11 Bucky Fuller, Poet and Prophet
2In the year 1962, Harvard University recalled Buckminster Fuller. But this time it was not as an undergraduate student.
3 He was asked to fill an honorary Chair and to become the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. This professorship had been established to bring famous poets to the university for a two-month period during the school year, and the duty of each visiting professor was to give a series of lectures to students.
4 What did a world design scientist like Buckminster Fuller have to do with poetry? What did the geodesic dome have to do with rhymes and rhythm?
5 It had all begun many years before, when Bucky had been working for the Phelps Dodge Corporation. He had written a technical paper that was to be presented to the board of directors. One of the directors tried to read the paper. He sent it back to Bucky with a note saying that the paper just didn’t make sense to him.
6 Bucky arranged to meet the man; patiently, he read the paper to him aloud, pausing every few moments to let the words sink in. ‘‘Why, that sounds just like poetry!’’
7 cried the director. ‘‘Why don’t you write it over again, just the way you read it to me?’’
8 Bucky changed the lines of prose into lines of poetry, without changing any of the words, and resubmitted the paper to the board. Back it came with a message: the board of directors refused to read a poetical document.
9 Bucky protested that it wasn’t really poetry at all, just his regular prose chopped up in order to make more sense. ‘‘Look,’’ said the director, ‘‘I’m having a couple of poets up to the house for dinner tonight. I’ll show them your paper and let them decide.’’ The next day, he called Bucky. ‘‘No use, Fuller. They say it’s poetry all right!’’ Back into prose form went the article.
10 From then on Bucky kept trying to put his thoughts into free verse. In 1940 he wrote a long poem, based on his feelings about how democracy should really work in the United States. This was the time when Hitler was threatening to overrun all of Europe. Bucky called the poem, ‘‘No More Secondhand God.’’ Part of the poem read:
11 Many people believe Democracy obsolete.
12 They are wrong.
13 Obsolete is the one thing
1415Democracy can never be, obstinate, obstreperous, observant, obscure, but —
16I will explain. That is, I will
17 if it’s Democracy you really wish to save,
1819and not some trick you have been getting away with behind its kindly broad young back. . . .
20 Even his complicated descriptions of what comprehensive anticipatory design science meant looked better and sounded more understandable in poetic form. All you had to do was compare the same passage written first as prose and then as poetry:
2122Thus, man is not the vegetable he eats, nor the water he drinks, nor the gases he breathes. Man is pure abstract integrity, made visible to other men by man-tuneable frequency relays of complexedly interlocking, but reciprocally accommodating, patterns representing every patterning principle of universe cohering as the comprehensive integrity of pattern associabilities at mid-spectrum ranges, whose comprehensively and synergetically surprising results are known to men as uniquely ‘‘individual’’ man.
23 Read aloud as lines of poetry, these same prose words sounded beautiful and tended to have meaning, even if you didn’t understand all the words:
24 thus, man is not the vegetable he eats
25 nor the water he drinks,
26 nor the gases he breathes
27 man is pure abstract pattern integrity
28 made visible to other men
29 by man-tuneable frequency relays
30 of complexedly interlocking but
3132reciprocally accommodating patterns —representing every patterning principle of universe cohering as the comprehensive integrity of pattern associabilities at mid-spectrum ranges whose comprehensively and synergetically
33 surprising results
34 are known to men
35 as uniquely ‘‘individual’’ man . . .
36 TVo More Secondhand God was published as a book (along with other poems and some essays) by the Southern Illinois University Press. In 1962, another of Bucky’s poems, this time a very long one, was also published in book form. Its title was Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization.
37 At Harvard University, during the months of February and March, Bucky delivered three lectures. Poet, inventor, architect —it made no difference to the students; Bucky was a tremendous success. In his own words, the Harvard concept of the word poet had little to do with a man who wrote poetry; by poet they really meant ‘‘man who puts things together.’’ In that sense, Fuller the Comprehensive Man was qualified for the Norton Professorship of Poetry.
38 Bucky’s activities and interests were so widespread during the early years of the 1960’s, that he always seemed to be in ten places at once. One of the places was East St. Louis in Illinois, where Southern Illinois University was planning to establish a new city branch campus. Bucky was asked to speak to the planning committee, which was made up of college presidents, a city planner, a sociologist, a psychiatrist, and a landscape architect, each a famous person in his own field. Of course, R. Buckminster Fuller was himself a member of the committee.
39 In this talk (which was later published as a book called Education Automation), Bucky presented his own ideas about what a university should be and what it should accomplish in the way of educating young people. He suggested that the United States would have to change its point of view about the education of its children. American education had declined from its early, ideal state to where it was now mainly being used by politicians as a means of achieving power. Meanwhile, the really pressing problems at hand were completely ignored. Bucky said:
40 ‘‘There is also a general baby-sitting function which is called school. While the children are being ‘baby sat,’ they might as well be given something to read. We find that they get along pretty well with the game of ‘reading’; so we give them more to read, and we add writing and arithmetic. Very seriously, much of what goes on in our schools is strictly related to social experiences, and that is fine —that’s good for the kids. But I would say that we are going to add much more in the near future by taking advantage of the children’s ability to show us what they need.’’
41 He then pointed out how television could be used to bring education right into the home, and how computers were going to be used to fortify the learning process. What could the universities do? Their job would be to take education out of the hands of the politicians and to find solutions to the problems of educating our children through the use of total world planning. The sad fact was that the total resources of the earth were now being used to serve only forty-three per cent of humanity. Through the use of comprehensive anticipatory design science, all the resources of the world could be made to serve all humanity.
42 Changes in human society had to be anticipated and not dealt with as they happened. For example, it was inevitable that soon man would no longer have to use his muscles in order to make a living. Automation —the automatic control of all production machinery by computers —would take care of that. When that happened, what would have to be done? One important result would be that society would have to educate each and every one of its members. All people everywhere would have to be made literate by being sent to schools. Bucky was certain that education was going to become the major industry of the world.
43 In an effort to demonstrate his seriousness and his concern for the future, Bucky financed a research program at Southern Illinois to investigate how the world’s natural resources were being used. He called his program a ten-year design (1965-1975) for ‘‘re-tooling’’ the world. This study would show specifically how all the chemical and energy resources of the world could be ‘‘rendered adequate to the service of one hundred per cent of humanity at higher standards of living and total enjoyment than any man has yet experienced.’’
44 Bucky asked John McHale, a visiting artist and designer from England, to be the executive director of the project. The research team was composed of two physicists, three design specialists, and an architect.
45 In 1963, the first report of World Science Decade, 1965--1975, was published. It included rafts of data about the distribution of world resources and world energy, all compiled and processed by computers. One table listed the world production of major minerals and metals, country by country. A group of maps showed the distribution of items like iron ore, coal, and waterpower over the surface of the earth. One of the most striking reports showed how at least half the world’s people were really cut off from communication with the rest of the world; in these areas there were fewer than ten daily newspapers, five radio receivers, and two movie-theater seats for every hundred persons. Such cut-off places existed mainly on the continents of Asia, Africa, and South America —the less industrialized parts of the world.
46 Bucky’s research team also noted that the solution for this problem of noncommunication could well be provided by mass world education. Television, moving pictures, and computerized teaching, all linked together with the new understandings psychologists had achieved about people and learning, were now available to make the job easier. The report noted further: ‘‘It is well to remember that the comprehensive world economics are going to force vast economic reforms of industries and nations which incidentally will require utter modernization of the educational processes in order to survive …As we effectively disemploy man as a mechanical worker and pay him to return to his studies this will bring about profound changes in our concept of education itself. Education ‘to earn a living’ will become an anachronism . .
47 Also included in the report was a grand lecture entitled, ‘‘World Design Initiative,’’ given by Bucky to a large audience of professional architects and architecture students at the International Symposium on Architecture held in Mexico. In this talk (in true Fuller style, the printed manuscript ran about a hundred pages), Bucky presented the development of his natural synergetic geometry and told how the geodesic dome had been born. He urged all the visiting architects and the students who were listening to devote their lives to furthering the cause of ‘‘livingry,’’ even if that meant departing from accepted patterns of professional behavior.
48 ‘‘I am convinced,’’ said Bucky, ‘‘that it is only man’s inertial ignorance and its superstition-conditioned reflexes that bind him, unrealistically, within the nonsensical illusion of conformity.’’ By that, he meant that men tended to lose their fears of change and the unknown very slowly. Rather than meet the challenge of change head-on with the new power that science and technology now afforded, older generations hesitated to break with the traditions of the past that held them captive.
49 Such messages of hope and change became part and parcel of Bucky’s world career. As always, these messages were addressed to university students everywhere.
50 In June 1965, the year of his seventieth birthday, Bucky sat in his rooms in Bristol, England, where he was a visiting professor at the University of Bristol, and wrote a short essay called, ‘‘Utopia or Oblivion.’’
51 In it, he pointed out that man now had for the first time the actual possibility of achieving utopia —or the perfect world —in his grasp. On the other hand, the chance that he would destroy himself and the whole world was equally possible. Which was it to be? How was the choice to be made?
52 The large percentage of human beings on earth, he wrote, have failed to see and understand the full significance of the new technological revolution. Only one per cent of the world’s population were scientists, and the other ninety-nine per cent were hopelessly out of communication with them.
53 Also, history showed plainly that control, first of the seas and then of the land, was accomplished by one per cent of the total population, while the rest of humanity seemed to be unaware of what was happening. The powerful ‘‘masters’’ of society could and did hire inventors, scientists, and engineers to perfect the technology that was used to hold power. Much of what went on could be hidden from the public in the name of national defense secrecy. In the name of that same ‘‘defense,’’ the ‘‘masters’’ could use most of the new science and technology to create and stockpile the final tools of man’s own destruction —weaponry.
54 But those students who had begun to study and to understand the whole point of world design science were also beginning to see that there was a critical need to change this pattern of world control.
55 Bucky Fuller knew students. Better yet, he could see the world through the eyes of young students. Even though he was now seventy, he was still a member of every student generation. He wrote:
56 ‘‘The student knows that man can do anything he wants. Yet they see world officialdom investing the world’s highest capabilities only in race suicide springboards!’’
57 Students all over the world were becoming restless.
58 They were becoming dissatisfied with the inadequacies of past ways of coping with the pressing problems of mankind. They were becoming aware that many people on earth were still starving, while billions of dollars and millions of man-hours of work were being wasted on weapons and war.
59 And those students who were in college during the early 1960’s were a special group. Many of the graduate students had been bom while their fathers were away at war. The undergraduates had cut their eyeteeth on television which had put them directly in touch with the entire world. They knew the world as one in which science and technology had made possible inventions to surmount all the barriers of nature. Their birthmark was the atom bomb. So their dissatisfactiion with the way the world was being controlled was logical and genuine. They knew that to change this way was their destiny.
60 If the students could persuade the adult world that such a change was necessary, the world might yet be saved. Bucky wrote these words with all the hope an optimist could muster. If the students could manage to win such support from adult wage earners within the next ten years, he wrote, man might yet continue on earth. Because of the students’ intuition and youth, the chances were good.
61 Unfortunately the people in charge of affairs in the various countries —the bankers, businessmen, and politicians —had not understood the message of world design science. They seemed to want to keep the world as disunited as possible. To Bucky, these men in the different countries of the world, democracy or dictatorship, seemed to be carrying on a kind of game-playing. Each country boasted of its own inventiveness, of its own national wealth, or its own national industrialization.
6263This kind of political ballyhoo was nonsense to Bucky. He did not have faith in national man. He could only see an international man, a character he called continuous man. It was continuous man, American and Russian, Swede and Brazilian, who could really run things while the politicians, both capitalist and communist, played out their little national games. It was the job of continuous man to make the world work. He was the one to make all of humanity consumers of the marvels that science and technology would produce.
64And Bucky Fuller had dedicated himself to keeping continuous man alive forever.