Title: Thinking Technology: William Golder and Samuel Butler in the pre-history of New Zealand as a modern technological society

Author: Brian Opie

Publication details: Victoria University of Wellington Library, 2014, Wellington

Part of: William Golder Electronic Edition

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Conclusion

There is clearly a larger comparison to be made between these unlike settlers. Its starting point could be found in their respective attempts to reverse what Butler describes as the normal mode of human perception: ‘we are pulled through the world backwards and only see that we have passed’ (LU, 199). It would explore more fully their employment of literary means like satire as a means of critiquing the dominant values of the societies in which they made their lives, New Zealand for Golder and England for Butler³⁴, and their humanising engagement with science on a foundation in literature, the arts and philosophical thought. For both, even if with different implications and outcomes, natural theology provided the bridge between nature, humanity, and the large cultural and philosophical issues generated by the exploration of nature and inquiry into the meaning of technological invention³⁵. If Golder’s thought continued to be framed by Scottish conceptions of history and cultural evolution, and by evangelical Protestantism, and if he was apparently untroubled by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, he nonetheless also continued to make the case for intellectual and technological progress grounded in the interaction between the knowledge systems of science and religion³⁶. He would surely agree with Butler’s statement that ‘the principal varieties and sub-varieties of the human are not now to be looked for among the negroes, the Circassians, the Malays, or the American aborigines, but among the rich and the poor. The difference in physical organization between these two species of man is far greater than that between the so-called types of humanity’ (LE, p.218-219).

Golder and Butler both came from settled societies, nations within the homeland of the British Empire, however much those societies were being transformed culturally, intellectually and economically. Golder stayed in New Zealand until he returned to Scotland just before his death in 1876, and spent his life seeking to actualise a conception of a new nation to be made out of the settler nations and the indigenous people of New Zealand, a concpetion founded in the actuality of agricultural and industrial transformation on the model of, but to supersede, that of Britain, which represented only a stage (if currently the most advanced) in the forward progress of the civilising of nature and humanity. Butler returned to England after four years, to fulfil a different cultural project through his painting and writing. This plan was already laid down in his English cultural and intellectual origins, and hinted at in the constant presence of those origins in the frame of cultural references by which he found analogies for translating the strange actuality of New Zealand into an Anglo-European cultural vocabulary.³⁷ There is no record of Golder’s response during his few months back in Scotland to the society he had held in memory, represented in poetry, and maintained contact with through letters, newspapers and books during his long absence. For Butler, perhaps the narrator’s mode of transport out of Erewhon, by adding a new ‘limb’ in the form of the hot air balloon, provides a suitable allegory of escape from one possible future (which is a version of the past and present of England) to another which is uncertain, unmapped, and unpeopled – ‘adrift’ in ‘blank space and … conjectures’ - by means of knowledge embodied in a new technology³⁸. The effect for the travellers of becoming dependent on the machine is to become relocated in another nowhere, the undefined space of the sea marked both as a space of utter freedom from the constraints of social inheritance and by the impossibility of humanly surviving that freedom outside society of some kind. Across the range was to be found an imagined society in which the technological future as Butler and Golder conceived its becoming in their present had been suspended, just as New Zealand itself and its indigenous inhabitants for Golder could be located in the stadial version of history at the first stage³⁹.

Both perceived that they, and humanity in general, were living at a cusp in human history, a perception which has as its correlative the state of mind which is otherwise experienced as vision, dream or prophecy. Critically, this state of mind is not referred for its origin to personal history but to the collective achievements of humanity. It is an extension or extrapolation from Butler’s comment that ‘By the institutions and state of science under which a man is born it is determined whether he shall have the limbs of an Australian savage or those of a nineteenth-century Englishman’ (LE, 218), and Golder’s view that, while Britain at the time he wrote represented the highest point of human civilization it, too, would be superseded by humanity’s onward progress, for example, as it became manifested in the future nation of New Zealand⁴⁰.

Butler’s conception of the future takes in a timescale forward as long as the geological timescale extended backwards from his and Golder’s present, whereas Golder’s is more likely to have been framed by millennial expectations⁴¹. The aspiration to know more, and to communicate new knowledge as the means of bringing the future into existence, which is shared by these writers however different their intellectual and cultural formation, can be summarily represented in the titles of two much reprinted works by Rev. Thomas Dick, The Christian Philosopher (1823) and Philosophy of a Future State (1828).⁴² But Golder also shares Butler’s view of the means by which this future can be grasped and made available to knowledge. One of the critical steps taken by humanity in Butler’s theory of human evolution as knowledge enabled and driven is described as follows: ‘[Man] learnt to perceive the moral government under which he held the feudal tenure of his life – perceiving it he symbolized it, and to this day our poets and prophets still strive to symbolize it more and more completely’ (LE, p.216). For ‘prophets’ in this era of what we now call information or knowledge societies we can write ‘philosophers’, in the sense of that term exemplified by Butler’s speculative and critical writing, by Golder’s speculative poetry, and by Dick’s argument for the harmony between science, morality and religion.

Back in England, Butler found himself out of place in respect of the cultural authority of Darwinianism. He responded to the challenge that he had nothing of worth to contribute because he was not a scientist by emphasising the value of literary culture and ‘dar[ing] to reflect’ on the results of scientific investigation⁴³. In New Zealand, Golder wrote himself into the new place, but from a social position equally out of place with respect to cultural authority. His writing, addressed to a nation which did not yet exist, has disappeared from that nation’s memory. Butler’s writing, on the other hand, has found its ‘nation’, in that literate and critical readership seeking to understand the future from its traces and anticipations in the work of ‘the reflective mind’.