9 Dialogue with a Skeptic

2‘‘So we have an impasse,’’ said the Skeptic. ‘‘He has lived long enough to see that nothing is going to work out as he expected. Certainly not the Shelter industry in which he invested the greater part of his life. To accept this would be to throw a lifetime away. So he keeps very busy jetting about, and talking. That Universe he expounds is not ours. He’s spun it out of his impulses, and spun it so cunningly a fact can no more dent it than Walter O’Malley’s stones could dent that plastic globe. Or perhaps the Tensegrity Sphere is a better image: the pieces are tautly connected and arrest attention by the way they float, but they present little surface to objections. An inconvenient missile will pass clean through, and he can remark that there has been no collision. As for the rest of us meanwhile, perhaps we muddle on toward doomsday, or perhaps only through a long tunnel, but Fuller is no longer relevant to our muddling. We may guess that there will be no domesday. Domes, that is what his life now comes to, domes and verbiage. I’ll return to the verbiage. Let us talk more of the domes. You did not mention that they often leak.’’

3 ‘‘Someone always says that,’’ I replied, ‘‘and never thinks to add that conventional houses leak too. Leakage plagued Frank Lloyd Wright, who once advised a client with water dripping on his head to move his chair. It still plagued homeowners within living memory. I can remember pans catching drip in leaky attics. If few houses built today leak, that is because they inherit some centuries’ concentration on the problem.’’

4 ‘ ‘You talk like a book,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘ ‘and since I am in a book I shall talk like one too. May I point out that the maligned cube has advantages? It segregates functions, walls for one job, roof for another. Builders can apply special techniques to the roof: lapped shingles, covering one another’s joints, over sheets of tar paper to stop what gets past the shingles. No leakage. But every part of a dome is both walls and roof, and moreover you cannot lay tar paper on a compound-curved surface.’’

5 ‘‘This grows trivial,’’ I answered. ‘‘Why worry about fitting tar paper? There is design, integral gutters along the joints. There are space-age sealants. The great Expo structure is watertight except where a few of the 1900 plexiglass panels had their fit disrupted by ice the day they went in. Sealants are very versatile. The Domebook folk, who can’t manage precision fit and whose plywood sheathing expands and contracts alarmingly, went mad with leaks for a while but have lately been finding a leakproof answer in sealants.’’

6 The Skeptic said he was glad to hear it. ‘‘I bring up leakage,’’ he pursued, ‘‘not because I suppose it cannot be defeated, but because it has concerned Bucky so little. It is typical of what does not concern him. He is happy in his geometry’s abstract rightness. His second cousin John P. Marquand once remarked that the Dymaxion Laundry was to give back your shirt in three minutes washed and dried, but not ironed. Bucky said it was silly

7 to have an ironed shirt. ‘This is illustrative,’ said Marquand, ‘of my cousin’s entire mental process. The trouble is the shirts never come out pressed.’ It’s worth thinking about. When Bucky tells us we are silly to want shirts pressed, he is telling us we must adopt his priorities, and dispense with anything he thinks silly.’’

8 ‘‘And yet he is the least coercive of men.’’

9 ‘‘Ah,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘but how those environments of his would coerce. ‘Don’t reform the person,’ he says, ‘reform the environment.’ In the 4-D specifications, the reformed environment included a ‘vacuum toothbrush,’ also a chinning bar. The ‘vacuum toothbrush’ is probably something he saw at a dentist’s. I don’t want its hose round my neck like Laocoon’s first snake. On the other hand I want a hot bath, in a tub.’’

10 ‘‘There was a tub in the Dymaxion Bathroom.’’

11 ‘‘A short tub, yes. But his next speculations were ephe- meralizing that away. See what comes of reforming people’s environments. He stated the bath’s objective, cleanliness. (How fanatical he is about cleanliness, by the way. The reason he wanted photo-cell door openers was to break the microbe chain.) Then superior ‘external skin cleansing,’ as he calls it, will be obtained from the Fog Gun he developed after noticing that fog removes grime from sailors’ faces. This would cut to a fraction what he calls ‘the quantities of water involved in the older bathing,’ and bring him one step closer to his goal of cutting the water-lines that immobilize homes. But a phrase like ‘external skin cleansing’ is one of his hypnotics. It mesmerizes us into forgetting the satisfactions of lying in a hot tub. The Romans understood those satisfactions. Sig- fried Giedion calls their baths places of ‘regeneration.’ ’’

12 ‘‘Habit, habit,’’ I replied. ‘‘You might also regenerate in some other fashion, and let the bath be an external skin cleanser only. After all the bath is not a human constant. Eskimos have not your passion for baths.’’

13 ‘‘Nor I for the Eskimos’ snow domes. But do not evade the principle. As Professor Hall said, he is apt to identify selected functions, and drive straight toward them. I gather that was Professor Hall’s point, that he doesn’t ask us what we want. Or he takes advantage of the fact that we cannot quite say what we want. We simply do it, when we can. And while we are fumbling for words he is drawing up his Cartesian checklists of bloodless categories. We might modify any of these categories---we might insert a bathtub, or delete a vacuum toothbrush. But their whole spirit is inimical to human satisfaction.’’

14 ‘‘What categories?’’

15 ‘‘Well, look at the Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage, its 1963 updating, and consult section ILA. Here it is:

16 ILA. Provision for (unself-conscious) (spontaneous) mechanical performance of inevitable organic routines of the dwelling and its occupants with minimum of invested attention or effort.

1.: Fueling of

A.: house
B.: occupant (eating) (metabolism)

2.: Realignment of house or occupants in sleep by allowing muscular, nerve and cellular realignment accomplished by designed elimination of known restrictive factors
3.: Refusing of house or occupants

A.: internal, i.e., intestinal, etc.
B.: external, i.e., bathing or pore-cleansing
C.: mental, i.e., elimination by empirical dynamics
D.: circulatory: external---atmospheric control; internal---as respiratory functions

17 ‘Pore cleansing,’ and that lovely word ‘realignment,’ by which he means ‘sleep.’ And ‘Fueling of A. house; B. occupant.’ That is priceless.’’

18 ‘‘It is also witty,’’ I said. ‘‘And don’t think he doesn’t know it. He will speak of birds patrolling ‘areas of maximum anticipated metabolic advantage,’ and pause and add, ‘Worms.’ I admire the nimbleness of mind that can withdraw at will from worms to so grand a pattern. It is like the great description in Nine Chains of the phantom captain’s courtship, with a view to ‘suitable hook-up conditions’ for ‘the manufacture of an improved model replica.’ You remember the explanation of the lover’s word ‘Beautiful!’ It meant that Murphy had noted in Julia ‘a mechanism that was highly uniform, i.e., not deformed, and therefore favorable for plant hook-up.’ If that is playfully satiric, it is also poetic. The poet’s trade, in part, is finding unexpected reasons for unexpected categories. Donne called his lady ‘O more than Moon’ in part for the sake of fine sound, but he also supplied the logical reason that her weeping made a tide of tears. That is not your romantic Moon, as Fuller’s is not the romantic Julia. Minds take pleasure in such witty accuracies. They are also heuristic. We can never break out of habits till we see them recategorized. Buggy-makers went under for not grasping that they were in the transportation business.’’

19 ‘‘Very well, very well, witty. But it is also in the fashion of the 1930’s, from which that passage dates. Thinking of people as machines was a nineteenth-century highbrow habit. Like everything highbrow, it was a couple of generations becoming part of the unchallenged environment. But at last it was everyone’s habit, and needed to be challenged, not indulged. Chaplin was challenging it in Modern Times, not long after Fuller designed the Dy- maxion House, and not long before he wrote that courtship passage. No one forgets Charlie at lunchtime, being ‘refueled’ by a machine that moved a corncob past his teeth like a typewriter carriage. When Bucky surrounded the Dymaxion dweller with a plenitude of gadgetry to free him from labor, he was unconsciously fitting a mechanical man to a mechanical house. Beware of whoever mechanizes your body. Beware of glib efforts to separate you from it. Whether Bucky Fuller, calling it a machine to be fulfilled by mechanical extensions, or Mrs. Eddy ephemeral- izing it away to be discounted in a limbo of dream, such speculators are provincial: not bold at all, not innovative at all, but naive recursors to that oldest and most insidious of simplifications, the gospel of the Gnostics, of the Mani- chaeans, for whom salvation was enlightenment, and the cure for a toothache or a leaky roof was to deem them beneath notice. Lloyd Kahn’s ‘I know my hand’ is as profound as any remark you have quoted. The Phantom Captain is not apart from the hand. He is a Synergy, one of whose subsystems is a living hand.’’

20 ‘‘Emphasis, emphasis,’’ I said. ‘‘I distrust dualism as much as you. But like you I wear glasses, and like Bucky I hear with mechanical help. In certain respects the body has functions we can augment, and we may as well call them mechanical functions. Nor does Bucky discount body-knowledge, not all the time. Remember his love of athletics, and his ‘intuitive dynamic sense.’ No, the point of his talk is to undercut the real robot-mongers, the Skinners for whom we are nothing but machines, for whom all passion is a surge from the endocrines, all behavior habit shaped by stimuli, all thought a traffic-pattern through synapses. Mind is not Brain, he keeps telling them. He is right. Have respect for Mind, and gadgets need not enslave. They are partly conveniences, and partly toys.’’

21 ‘‘But,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘gadgets, like toys, preoccupy. They impose their routine. Also---he seems to have forgotten---they keep breaking down, and their owners are soon working for them. That house is as much a caricature of a home as the courtship passage in Nine Chains is a caricature of love. The difference is that the house is an unconscious caricature. Which is only to say that his wittiness, like anyone else’s, comes and goes. And when it goes, we find him elaborating an unexamined stereotype of man, and with truly Messianic fervor.’’

22 ‘‘Not so fast,’’ I said. ‘‘A minute ago you used the word ‘home.’ ‘Home’ is a romance word, and Bucky is right to see romance as the great emulsifier of habit. Thirty years ago, after remarking that when you have seen your first one hundred low-cost wartime houses you have seen one hundred too many, he went on to explain why people put up with them. Human beings, he said, will ‘engulf these drab items with a foolhardy romanticism that will turn Umpty-umpty Panel Boards into a ‘‘home.’’ ’ As for machinery, it can indeed tyrranize. But the relation between man and machine he has in mind is ideally like your relation with a refrigerator. Nothing is so trouble-free, nothing so durable, nothing so indispensable. It does its job far better than the icebox it replaced. And it relieves you of a great burden. If you did not have one in your house you would be able to buy no more fresh food than you could consume within hours. Refrigeration warps nobody’s life-style, unless he goes in for such nonsense as TV dinners. Bucky’s vacuum toothbrush is a bizarre detail, long behind him. It was special-case. The machine he dreams on now is as general-purpose as the refrigerator: the Space-Age power pack, the black box that will serve your metabolic needs anywhere.’’

23 ‘‘Ah, but serving my metabolic needs means recycling

24 my food and water. Do you never see something alarming in that ruthless simplicity of mind of his? It still envisages ‘Fueling B. occupant.’ Is not frugality his pattern of virtue? Not a drab necessitous frugality, but spick and span like a ship’s galley. Plain living and high thinking.’’

25 ‘‘We are coming full circle,’’ I said. ‘‘You began by talking of leaky domes, by which you meant that his environments may not work. Now you are arguing that they may work too well.’’

26 ‘‘It is not a circle,’’ the Skeptic said. ‘‘It is a pair of approaches to the same principle. The principle is that reality and his reasonings do not coincide. For instance, he reasoned that the great Montreal Bubble need not get hot if mechanically operated shades covered triangles as the sun moved, to cut off its direct rays. Too few were installed---not his fault, I agree: there was a budget. More to the point, motorized window-blinds need service, and some of these were 200 feet off the ground. The Montreal Director of Public Works writes me that access was so difficult repairs and maintenance were almost nil.’’

27 ‘‘Remember,’’ I admonished, ‘‘that it was an Expo structure, designed for six months’ service, then dismantling. No one expected it to be there five years later.’’

28 ‘‘Quite. But then the general problem of maintaining a huge Geodesic remains unsolved. Yet in principle it can be made to sound like no problem at all. A far more complex theme, human behavior, also sounds like no problem at all as he discusses it. But he oversimplifies with quite stunning blandness. It is always the technologist talking.’’

29 ‘‘Technologist,’’ I said. ‘‘An easy term of abuse.’’

30 ‘‘Let me specify carefully,’’ said the Skeptic. ‘‘I do not paraphrase for the n + 1^th time the ‘humanist’ indictment of a barbarous scientist. Much ‘humanist’ baggage is carried about sentimentally, and many men who felt no one was watching would be happy to bury it. No, I claim that Bucky is himself sentimental. His conception of man sounds generous. It is utterly naive. It is the old Romantic conception: Rousseau’s embarrassing baby, bottle-fed for two centuries and never growing up nor moving away: the conception of the child born good, in fact perfect, in fact a ‘comprehensivist,’ a genius, until his environment corrupts him. Hence the obsession with environments.’’

31 ‘‘Wait,’’ I said.

32 ‘‘Listen,’’ he said. ‘‘It is as consistent a theme as we shall find in Fuller’s utterances. Here he is arguing in 1928 that children, born truthful, only learn untruthful habits ‘from the selfish prohibition of truth by their elders.’ Much of this in turn stems from ‘great unconscious selfishness of parents, due to drudgery,’ for which we are to blame unsuitable houses. Solve the housing problem, he says, and other problem areas---politics, education, unemployment, crime-will practically solve themselves.’ There will ensue ‘a glorified system of spontaneous education of choice, similar to the Montessori system,’ to make life ever ‘cleaner and happier, more rhythmical and artistic.’ ’’

33 ‘‘A young man’s rhetoric,’’ I said, ‘‘long outgrown like the vacuum toothbrush.’’

34 ‘‘The rhetoric is outgrown,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘but not the dream. After forty years we may discover that the ‘house’ of 1928 was really a facilitating metaphor for the child’s whole intellectual environment. Yet he still supposes that to optimize that environment is to leave no adult problems whatsoever. In a man who has seen life for seventy-six years, I can only call that a nearly pathetic naivete. Imagine those liberated millions and millions, mostly idle. Can you not see them smashing things in sheer boredom?’’

35 ‘‘His reply would be that the Universe cannot bore.’’

36 ‘‘My reply would be that the Universe is only accessible to an intensity of interest that is quite exceptional. Your average sensual youth is soon looking for something to do. How often he smashes a window.’’

37 ‘‘That is not exactly boredom,’’ I protested. ‘‘He will smash a schoolhouse window, or a pawnshop window, which he takes to be a symbol of futile oppression. By definition, in a rational world such oppression would be absent. Still, I agree that experience tells against Bucky. We have no instance of a functioning Utopia, and the advocate of ‘work’ will always point out that it keeps folk out of mischief. The old cliche about Heaven being boring suggests some inherent human lack, some inability to fill up the time if much unwelcome bother does not fill it up. Fuller of course might rejoin that all our experience is irrelevant, because it pertains to people whose imaginations have been crippled since childhood by exactly the kind of environment he hopes to renovate. World Man in his leisure, having known nothing but freedom, would in fact be a new kind of man.’’

38 ‘‘That is not a new idea,’’ said the Skeptic. ‘‘The great revolutions of 1776, of 1789, of 1917, all promised a new human birth. The American Revolution was to have set free the American Adam, and the story (ironically for Fuller) is that the Machine ruined his Garden. Flaubert devoted a career to inventorying the anguish and absurdity which the promise of the French Revolution left behind. Journalists after the Russian Revolution told us fairy tales about happy workers, free from anxiety, all spontaneously studying integral calculus. Our newest fairy tales pertain to Mao’s China, a sanitary state erected upon millions of corpses. Yet Fuller’s faith in the Industrial Revolution does not falter. At least one order of human experience seems unable to teach him.’’

39 ‘‘But again,’’ I put in, ‘‘those were all political revolutions. There is nothing, he says, that politics can do but rearrange the patterns of scarcity, move the deprivation--- often bloodily---to a different sector. Only industrialization can increase the supply. You mentioned Flaubert. His Emma Bovary was not liberated from scarcity---far from it. Her suicide was not only her final Romantic gesture, it was also an escape from converging debts. And his Bouvard and Pecuchet, those ninnies whose endless studies seem to discredit study itself, came too late to the life of the mind. A legacy brought them freedom when they were fifty.’’

40 ‘‘We are not going to resolve this,’’ said the Skeptic. ‘‘If there has been no possibility of evidence for human sweetness, then what Fuller must ask is blind faith. Primarily, these days, he is a religious leader. The fact does make him uneasy. He has spoken of the dangers of a cult. Unhappily he has no option but to ask for faith alone.’’

41 ‘‘True,’’ I said. ‘‘And it is an endearing faith. How many men act on their faith as he does? How many are confident that you are both able and willing to understand the most complicated patterns they can lay before you?’’

42 ‘‘Few, I agree. What most men know, they guard as a monopoly. A textbook has been described as a device to prevent the student from learning too much, and curricula seem designed to prevent him from learning too fast. It is also true that children want to learn nearly everything---in his language, they are not specialists---and that somehow this universality of theirs gets disconnected. I remember that Fuller calls himself a ‘low-average’ individual, not a ‘genius’ at all, but fortunate in having escaped too many disconnects. We may grant him this much: our schools are so incredibly wasteful they diminish the potential of every child who passes through. (It was Maria Montessori, by the way, who first used the ‘house’---La Casa dei Bambini--- as a name for a learning environment.) Nevertheless, Fuller remains self-deceived---by his own character, as it happens. For he is exceptional in one important way. He does not waste time. He never suspects that people freed from toil might slump in front of TV popping tranquilizers, because he himself, even when Dymaxion Sleep gave him twenty-two-hour days, had more he wanted to do than he could fit in. That talent for self-disciplined work is as much a New England heritage as his tidiness. It is the ethic pertinent to scarcity in a harsh climate. I find that ironic.’’

43 ‘‘It is true,’’ I agreed, ‘‘that there are many inconsistencies in his talk. When he is lecturing on how to make the world work, all is environment; but his Myth of the Water People seems genetic. Do you remember that version of prehistory? In Indo-China, it seems, in mankind’s dawn, men divided spontaneously into two groups: those who drifted with the prevailing winds, those who sailed into them. The former floated across the Pacific, peopling such places as Tahiti. The latter, pursuing what he calls the North-easterly Spiral, progressively mastered the forces they confronted, turned into mind-over-matterists, peopled Europe, crossed to America, sired the Yankee achievers and permitted Bucky Fuller to suppose that people given time will use it to advantage.’’

44 ‘‘A charming story,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘and I am sure impervious to anything an anthropologist might say. Bucky has a gift for overriding troublesome facts. Thus it suits him to make Einstein’s universe of motion supersede Newton’s universe of rest as a consequence of the discovery that light takes time to travel. He gives the impression that this fact was discovered about 1900. He is thinking of Michelson’s measurements. But Newton knew that light has a velocity. Olaus Romer calculated it in 1676, and his figure was only 3 percent too high.’’

45 ‘ ‘Though often,’’ I said, ‘ ‘he is right in principle when his facts are wrong. Newton may have known the velocity of light, but he knew it as a complication merely. Jupiter’s satellites were eclipsed sooner or later than predicted, according as Jupiter was nearer or farther from the Earth. This was a nuisance which Romer explained away by assigning light a velocity. Men went on thinking the satellites were ‘really’ eclipsed at the calculated times. Einstein in effect said that the word ‘really’ in that sentence was meaningless, and it was with Einstein that the time light takes was brought into a comprehensive structure of thought. In that sense at least, it was discovered when Bucky says it was.’’

46 ‘‘How do you mean that ‘really’ was meaningless?’’

47 ‘‘I mean that the difference between the static and the energetic universes is one of Bucky’s profoundest insights. It is on record that he grasped its implications more fully than Einstein himself. In 1938, Einstein found the exposition in Nine Chains acceptable, but was astonished to be told that there were practical consequences. Bucky had written, ‘E = me² = Mrs. Murphy’s Horsepower,’ and calculated the retail price of light as one and a half billion dollars a pound. What he had grasped was the difference Einstein made to our notions of Theory and Practice.

48 ‘‘In the all-at-once Universe, where the norm is Rest (as at Harvard), things ‘really’ happen as though our knowledge of them did not depend on light’s timing. When they are seen to happen later, we correct for the time it has taken us to see them. In this way, the real is always theoretical, and there is always a gap between theory and practice. Bodies fall in vacuo; we correct for air resistance. Wheels spin forever: we correct for friction.

49 These are all lags of time. Time is the domain of inconvenient error. Weight, friction, resistance, shift phenomena into time, where imperfection presides.

50 ‘‘Buildings, in the same way, theoretically lasted forever. It was only in an imperfect world that they fell apart.

51 ‘‘Bucky grasped that change was no imperfection, but a principle. ‘Nature,’ he says ‘never fails.’ And he had the wit to attach this to Einstein at one end, and to the duration of artifacts at the other. Going one way, we get his Energetic Geometry. Going the other way, we arrive at calculated life-spans and recycling. Einstein and ecology are continuous. Duration is a normal fact about any phenomenon, a lightning-flash or an automobile. That is why ‘ownership,’ which implies permanence, seems to him obsolete. He now rents cars. I am told when he ‘owned’ them he used to forget them at airports.’’

52 ‘‘It is a beautiful pattern,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘the kind of pattern at which he excels. Cranks too excel at such patterns, of comparable simplicity if not of equal beauty. You surprised me, by the way, in supposing the crank to be indigenous to America, and still more in being so ready to distinguish Fullerism from crankery. Have you forgotten the long history of infatuated minds, for whom precisely Bucky’s primary patterns, the five Platonic solids, were paradigms of God’s way? Plato himself, who was something of a crank, set the example when he identified the dodecahedron with the all-embracing ether, within which were four kinds of molecules: tetrahedral fire, octahedral air, icosahedral water, cubical earth. And since you’ve mentioned Kepler in your book, let me remind you that Kepler’s lifework consisted in nestling the planetary spheres into and around those same five solids, in the faith that he could make their fit agree with what observers of the sky reported. The Three Laws for which he is immortal were by-products, trial balances which it seems he never took seriously. They did fit, he noticed, but they used the wrong shapes and numbers, and Arthur Koestler, whom you’ve also cited, remarks that it took Newton’s genius to dig them out of the jargon-jungle Kepler left. And here is Bucky, playing that ancient game, but not struggling with details in Kepler’s way. He simply disregards details.

53 ‘‘Look at Utopia or Oblivion. On page 101, we find pictures of linked tetrahedra, labeled ‘Chemical Bonding.’ We are told that point-to-point tetrahedra---single bonded ---resemble a gas. Hinged edge to edge, they are like water. Face to face, they are rigid, like crystals. Interpenetrating, they have the hardness of diamonds. Alas, Linus Pauling, who is mentioned on that very page, tells us (The Nature of the Chemical Bond, page 559) that ‘The presence of shared edges and especially of shared faces in a coordinated structure decreases its stability,’ since the positive ions the tetrahedra enclose dislike coming so close together. Pauling’s pictures of tetrahedra touching only at corners depict crystals, not gases. Bucky’s is a pretty intuitive model, but it is not chemistry.’’

54 ‘‘I will concede,’’ I said, ‘‘a large problem area, in which three different things tend to get mixed up: a coordinate system, a set of quick analogies, and the actual modeling of natural structures. All a coordinate system needs to claim is that it is close enough to actuality to give an economical accounting. You remember our analogy of the bathroom tiles. They were hexagons, and their area was always irrational, inescapably so, if we computed in squares, because V 3 is irrational. If we use a three-way grid the area need not be a whole number, but it can be. In that sense, the grid follows the grain of reality. Using it, though, is not the same as asserting that all reality is neatly, symmetrically triangular or hexagonal.’’

55 ‘‘I could wish,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘that his expositions observed that distinction a little more carefully. There are times when one might wonder if he understands the import of his own words, and he is not always scrupulous about that of other people’s. Look at page 107 of Utopia or Oblivion, where Dr. Benjamin Bloom’s Stability and Change in Human Characteristics is misrepresented by the amazing statement that ‘If you can give Dr. Bloom an adequate report of environmental factors governing a given young life from birth to seventeen years of age- such as description of the home---private bathroom or no ---drunken parents---play only in streets---etc., he can give you the IQ of that life within 1 percent.’ I can find no such claim in the book, which is for the most part a sober study of how various sorts of statistics correlate. Bucky’s eye was caught by a summarizing paragraph which showed the effect of environment on IQ tapering off till at age seventeen it seemed inoperative. But the sentence he gives us, with its odd implication that middle-class children from homes with play space and private bathrooms will have uniformly high IQ’s, cannot be ascribed to Dr. Bloom of Chicago. It has the stamp of a Boston Brahmin.’’

56 ‘‘I am afraid,’’ I said, ‘ ‘that Utopia or Oblivion contains many more such creative misrememberings. Everything in it was talked out before audiences, and the editing has not been tidy.’’

57 ‘‘Still, it reflects what he said, and yet another departure from reality, in this case another man’s book’s reality. He is very vivid. He can make whatever he is promoting at the moment seem reasonable and acceptable. But out in the real world we sometimes discover we have been misinformed, and we always discover the reasonableness vanishing. Barry Farrell, in his excellent article in Life (Feb. 26, 1971), reproduced the effect very well. Leaving behind the entrancement of Bear Island talk, he drove toward New York, a ‘mounting disaster’ where ‘the smog and din seemed lethal.’ Surrounded by noise, pollution, violence and rot, he felt the vision fade. ‘I couldn’t maintain my grasp on the belief that human welfare was a function of technological advance.’ ’’

58 ‘‘ ‘Noise, pollution, violence, and rot,’ ’’ I repeated. ‘‘Now let us note that in 1928, Fuller would have told him that this would be the reality of a modern city, and would not have been believed. Back then, he spent countless hours trying to persuade men that the world they had built was not only less than perfect, it was doomed to crumble of its irremediable imperfections. What Farrell perceived in the fall of 1970 was the fulfillment of a forty-two-year-old prediction.’’

59 ‘‘Ah,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘I wondered when you would get around to his record as a prophet. I grant he was diagnosing rot in 1928. But he was also announcing the birth of a new era, to be inaugurated by industrially reproducible housing.’’

60 ‘‘Exactly,’’ I said, ‘‘and of course it was not born. And we have about us the alternative he foretold. Moreover he did not think it would be born overnight. Twenty-five years was to be the research-and-development lag; the Ford Dome, in 1953, came just on schedule.’’

61 ‘‘A favorite instance,’’ said the Skeptic. ‘‘But (1) we do not find him saying in 1928 that it would take twenty-five years. In Timelock we are teased with the notion that it is imminent, and even hoaxed by talk of a Syndicate that did not exist, ready with designs for which the very materials---by his own later admission---did not exist either. And (2) the Ford Dome was a one-shot; it started no massive trend.’’

62 ‘‘You are right to say that the Ford Dome was not the first snowball of a domical avalanche. As to why Domes are not all around us, I have suggested some reasons. As to the bluff in Timelock, clearly he was fishing for an industrial commitment, to inaugurate the research. He was not as self-deceived as we may think. He knew that the Dymaxion House needed heat-treated aluminum alloys, and that the aluminum industry thought of their product only as a soft metal. Those alloys did come, after five years, and the aircraft industry was born.’’

63 ‘‘Very well, we will set aside his show of conviction that the 4-D house could be realized tomorrow. Though that did not prevent his writing in 1932 that the Bath Iron Works and Starling Burgess were about to ‘take over design and fabrication responsibility for the first Dymaxion House, which a syndicate, now forming, will underwrite.’ There was to be a kind of designers’ commune, apparently, up on the Maine coast. Note the habit again: something announced as imminent, which never eventuates.’’

64 ‘‘Note the date: 1932. The financial flux of that era surely explains what happened to the prospects of the commune. And he received a gift of money, and turned his attention, with Burgess, to the car.’’

65 ‘‘We are drifting from my point, which is simply that for a man with a prophet’s reputation he has a poor record of prophecy. How many of the people who acclaim his foresight have seen a first edition of Nine Chains to the Moon? In the front matter, dated 1938, we find a list of prophecies, twenty-two of them. They were to happen by July 12, 1948. Almost none of them did. They included ‘Beamed radio transmission of power employing gold as the reflecting surface,’ and ‘Substitution of a man-hour for a metallic monetary base,’ and ‘Conquest of cancer.’ ’’

66 ‘‘What did happen was war. It disrupted all short-term trends.’’

67 ‘‘And he did not foresee the war, of all things? It is like not having noticed an onrushing elephant.’’

68 ‘‘He was hardly alone, in the United States, in not foreseeing it.’’

69 ‘‘But his business, he tells us, is foresight.’’

70 ‘‘His special-case foresight has been no better than anyone’s. That is always a risk. There are too many random elements. He is better at reading trends. He saw airplanes replacing railroads as passenger carriers when railroads still enjoyed thirty times the passenger-mileage of planes. He foresaw impressive scrap recirculation. He foresaw children learning from TV.’’

71 ‘‘Special cases and trends,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘a delicate distinction; it is futile to compute his scores. It is true that he now specializes in trends, whereas in the 1930’s, like Popular Mechanics, he saw all manner of marvels just ahead. That was the decade when ‘the future’ was popularized. The Dymaxion Car at the Chicago Century of Progress makes a fitting symbol. In those days every fall fair had its robot, a tin man who would stand or sit on spoken command. Little boys paid their dimes to marvel at him, and their parents expected a servant like that some day. Bucky’s guesses were far better informed; still, they were part of the history of that decade. Robotry without problems. But these trends of his: they have also their effect, which is sedative. Henry Luce once accused him of thinking man was determined, whereas he, Luce, believed in man’s capacity to shape his future. Luce could not have been more wrong. If anyone believes the human future lies in human hands, it is Bucky. Still, it is an interesting error. What Luce was responding to was the curious fact that Bucky does not tell you what to do next. Certain things will happen, he tells you, whether you participate or not. One can see why it sounds like determinism.’’

72 ‘‘It does. But a trend is made of innumerable decisions. It is a logical direction mankind may well take. Mankind may not, though Bucky trusts they will. Your way of par-

73 282 | BUCKY ticipating is up to you. At least you need not suppose that everything inevitably gets worse.’’

74 ‘‘Ah,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘but if you are close to Bucky your way of participating seems not to be up to you. It is astonishing how many disaffected disciples one hears of, who were once participants but found they could not participate. He’s not a good master, one of them said; not like the Zen master, who understands that the pupil will impart a personal inflection.’’

75 I said, ‘‘I’ve no experience of his mastery. It’s quite possible---and would be quite understandable---that a condition of intimate discipleship would be willingness to hook into Bucky’s trip of the moment. He always knows what needs doing in his own vicinity, which is not necessarily the same thing as what a disciple is really able to do for humanity. The tension between these two things might strain anyone’s psyche, if he thought that by being near Bucky he would learn what his own vocation was. Not that everyone who has come near him, nor even everyone who has split off again, wanted to be told what to do, but it’s inevitable that he should attract people who do want that. He has remarked how easy it would be to build an organization of weaklings. The World Game, for example: it was to be man’s next hope: the computerized interplay of world resources, world strategies. Yet where it was tried it tended to turn into encounter groups, and Bucky finally issued an encyclical disqualifying participants who had not been properly trained.’’

76 ‘‘Which appears to mean,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘participants who had not gone through his curriculum to the extent that their thoughts were indistinguishable from his. The World Game is a good case to examine. Like everything else he’s envisaged, it needed funding on a dangerously large scale: I mean dangerous in the sense that any

77 source of so much money---think of the computer time!--- would feel entitled to control of the enterprise. Yet its whole point was that no one should control it. It was to be as impersonal as Nature, and if the data showed that Alaska and Siberia ought to share a power grid, that decision would come with compelling inevitability, regardless of the wishes of any sponsor. Now Bucky had already suggested such an international electric network, based on the principle that the peak demand for power travels around the earth with daylight. In New York, without a computer, they attempted a World Game Workshop, and sure enough, one of its announced conclusions was the need for that power grid. What the participants learned was invaluable to the participants. What the world learned was what Bucky had already told it. The output was the input, translated, and had they had their multi-million- dollar endowment, its true function would have been to hang wreaths of greenbacks around bright ideas of Bucky’s. Has any World Game session ever discovered anything it had not been told to start with?’’

78 ‘ ‘One thing, as a matter of fact,’’ I replied. ‘‘The exact balance between the sulphur we mine and the sulphur we discharge from smokestacks. But before you decide that the World Game is nothing but an amplifying device connected to Bucky Fuller, remember that it has not really been tried. The programs and the computer time have not been available.’’

79 ‘‘Once more,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘the idea has a splendid plausibility. But once again, we come to hard reality. Can you imagine America and Russia depending on each other for power? He may be right to call politics obsolete, but political realities are realities. He may be right to say that statesmen who cannot yield to one another can gracefully yield to a computer. But the minute they did they would be ousted from office, and they surely know it. No one really trusts a computer. The public’s working experience of computers is that they mess up the records of charge accounts.’’

80 ‘ ‘Everyone who has flown has trusted his life to a computer.’’

81 ‘‘No one knows that half as well as he knows about the computer errors that get him dunned over and over for bills he has long since paid. My point is, Bucky is relying on the psychological prestige of computers, and ignoring the plain fact that it is low. My other point about the World Game, though, has to do with its illusion of impersonality. It may yield many novel details, like that one about sulphur. But the large answers seem predictable. They will be Fulleresque answers, in response to Fuller- esque questions. In the 1950’s, when Bucky was zooming from campus to campus, group after group began by hearing about the vast patterns of humanity, and ended by finding themselves designing a dome that Bucky wanted designed.’’

82 ‘‘But what they wanted to do was design a dome,’’ I responded. ‘‘Many of them chafed through the part about the vast patterns. Moreover, he knew quite well that student designers would have to ride piggyback on his experience. He had two choices. One was just to tell them how to build the dome. The other was to let them share the design process the only way they could- share it, which was by seeing its logic at that moment in history. This involved, he was frank to admit, a certain artificiality. What could be done in two weeks? So he set up his exposition in such a way that a dome project was its logical outcome.’’

83 ‘‘I have also heard,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘that he was fuss-

84 DIALOGUE WITH A SKEPTIC | 285 ing about licenses and patent rights, and requiring signed waivers. There is a certain anomaly, you must admit, in someone holding a patent on what he tells you is a law of nature. That may have been part of the stress disciples felt. These things are so simple many of them have been invented before. Alexander Graham Bell made Octet Truss structures. Some German in the 1920’s made what looks in a photograph very much like a geodesic structure. Kenneth Snelson made the first Tensegrity Mast. Bucky enjoys the credit for all three.’’

85 ‘‘That reminds me of James Joyce’s question,’’ I said. ‘‘If someone hacking in fury at a block of wood should produce an image of a cow, would that cow be a work of art? Joyce answered no; the art lay not in the artifact but in the consciousness. Bucky understands those structures. It has always been possible for people to make them without understanding them. Triangulating a sphere, and understanding the virtues of the structure you get by triangulating a sphere, are quite different things. The German planetarium-designer seems not to have known what he stumbled on, since his Geodesic Dome had no successor, and was attended by no explanations. Can a man have invented a thing, if he cannot explain it? The Patent Office avoids such metaphysics; all you can patent is a special-case realization. A patent lawyer would probably tell you that the Octet Truss patent covers only the systems of joinery it enumerates. A principle is nonpatentable. So is one’s insight into principle. The patent gives you a kind of ownership over ways of fastening pieces of metal together. But the virtue of the structure is not in those fastenings. It is synergetic, invisible and only your mind can get at it. And it is what you are giving away when you explain.’’

86 ‘‘Nonsense. The virtue is in the thing itself, standing there.’’

87 ‘‘Tell that to a building inspector. Years ago someone used the Octet Truss to support floors in the Fine Arts Building at Yale. The structural engineers, knowing nothing of synergy, demanded that any one of the three sets of beams should be heavy enough for the job. Enormous redundancy, therefore; aesthetic nonsense.’’

88 ‘‘Why did they demand that?’’

89 ‘‘Because the textbooks say that two beams intersecting in midair have the strength of the stronger only. The stronger acts as a fulcrum over which the weaker bends, like a stick snapped across one’s knee. So you figure loads as though only the stronger were there. The second is redundant. And three, they said, would be even more redundant. Bucky was rightly annoyed, because that architect had used a system he did not understand well enough to defend. Every such incident fritters away people’s confidence in anything but good old tried-and-true Strength through Weight. And Bucky’s real interest is in altering our consciousness of reality. Every synergetic structure cleanly employed is a teaching machine to alter consciousness. Hence his long insistence on keeping control of their use. Hence his tight rein on students. People who wanted to fool with geodesics met a wall of discouragement when they tried to get data. He wanted to indoctrinate them first. Geodesic orange-juice stands were proposed, and he might have gotten rich on the franchise. He scorned such trivi- alization. To some associates it seemed maddening behavior, especially in a man who had long scorned the monopolies created by patents.’’

90 ‘‘That,’’ said the Skeptic, ‘‘would be Fuller’s version of many skirmishes and many aborts. There is a sense in which everything he has touched has aborted, leaving him

91 to expound an ever more detailed vision of the Universe. There are many more themes I might raise. I shall raise just one more, the most general one I can. It has to do with his habitual way of expounding, which is to commence with the largest intelligible system and work inward by subdivision. He has always insisted that a local achievement must be the special case of a larger solution. That is why he is not a millionaire today; he would never stick to some invention and develop it as best it could be developed in an imperfect world. It was always necessary to change the whole world first, and never possible. Now just as he will not permit us to build special-case buildings, he will not permit us to think in special cases either. Thinking of what is nearest to hand, that is comparable to a Geodesic orange-juice stand. But observe the analogy with Twenty Questions.’’

92 ‘‘What analogy?’’

93 ‘‘Progress by subdivision. Better still, observe how efficiently I can direct you to a single word in a book of 400 pages. I can tell you it is in the first half of the book. I can tell you it is in the second half of that half. My first statement has excluded 200 pages. My second has excluded 100 of those. Nine such decisions will exclude all the pages but one. Eight or nine more will exclude all the words on that page except the target word. Fewer than twenty questions---seventeen or eighteen---and we have zeroed in. We zero in by throwing out irrelevancies, and in early stages throwing them out in great handfuls.’’

94 ‘‘So?’’

95 ‘‘So the crucial decisions are the earliest ones, the ones made at the greatest remove from the target. You remember when Bucky was asked a question about race, he brought out his map on which you can see the whole world---that passion for wholes!---and in effect played

96 Twenty Questions. What reality coerces naked men? Temperature. What skin withstands warm temperatures? Dark skin. What of men who wander where it is not warm? There is no reason their skins should not be light. . . . Eventually isolation and interbreeding have given us men with skins of different shades; a further sequence of factors has produced the European custom of enslaving black men; and anyone who follows the argument can see that the black man’s inferiority is a white man’s self-serving illusion. People have only to understand this, and a nasty problem will simply go away. But the psychic response of races to one another, and the economic trap in which certain races are caught, is far more complex than any misunderstanding about pigments. The heart of another, said Turgenev, is a dark forest. In that dimness dark fears, inaccessible to reason, can be triggered by the sight of an alien face. Bucky excludes that whole territory, I grant not out of insensitivity but because his habits of thinking cannot get at it. What he might one day say about racial problems was very nearly determined the day he decided, decades ago, that the colors on his map should zone off temperatures. That meant we should no longer be able to see, as we see on earlier maps, the line across which Frenchmen glare at Germans. Such distrusts are quite as ‘real’ as temperatures. Habit may erode them away, or may not; whereas the effects of temperature can be engineered away. He chose for his key realities the factors an engineer can get at, and only those.’’

97 ‘‘You are saying, I gather, that his major decisions, the ones most remote from some immediate question, after all reflect his biases. But what would you expect?’’

98 ‘‘Nothing,’’ said the Skeptic. ‘‘I merely wished to get it said. But observe, as with the World Game, how the system shapes its own output. Take maps again. They show

99 DIALOGUE WITH A SKEPTIC | 289 obstacles to travel. Mountain ranges are obstacles; so are deserts. Political boundaries may be serious obstacles. If you are sailing, America is an obstacle to traffic between Spain and China. For sailormen the Arctic and Antarctic seas are such consummate obstacles the Mercator chart ignores them completely. Bucky’s map omits all such obstacles, because it is a flying map. Its realities are those of the air age. It also shows you how cold it gets where, a factor which shapes air currents and also the distribution of peoples. It does not show the Ural Mountains, nor the Sahara, nor the Sino-Soviet frontier. These realities have not gone away. He has simply declared them irrelevant to an air-ocean World. The map shows you many things no previous map made clear. My point is, the things it omits are none the less real. Yet any decisions it shapes will omit those things. And yet all our talk will have the look of rigor, of having started from the Whole World that map shows.’’

100 ‘‘I see,’’ I said. ‘‘You have talked much of his disregarding reality. Now you are showing that he sets aside certain aspects of reality---highly publicized ones, it may be added ---to emphasize the coherence of other aspects. That coherence, and its novelties, continue to fascinate. It is a feat of conceptual art. It helps free the mind. ‘Can Buckminster Fuller Save Us?’ was the heading The New York Times Book Review once put over a piece they commissioned from me. They had me answering ‘Yes,’ which is untrue. I do not expect him to ‘‘save’’ us or me or anyone. As for what I value in his activities, it will take one more chapter to try to summarize.’’

101 The Skeptic said he would read it.

102