Eco-Thought and the Mind of the Engineer - Buckminster Fuller on Spaceship Earth
I came to this 1969 cult 'classic' in the
fervent hope that it might allow me, finally, to 'get' modern
environmentalism for which this is a seminal text. Part of my
subsequent lack of enthusiasm is down to style. There is no doubt that
Buckminster Fuller was a genius of sorts - at least as an engineer,
planner and technologist - but he writes like a 'speak your weight'
machine with a propensity for creating neologistic compound words that
would put German philosophy to shame.
Far from inspiring, the man
just cannot write imaginative prose and yet his subject cries out for
imagination. I am sure that he says precisely what he means but it is
next to impossible to sustain an interest while being hectored by a
person, no doubt kindly in intention in his way, who is egotistical to
the nth degree - a 'speech-talker', as my daughter would term such
types. Still, great thoughts are only made easier, no more, by
great language skills. There are many prose poets whose ideas can be
distilled down to mere mystical garbage when the beauty of the
formulation has passed from one ear and out of the other.
Sadly,
his are not such great thoughts either ... instead we get a self
assured, somewhat egotistical, reasoning that patronises the reader in a
step-by-step and apparently logical approach that blinds us with
pseudo-science. If persons were just units of existence with blank
slates for minds, he might conceivably have a point. But we are not and
so he does not. Buckminster Fuller becomes a type of intellectual monster despite
all his fine aspirations for humanity. He is so, in part, because he
sees us all not truly as intrinsically flawed individuals (which we are
and which makes us who we are at our best) but as units of existence who
can be made nobler by planners. He is a planner. We are the crooked
timber that must be used to fulfil the plan for our own good.
Where
have we heard such sentiments before? Why, from pretty well every
'great' Western ideologue and thinker whose ego has extended itself to
encompass the known human universe. Far from being ready to
consider deep globalist environmentalism (as opposed to human-centred
localist environmentalism) as a reasonable possibility for humanity,
Buckminster Fuller has converted me into its sworn enemy.
I now
know, if there are others like him within the contemporary
environmentalist movement (for we can see his influence in the
'Zeitgeist Movement' and in the eco-hysteria surrounding the circle of
Al Gore), that, when we ordinary humans fail to meet the needs of the
Plan, whatever his personal benignity, his heirs will make old Joe
Stalin look like a pussy cat as they enforce their will on a global
scale - always in the interests of us and of humanity, of course. If
you are the sort of personality who would have loved the engineers of the first half of the twentieth century that Adam Curtis exposed to view in 'Pandora's Box' then you'll just love Buckminster Fuller today!
This
philosophical primitivism is a shame because there is a great deal of
merit in his analysis of capitalism even if he seems loathe to be direct
about his primary enemy lest he get accused of being a fellow-traveller
with the equally flawed Soviet communist alternative that had divided up the
world with Washington while he wrote. He gets close to a truth in
his myth of the Great Pirates (the one entertaining and worthwhile
section of what is otherwise a monument to the turgid) but it is still
not the truth.
The tale of the Great Pirates is a sound enough
mythic critique of what we have inherited (as of 1969) but it is about
as historically plausible as pretty well every other evangelical
motivating myth that has come out of the Anglo-Saxon imperium, from
those of the Mormons and Madame Blavatsky to those of Margaret Murray
and L. Ron Hubbbard. The history in this book is mostly just
simplistic nonsense that seems to depend on the reading of a few
geostrategists and very little experience of practical politics, the
sort of simplistic populism, mixed with technocracy, that is standard
fare when a certain type of engineer tries to make sense of human
complexity and builds societies as he might build bridges.
Old
political activists will know that the heart sinks when an engineer or
scientist tries to apply engineering or scientific principles to knotty
political problems ... He does make us think, to his credit,
about excessive cultural specialisation and about what 'wealth' actually
means to humanity. On the latter, he adopts an American populist
approach that is analytically correct even if it may not be
pragmatically meaningful, given where we are today.
He has also
done us a service in suggesting that we are going to be more socially
productive and creative if we are given more freedom to think at
leisure. The science of daydreaming suggests that our mind does benefit
from idling. And he did the West another great service by joining those
who pointed out the effects of pollution within the capitalist world
long before it was forced to the notice of Soviet planners by their
bullied dissidents.
Failure to consider polluting effects was
undoubtedly a major contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union
and the discrediting of its Communist model - Buckminster Fuller's
dissident voice helped the West adjust more effectively to the threat of
environmental degradation. Finally, the analysis of the way that
wealth is easily created in war but not in peace is a criticism that
stands today of how sovereign 'piratical' states have served the
interests of their historically continuous institutions far more often
than they have of their peoples.
Buckminster Fuller's somewhat
stylistically suppressed righteous anger at global inequity,
imperialism, elite corruption, planetary dispoliation and inefficiency
leads him to some wise analytical conclusions but not to equally wise
solutions. The Spaceship Earth concept is, of course, seductive,
like those of Gaia or the Clash of Civilisations or the End of History,
but such book-selling catch-phrases are either so general as to have no
meaning for humanity (unless you remove humanity from the equation
altogether) or are grossly simplistic when it comes to trying to decide
what humanity (which really means individual persons in societies and
not some essentialist reified thing with one hive mind) is to do next.
The
truism in Spaceship Earth (which we must accept) is that, as a species,
we sink or swim with the planet. If it dies, we die - end of story. But
there is one heck of a leap from that simple and true proposition to
the determination for a planned world government of happy free people
living in leisure guided by philosopher kings like our dear Buckminster
Fuller. Self-appointed Platonic Guardians have not had a great
record in the humanity stakes. The Buckmister Fullerenes are unlikely to
be much better if they actually get their hands on any directive power.
I am, for example, not an 'Earthian' but a person who happens to live
on Earth. So are you?
As for his faith in computers and
automation, this is a belief and nothing more. A sort of instinctive
scientific progressivism that over-estimates what computers can do to
model our universe and underestimates the logic of an AI displacing us
as soon as it can model it better than us. In the end, one fears
that this brave new world (and we are reminded of Huxley here) requires
the behavioural normalisation of humanity on a mass scale in order to
ensure that the computers can cope with the variables!
His
advocacy of 'synergy' and general systems theory reminds one of nothing
less than the contemporaneous Rand Corporation, the cold calculations of
Hermann Kahn and the vicious number crunching of the latterly contrite
Robert McNamara as he judged the success of a war by the body bags. This
is the world of American technocrats at the height of the Cold War. It is salutary to remember that the US lost the Vietnam War and that
central planning ruined the Soviet Union just as it would no doubt
eventually ruin the planet.
On top of this, there is in the
introduction to the book by his grandson all the barely concealed
hysteria that drives an environmental 'enthusiasm' that seems to owe as
much to a peculiarly charismatic frame of mind in American small town
populism as it does to genuine scientific endeavour. This is a
text that believers may love but that the rest of us should question
more critically and ask how or why an engineer, who experimented with
sleep patterns for himself and then was puzzled that his colleagues
could not keep up, can or should have anything to say about the workings
of the human soul. Buckminster Fuller's genius lay in the
observation, management and manipulation of matter - and he should not
have strayed from that territory.