by LOUISE LIEBESKIND
Francis Bacon has been charged with robbing science of its innocence. But what if we’ve all been reading him wrong?
Francis Bacon is known, above all, for conceiving of a great and terrible human project: the conquest of nature for “the relief of man’s estate.” This project, still ongoing, has its champions. “If the point of philosophy is to change the world,” Peter Thiel posits, “Sir Francis Bacon may be the most successful philosopher ever.” But critics abound. Bacon stands accused of alienating human beings from nature, abandoning the wisdom of the ancients, degrading a philosophy dedicated to the contemplation of truth, and replacing it with something cruder, a science of power.
In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis goes so far as to compare Bacon to Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus:
You will read in some critics that Faustus has a thirst for knowledge. In reality, he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants … but gold and guns and girls. “All things that move between the quiet poles shall be at his command” and “a sound magician is a mighty god.” In the same spirit Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit. The true object is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible.
Lewis draws the final phrase of this critique from Bacon’s New Atlantis, the 1627 utopian novella from which this journal takes its name. But why would a publication like The New Atlantis, dedicated to the persistent questioning of science and technology, name itself after a philosopher’s utopian dreams about magicians on the verge of becoming mighty gods?
According to the journal’s self-description on page 2 of every print issue, this is not the whole story. Bacon’s book raises questions about the moral and political difficulties that accompany the technological powerhouse it depicts, even if it “offers no obvious answers.”
Perhaps it seduces more than it warns. But the tale also hints at some of the dilemmas that arise with the ability to remake and reconfigure the natural world: governing science, so that it might flourish freely without destroying or dehumanizing us, and understanding the effect of technology on human life, human aspiration, and the human good. To a great extent, we live in the world Bacon imagined, and now we must find a way to live well with both its burdens and its blessings. This very challenge, which now confronts our own society most forcefully, is the focus of this journal.
The fact is, people have been puzzling over Bacon’s uncanny utopia for four hundred years without being able to pin it down. The reason for this is simple: We’ve been reading it wrong. Bacon’s New Atlantis is not an image of things hoped for or of things to come. It is an instructive fable about what happens when human beings stumble across the boundary between things human and things divine, a story about fear, intimidation, and desire.
Human beings have always lusted after knowledge, specifically that knowledge which promises to open our eyes so that we might become like gods. Bacon did not invent or ignite this desire, but he did understand it better than most.
New Atlantis
In form, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is modeled loosely on Thomas More’s Utopia. A ship full of European sailors lands on a previously unknown island in the Americas where they find a civilized society in many ways superior to their own. The narrator describes the customs and institutions of this society, which in Bacon is called “Bensalem,” Hebrew for “son of peace.” Sometimes Bacon echoes, sometimes improves upon, More’s earlier work. But at the end of the story, Bacon turns to focus solely on the most original feature of the island, an institution called Solomon’s House, or the College of the Six Days Works.
This secretive society of natural philosophers seeks nothing less than “the effecting of all things possible,” as C. S. Lewis duly notes. Bacon devotes a quarter of the total text of New Atlantis to an unadorned account of the powers and insights the philosophers in Solomon’s House have. Then the work ends abruptly with no account of the sailors’ trip home or the results of their discovery. The story ends mid-paragraph, with a final line tacked on at the end: “The rest was not perfected.”
What is the meaning of this tale? The first and simplest answer was given by William Rawley, Bacon’s chaplain, who was responsible for publishing New Atlantis after Bacon’s death. He wrote in his preface to the work: “This fable my Lord devised, to the end that he might exhibit therein a model or description of a college instituted for the interpreting of nature and the producing of great and marvellous works for the benefit of men….” The founders of the Royal Society, Great Britain’s famous scientific academy, seem to have had a similar idea a few decades later: Bacon “had the true Imagination of the whole Extent of this Enterprise, as it is now set on foot.”
But this interpretation only goes so far. Solomon’s House does serve as a model for the modern research institution in certain crucial respects. We learn in the story that it is a large, well-resourced enterprise organized to pursue basic knowledge through diligent experimentation and to apply that knowledge to the invention of powerful new tools. But its power, knowledge, and peculiar pride of place in Bensalem remain unrivaled by any existing research institution today. Solomon’s House sees everything that happens outside its walls while keeping its own activities secret, and it wields unquestioned, if mysterious, political power in Bensalem. In the twentieth century, disturbed by the political and technological developments of their own time, readers of Bacon’s work began to look more closely at Bensalem’s politics, and they did not like what they found.
In his book Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, Robert Faulkner concludes that the peace and prosperity Bensalem enjoys are products of a terrifying and opaque political machine. A single institution, Solomon’s House, combines all religious, political, and scientific knowledge and power in itself, and dispenses only what it wants, when it wants, to an obedient people. This has devastating spiritual effects, according to Jerry Weinberger, who in his article “On the Miracles in Bacon’s New Atlantis” paints an image of a society totally dehumanized by its own success at mastering nature and establishing peace. The people of Bensalem are not truly happy, he argues, they are “contented cows,” or rather like sheep, “their orderliness lobotomised.” And, arguably, Bensalemites are only a few steps further along the path of Baconian “progress,” as Weinberger describes it, than modern Americans are.
This is a disturbing conclusion with disturbing implications for the future of the modern world. But Bacon does not actually claim, as Weinberger asserts, that New Atlantis “depicts the world to be produced by his famous project for modern science and technology.” Bacon writes an elaborate work of fiction in which he describes, among other things, an imaginary commonwealth that is as terrible in its power and intelligence as it is attractive. Readers have chosen, of their own accord, to interpret it as a premonition of their own hopes and fears.
Bacon’s New Atlantis is not even set in the future. The action of the story takes place “six-score years” after the discovery of the New World, that is, roughly in Bacon’s present day. That present is rooted, however, in a deep past that is counter to all historical fact. Three thousand years before the story begins, the island of Bensalem enjoyed commerce with Europe, Asia, Africa, and the lost empire of Atlantis. Over a thousand years after that, when Atlantis had fallen and the ancient art of navigation was forgotten to all but Bensalem, a wise lawgiver taught them how to live in isolation from the rest of the world. Since that time, Bensalem has enjoyed perfect peace. Capable of sustaining itself without importing goods, and inaccessible to the rest of the world, its only external commerce has been through a network of spies, sent out to keep tabs on world events and new technologies. Bensalem has honored its great lawgiver by strictly adhering, for nearly two millennia, to the laws he put in place. And in the meantime, it has been blessed with its own special revelation of the gospel, enjoying religious harmony without schism, controversy, or scientific rivalry. It is populated by people who are perfectly chaste, scorn money, and are not inclined to question authority or pry into state secrets.
The New Atlantis for more