A Nation Of Political Fools, 1713 Edition

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

"Although this Island of Folly cannot be found on the map, you will have no difficulty in guessing its real name and location by observing its mores and inhabitants" (Preface).

 In 1713,  A New Voyage to the Island of Fools was published, an  anti-Utopian satire of England's Tory government disguised as a voyage of exploration led by a Venetian nobleman. Pseudonymously written, it has been variously attributed to Jonathan Swift, Edmund Stacey, or Edward Ward. 

By 1713 the Tory party had dominated Parliament for the three preceding years and had made further gains in the current year's elections. Prime Minister Robert Harley, appointed after the downfall of the Whigs in 1710, attempted to pursue a moderate and non-controversial policy, but had  to contend with extremist Tories on the backbenches who were frustrated by the lack of support for their legislation against dissent. 

In five letters, the primativist narrator of ...the Island of Fools observes and reports on the mores of a nation in a sad state of affairs.

The inhabitants of Stultitia, the island of fools, were not "Stultitian [that is, foolish] by nature, but by practice," we are told. Foolishness is considered a moral failure and here refers to the vices that consumed the nation. "Slaves of sentiments, inclinations, interest, avarice, ambition, and desire for vengeance and of 'fantasies,' the Stultitians are suckers for adulation, flattery, false evidence, crime, rebellion, cheating, treason, rioting, prostitution and 'all manner of wickedness and folly'" ((Braga, The Rationalist Critique of Utopian Thinking, University of Bucharest Review, Vol. I. 2011, no. 1, p. 128).

Obsession with superstitions and collective illusions is the cause of human corruption, according to Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, and the Stultitians enjoy a surfeit of superstitions and collective psychoses. "In order to impinge them to riot or rebellion and to any action in general, it is enough to excite their fancy with a few new Notions or Projects that they will embrace without giving the least thought about their Truth, Reason or their Probability." Imaginary “epidemical pseudosciences”  lie at the core of the Stultitian mind-set.

"During the 17th-18th centuries, the pressure exercised by combined critiques due to religious ideology and later on by rationalist mentality rendered utopias suspect to the eyes of many authors. Christian counter-utopists, ranging from Joseph Hall to Jonathan Swift, accepted and adopted the dogmas related to the Lost Earthly Paradise and Man’s Cursed City, transforming the utopian space into hell on earth, into monstrous kingdoms that would rival Dante’s circles.

"In turn, humanist counter-utopists, skeptical regarding man’s capacity of establishing a perfect society, found other means of expressing their incredulity as well as sarcasms. They imagined madmen islands and kingdoms of fools, demonstrating, by reductio ab absurdum, that the application of the ideals of reason to social programs would only lead to nightmarish societies" (Ibid.).

Slings and arrows from satirists skewering the Tories did not change a thing. Their government remained popular with the electorate for its effort to end the War of the Spanish Succession and ratify the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. 

As for Jonathan Swift being the author of this pamphlet, not true. At this point, Swift, who, as a political pamphleteer simultaneously played tennis on both sides of the net, had permanently moved from the Whig to the Tory party, joining its inner circle: he was a one-issue voter and found Tory policy on the Irish clergy in agreement with his own sympathies as an Irishman. Edmund Stacey, author of The Parliament of Birds (1712), also published by John Morphew, is the likeliest suspect, though Edward Ward is given credit in a manuscript annotation.

Those on the Right or Left seeking ammo in this satire will find it; Right and Left politics as we understand it today did not exist at that time - ideology was fluid and not as sharply defined as now -  It was in the post-Revolution French Assembly that those political directions were established: monarchists sat on the right, republicans on the left side of the Assembly's aisle. Contemporary American Conservatives may plotz to learn that in the 18th and 19th centuries Liberal Conservatism was, far from an oxymoron, a recognized, respected and viable political viewpoint.

The enduring lesson here is that utopias look good on paper but are a disaster in practice, no matter the ideology. Heaven on earth is an impossibility, whether as an ideal society in which government plays no role at all in the lives of its citizens and taxes are non-existent, or an ideal where the government will help the vulnerable from birth to death if necessary at a price shared by all good citizens. It's always a fool's game. People tend to get in the way when a perfect world is pursued; your perfection is my purgatory. One man's sage is another man's fool.

The population of the Island of Fools is exploding yet it's a protean destination resort and can accommodate all who wish to vacation in folly and call it wisdom.

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[UTOPIAN SATIRE]. A New Voyage to the Island of Fools, Representing the Policy, Government, and Present State of the Stultitians. By a Noble Venetian. Inscib'd to the Right Honorable The Lord Fernando. Translated from the Italian. London: John Morphew, [September] 1713. Attributed to Swift (in Wrenn catalogue) but not in Teerink.  Octavo (188 x 118 mm). [2], 62 pp. Wrappers.

A second edition was issued in 1715.

Claeys, Utopias of the British Enlightenment, p. xxix. Letellier, The English Novel 1700-1740, p. 336.

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Image courtesy of Christie's, which is offering this title in its Fine Printed Books and Manuscripts sale November 15, 2013. With our thanks. 

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The Glorious Future Of Detroit Under Glass, Including Television And The Hyperloop, In 1884

by Stephen J. Gertz

Poetical Drifts of Thought or, Problems of Progress. Treating Upon The Mistakes of the Church - The Mistakes of the Atheist Infidel and Materialist - God Not the Maker of the Universe - Progress the Evidence of a Merciful But Not All-Powerful God. Reconciliation of Science and Christianity. The Formation of a Solar System - Evolution - Human Progress - Possibilities of the Future - Including Spicy Explanatory Matter In Prose. Embellished with Nearly 200 Illustrations. Together with a Number of Fine Poems on Popular Subjects. Including Sketches of the City of the Straits - Past, Present and Future.

Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus (We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes”) - Motto of Detroit.

Current reports of Detroit's collapse are premature. Lyman E. Stowe, a citizen of pre-Motor City, saw the present in 1884, was pleased, and predicted a future for the metropolis that makes anything H.G. Wells ever wrote seem the product of a pedestrian mind completely lacking in imagination.

The first three of fifty-five stanzas to be recited to the tune of Yankee Doodle.

It's a future based upon electricity, chemistry, the abolition of ignorance, and the reconciliation of science and religion. It's a future told, for the most part, in poems that threaten the very existence of poetry. Scansion, smansion, who needs it? When you write fifty-five quatrains in praise of Detroit's present and direct that they be recited to the tune of Yankee Doodle, Erato sticks a feather in her cap, calls it macaroni, gets buried in poetical snowdrifts of thought and prays for a St. Bernard to find her beneath the avalanche.

Detroit in 1884.

Poetical Drifts of Thought is one of the many eccentric self-published works of American 19th-century imaginative writing yet it stands out from the usual crowd of crazy texts by sewing utopian literature, futurology, freethought, Swedenborg, Darwin, and social engineering into a crazy quilt that just won't quit. Lyman E. Stowe was a rugged individualist in the sea of rabid individualists that emerged during the Second Great Awakening in the United States, when the American ethos of individualism met evangelicalism and singular opinions and beliefs were tossed into a Christian fruit salad to present to the world a medley of motley ideas, many radical, in search of acceptance by someone, anyone - please listen!

The Flying Machine of the near Future.

Amongst the many visions Stowe has of Detroit in the year 2100 are air travel; television (“Seeing Distant Friends by Electricity’s Aid”); control of global weather patterns...

Elon Musk's Hyperloop.

...and travel by cars through underground pneumatic tubes. And you thought Elon Musk's Hyperloop was futuristic?  Late!

Food inhaled, not eaten, with acid-reflux vanquished.

Inhaling nutriment in gaseous form via electrical and chemical process.

How 'bout the replacement of solid foods with “nutritive gasses”? Combined with nitrous oxide for belly laughs?

Manufacturing clothes by gathering the particles direct from
water, earth, and atmosphere by electricity and chemistry.

Clothes may make the man but in Detroit's future man doesn't make the clothes. In a stunning blow to the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, clothing will be manufactured using a combination of electricity and chemistry to process particles of water, earth, and atmosphere into a three-piece, custom-made 100% merino wool canvassed suit with structured waist, single vent, hand-rolled lapels, padded shoulders, and handsome silhouette.

Preface as excuse for the book.

Typical in books of this nature, the author has his own ideas about book format and punctuation. Since he believes that a preface is nothing more than an excuse for a writer to rev-up before mouthing off, he calls it like he sees it. Then makes his excuse for writing the book.

Super-sized quotations marks lest the author forget them,
to be inserted by the reader where appropriate.

Stowe makes every attempt to be scrupulous with crediting other writers "but for fear that I might sometimes miss, I place these large quotation marks, large enough for all to see, and ask the fastidious reader to place them where they belong." In short, he leaves the copy editing to the reader.

Eden on Lake Michigan in the year 2100.

Current denizens of Detroit will be pleased or piqued to learn that in the year 2100 they will become peasants under glass, sharing life with hothouse flowers and exotic fruits in a greenhouse gotham where it's sunny, warm, and wonderful all year 'round.

Detroit in the year 2100, the City covered in glass and iron for
20 square miles. Heated by the internal heats of the earth, lit up
with electricity, with perpetual summer days and tropical fruits and
flowers growing all year 'round.

La dolce far niete aside,

All have a certain work to do,
Yet all are gents and ladies too;
All free from strife and toil and care,
They float and breathe the perfumed air.
Sweet music's swelling chorus rings,
And soothing echoes outward flings,
From cheering bands, their sounds inspire
Like sweet Aeolian harp or lyre

Here, Stowe apparently references The Funk Brothers, the uncredited and largely unheralded studio musicians who were the house band hand-picked by Berry Gordy in 1959 for Detroit's Motown Records.

The Battle of the Future.
Detroit's favorite son, Ted Nugent, at upper far right
(of course), attacks those at left (naturally)
who would undermine the Bill of Rights.

You'd think that one who envisions a paradise city under glass would avoid war - the results would be shattering - but no. Aeriel ballets with bullets n' bombs will still have their place as long as man has an immortal soul.     

"The mind is but organized matter, there's no immortal soul.

In a blow, however, to Christianity as we know it, Christian Lyman E. Stowe asserts that "the mind is but organized matter, there's no immortal soul," a strange sentiment from an anti-materialist but "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines" (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

"

Discovery of the Art of Renewing Life.

 

Then again, who needs an immortal soul when life can renewed as if a subscription to LIFE magazine? I see Ford's River Rouge factory repurposed, renewing life on an assembly line.

In what will be major news to the faithful of all monotheistic religions, Stowe asserts that God didn't make the universe and God's not All-Powerful. Then who, Henry Ford? (Ford thought so). 

Other books by Lyman E. Stone include: My Wife Nellie and I; a Poetical Sketch of Love and Fancy with Other Poems, Including Blank Lines for Autograph and Remarks (1895); What Is Coming is a Wonderful Exposition of the Prophecies and Comparison with Ancient and Modern Historical and Political Events Together with an Ample, Though Concise History of Money from King Solomon's Time to the Present (1896); Stowe's Bible Astrology: the Bible Founded on Astrology (1907); Astrological Periodicity: A Book of Instructions, Showing Man, Beast and Plant are Subject to the Influences of the Planets ... [which gives good and evil periods, which can be taken advantage of and be a benefit, not only to the individual, but to all classes of people (1907); Right Hours to Success (1907); Karmenia; or, What the Spirit Told Me, "Truth Stranger Than Fiction" a Series of Short Occult Stories, Real Experiences During the Life of a Man 72 Years of Age, Garnished in the Clothes of Fiction (1918).

All to be read to the tune of Yankee Doodle.

As for Poetical Drifts of Thought, "The book is what the title implies - 'Drifts of Thought.' You say you don't believe it or agree with it all. Well, I don't blame you, for I don't know as I do my self. Yet my theory is grounded upon logic that seems indisputable within the bounds of anything come-at-able.

"We all have a right to express our thoughts, and by free expression of our thoughts we learn from one another, but I must now say for the present, Good By. Good By."

See you later, alligator. Bankruptcy? Don't have a goiter, you Detroiter. This, too, shall pass - like that gaseous meal you just inhaled.

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STOWE, Lyman E. Poetical Drifts of Thought or, Problems of Progress. Treating Upon The Mistakes of the Church - The Mistakes of the Atheist Infidel and Materialist - God Not the Maker of the Universe - Progress the Evidence of a Merciful But Not All-Powerful God. Reconciliation of Science and Christianity. The Formation of a Solar System - Evolution - Human Progress - Possibilities of the Future - Including Spicy Explanatory Matter In Prose. Embellished with Nearly 200 Illustrations.. Together with a Number of Fine Poems on Popular Subjects. Including Sketches of the City of the Straits - Past, Present and Future. Detroit, Mich.: Lyman E. Stowe, Publisher, 1884.

First edition. Tall octavo. 319, [1] pp. Illustrated throughout with woodcuts. Publisher's gilt-pictorial green cloth over beveled boards.

Not in Negley, Utopian Literature, nor in Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature. 
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Future Utopia In Brooklyn, 1992! (In Case You Missed It)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Brooklyn, 1992, a great place to live.

It is cleaner; you can eat off the sidewalks. It is more peaceful; on Sundays you can hear a pin drop. It is healthier, and generally better than ever before. A 2¢ plain, (seltzer, i.e. seltza!) presumably, still costs two cents. Mass electrification via solar power and mechanization have brought widespread prosperity, and the extremes of wealth and poverty have been shaved. The electric car is standard (though not a Prius in sight). Government and the economy have meshed as a cooperative commonwealth. All land is owned by the state; people lease the sites of their palatial  - yes, palatial - homes.; every house a McMansion. Men and women are fully equal. Religion and science have buried the hatchet and are now best buds; indeed science and religion are one. Color photography has finally arrived. Various super-duper gizmos have increased the breadth and efficiency of personal communications.  Contact has been been made with Mars. The borough is now part of the city of Columbia, formerly New York. War is a thing of the past. The whole scene is, as they say in Brooklyn, "Cherce."

Oh, and dogs now understand human speech and can respond with a code of staccato barks.

Big changes since 1893, when the above was predicted. Bigger than when Bohemia colonized the Williamsburg district, bigger than when its HQ (hip quotient) burst the thermometer and led to gentrification, bohemian exodus, and Starbucks.

 

Earth Revisited is one of the more unusual novels of Utopian literature, a genre that thrived during the latter part of the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.

In 1892 Herbert Atheron is a successful businessman with a wife and two children. Only fifty, he contracts a fatal disease; he is dying as the novel opens. He regrets his life of crass money-making and rues the loss of Teresa, a young woman he was in love with in youth but who had tragically died. He loses consciousness.

When he awakens, he is a twenty-seven year old named Harold Amesbury, a man who has been ill and delirious for the last three months, nursed by Helen, who brings him back to a semblance of mental balance and introduces him to the world, Brooklyn, one hundred years later, a place of "bewildering magnificence and beauty." 

Helen and Harold draw close but his obsession with the long-lost Teresa drives a wedge between them and she leaves him. He boards at a house owned by a medium who leads him on a spiritual journey through time and space to the now-evergreen Sahara where he meets up with Helen. They experience a spiritual mind-meld and learn that Helen is the reincarnation of Teresa. They marry, take the last exit to Brooklyn, watch a tree grow there, and live happily ever after.

Byron Alden Brooks (1845–1911) "was a native New Yorker, born in the small town of Theresa. He was educated at Wesleyan University. Brooks was a teacher, journalist, and inventor as well as the author of several other literary works. His first book was King Saul (1876). As an inventor, he produced improvements in typewriters and linotype machines; his most notable innovation was probably the first typewriter that could shift between upper- and lower-case letters" (The National Cyclopedia of American Biography).

Only one thing remains in Brooklyn 1992 as it was in 1892. Dogs cannot scoop up their own poop. And they call it utopia...
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BROOKS, Byron. Earth Revisited. Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1893. First edition. Octavo. 318, (4 publisher's catalog) pp. Publisher's blue cloth boards, lettered in gilt.

Bleiler, Science-Fiction the Early Years 277. Negley 149. Sargent, p.49.
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Image courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books.

Read the entire text of Earth Revisited here.
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