranching operations built on the model of heavy industry, with all of the environmental and social costs that this threatens. Far from the rural idyll that the helicopter brings to the Earth in ‘Rescue Party’, the helicopter remains of limited use and did little or nothing to curb the explosive growth of the cities which began with the Industrial Revolution and has continued with only a few and rather minor counter-trends, and these are confined largely to the Anglo-European world and the wealthier of its colonies.

Viewed from the vantage point of Clarke’s eternal post-World War II optimism, the future for scientific development is bright.  Clarke simply assumes for the sake of these stories that the exploration of space would continue and that progress towards the planets was inevitable.  It would also be accomplished by very little conflict and even less bloodshed.  The solar system was as ripe for exploration and colonisation as the New World was centuries earlier.  On this point, for all of his vision, Clarke was perpetually blinded by his British colonial ideologies, whether he was aware of them or not.  This is crystal clear in the story ‘Songs of the Distant Earth’ (and to a lesser extent ‘Breaking Strain’), which re-enacts the British encounter with the South Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which subtly but unmistakably reinforces the myth of history as progress.

This, it turns out, is a symptom of a larger problem with the stories in The Sentinal.  At the same time that he is making huge, counter-intuitive leaps about the effects of new technologies, Clarke’s view of culture and history is strangely anaemic.  This particular blindness, in which Clarke is by no means alone among science-fiction writers, is coupled with a curious lack of imagination in the cultural and social sphere.  For he is unable to imagine a world that is fundamentally different from our own, or at least the world as Clake saw it from the former British colony of Sri Lanka, where he spent much of his life.  The Sentinel‘s stories exist in a future that looks a good like the present.  The sense of cultural, political, and economic inertia present in these stories is stunning. Clarke imagines little political upheaval and fails to anticipate developments such as the end of the Soviet Union only two decades after the last story here was written.

Clarke’s tendency towards prophetic hyperbole is thus rooted in his failure to understand that technology is at least partially cultural. Clarke’s failure, then, beside his blind belief in the inherent value of technological development, is his inability (or his simple refusal) to understand that technology, quite removed from its scientific side, is also immersed in human culture, which influences and even determines its use and reception.  Given that the Clarke who wrote The Sentinel – and Clarke was a complex, sometimes contradictory man wrote or co-wrote literally hundreds of books and stories which do not add up to a fully coherent ideology of philosophy of history – can not imagine a world without the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, consumer capitalism, and an independent mass media, his view of technology was similarly limited.

He also imagines that governments will continue to fund science for the sake of science, though he does realise that at least some of the motivation behind the golden age of space exploration was political and military.  This prediction, which is never made explicit but is present in each and every story in the collection, has also failed to materialise, largely given the limited resources governments now give to pure science and the ever more persistent demand that science and technological development serve some kind of purpose – usually economic – rather than serving the interests of disinterested knowledge.  Clarke fails to anticipate the cultural and economic forces that have brought space exploration to a near standstill or limited it to uninspiring and wasteful projects like the International Space Station. According to the timeline Clarke imagines in 2001, and in the story ‘The Sentinel’, which provided the kernel of the larger novel, there was to be permanent bases on the moon in place by the mid 1990s.  Instead, the Apollo programme has been relegated to a footnote in Cold War history ripe for re-appropriation in popular culture texts like Michael Bay’s jingoistic, neo-fascist film Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Clarke on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Given Clarke’s often dismissive attitude towards organised religion – see Childhood’s End and The Fountains of Paradise for examples – his failure to acknowledge the failures of scientific prophecy is all the more striking. It also highlights the similarities between placing one’s hopes in the next step in scientific development and placing one’s hopes in the great coming of a saviour figure – as in Christianity, messianic Judaism, some forms of Buddhism, and countless other traditions – who will interrupt the course of history and bring about a new and better world.  Over the course of The Sentinel, Clarke simply ignores the marginal predictive value of his persistent overestimation of the power and significance of incremental scientific developments.  When one prophecy fails, he simply moves on to another tale of the partial redemption of the world by a new technology while never addressing the previous failure (it is worth noting that he did get some things – many things, in fact – right, including his invention of the concept of the geosynchronous communications satellite).

By simply ignoring the failures of his prophetic imagination, Clarke reminds me irresistibly of those Christians who have been convinced that the apocalypse was just around the corner (just as the gospels claim that Jesus promised some two millennia ago), despite the fact that this prophecy has been failing over and over again for centuries.  The fact that technology has failed time and again to live up to its promises, like so many religious prophecies, that it has failed to bring about greater social and economic equity, something we were promised would happen with the arrival of the printing press, the steam engine, the railroad, electricity, the telegraph, photography, the cinema radio, television, the personal computer, and, most recently, the Internet (or Web 2.0, which was to save us – again – from the inequities of the earlier technologies), is in itself interesting.

What is more interesting, at least in the context of religious prophecy, is how immune this belief in technological salvation is to historical realities and the complexity of human culture.  This points to a persistence of belief that is structurally very similar to the continued rationalisations of failed religious prophecy.  Even if Hal Lindsey’s identification of events in the 1970s and 1980s with the events of the Book of Revelation failed to accurately predict the beginnings of the end of times, this does not stop millions of people from believing precisely the same thing about more recent world events.

This is not a coincidence, of course, given how the structures of the Christian narrative of history persist and are transformed in the narratives of modernity, particularly in secular eschatologies like those of classical Marxism, the National Socialists, and all of those people that believe that technology is going to save us.  The real question I have here is how to begin to think more rationally about the true capabilities of science and technology, especially when the potential of both is limited so clearly and so persistently by economics and politics.  If someone like Arthur C. Clarke can get things so clearly wrong, why do we persist in waiting for the next technology, the one that is going to save us? Why do we continue on as if this were an inevitable fact?  I think some of this might be because most people, like Clarke, and unable to imagine a world that is truly, fundamentally different from our own.

In practical, this-worldly terms, if we are waiting for the arrival of that magical machine that will save us from all of our follies (many of them, of course, technological, like the internal-combustion engine) without coupling this with a serious and sustained effort to change the cultures that surround this anticipation and make it bear the burden of a dark and difficult future, we would be just as well to be waiting for Jesus (or Maitreya, the Buddha of the future in many schools of Mahayana Buddhist thought), who is coming along soon.

Any day now …

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J.N. Darby’s End-Times Family Tree: Is Dispensationalism from the Bible or Evangelical Tradition?

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Cyrus Scofield, Dallas Theological Seminary, David L. Cooper, dispensationalism, Gog, Hal Lindsey, J.N. Darby, John Nelson Darby, John Walvoord, Late Great Planet Earth, Left Behind, Lewis Chafer, Rayford Steel, Tim LaHaye, Tribulation

In his 1970 work, The Late Great Planet Earth, Hal Lindsey claims that the complex system of dispensationalism he professes simply ‘falls out’ of a plain reading of the Bible; it requires little theological education and no knowledge of the dispensational theories of others – though he is quick to assure readers that he does actually have formal theological training. They are the only ones who don’t have the NT wrong. On his biblical interpretation, he claims to be doing nothing more than “diligently [seeking] to follow” the plain sense of the biblical text. He quotes David L. Cooper’s 1940 work, When Gog’s Armies Meet the Almighty in the Land of Israel:

“When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense; therefore, take every word as its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths, indicate clearly otherwise.”

Another well-known author of some of the most popular Christian fiction ever written, Tim LaHaye, adheres to the same idea, calling this sentiment of Cooper’s “the golden rule of biblical interpretation.”

However, it is possible to trace the development and transmission of these ideas right back to John Nelson Darby.

John Nelson Darby has been called the “father or dispensationalism.” While he was not the first to explicate the idea of dispensationalism, it was he who expanded on and developed the complicated theory of salvation history, which identifies a series of epochs following one another in a linear fashion. He was also the first to solidify the concept of the rapture of the church, based on 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Darby had significant influence on Cyrus Scofield’s beliefs during the Bible Prophecy Conference movement throughout North America at the end of the nineteenth century, and there is no doubt that Scofield borrowed copiously from Darby while writing his annotated Reference Bible.

Where does the trail lead from there? Scofield became a close friend and colleague of Lewis Chafer, who went on to found the Evangelical Theological College, which would eventually become the Dallas Theological Seminary. Chafer taught at Dwight L. Moody’s Northfield School in Massachusetts from 1902-1910. During this time, he came into contact with Scofield, who, fresh from the Bible Prophecy Conference movement of the late 1800s, encouraged Chafer’s development as a theologian and preacher. Chafer explicates in an article in Sunday School Times, published in March, 1923, that Scofield was profoundly instrumental in his adoption of his dispensationalism.

In 1924 Chafer, founded the Evangelical Theological College. In 1936 it underwent a name-change to become Dallas Theological Seminary and Graduate School of Theology, finally becoming simply the Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) in 1969. Its first students were a small group of only thirteen that were taught under the guidance of Chafer, who presided over the school from 1924 until 1952, at which point John Walvoord took over as president. Walvoord and Chafer were like-minded colleagues that shared many similar ideas. In 1926, Chafer wrote one of his most significant publications, Major Bible Themes, of which Walvoord revised and updated in 1974. During Walvoord’s presidency at DTS, who else but Hal Lindsey attended the institute, and it was here, under the direction of Walvoord and his staff that Lindsey solidified his pretribulational, premillennial dispensationalism.

The final link in this chain is Tim LaHaye. While LaHaye never credits Lindsey for any of his ideas, it is clear that he has relied on large parts of The Late Great Planet Earth for his writing of Left Behind. While reading The Late Great Planet Earth, there are clear similarities between the two authors’ work: from Lindsey’s account of modern warfare during the Tribulations and LaHaye’s description of World War Three, to the words of LaHaye’s main protagonist, Rayford Steel, on his learning of his wife’s disappearance in the rapture – “Rayford had to direct people to the Bible… he had begun taking [his wife’s] Bible everywhere he went, reading it wherever possible;” compared with Lindsey’s, “I’m going to find myself a Bible and read those very verses my wife underlined. I wouldn’t listen to her when she was here…” Compare Lindsey’s account of a football game, “It was the last quarter of the championship game…only one minute to go and they fumbled – our quarterback recovered…when – zap – no more quarterback – completely gone, just like that!” with LaHaye’s soccer game, “most of the spectators and all but one of the players disappeared in the middle of play, leaving their shoes and uniforms on the ground.” Though these similarities may seem coincidental, when reading the two books simultaneously, the parallels between the books are striking, especially in the depictions of the events that occur during the Tribulations.

Although neither Lindsey nor LaHaye ever explicitly deny that their ideas stem from this tradition, they are both self-deceived in their belief that the ideas they profess are merely interpretations of “the plain sense” of the biblical text.

The Bad Boys of Prophecy