This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
It is said, Lewis Lapham tells us, that Abbot John Trithemius of Sponheim, a fifteenth-century scholar and mage, devised a set of incantations to carry "messages instantaneously... through the agency of the stars and planets who rule time." In 1962, Lapham adds, Bell Labs "converted the thought into Telstar, the communications satellite relaying data, from earth to heaven and back to earth, in less than six-tenths of a second." Magic had become science. Today, the Pentagon is picking up the centuries old gauntlet, asking the brightest minds in academe -- through its far-out research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA -- to come up with a means for a 20-something-kid-cum-lieutenant or perhaps the military's much-lauded "strategic corporal" to be wired into unprecedented amounts of information beamed down from the heavens above.
At some level, even the language of DARPA's solicitation for its SeeMe program seems to conjure up the visions that danced in Trithemius's head. Its goal, we are told, "is to provide useful on-demand imagery information directly to the lowest echelon warfighter in the field from a very low cost satellite constellation launched on a schedule that conforms to DoD [Department of Defense] operational tempos." Those heavenly-sounding constellations are, however, tempered by the reality of what the Pentagon is really after.
Yesterday's future of high-tech satellites that would allow our thoughts to slip "the surly bonds of Earth," while connecting the far reaches of the planet and linking minds globally in ways even Trithemius couldn't imagine, is now being exchanged for a low-bid, low-rent system of military satellites. These will be capable of allowing a kid just out of high school to more efficiently target a kid who probably never went to high school -- all courtesy of a well-educated university scientist who never bothered to think of the implications of his tenure-producing, tax-payer-funded research. This can't be what Trithemius had in mind. And yet, that's where we're at.
If the Pentagon has its way, SeeMe will eventually fill the skies with cheap, disposable "satellites at very low altitudes, networked to existing fielded communications systems and handheld platforms." So much for the "the high untrespassed sanctity of space." But let Lewis Lapham explore further the borderlands of science and magic that have somehow been fused into the very center of our lives. The famed former editor of Harper's Magazine now edits Lapham's Quarterly, which, four times a year, brilliantly unites some of the most provocative and original voices in history around a single topic. (You can subscribe to it by clicking here.) TomDispatch thanks the editors of that journal for allowing us to offer an exclusive online first look at Lapham's elegant history of unreason in this techno-age of ours. Nick Turse
Magic and the Machine: Living in an American Age of Techno-Wonder and Unreason Lewis H. Lapham
[A longer version of this essay appears in "Magic Shows," the Summer 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly, and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]
As between the natural and the supernatural, I've never been much good at drawing firm distinctions. I know myself to be orbiting the sun at the speed of 65,000 miles per hour, but I can't shake free of the impression shared by Pope Urban VIII, who in 1633 informed Galileo that the earth doesn't move. So also the desk over which I bend to write, seemingly a solid mass of wood but in point of fact a restless flux of atoms bubbling in a cauldron equivalent to the one attended by the witches in Macbeth.
Nor do I separate the reality from the virtual reality when conversing with the airy spirits in a cell phone, or while gazing into the wizard's mirror of a television screen. What once was sorcery maybe now is science, but the wonders technological of which I find myself in full possession, among them indoor plumbing and electric light, I incline to regard as demonstrations magical.
This inclination apparently is what constitutes a proof of being human, a faculty like the possession of language that distinguishes man from insect, guinea hen, and ape. In the beginning was the word, and with it the powers of enchantment. I take my cue from Christopher Marlowe's tragical drama Doctor Faustus because his dreams of "profit and delight,/Of power, of honor, of omnipotence," are the stuff that America is made of, as was both the consequence to be expected and the consummation devoutly to be wished when America was formed in the alembic of the Elizabethan imagination. Marlowe was present at the creation, as were William Shakespeare, the navigators Martin Frobisher and Francis Drake, and the Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon envisioning a utopian New Atlantis on the coast of Virginia.
It was an age that delighted in the experiment with miracles, fiction emerging into fact on the far shores of the world's oceans, fact eliding into fiction in the Globe Theatre on an embankment of the Thames. London toward the end of the sixteenth century served as the clearinghouse for the currencies of the new learning that during the prior 150 years had been gathering weight and value under the imprints of the Italian Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation in Germany. The Elizabethans had in hand the writings of Niccolà ² Machiavelli and Martin Luther as well as those of Ovid and Lucretius, maps drawn by Gerardus Mercator and Martin Waldseemà ¼ller, the observations of Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Paracelsus.
The medieval world was dying an uneasy death, but magic remained an option, a direction, and a technology not yet rendered obsolete. Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, found the air "not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible devils." To the Puritan dissenters contemplating a departure to a new and better world the devils were all too visible in a land that "aboundeth with murders, slaughters, incests, adulteries, whoredom, drunkenness, oppression, and pride."
Thinks Tanks of the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries
In both the skilled and unskilled mind, astronomy and astrology were still inseparable, as were chemistry and alchemy, and so it is no surprise to find Marlowe within the orbit of inquisitive "intelligencers" centered on the wealth and patronage of Henry Percy, "the Wizard Earl" of Northumberland, who attracted to his estate in Sussex the presence of Dr. John Dee, physician to Queen Elizabeth blessed with crystal showstones occupied by angels, as well as that of Walter Raleigh, court poet and venture capitalist outfitting a voyage to Guiana to retrieve the riches of El Dorado.
The earl had amassed a library of nearly 2,000 books and equipped a laboratory for his resident magi, chief among them Thomas Hariot, as an astronomer known for his improvement of the telescope (the "optic tube"), and as a mathematician for his compilation of logarithmic tables. As well versed in the science of the occult as he was practiced in the study of geography, Hariot appears in Charles Nicholl's book The Reckoning as a likely model for Marlowe's Faustus.
During the same month last spring in which I was reading Nicholl's account of the Elizabethan think tank assembled by the Wizard Earl, I came across its twentieth-century analog in Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. As in the sixteenth century, so again in the twentieth: a gathering of forces both natural and supernatural in search of something new under the sun.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
