The modern future was born, according to one dating, in the year 1770, when a Parisian hack writer named Louis-Sebastien Mercier wrote a book called L’an 2440…
…This linear conception of the time is another essential ingredient of the modern conception of the future; like the Augustinian doctrine it sees in history, future history included, a progression of unique events strung out on time’s thread, like beads on an infinite string.
by Robida Albert—”Maison tournante aérienne”: drawing shows a dwelling structure elevated above rooftops and designed to revolve and adjust in various directions. An occupant points to an airship with a fish-shaped bag in the sky lower right. One of the artist’s conceptions for his book on life in the upcoming twentieth century. (Source: A.G. Renstrom, LC staff, 1981-82.) ink over graphite underdrawing.—source: WIKI
Yet Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s L’an 2440 is as remote from Augustine as it is from Plato or the philosophers of India. Mercier’s future Paris is not the unfolding of the divine plan, and Providence plays no part in making it what it will be. The author of L’an 2440 is utterly secular. He takes it for granted that man lives only in history and has no share in eternity, that human things are the creation, not of Providence, nor of Fate, nor of any superhuman agency, but only of natural, and knowable, historical causes. Precisely because this is so, said Mercier, the future of society is rationally predictable. All that is required is knowledge of the leading causes and trends that determine the future of the ever-changing world.
It took a century and more before the brash assumptions of a Parisian scribbler were made explicit, expanded, and elaborated by men of far greater intellect than Mercier. It was done by pioneer sociologists who demonstrated that society as a whole could develop because all its parts were interdependent. At the same time, a new breed of historians appeared, who, forsaking the doings of kings and tyrants, began demonstrating that everything from the forms of law to the shapes of forks had a history, was the product of change in time. ( to be continued)…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…The book was Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s (1740-1814) L’An 2440. Rêve s’il en fut jamais, a vision of Paris in the far future. Mercier was a flâneur avant la lettre, who knew his city intimately (he later published a twelve-volume portrait of the Paris of his own day, closely and shrewdly observed), and his fantasized city of the future was in barbed counterpoint to the ills of the present – no wonder it was banned. To the astonishment of the time-traveler, the Parisians of the year 2440 are polite, hard-working, and have abandoned high fashion for sturdy, plain clothing. There are still rich and poor, but the gap between them has narrowed, and no one goes hungry.
France is still a monarchy, but the king is an open-minded, open-hearted ruler who consults regularly with the wisest of his subjects and wanders the streets of his capital without pomp and circumstance in order to inform himself firsthand about the state of the nation. The palace of Versailles has fallen into ruins, a mute reproach to the wastrel extravagance of yore. Parisians of the far future still get around the city in horse-drawn carriages, but they no longer recklessly run over pedestrians, and the streets they traverse are broad and well lit. Great social and political advances have been made – the government works for the welfare of the many rather than amassing wealth for the few, the crime rate has sunk to almost zero, even Parisian traffic has been tamed. But science and technology have stood still or even slipped backwards: doctors have gone back to a few herbal medicines, the chief scientific institution is an overstuffed natural history museum exhibiting the great chain of being, the research program is lifted straight from Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) scientific utopia The New Atlantis (1627) (already retrograde in 1770, much less 2440), and the once vast collection of books housed in the royal library has been conveniently reduced by a bonfire that disposed of thousands of books deemed erroneous, malicious, repetitious, or just badly written: “We consigned to the fire that enormous mass [of books], as an expiatory sacrifice offered to truth, good sense, and true taste.”…
Read More:http://www.einsteinforum.de/fileadmin/einsteinforum/downloads/Winter08-09/Hyderabad_Daston_fin.pdf
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