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The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul
A pioneering book proposing a transhumanist vision of the future, from one of the most influential visionary scientists of the twentieth century.
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1929
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About the author
J.D. Bernal
77 books31 followersJohn Desmond Bernal FRS was one of the United Kingdom's most well-known and controversial scientists. Bernal is considered a pioneer in X-ray crystallography in molecular biology. He published extensively on the history of science. In addition, Bernal wrote popular books on science and society, and he was also a communist activist.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
June 22, 2020
Were you looking for the dialectical synthesis of Joseph Stalin and Isaac Asimov? If not, then why not?
October 21, 2019
You know, one of the problems of modern society is that some of the most powerful platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) are being run by tech-bros, people who believe that STEM trumps anything, scientists and engineers are superior to others, and that we just let tech do its thing we'll enter a golden age in no time. Blind belief in technology can be good, but it can also be a detriment - one example would be the current opposition to doing anything about climate change, we'll just have to wait until the right tech pops up to lower CO2 counts in the atmosphere. Modern opponents like Evgeny Morozov call this 'solutionism', where engineers try to solve complex social problems using tech, but these complex problems require social, political, human solutions. Bernal was far ahead of his times in that style of thinking.
A long time before the current wave of tech-bros, there was The World, The Flesh & The Devil, which would be a manifesto for that type if it weren't so old. It's a short-ish essay on the near future of mankind, where things are taking us, what is going to happen to mankind, thought on a large scale. Reading this 100% positive science-is-going-to-make-us-into-uberpeople is a wonderful exercise after years of tech-is-going-to-kill-us-all, but come on, it's often so blue-eyed it's painful.
Bernal, as a scientist, has a weird obsession with the superiority of scientists to other 'non-scientists':
or
Yeah you fools, let the scientists run the place and go live in the Bio-Dome or whatever. You have nothing to contribute to how the world is run!
There are some weird other things, for example, Bernal is rather sex-negative:
In other words: our physiological needs are standing in the way, stop touching your girlfriend, start writing this paper! There's a weird prudish thing going on here which keeps on bubbling up. Another quote:
?!!?
Bernal has (is that a British thing?) a bit of a horror of the body, and that influences how he sees the future - mankind moves beyond the body, becomes first the influencer, then the creator of its own shell. Those who don't want to influence 'stay behind', those who do slowly develop into their own species, with a large conceptual language gap in the middle (a common theme in science-fiction! Just look at Peter Watts' novels).
In a way, we've already started to influence ourselves. You could treat the Internet as an extension of your memory, all you have to do is 'remember' by typing words into a search engine, not that different from remembering using your brain (instead of words, you use some other token to remember - a smell, a word, a song....). I don't start much work without first googling the question, chances are there's a solution to my problem in the first result, a solution better than the one I remembered using my own brain. So in a way, we've already partially become the creators of our own body. Unlike Bernal's beliefs, however, this change hasn't happened unevenly across scientist/non-scientist, but more across poor/non-poor borders.
Bernal was a Marxist and communist who believed that communism will help usher in his age of the man-made man:
So scientism, Bernalism, tech-bro-ism, whatever you want to call it, eventually needs communism to grow, and communism needs scientism to continue climbing up the Marxian hierarchy towards 'pure' communism. Feels quaint in 2019.
But: In an age where the world is obviously being run by even-more-than-usually dumb people, reading about Bernal's belief in never-ending progress is honestly refreshing. So if you need to replenish your battery with some 'large' solutions, go for it? (Another good 'refresher', who's not so blue-eyed: Freeman Dyson.)
A long time before the current wave of tech-bros, there was The World, The Flesh & The Devil, which would be a manifesto for that type if it weren't so old. It's a short-ish essay on the near future of mankind, where things are taking us, what is going to happen to mankind, thought on a large scale. Reading this 100% positive science-is-going-to-make-us-into-uberpeople is a wonderful exercise after years of tech-is-going-to-kill-us-all, but come on, it's often so blue-eyed it's painful.
Bernal, as a scientist, has a weird obsession with the superiority of scientists to other 'non-scientists':
More and more, the world may be run by the scientific expert. The new nations, America, China and Russia, have begun to adapt to this idea consciously. Scientific bodies naturally are first conceived of as advisory and they will probably never become anything else; but, with every advance in the direction of more rational psychology, the power of advice will increase and that of force proportionately decrease.
or
A happy prosperous humanity enjoying their bodies, exercising the arts, patronizing the religions, may be well content to leave the machine, by which their desires are satisfied, in other and more efficient hands.
Yeah you fools, let the scientists run the place and go live in the Bio-Dome or whatever. You have nothing to contribute to how the world is run!
There are some weird other things, for example, Bernal is rather sex-negative:
Humanity, or its descendants, may well be much more occupied with purely scientific research and much less with the necessity of satisfying primary physiological and psychological needs than it is at present.
In other words: our physiological needs are standing in the way, stop touching your girlfriend, start writing this paper! There's a weird prudish thing going on here which keeps on bubbling up. Another quote:
A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to æsthetic creation.
?!!?
Bernal has (is that a British thing?) a bit of a horror of the body, and that influences how he sees the future - mankind moves beyond the body, becomes first the influencer, then the creator of its own shell. Those who don't want to influence 'stay behind', those who do slowly develop into their own species, with a large conceptual language gap in the middle (a common theme in science-fiction! Just look at Peter Watts' novels).
In a way, we've already started to influence ourselves. You could treat the Internet as an extension of your memory, all you have to do is 'remember' by typing words into a search engine, not that different from remembering using your brain (instead of words, you use some other token to remember - a smell, a word, a song....). I don't start much work without first googling the question, chances are there's a solution to my problem in the first result, a solution better than the one I remembered using my own brain. So in a way, we've already partially become the creators of our own body. Unlike Bernal's beliefs, however, this change hasn't happened unevenly across scientist/non-scientist, but more across poor/non-poor borders.
Bernal was a Marxist and communist who believed that communism will help usher in his age of the man-made man:
The technical importance of the scientist is bound to give him the independent administration of large funds and end the mendicant state in which he exists at present. [...] the organization of the world would have to pass through its present semi-capitalistic stage to complete proletarian dictatorship, because it is unlikely that a scientific corporation would, in an ordinary capitalistic state, be allowed to be so wealthy and powerful. In a Soviet state (not the state of the present, but one freed from the danger of capitalist attack), the scientific institutions would in fact gradually become the government, and a further stage of the Marxian hierarchy of domination would be reached.
So scientism, Bernalism, tech-bro-ism, whatever you want to call it, eventually needs communism to grow, and communism needs scientism to continue climbing up the Marxian hierarchy towards 'pure' communism. Feels quaint in 2019.
But: In an age where the world is obviously being run by even-more-than-usually dumb people, reading about Bernal's belief in never-ending progress is honestly refreshing. So if you need to replenish your battery with some 'large' solutions, go for it? (Another good 'refresher', who's not so blue-eyed: Freeman Dyson.)
Read
November 14, 2023Techno-optimist science bro speculates about the future, but make it Marxist. Proto-Star Trek / internet-of-things / icky accelerationism / neuralink futurism vibes. Written by a crystallography nerd at Cambridge's Cavendish Lab, who was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. My communist friends all like to hate on McKenzie Wark but I loved the intro.
August 21, 2013
Some amazing future gazing from the X-ray crystallography pioneer, particularly about manned space flight 30 years before Sputnik, but also some dire philosophical twaddle. Fascinating, though.
June 17, 2018
delightful for its earnestness and historical curiosity.
April 28, 2018
When I saw Verso's 2017 reissue of this 1929 book in the library, I picked it up because I vaguely recalled that it had informed Grant Morrison's work around the turn of the millennium, such as
The Invisibles
, which I recently re-read. Unfortunately, I can't find any evidence that this is true, but I read the Irish Marxist scientist Bernal's brief, spirited utopian tract anyway.
Bernal fell into a disrepute as a thinker in the mid- to late-twentieth century not only because he was a Marxist, but because he was an outright defender of Stalinism, even after those breaking points of the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, this new edition of his first book features an introduction by McKenzie Wark (from which I derive the above information) defending its continuing relevance on the two grounds of the political left's 1.) need to deal with science (and not just philosophy and art) in "the Anthropocene" and 2.) need to appeal to affects other than Adornian miserablism. I certainly sympathize with the latter goal, and was charmed by Wark's linkage of Bernal not only to the socialist Shaw but to another Irish literary predecessor:
Bernal's title refers to three areas of human existence that, he hopes, will come increasingly under rational control with the progress of science: the world is nature, the external environment; the flesh is the human body itself; and the devil is the psyche or human consciousness. In other words, as Bernal puts it, the physical, the physiological, and the psychological.
He imagines the future conquest of nature as a conquest of space: we will live, Bernal claims, in small globes among the planets, bounding through open space across low-gravity plains. As for the human body, it will extend its life as a brain in a cylinder connected to the world by various wired and wireless mechanisms; not only that, but it will join itself to collective brains, which will change our perception of what it is to have a self since they will persist in some ineffable quiddity even as constituent parts join up or die off.
Finally, Bernal relies on Freud for his psychology and imagines that as we distance ourselves further and further from nature, sublimation will play a greater and greater role in our experience: the energy that once went for biological reproduction will now go toward technological and social reproduction; Bernal, who uses the word "perversity" as an honorific description of evolution's ingenuity, gives his latent aestheticism full rein:
Again, I share Wark's wonder that the left used to be able to strike this tone, before the defeat of its prophecies, at least in their orthodox form, turned it to the "ruthless criticism of everything existing" less as the negative moment in an ongoing dialectic than as an end in itself, whether exhibited by the grandeur of Adorno's all-encompassing denunciations or by the anhedonic carping of social media.
On the other hand, there are good reasons to mistrust utopianism, from whatever ideological quarter. At the end of this short book, Bernal worries that psychoanalysis will actually make us happy by restoring us to the innocence of our animal desires and thereby turning us away from sublimation's glorious goad to self-transcendence. The scientists, though, will never be appeased, Bernal speculates; in the evolving Soviet state he imagines that scientific bodies will actually be able to seize political control ("the scientific institutions would in fact gradually become the government, and a further stage of the Marxian hierarchy of domination would be reached") and take to the stars, leaving psychoanalyzed bovine mankind to graze on the earth, itself now considered by the future star children as a "a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment."
Bernal signals by his title that his speculations are religion by other means (he inadvertently echoes Dante: "consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light"), but he often forgets to account for that as he elaborates his eschatologies. As for aestheticism, it is often misapplied when joined to politics, just as politics is often misapplied when joined to aesthetics: artists might provide hints to the multiple agencies who make the world, but in general no one party or guild—not even my own—should have total control, of this planet or any other. With these twentieth-century cautions in mind, though, maybe we can begin to think again about making a future that at least fascinates, if it does not offer salvation.
Bernal fell into a disrepute as a thinker in the mid- to late-twentieth century not only because he was a Marxist, but because he was an outright defender of Stalinism, even after those breaking points of the Hungarian and Czechoslovakian uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, this new edition of his first book features an introduction by McKenzie Wark (from which I derive the above information) defending its continuing relevance on the two grounds of the political left's 1.) need to deal with science (and not just philosophy and art) in "the Anthropocene" and 2.) need to appeal to affects other than Adornian miserablism. I certainly sympathize with the latter goal, and was charmed by Wark's linkage of Bernal not only to the socialist Shaw but to another Irish literary predecessor:
Bernal's thinking in this era is, among other things, the aesthetics of Oscar Wilde expanded to a scale that imagines making over the cosmos itself as a work of art.
Bernal's title refers to three areas of human existence that, he hopes, will come increasingly under rational control with the progress of science: the world is nature, the external environment; the flesh is the human body itself; and the devil is the psyche or human consciousness. In other words, as Bernal puts it, the physical, the physiological, and the psychological.
He imagines the future conquest of nature as a conquest of space: we will live, Bernal claims, in small globes among the planets, bounding through open space across low-gravity plains. As for the human body, it will extend its life as a brain in a cylinder connected to the world by various wired and wireless mechanisms; not only that, but it will join itself to collective brains, which will change our perception of what it is to have a self since they will persist in some ineffable quiddity even as constituent parts join up or die off.
Finally, Bernal relies on Freud for his psychology and imagines that as we distance ourselves further and further from nature, sublimation will play a greater and greater role in our experience: the energy that once went for biological reproduction will now go toward technological and social reproduction; Bernal, who uses the word "perversity" as an honorific description of evolution's ingenuity, gives his latent aestheticism full rein:
The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now. The cardinal tendency of progress is the replacement of an indifferent chance environment by a deliberately created one. As time goes on, the acceptance, the appreciation, even the understanding of nature, will be less and less needed. In its place will come the need to determine the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe which is nothing more nor less than art.
Again, I share Wark's wonder that the left used to be able to strike this tone, before the defeat of its prophecies, at least in their orthodox form, turned it to the "ruthless criticism of everything existing" less as the negative moment in an ongoing dialectic than as an end in itself, whether exhibited by the grandeur of Adorno's all-encompassing denunciations or by the anhedonic carping of social media.
On the other hand, there are good reasons to mistrust utopianism, from whatever ideological quarter. At the end of this short book, Bernal worries that psychoanalysis will actually make us happy by restoring us to the innocence of our animal desires and thereby turning us away from sublimation's glorious goad to self-transcendence. The scientists, though, will never be appeased, Bernal speculates; in the evolving Soviet state he imagines that scientific bodies will actually be able to seize political control ("the scientific institutions would in fact gradually become the government, and a further stage of the Marxian hierarchy of domination would be reached") and take to the stars, leaving psychoanalyzed bovine mankind to graze on the earth, itself now considered by the future star children as a "a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment."
Bernal signals by his title that his speculations are religion by other means (he inadvertently echoes Dante: "consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light"), but he often forgets to account for that as he elaborates his eschatologies. As for aestheticism, it is often misapplied when joined to politics, just as politics is often misapplied when joined to aesthetics: artists might provide hints to the multiple agencies who make the world, but in general no one party or guild—not even my own—should have total control, of this planet or any other. With these twentieth-century cautions in mind, though, maybe we can begin to think again about making a future that at least fascinates, if it does not offer salvation.
Read
January 28, 2018Tough one to rate - an intellectual curiosity from 1929 that basically predates, predicts, and prophesies the tributaries of science and science fiction alike. As interesting for what it's right about as what is wrong.
Some predictions are so far flung they may not even be inaccurate - we just haven't caught up to the future.
-.5 for oddly specific Marxist sentiments at the end
3.5 cool cool cool
Some predictions are so far flung they may not even be inaccurate - we just haven't caught up to the future.
-.5 for oddly specific Marxist sentiments at the end
3.5 cool cool cool
June 5, 2013
Arthur C. Clarke called this "one of the most brilliant attempts at scientific prediction ever made." I agree: this is a very sophisticated and penetrating classic in the field of futurology -- all the more amazing because it was written in 1929 (about the time Buck Rogers debuted). Sometimes Bernal misses, like his idea that it will be convenient to live in 3D cities in zero gravity. It didn't occur to him that zero gravity would have negative effects on human health. Other times, he hits the bull's-eye, like his speculations about future humans bifurcating into two castes: a technological post-human caste which continues to evolve through mechanism and surgery etc.; and a luddite Human Classic™ version which prefers to retain its traditional form. It's almost 100 years since Bernal wrote, and that very debate is heating up! All in all, a concise and worthwhile read.
July 4, 2022
Starts with his plans to build space colonies out of the remnants of asteroids, ends with calls for a collective soviet style technocracy composed on brains in jars with artificial sense organs. Batshit, but I love it.
Many people would scoff at this nowadays in our cynical, sneering postmodernist age. It is, indeed, written from another time, a message in a bottle when a combination of early Bolshevik thinking and scientific optimism were still currencies in vogue. Its before science was perceived as being discredited, from the zyklon-b gas Chambers to the atom bomb, before our collective vision of a science based society was filled with the dreary, conservative pessimism of Brave New World.
We now live in an era when science is routinely, performatively trashed. The right, obviously, being the sworn enemies of human civillisation, have their best to try and reverse the gains of the Enlightenment. Evangelicals deny evolution and try to ban teachings of it schoolrooms, corporations spent millions destroying, muddying or else just undermining the science of climate breakdown for decades to the point where we now face the spectre of its unstoppable unfurling, anti vaxxers, COVID deniers, and anti-4G cranks polluted our cities in mass protests during the height of the pandemic and proffesional lunatics like Jordan Peterson profess distain for reason and hark back to pre-modern, fin de siecle cults of Christian worship, Jungian fantasy, primal myth and an assorted jamboree of primitive backwards nonsense. The left though, has culpability is cultivating this atmosphere of irrationallism. The post war intellectual left, haunted by the failure of the USSR, and increasingly lurching between anarchist drop out culture, Maoist theatrics and out and out spiritual LSD cults, cowed and intimidated by the onslaught on anti communist propaganda, decided to intellectually denounce science as a tool of capital, of being racist, eurocentric, imperalist, totalitarian. Professional charlatans, from Feyerabend to Federichi decided to denounce the entire apparatus, the former ending up joining the Catholic Church in applauding the persecution of Gallileo, and the latter deciding to invoke an image of some lost nirvana of pre modern witchcraft based paradise, destroyed by evil Male Science. More recent intellectual garbage include Bruno Lator, with his wholesale and complete embrace of relativism and his denial of even the most minimal forms of objectivity, and Gigorio Agamben, whose whole sale embrace of quasi-Medievalism and crazy anti-medicine conspiracy theories is as tragic as it is laughable. Both the latter two were fed on the teats of Foucault, the man's whose Nietzschean, anti-moral nihillism and ultra-relatvism did more to poison an entire generation of leftists than anyone else I can think of.
So it comes that such unabashed science optimism, with a dash of true utopian craziness, and with a dizziness for the possibilities of the future, feels like such a breathe of fresh air, so bold, so radical, so incredible. And, as McKenzie Mark says in the introduction, in age where our main threats are climate breakdown, recurrent plauges and advanced AI, with deranged social media aggrevated lunatics denying the first two and equally deranged Sillicon Valley fascists eagerly embracing the latter in their goal of eradicating the human all together, a book attempting to outline the way science and politics work together, and the need for the creation of some kind of Soviet-style technocracy operating under a system of advanced central planning, is actually more pragmatic and sensible than a thousand dreary anti science postmodernist tomes.
Written in 1929, its staggeringly prescient in places, and an overall burst of fresh air in todays arid intellectual landscape
Many people would scoff at this nowadays in our cynical, sneering postmodernist age. It is, indeed, written from another time, a message in a bottle when a combination of early Bolshevik thinking and scientific optimism were still currencies in vogue. Its before science was perceived as being discredited, from the zyklon-b gas Chambers to the atom bomb, before our collective vision of a science based society was filled with the dreary, conservative pessimism of Brave New World.
We now live in an era when science is routinely, performatively trashed. The right, obviously, being the sworn enemies of human civillisation, have their best to try and reverse the gains of the Enlightenment. Evangelicals deny evolution and try to ban teachings of it schoolrooms, corporations spent millions destroying, muddying or else just undermining the science of climate breakdown for decades to the point where we now face the spectre of its unstoppable unfurling, anti vaxxers, COVID deniers, and anti-4G cranks polluted our cities in mass protests during the height of the pandemic and proffesional lunatics like Jordan Peterson profess distain for reason and hark back to pre-modern, fin de siecle cults of Christian worship, Jungian fantasy, primal myth and an assorted jamboree of primitive backwards nonsense. The left though, has culpability is cultivating this atmosphere of irrationallism. The post war intellectual left, haunted by the failure of the USSR, and increasingly lurching between anarchist drop out culture, Maoist theatrics and out and out spiritual LSD cults, cowed and intimidated by the onslaught on anti communist propaganda, decided to intellectually denounce science as a tool of capital, of being racist, eurocentric, imperalist, totalitarian. Professional charlatans, from Feyerabend to Federichi decided to denounce the entire apparatus, the former ending up joining the Catholic Church in applauding the persecution of Gallileo, and the latter deciding to invoke an image of some lost nirvana of pre modern witchcraft based paradise, destroyed by evil Male Science. More recent intellectual garbage include Bruno Lator, with his wholesale and complete embrace of relativism and his denial of even the most minimal forms of objectivity, and Gigorio Agamben, whose whole sale embrace of quasi-Medievalism and crazy anti-medicine conspiracy theories is as tragic as it is laughable. Both the latter two were fed on the teats of Foucault, the man's whose Nietzschean, anti-moral nihillism and ultra-relatvism did more to poison an entire generation of leftists than anyone else I can think of.
So it comes that such unabashed science optimism, with a dash of true utopian craziness, and with a dizziness for the possibilities of the future, feels like such a breathe of fresh air, so bold, so radical, so incredible. And, as McKenzie Mark says in the introduction, in age where our main threats are climate breakdown, recurrent plauges and advanced AI, with deranged social media aggrevated lunatics denying the first two and equally deranged Sillicon Valley fascists eagerly embracing the latter in their goal of eradicating the human all together, a book attempting to outline the way science and politics work together, and the need for the creation of some kind of Soviet-style technocracy operating under a system of advanced central planning, is actually more pragmatic and sensible than a thousand dreary anti science postmodernist tomes.
Written in 1929, its staggeringly prescient in places, and an overall burst of fresh air in todays arid intellectual landscape
December 4, 2025
I'll admit to being a sucker for grandiose and expansive books on theory; I really like when authors take big swings. And I like the very particular 1910s-1930s "the world is changing rapidly and I'm going to try to predict everything in the future" type books as well.
This book checks all those boxes, but the issue with taking a big swing is that you often end up with a big miss, and this swing and a miss is so big the author ends up in the dirt with chalk on his face.
To briefly summarize, J.D. Bernal was a brilliant turn-of-the-century chemist who was also an unapologetic Marxist of the Stalinist stripe. The book itself, which is thankfully brief, is a work of speculative scientific nonfiction, in which Bernal analyzes the future of humanity through the lens of "the world" (i.e. organic and inorganic material around us), "the flesh" (anatomy and biology), and "the devil" (our psychology). Each is examined in turn, and synthesized in a final concluding chapter.
First the good: J.D. Bernal in definitely on to something in his section on "the devil." Incorporating some early Freudian concepts, Bernal talks about the role of science in society, and the tension between an educated scientific elite and "the masses." One doesn't need to look much further than the political backlash in the United States to COVID vaccines and other experts to see that much of what Bernal discusses in this book came to fruition. He also makes some interesting points on the role of specialization in science, describing how as scientific advances get more complex it will require greater levels of specialization, but at the cost of losing sight of the big picture. This chapter is really good, and would be worth seeking out individually or excerpting.
But the rest of the book is uninteresting. Some of the things he discusses are not so much wrong as they are, sitting here in 2025, not compelling. And not in the sense of "wow can you believe that they were so wrong about the future in 1929" (because that's a pretty unfair critique), but instead it's not compelling in the sense that he doesn't provide any sort of real framework with which to evaluate the future. The predictions and speculations made, ranging from advances in rocketry that allow us to go to space (true!) to being able to soak our brains in fluid and build robot arms and walk around for eternity (not true!), are just thrown against the wall spaghetti-style. Some stick, some don't, but there's no clear throughline for the reader to understand why some of it sticks and some won't.
As a reader from the future, I don't think that speculative predictions such as these are bad, nor do I begrudge anyone for being wrong. What I think makes this work pretty dull is that there's nothing really underpinning why he's right or wrong; there's no theory or praxis by which we can say, "sure he got the details wrong, but in broad strokes his application of X is still useful because..." The notable exception to this principle is the Devil section, and it's not a coincidence it's the best.
I'm not a big fan of science fiction, but if you are this book is notable because it is the first articulation of the Bernal sphere proposal (a self-contained way to live in space) which has been featured in numerous science fiction stories ranging from Arthur C Clarke to Sonic the Hedgehog. But besides that little nugget, I'd say this is a pretty banal read.
This book checks all those boxes, but the issue with taking a big swing is that you often end up with a big miss, and this swing and a miss is so big the author ends up in the dirt with chalk on his face.
To briefly summarize, J.D. Bernal was a brilliant turn-of-the-century chemist who was also an unapologetic Marxist of the Stalinist stripe. The book itself, which is thankfully brief, is a work of speculative scientific nonfiction, in which Bernal analyzes the future of humanity through the lens of "the world" (i.e. organic and inorganic material around us), "the flesh" (anatomy and biology), and "the devil" (our psychology). Each is examined in turn, and synthesized in a final concluding chapter.
First the good: J.D. Bernal in definitely on to something in his section on "the devil." Incorporating some early Freudian concepts, Bernal talks about the role of science in society, and the tension between an educated scientific elite and "the masses." One doesn't need to look much further than the political backlash in the United States to COVID vaccines and other experts to see that much of what Bernal discusses in this book came to fruition. He also makes some interesting points on the role of specialization in science, describing how as scientific advances get more complex it will require greater levels of specialization, but at the cost of losing sight of the big picture. This chapter is really good, and would be worth seeking out individually or excerpting.
But the rest of the book is uninteresting. Some of the things he discusses are not so much wrong as they are, sitting here in 2025, not compelling. And not in the sense of "wow can you believe that they were so wrong about the future in 1929" (because that's a pretty unfair critique), but instead it's not compelling in the sense that he doesn't provide any sort of real framework with which to evaluate the future. The predictions and speculations made, ranging from advances in rocketry that allow us to go to space (true!) to being able to soak our brains in fluid and build robot arms and walk around for eternity (not true!), are just thrown against the wall spaghetti-style. Some stick, some don't, but there's no clear throughline for the reader to understand why some of it sticks and some won't.
As a reader from the future, I don't think that speculative predictions such as these are bad, nor do I begrudge anyone for being wrong. What I think makes this work pretty dull is that there's nothing really underpinning why he's right or wrong; there's no theory or praxis by which we can say, "sure he got the details wrong, but in broad strokes his application of X is still useful because..." The notable exception to this principle is the Devil section, and it's not a coincidence it's the best.
I'm not a big fan of science fiction, but if you are this book is notable because it is the first articulation of the Bernal sphere proposal (a self-contained way to live in space) which has been featured in numerous science fiction stories ranging from Arthur C Clarke to Sonic the Hedgehog. But besides that little nugget, I'd say this is a pretty banal read.
December 3, 2018
Clarke so strongly recommended this concise speculative essay in Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations that I just had to read it - tonight. Despite the title, this is less theological then cyberpunk, but from the dieselpunk 1920s. This visionary published in 1929 a considered, thoughtful and logical pronouncement on the future that included space travel"
including such conveyances as the recently trotted out light-sail:
This seer would not be surprised by the dreams of nanotech and in this own Brave New World moment foresaw cybernetically transformed humans and brain-in-a-pan immortality:
Even this tether can be snipped for a truly unfettered apotheosis:
Once the earth's gravitational field is overcome, development must follow with immense rapidity. Without going too closely into the mechanical details, it appears that the most effective method is based on the principle of the rocket, and the difficulty, as it exists, is simply that of projecting the particles, whose recoil is being utilized, with the greatest possible velocity, so that to economize both energy and the amount of matter required for propulsion.
including such conveyances as the recently trotted out light-sail:
...form of space sailing might be developed which used the repulsive effect of the sun's rays instead of wind. A space vessel spreading its large, metallic wings, acres in extent, to the full, might be blown to the limit of Neptune's orbit.
This seer would not be surprised by the dreams of nanotech and in this own Brave New World moment foresaw cybernetically transformed humans and brain-in-a-pan immortality:
If a method has been found of connecting a nerve ending in a brain directly with an electrical reactor, then the way is open for connecting it with a brain-cell of another person. Such a connection being, of course, essentially electrical, could be effected just as well through the ether as along wires. At first this would limit itself to the more perfect and economic transference of thought which would be necessary in the co-operative thinking of the future. But it cannot stop here. Connections between two or more minds would tend to become a more and more permanent condition until they functioned as a dual or multiple organism.
Even this tether can be snipped for a truly unfettered apotheosis:
Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealize...
March 5, 2022
The power of this book lies not so much in what it has to say – which, though inevitably dated, is more than occasionally interesting – as in the approach it takes to divining the future. Read it not for historical interest only: you will find a perspective that feels fresh and novel, a century on.
Bernal has a cold eye and a steady hand that enables him to pick apart the wishful-thinking element in all projections, and to follow a method that separates in order to analyse, and then re-synthesises. He is shrewd, too, in identifying both the role of human intention and the likelihood of unintended consequences:
The analysis is based around the three strands of the title: world (physics), flesh (physiology) and devil (psychology). I really enjoyed the discussion of cyborg post-humanism in the flesh section, and McKenzie Wark's preface is right to pick out Bernal's characterisation of perversity – we would say 'queerness' now – as a key factor in evolution. "Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution." He acknowledges the resistance that such a break will face from some sectors of society, but insists that other sectors will inevitably experiment. "After all it is brain that counts," Bernal writes, and I wonder what he would make of recent research findings that we have two other smaller brains (one in the central nervous system, the other in our gut). It complicates the brain-in-a-vat projection, surely?
I'm also fascinated by Bernal's predictions of the rise of a technocratic order:
Alongside Arthur C. Clarke, a known Bernal fan, I bet John Cage read and enjoyed this book.
Bernal has a cold eye and a steady hand that enables him to pick apart the wishful-thinking element in all projections, and to follow a method that separates in order to analyse, and then re-synthesises. He is shrewd, too, in identifying both the role of human intention and the likelihood of unintended consequences:
there is the knowledge of our desires, but though the future according to our desires, is an illusion, our desires are, paradoxically, already tending to be the chief agent of change in the universe; it is only that the actual change is so rarely the desired change.
The analysis is based around the three strands of the title: world (physics), flesh (physiology) and devil (psychology). I really enjoyed the discussion of cyborg post-humanism in the flesh section, and McKenzie Wark's preface is right to pick out Bernal's characterisation of perversity – we would say 'queerness' now – as a key factor in evolution. "Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution." He acknowledges the resistance that such a break will face from some sectors of society, but insists that other sectors will inevitably experiment. "After all it is brain that counts," Bernal writes, and I wonder what he would make of recent research findings that we have two other smaller brains (one in the central nervous system, the other in our gut). It complicates the brain-in-a-vat projection, surely?
I'm also fascinated by Bernal's predictions of the rise of a technocratic order:
More and more, the world may be run by the scientific expert. The new nations, America, China and Russia, have begun to adapt to this idea consciously. Scientific bodies naturally are first conceived of as advisory and they will probably never become anything else; but, with every advance in the direction of more rational psychology, the power of advice will increase and that of force proportionately decrease.
Alongside Arthur C. Clarke, a known Bernal fan, I bet John Cage read and enjoyed this book.
September 11, 2019
'Mankind as a whole given peace, plenty and freedom, might well be content to let alone the fanatical but useful people who chose to distort their bodies or blow themselves into space; and if, at some time, the magnitude of the changes made them aware that something important and terrifying had happened, it would then be too late for them to do anything about it. Even if a wave to primitive obscurantism then swept the world clear of the heresy of science, science would already be on its way to the stars.
Mankind—the old mankind—would be left in undisputed possession of the earth, to be regarded by the inhabitants of the celestial spheres with a curious reverence. The world might, in fact, be transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment.'
Mankind—the old mankind—would be left in undisputed possession of the earth, to be regarded by the inhabitants of the celestial spheres with a curious reverence. The world might, in fact, be transformed into a human zoo, a zoo so intelligently managed that its inhabitants are not aware that they are there merely for the purposes of observation and experiment.'
October 12, 2025
this is honestly a book entirely made of contradictions - spends an entire chapter lamenting that we must leave the flesh behind for the sake of progress, before acknowledging in the final chapter that making changes to our physiology is bound to change our psychology and probably in unpredictable ways. an absurd techno-optimism emanating from the worst follies of rationalism, supposedly written by a Marxist (Stalinist, to be specific), that also supposes a hierarchy in future society between the scientifically minded and everyone else (towards the end, literally 'those too stupid or stubborn to change').
admittedly, incredibly creative for a thinker in the 1920s and anticipates a lot of science fiction but sorry McKenzie Wark, I thought this was awful.
admittedly, incredibly creative for a thinker in the 1920s and anticipates a lot of science fiction but sorry McKenzie Wark, I thought this was awful.
January 14, 2025
This book argues for -
Transformation of physical surroundings: let us live in hollowed out comet-debris bubbles
Transformation of physiology: become emotionless, sexless, immobile brains in tubes…because it is more convenient to manage the plebs- who will also assist in the manual labor for research.
Transformation of the psyche: no more desire, no more attraction- join the ‘complex’ hive-mind that will live on the moon or stay on earth as part of the human zoo.
Sounds great. I’ll eat my bugs now!
Transformation of physical surroundings: let us live in hollowed out comet-debris bubbles
Transformation of physiology: become emotionless, sexless, immobile brains in tubes…because it is more convenient to manage the plebs- who will also assist in the manual labor for research.
Transformation of the psyche: no more desire, no more attraction- join the ‘complex’ hive-mind that will live on the moon or stay on earth as part of the human zoo.
Sounds great. I’ll eat my bugs now!
May 8, 2022
Beautiful short piece by one the pioneers of X-ray crystallography during his youthful years. I love how he attempts to look for a synthesis between purely "rational", "scientific thinking" and the arts and human desires, it reminds me a lot of magnificent writings of Caudwell on art, poetry, and freedom.
For everyone interested in science and philosophy, especially Marxists working in the sciences, Bernal is a must read
For everyone interested in science and philosophy, especially Marxists working in the sciences, Bernal is a must read
November 16, 2018
Intriguing at points, picking up steam as he goes. The section on the Devil and the discussion of the human zoo are particularly illuminating. Unfortunately, the descriptions of biology have not aged well.
May 17, 2020
Early transhumanist manifesto that's utterly nuts, but in the most charming possible way. Reminds me of Saint-Simon's lemonade seas except that I'm not even sure it's wrong. Can't wait to live 120 years immersed in decadent human pleasures before uploading myself to become a deep-sea mining robot.
January 13, 2021
A bit like a collision between a science fiction novel and a scientific paper explaining how the human race could become a pan galactic species. Well worth a read for how the future looked way back in 1929
August 23, 2021
No puedo no leerlo en clave de ficción.
Empieza bastante naif y se vuelve oscuro llegando al final.
Empieza bastante naif y se vuelve oscuro llegando al final.
September 23, 2023
A bit crazy for ti time, but it became a very influential book.
November 30, 2024
I was very surprised that a man of Bernal's disciplinary quality would write such a book, but here we are, and it was a great read
February 7, 2025
Despite being a little too optimistic, I thought this was fantastic and so imaginative.
August 26, 2025
The remembrance of a once teleoptimistic inquiry into technē is now confined within the lament of our present body politic. Clearest at its margins humanity remains.
August 20, 2022
An interesting essay on futurology with a surprising lack of societal imagination, especially for a socialist.
November 3, 2020
An interesting look into what a scientist in 1929 could predict about the future.
J.D Bernal talks about humanity exploring space and living in pods encircling the sun, about trans-humanism, and about how the world will politically organize itself in light of these scientific advancements.
Unfortunately most of his predictions don't touch on what has been accomplished already by 2020 - primarily with regard to advancements in computing. The essay still remains firmly in the grasp of science fiction. But interesting nonetheless.
J.D Bernal talks about humanity exploring space and living in pods encircling the sun, about trans-humanism, and about how the world will politically organize itself in light of these scientific advancements.
Unfortunately most of his predictions don't touch on what has been accomplished already by 2020 - primarily with regard to advancements in computing. The essay still remains firmly in the grasp of science fiction. But interesting nonetheless.
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