The Absolute at Large 
by 

Karel Čapek, 

 

Stephen Baxter (Introduction)

 

The God Factory

What genius! The talent to creatively and productively rubbish an entire intellectual tradition would be enough to establish Čapek as a master-satirist. That he does it with such wit, humour and self-effacement puts him in a class of his own, perhaps as the court jester of Modernism who tweaks everyone’s beard and becomes the more loved for it.

Platonic monism is arguably the most enduring conception of the world we live in. And not just among philosophers. The monistic attitude is culturally pervasive from science to tv talk shows. Monism holds that the entire universe is composed ultimately of a single substance. Further, that this substance is either held together in its various forms or evolves in order to produce (it matters little which) something called spirit. Spirit is both the glue that pervades everything which exists, and, in effect gives substance its existence.

Religious types, particularly Christians (but also Muslims), have had a long love affair with Platonic monism. It has been very useful in explaining a range of doctrines more or less rationally. But scientifically oriented minds also find it attractive as they attempt to explain to the rest of us why things look the way they do, from atoms to galactic clusters. Monism suggests that however subtly things are constructed, their fundamental logic is simple and comprehensible. It sets an agenda for assessing this structure we have come to call scientific method.

Čapek knows this tradition of Platonic monism intimately. He drops key names from the tradition like Spinoza and Leibniz who re-invigorated the tradition during the Enlightenment, as well as the so-called Positivists of the 19th century who opposed it with their own brand of monism. So he also knows the tendency which the adherents of monism have in drifting ever so casually from substance-monism into political-monism. A single way of being implies, for many, a single correct way of thinking, which is then enforced by institutions of the church, government, business, and the scientific establishment.

One interpretation of the movement called Modernism is that it began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response of suspicion to Platonic monism, especially in its Enlightenment forms. The Enlightenment promoted confidence in rational certainty and intellectual progress rather than religious faith and obedience. The Modernist counter-attitude, for lack of of a more precise term, reached its strongest point between the two world wars with writers like Wolff, Fitzgerald, Eliot, and, of course, Čapek. These people had experienced the smugness of 19th century culture and the social and political disaster of the Great War. They were less than delighted with the Enlightenment vision of the world.

Modernist writers had also experienced an incredible expansion of scientific knowledge, especially those of the turn of the century discoveries in physics. Max Planck’s Quantum Hypothesis and Albert Einstein’s propositions about electro-magnetic radiation described an unexpected world, but a world that seemed to confirm the idea of monistic simplicity. Mass and energy were different manifestations of the same thing. By the time Capek was writing his weekly instalments of The Absolute at Large in the mid-20’s, it was clear that science had uncovered a source of power that was entirely beyond human imagination.The Enlightenment had apparently succeeded.

The new physics of the early 20th century promised a breakthrough not just in technological ability but also in the character of human existence. The usual scientific optimism of the new physics was fixated on the freedom that so much readily available power could provide. Energy, which now could be seen to be abundant and available everywhere, was the key to a golden age of culture, to unlimited economic development, and to ever greater technological advance. Human power had become virtually unlimited.

Theoretically, the energy available in a lump of Silesian coal could power a city for years or an ocean transport ship for decades. Alternatively it could be used to keep people warm, to grow food, to create new materials from which to build human shelters. The apocalypse had arrived but it brought with it not judgment but vindication. Heaven was at hand.

For Čapek these discoveries did not bode well for the planet or the future of humanity. But how to penetrate the pervasive bubble of scientific optimism? His tactic was brilliant: By taking the modern form of Platonic monism entirely literally, he could raise suspicions about the consequences of the new physics without attacking the logic of the thinking involved. All he had to do was refine the vocabulary a bit.

Atomic energy, in his writing, was not just a physical force, it was the perennial spirit trapped within the confines of matter. This fit perfectly with the age-old tenets of Platonism that had been absorbed into popular patterns of thought. Plato and Spinoza and Leibniz were correct, the world is essentially spirit. Science has proven it. And when this spirit is released through modern technology, when the matter encasing it is entirely annihilated, it is capable of unimaginable things. 

Quite rightly, however, it is the entrepreneurial business man not the scientist or the philosopher who understands the necessary methods for spreading this new knowledge to the rest of mankind. Čapek’s protagonist is the Bill Gates of his day, with a vision to get a nuclear fission ‘carburator’ into every city and factory and house in the land. In addition to its other benefits, this mechanism also gives off a sort of radiation which makes folk far more virtuous, friendly and... well, connected, at least for a time. Thinking about it, one wonders if Gates got his script for ‘a computer in every home’ straight from Čapek.

Čapek equates this power held within matter with the Absolute of Platonic Idealism. This Absolute is the source of all being, the ultimate reality, the Higgs boson of the day. The Absolute is, in short, God. Although the local bishop is keen to deny this divine attribution, it is only because the fact of the Absolute as it can be observed in action in the carburator, in the flesh at it were, contradicts some traditional dogmatic assertions. The suggestion is, however, that the bishop is acting much like the grand inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s story of Christ’s re-appearance. He rejects the Absolute just as the inquisitor rejects Christ because Christianity has developed its own interests quite apart from the divine, one of which is the maintenance of a stable hierarchy of power.

In The Absolute at Large Čapek satirises every major modern institution from academic philosophy, to applied science, to practical technological development, to government and its role in social regulation and defense, to the modern church and its theology. But despite this broad institutional range, his primary target is very narrowly defined: Idolatry, the worship of the material, among which Čapek includes the intellectual and conceptual as well as the physical. In this he is as clear, even if rather less violent, than Moses encountering the Golden Calf.

He is also considerably more subtle given the circumstances of his own descent from the mountain. The idols created by the Enlightenment are, he shows, as subversive to human welfare as the stone images to which human sacrifices were made in ancient history. In fact they are more destructive because they are less obvious. They appear now in the form of progress, and achievement, and potential. These idols are seductive in a way that chunks of basalt could never be. They are more enticing because they are symbols of hope rather than fear.

Scientific method, technological skill, and capitalist marketing promise a great deal. But these promises are illusory according to The Absolute at Large. The recent events of European history should have demonstrated the profound depth of this illusion to his readers; but they didn’t. And they still haven’t despite a further century of human experience. The lessons about idolatry are perennial but apparently have to be learned perennially as well. And the primary lesson is this: God cannot be defined, captured and used by human beings. Any attempt to do so will result in disaster. Time, of course, has proven Čapek to be prescient as well as witty.