The Prophet of Scientific Morality

The Prophet of Scientific Morality

"Editor’s Column" by Walter A. McDougall, in Orbis (Summer 2001), Foreign Policy Research Inst., 1528 Walnut St., Ste. 610, Philadelphia, Pa. 19102–3684.

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"Editor’s Column" by Walter A. McDougall, in Orbis (Summer 2001), Foreign Policy Research Inst., 1528 Walnut St., Ste. 610, Philadelphia, Pa. 19102–3684.

Mention Jules Verne (1828–1905), and most people think of the visionary novelist who, among other things, foretold the space age, inspiring such rocket scientists as Robert Goddard and Wernher von Braun, and penned books, such as Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870), that spawned Hollywood hits. But the man himself, says McDougall, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the editor of Orbis, was a jumble of contradictions. Where one would expect to find "a rationalist and promoter of science," one discovers a romantic. Instead of a bohemian like his contemporaries Victor Hugo and Émile Zola, "one finds a paragon of respectability." And though Verne inhabits the public consciousness as "an apostle of progress," McDougall reminds us that he "ended his life issuing jeremiads about the dangers of another Dark Age."

Born in Nantes, the son of a lawyer who expected Jules to follow him into the legal profession, Verne at an early age acted upon the passions that were to rule his life: "freedom, music, and the sea." At the age of 11, he stowed away on a ship bound for the West Indies; discovered and sent home, he promised his mother that "from now on, I will travel only in my dreams." Verne obtained his law license in 1848 in Paris, but that same year Parisian mobs overthrew the monarchy, and Verne embraced the liberal revolution. He walked away from law, and announced his intention in 1852 to become a writer. It took him a while to realize his ambition. He first married and became a stockbroker, but devoured books on science as he struggled to make his way.

Then, in 1862, a revelation: "It struck me one day that perhaps I might utilize my scientific education to blend together science and romance into a work ...that might appeal to the public taste." The result was Five Weeks in a Balloon, which launched his writing career. Soon to come were Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and the visionary From the Earth to the Moon (1865). Verne would publish 64 novels and 21 short stories, becoming the fourth-mosttranslated author in history (behind Joseph Stalin, V. I. Lenin, and the detective writer Georges Simenon).

To McDougall, the message of such novels as 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and The Mysterious Island (1875) is "a virtual catechism. Science permits human beings to locate themselves in the cosmos, survive perils, unlock Nature’s secrets, serve their fellow man, and finally become ‘more than a man.’ " Verne’s scientist-heroes, such as Captain Nemo, are "godlike" creatures. It all seems to suggest a "positivistic stance: science as a secular religion." But McDougall says that Verne "frankly romanticized science and technology as fairy lands liberating his middle-class readers (and himself) from the tedium of modern urban life."

What accounts for the tone of pessimism that crept into Verne’s work in his later years? Partly, thinks McDougall, it was due to personal misfortune: His wife became an invalid, and his only son, Michel, became a rake. By 1890, Verne was suffering from facial neuralgia, and cataracts destroyed his eyesight in 1900. But experiences also affected his ideas. His early enchantment with America, which suffuses Around the World in Eighty Days, gradually gave way to concern about the technological colossus, and he witnessed firsthand the evils science can bring when Krupp-made cannon smashed Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. Scientists, once the heroes of his fictions, were now portrayed as evil geniuses. McDougall believes that Verne "saw the dangers of planned science, whether in the hands of governments or corporations," but he did not fault science; rather, "what he lost was his faith in mankind."

 

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