by Andrew Brown
Microcosm contains a cryptic list of his own sexual encounters with some of their salient features. Helen, for example, brought ‘friendly copulation and companionship’ whereas with Phyllis it was infatuation and copulation without intimacy, and a partner identified only as R. brought ‘high spirits and sexual technique’. Microcosm is more than a black book of conquests, and Bernal reflected on the stages of love with all their varying emotions. He referred to adultery as ‘a division of love’ and portrayed his own jealousy and marital torment in a passage of dialogue he entitled ‘Incomprehensibility’. The conversation takes place between a man and a young woman waiting at a bus stop. The man is feeling miserable and strikes up a conversation with the woman, telling her that he is married, but that night his wife is sleeping with another man. The woman, initially affronted by this salacious information from a stranger, cannot curb her curiosity. She chides him for taking ‘another man’s leavings’. The man protests that he loves his wife and, because he loves her, does not want to deny her the pleasure she derives from her lover. The woman tries to torment him. ‘You know that he is not just sleeping with her, that he is fondling her, caressing her. And you will go back to her after that.’ He did not expect the woman to understand, but is eager to keep the conversation until her bus comes. As she is about to board the bus, she suddenly gives him her address and suggests that they might meet again. His transitory misery is dispelled.
There is also a lyrical story about a couple who rendezvous in Avignon, after the man has travelled from London and the woman from the south of France. (Bernal recorded taking the night train to Avignon on 3rd September 1926 in his diary.)
Now they could breathe again, shake gradually free from unendurable hope. How they were melting. Ease could come, and joy, and ecstasy. This was a time snatched out of their lives. London was very far behind, work, prospects, duties, confusions. She had left the hermitage by the lake, d’Annunzio’s villa and his fantastic warship. In the afternoon they came into the sun and warm life… the sunlight was yellow coming down through the ilexes. She lay on the rampart of the stairs, stretched out like a lizard. He protested gently. ‘But what does it matter,’ she answered, ‘here nothing and no one matters. For once I can do what I like, be what I like.’ They came down the steep side to the bridge. The bridge which is like no other bridge in the world. The bridge that leads nowhere. The bridge that they dance on, through the town wall, past the church to the last arch. There they sat looking down on the river and on the other bank that could never be reached.
While Microcosm was never developed into a book, Bernal soon published his first monograph – The World, the Flesh & the Devil.2 The title was chosen to reflect the three enemies of the rational soul – the obstacles of the physical environment, the limitations of our cellular fabric and the darker aspects of our characters. It is essentially a treatise on the future. The writer Arthur C. Clarke has called the small book ‘the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made’,3 and credited Bernal with being the well-spring of many of his own ideas. In the book, Bernal set out two aspects of the future – man’s desire, ‘itself all future’, and destiny, ‘that which will inevitably happen’.4 In asking the question ‘how is it possible to examine scientifically the future’, Bernal soon came up against the problem that prediction is a limited technique when it is not soon followed by verification. He identified twin hazards to be avoided – hopeful illusions and the ingrained tendency to see the future as a continuation of the present – and cautioned that ‘even the more enlightened prophets let their imagination stop in some static Utopia… despite… all evidence pointing to ever increasing acceleration of change’.5 There were, it seemed to him, three disciplines of thought that might help in unravelling the complexities of the future – history (‘a storehouse of illustrative facts’), the physical sciences (as a way of comprehending the whole universe of space and time) and our knowledge of human desires. The third of these, he warned, was such a murky area in the underdeveloped subject of psychology that it made predictions from physical, chemical and biological laws seem inevitable, even though knowledge of those sciences was minimal.
To Bernal then, it seemed that prediction about the material world was on the surest ground, although as he pointed out in Microcosm, the brilliant discoveries of twentieth-century physicists ‘looked at from the commonsense and metaphysical points of view… seem definitely negative. The practical man finds that the matter that we have been investigating for the last 30 years has all melted away in our hands, has become probabilities, imaginary amplitudes and such like, while the metaphysicist, searching for reality finds that with us it has lost all meaning it ever possessed.’6 The problem with commonsense and metaphysics, according to Sage, was that they are anthropocentric, and the modern physicist had gained an immense amount of mathematical knowledge for which everyday logic and our power of visualization were inadequate. He returned to this theme in the chapter on ‘The World’, stating: ‘So far we have been living on the discoveries of the early and mid-nineteenth century, a macro-mechanical age of power and metal.’7 These discoveries tipped the balance in favour of man against the forces of nature by substituting steam and electrical power in place of muscle energy. Bernal believed that the new discoveries in ‘the micro-mechanics of the Quantum Theory which touch on the nature of matter itself, are far more fundamental and must in time produce far more important results’.8 In the years immediately before he wrote this, there had been rapid advances made in quantum mechanics with Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (1925), Schrödinger’s Equation (1926), and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (1927); but these were abstractions exchanged by a charmed circle of theoretical physicists. Sage’s bold prediction that such recent and abstruse ideas would prove to have fundamental significance and change man’s environment is testimony to his faith in the power of science. Our reliance on computer chips, with their digital operations, would not have surprised him.
The other major topic discussed in relation to the physical universe is space travel and colonization. Bernal identified the need to acquire sufficient acceleration to escape the earth’s gravitational field as the major barrier to extra-planetary travel, and surmised that ‘the most effective method is based on the principle of the rocket’.9 Recognizing that the momentum acquired by a rocket is equal and opposite to the momentum of the gas expelled from it, he was troubled that the mass of gas required as fuel would be ‘of the same order as the weight of the rocket itself, so that it is difficult to imagine how the rocket could contain enough material to maintain its propulsion for any length of time’.10 Although he could not see an immediate answer to this problem, he never doubted (unlike other eminent scientists then and later) that it would be solved and that space travel would become feasible. In unpublished notes probably written in 1930,11 Bernal contemplated the prospects for manned travel to the moon, and divided the project into three stages. The first would be the development of an efficient and reliable rocket, which would include a gyroscopic stabilizer to prevent it turning end over end like a Catherine wheel. Next would follow an initial space shot out of the earth’s atmosphere with successful return. Finally there would be a voyage in which a rocket was allowed to gravitate around the moon, fairly close to its surface without attempting to land, before an actual journey to the moon could be ‘anything but a suicidal venture’.
Bernal considered using an aeroplane as an alternative to rocket power to escape the earth’s gravitational pull; he calculated that if a body can attain a horizontal velocity of three-and-one-half miles per second, it will move off the earth in an ellipse. While this was impossible in the lower atmosphere, Sage reckoned that it could be done at an altitude of 50–60 miles above the earth. He adumbrated the space shuttle when concluding: ‘There is nothing of course to prevent a combination of the aeroplane and rocket method, and it is very possible that some combination will be found most effective.’12
Now that space travel has entered
history in ways similar to those predicted by Bernal decades earlier, his ideas on the subject do not strike us as outlandish. By contrast, his musings on space colonization and the transformation of the human form in The World, the Flesh & the Devil are as startling now as when he wrote them. If nothing else, they reinforce his strictures about taking the present for granted and only being able to see the future as a continuation of the present. For man to live in space, Bernal argued, he would need to build a permanent, large sphere or ‘celestial station’. The model he suggested involves a small spaceship attaching itself to an asteroid, which would then be hollowed out to provide a large, life-supporting, shell. He imagined it as ‘an enormously complicated single-celled plant’, with an outer protective wall that would be protective and rigid, as well as allowing the free access of radiant energy and preventing the escape of its internal atmosphere. He thought that man in adjusting to a three-dimensional, weightless way of living, would change radically in this environment. After contrasting the almost imperceptible slowness of changes due to natural evolution with the speed at which man alters his physical surroundings, Bernal suggested that in the future ‘man himself must actively interfere in his own making and interfere in a highly unnatural manner’,13 if he is to succeed in inhabiting new worlds, where oxygen and water are not freely available. Although biologists were apt to regard the mechanism of evolution as sacred, to Bernal it was ‘only nature’s way of achieving a shifting equilibrium with an environment’14 and if the process could be speeded up by the use of intelligence, then the natural way would be superseded. To change the human species by direct action, one ‘must alter either the germ plasm or the living structure of the body, or both together’.15
Altering the germ plasm would nowadays be referred to as genetic engineering or modification; in the 1920s, as Bernal pointed out, its most notable adherent was J.B.S. Haldane. John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, the son of an eminent Oxford physiologist, was nearly ten years Bernal’s senior, and his equal as an intellectual. He was an uncompromising, menacing, bulldog of a Scotsman, who had served with such ferocity in the Black Watch regiment during the war that the British Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, described him as ‘the bravest and dirtiest officer in my Army’.16 After the war, even though his undergraduate degree was in Classics, Haldane took up his father’s trade of physiology before switching from Oxford to Cambridge in 1923 to be reader in biochemistry. It was there that Bernal first got to know him, through meetings of the Heretics. The war had made Haldane ever distrustful of authority, whether human or divine, and he made no secret of his atheism (to do so, in his view, would be cowardly). His first book, Daedalus, grew from a talk given to the Heretics, and in it he lustily tackled a number of taboo subjects in biology, notably the potential benefits of ‘ectogenesis’ – the manufacture of babies to specified designs, outside the human body. The book sold in unexpectedly large numbers and established Haldane as a gifted and provocative popularizer of science. Haldane’s pungent literary style, coupled with such controversial subject matter exploded the convention that scientists could not or should not write entertainingly for the general public. Daedalus also provided Bernal with a text, as Haldane wrote that science ‘is man’s gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul’.17
The limitation of Haldane’s hypothetical alteration of the human species through ectogenesis, in Bernal’s opinion, was that the end product would still be limited by ‘the possibilities of flesh and blood’.18 Ever since ‘the apeancestor first used a stone he was modifying his bodily structure by the inclusion of a foreign substance’,19 and Bernal was now proposing that through the use of surgery and other medical techniques, it might be possible to introduce useful tools into the living tissues of the body. Assuming that man would live in increasingly complex environments, where the level of mental activity would be the supreme function, Bernal thought that the limbs could be replaced by more energy-efficient, artificial devices, and new sense organs (e.g. to detect infrared radiation and X-rays) might be incorporated. Admitting that his examples were far-fetched and cautioning that his account should be taken as a fable, Bernal elaborated on the existence of a transformable human being, pointing out that the operations themselves would soon come under the control of transformed individuals, and suggesting that the process would not result in one static or identical final form.
The one organ preserved in Bernal’s schema was the brain, although it was no longer to be housed in a skull but in a rigid lightweight cylinder, under optimal conditions. If new sense organs could be wired into the brain’s circuitry, then Bernal saw no reason why a direct connection could not be made with the brain of another ‘person’, setting up neural networks that permit the perfect transference of thought. ‘The minds would always preserve a certain individuality, the network of cells inside a single brain being more dense than that existing between brains; each brain would be chiefly occupied with its individual mental development and only communicate with the others for some common purpose.’20 Sage pointed out that the new life-form would be more plastic and adaptable so that over time the human heritage would dwindle; finally, he wondered whether ‘consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light’.21
Before we can abandon the world and subdue the flesh, according to Sage we first have to expel the devil, or those unseen, internal demons of our existence that confuse and hinder us. The obstacles that he saw to future progress were ‘a failure in the capacity for maintaining creative intellectual thinking’ and ‘the lack of desire to apply such thinking to the progress of humanity’.22 One of the leading threats to creative thinking, in Sage’s opinion, was the tendency towards specialization as scientific knowledge expanded. At the current stage of development, Sage regarded the modern scientist as ‘a primitive savage’ who hunted on his own or in small packs, and built success by his own talent but also depended on the richness of nature and the paucity of his own companions. With the expansion of science and the increased complexity of research, Sage predicted that ‘good hunting will not last much longer’ and foresaw a transition from food gathering to a food producing society, where there would be a far greater degree of planning and control of scientists’ activities. Recognizing that this change would risk the loss of independence and originality, he saw the need for an intelligent system of communication that would keep the individual scientist abreast of work in other fields and also allow every research worker potentially to sway the direction of any programme in which he or she is engaged. Sage still envisaged hierarchical organizations because ‘it is certain that originality, organizing power and industriousness will continue as now to be very unevenly distributed’.23 The obstacles to such an open system are ‘pedantry and bureaucracy – symptoms of an unintelligent respect for the past’24 which could be made to vanish, in Sage’s view, once their root causes were understood.
Important though intellectual capacity is, in Bernal’s estimation, the success of an age or an individual depends far more on desire. As a framework for analysing individual motivation, Bernal suggested a hybrid psychology, based on Freudianism, which would bring the aspirations and ideals of the super ego into line with external reality, while yet ‘rendering innocuous the power of the id’.25 Unlike most followers of Freud, Sage did not accept that human instincts and motivations were necessarily immutable. Under the influence of this fresh approach, whether through psychoanalysis or education, he speculated that art and science, and even religion, might coalesce. Although not cited in the book, Bernal always had Leonardo da Vinci in mind as the model of pure curiosity, searching for understanding and beauty in the whole universe. Leonardo’s observations were scientific and aesthetic
at the same time; to Sage, he represented beauty in science, ‘a beauty unexpressed since his day from the tragic divorce of art and science’.26
In Microcosm, Bernal showed that he was conscious of the deep antipathy engendered by revolutionary change in society. He admired the eighteenth-century French aristocracy for their learning, wit and aesthetic sensibilities, but deplored their ignorance of the cruelty and misery that surrounded them. When the unstoppable terror of the masses was unleashed, it not only swept away their mannered way of life, it also led to a reaction against all liberal ideas. Unlike the ‘gentlemanly’ American Revolution, the French Revolution carried a lasting effect due to its spontaneity and the ruthlessness of its attempt to break with the past. History spoke vividly to Bernal: ‘The fall of the Bastille and Valmy are still exhilarating, the execution of Louis XVI and the assassination of Marat are still horrifying events.’27 Despite this ambivalent legacy, he embraced the concept of revolution and admired Lenin for recognizing the need to work with ‘ruthless intelligence’ for mankind. Indeed he believed that Marxism offered the only solution to the world’s political problems, although he recognized that the implications of such an approach were ‘difficult and uncomfortable’. In The World, the Flesh & the Devil, Bernal stated that any desire for future progress needed to be strong enough to overcome the residual ‘distaste and hatred which mechanization has already brought into being’.28 He readily admitted that his readers may have already felt that distaste, particularly in relation to the bodily changes he outlined in ‘The Flesh’, because he had felt distaste himself in imagining them. While progress to date had meant that the power of those effecting changes such as industrialization had outweighed the emotional reactions of the masses, it was quite possible, in Bernal’s opinion, for the pendulum to swing in the other direction so that society reverted to an earlier stage. He believed that the writings of Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence were straws in a wind blowing in that reverse direction. Bernal was probably thinking of the novel Antic Hay, published a few years before, in which Huxley sharply satirized both Haldane and the idea of altering the germ plasm.
