Fuller and emptier
John Vaizey
Nine Chains to the Moon R. Buckminster Fuller (Cape £3.95) Education Automation R. Buckminster Fuller (Cape £1.95) Once a year, in the spring, the University of Colorado at Boulder has what it calls a World Affairs Conference, when it invites an astonishingly varied group of people to spend a week living it up in Colorado. On my first visit, a leading light of the Conference was Buckminster Fuller, who was treated with great reverence, though it was obvious, after the briefest acquaintance, that he fell very fully into the category that can be described as ' potty '. He had been thrown out of Harvard twice, it transpired, and had then spent a career wandering round the United States, Japan and various other places, having ideas, some of which came to fruition, and some of which did not, but which had generated for him the kind of following which Mary Baker Eddy institutionalised into a church, but which Buckminster Fuller has kept going as a kind of informal band of disciples who embrace his ideas. The difficulty is to pin down these ideas. The chief one appears to be that technological developments are now literally unlimited. As an instance of this, he was proposing at the time that I knew him to put the whole of New York under one vast aluminium dome in order to control the climate, a thing which he now proposes, in Education Automation, to do for a mobile university in the Mid-West.
What one has to ask oneself in reading these books is not only what exactly are they supposed to mean, but why is he somebody *whom the students in the United States appear to adore. The answer to the second question is easier than the first. Students everywhere, like most people, are fairly gullible, and they like people who seem to pay them attention. This was the secret of the success of quite a number of popular dons in the 1930s and 1940s, and Buckminster Fuller is a past master at it. He is also an extremely amiable, cheerful kind of American, infinitely resilient and with a splendid capacity for apparently listening to other People and then for going off at a kind of mad tangent.
His argument is extraordinary. Take for example this quotation: Teleologic alacrity enabled man to fashion empirically, seemingly by prestidigitation; for instance, there was the Yogi who could, by
means of cultivated figuring talent, mentally extract in a few seconds the cube root of an
18 digit figure. Such ability gradually engen dered the false popular conclusion that Mechanical experimentation is not scientific unless obviously cbrrelated with and preceded by the use of mathematics or at least drafting board activity. These latter media of science
seem so profound t to the only slightly rationalising "public " that it has come to acclaim as scientific only those who visibly utilise these means and, conversely, to discredit the teleo The passage is literally without meaning and, for page after page, it goes on like this. The consequence is that when you get to Education Automation, what Mr Buckminster Fuller is really telling us is that all knowledge is literally without meaning. If we may take a quotation from his book on education:
With two-way TV we will develop selecting dials for the children which will not be primarly an alphabetical but a visual species and chronologicai category selecting device with secondary alphabetical subdivisions. The child will be able to call up any kind of information he wants about any subject and get his latest authoritative TV documentary, the production of which I have already described to you. The answers to his questions and probings will be the best information that man has available up to that minute in history.
The implication of this is both that all knowledge is transitory — " information " — and that all attitudes' and human relationships are transitory and ought not to be preserved, and that we ought to move into an era which makes full use of the infinite capacity for mobility of people and things which modern technology has given, with no regrets for the past. I believe this view not only to be mistaken — most of the educational technology he describes does not work — but evil.
In Mr Buckminster Fuller's world there is no poverty, because he believes that by concentrated scientific effort poverty could be eliminated; there is also no grandeur, no suffering, no delight, no enjoyment, just a kind, of mad tinkering with gadgets, to get " ;nformation " and "change ", for their own sake. It is people like this who have brought the world to the verge of total technological catastrophe by means of atomic and biological warfare. Their bland tinkering with the social system as well as with the environment ought to be stopped, and it is about time people stopped laughing at Mr Buckminster Fuller's pottiness and regarded him for what he really is, an extremely dangerous and silly phenomenon.
John Vaizey is Professor of Economics at Brunel University and author of 'Social Democracy' and Thomas Hardy as Poet Laureates. To invent one Poet Laureate is unfortunate enough . . . B.G.
Princes Under the Volcans Raleigh Trevelyan (Macmillan £6.00) .
This handsomely-produced chronicle of the Anglo-Italian merchant families of Sicily will please those with a taste for anecdotal history. Mr Trevelyan describes the rise of the Inghams, Woodhouses, and Whitakers, from the days when they sold wine to Nelson through to genteel obsolescence under Mussolini and in the contemporary world,. The families are interesting less for themselves than for the people they knew; the book is at its best when describing them at their peak, around 1900, when they entertained in princely style. At over 500 pages, this is an enjoyable but heavyweight treatment of a slight subject: the author could, with advantage, have curbed his tendency to lengthy quotation from his voluminous, source material. A.W.
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