Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

I came to this 1969 cult 'classic' in the fervent hope that it might allow me, finally, to 'get' modern environmentalism for which this is a seminal text.

Part of my subsequent lack of enthusiasm is down to style. There is no doubt that Buckminster Fuller was a genius of sorts - at least as an engineer, planner and technologist - but he writes like a 'speak your weight' machine with a propensity for creating neologistic compound words that would put German philosophy to shame.

Far from inspiring, the man just cannot write imaginative prose and yet his subject cries out for imagination. I am sure that he says precisely what he means but it is next to impossible to sustain an interest while being hectored by a person, no doubt kindly in show more intention in his way, who is egotistical to the nth degree - a 'speech-talker', as my daughter would term such types.

Still, great thoughts are only made easier, no more, by great language skills. There are many prose poets whose ideas can be distilled down to mere mystical garbage when the beauty of the formulation has passed from one ear and out of the other.

Sadly, his are not such great thoughts either ... instead we get a self assured, somewhat egotistical, reasoning that patronises the reader in a step-by-step and apparently logical approach that blinds us with pseudo-science. If persons were just units of existence with blank slates for minds, he might conceivably have a point. But we are not and so he does not.

Buckminster Fuller is a sort of monster despite all his fine aspirations for humanity. He is so, in part, because he sees us all not truly as intrinsically flawed individuals (which we are and which makes us who we are at our best) but as units of existence who can be made nobler by planners. He is a planner and we are the crooked timber that must be used to fulfil the plan for our own good.

Where have we heard such sentiments before? Why, from pretty well every 'great' Western ideologue and thinker whose ego has extended itself to encompass the known human universe.

Far from being ready to consider deep globalist environmentalism (as opposed to human-centred localist environmentalism) as a reasonable possibility for humanity, Buckminster Fuller has converted me into its sworn enemy.

I now know, if there are others like him within the contemporary environmentalist movement (for we can see his influence in the 'Zeitgeist Movement' and in the eco-hysteria surrounding the circle of Al Gore), that, when we ordinary humans fail to meet the needs of the Plan, whatever his personal benignity, his heirs will make old Joe Stalin look like a pussy cat as they enforce their will on a global scale - always in the interests of us and of humanity, of course.

If you are the sort of personality who would have loved dear old Karl Marx before '36, then you'll just love Buckminster Fuller today!

This philosophical primitivism is a shame because there is a great deal of merit in his analysis of capitalism even if he seems loathe to be direct about his primary enemy lest he get accused of being a fellow-traveller with the equally flawed communist alternative that had divided up the world with Washington while he wrote.

He gets close to a truth in his myth of the Great Pirates (the one entertaining and worthwhile section of what is otherwise a monument to the turgid) but it is still not the truth.

The tale of the Great Pirates is a sound enough mythic critique of what we have inherited (as of 1969) but it is about as historically plausible as pretty well every other evangelical motivating myth that has come out of the Anglo-Saxon imperium, from those of the Mormons and Madame Blavatsky to those of Margaret Murray and L. Ron Hubbbard.

The history in this book is mostly just simplistic nonsense that seems to depend on the reading of a few geostrategists and very little experience of practical politics, the sort of simplistic populism, mixed with technocracy, that is standard fare when a certain type of engineer tries to make sense of human complexity and builds societies as he might build bridges.

Old political activists will know that the heart sinks when an engineer or scientist tries to apply engineering or scientific principles to knotty political problems ...

He does make us think, to his credit, about excessive cultural specialisation and about what 'wealth' actually means to humanity. On the latter, he adopts an American populist approach that is analytically correct even if it may not be pragmatically meaningful, given where we are today.

He has also done us a service in suggesting that we are going to be more socially productive and creative if we are given more freedom to think at leisure. The science of daydreaming suggests that our mind does benefit from idling.

And he did the West a great service by joining those who pointed out the effects of pollution within the capitalist world long before it was forced to the notice of Soviet planners by their bullied dissidents.

Failure to consider polluting effects was undoubtedly a major contributing factor to the fall of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of its Communist model - Buckminster Fuller's dissident voice helped the West adjust more effectively to the threat of environmental degradation.

Finally, the analysis of the way that wealth is easily created in war but not in peace is a criticism that stands today of how sovereign 'piratical' states have served the interests of their historically continuous institutions far more often than they have of their peoples.

Buckminster Fuller's somewhat stylistically suppressed righteous anger at global inequity, imperialism, elite corruption, planetary dispoliation and inefficiency leads him to some wise analytical conclusions but not to equally wise solutions.

The Spaceship Earth concept is, of course, seductive, like those of Gaia or the Clash of Civilisations or the End of History, but such book-selling catch-phrases are either so general as to have no meaning for humanity (unless you remove humanity from the equation altogether) or are grossly simplistic when it comes to trying to decide what humanity (which really means individual persons in societies and not some essentialist reified thing with one hive mind) is to do next.

The truism in Spaceship Earth (which we must accept) is that, as a species, we sink or swim with the planet. If it dies, we die - end of story. But there is one heck of a leap from that simple and true proposition to the determination for a planned world government of happy free people living in leisure guided by philosopher kings like our dear Buckminster Fuller.

Self-appointed Platonic Guardians have not had a great record in the humanity stakes. The Buckmister Fullerenes are unlikely to be much better if they actually get their hands on any directive power. I am, for example, not an 'Earthian' but a person who happens to live on Earth. So are you?

As for his faith in computers and automation, this is a belief and nothing more. A sort of instinctive scientific progressivism that over-estimates what computers can do to model our universe and underestimates the logic of an AI displacing us as soon as it can model it better than us.

In the end, one fears that this brave new world (and we are reminded of Huxley here) requires the behavioural normalisation of humanity on a mass scale in order to ensure that the computers can cope with the variables!

His advocacy of 'synergy' and general systems theory reminds one of nothing less than the contemporaneous Rand Corporation, the cold calculations of Hermann Kahn and the vicious number crunching of the latterly contrite Robert McNamara as he judged the success of a war by the body bags.

This is the world of American technocrats at the height of the Cold War and it is salutary to remember that the US lost the Vietnam War and that central planning ruined the Soviet Union just as it would no doubt eventually ruin the planet.

On top of this, there is in the introduction to the book by his grandson all the barely concealed hysteria that drives an environmental 'enthusiasm' that seems to owe as much to a peculiarly charismatic frame of mind in American small town populism as it does to genuine scientific endeavour.

This is a text that believers may love but that the rest of us should question more critically and ask how or why an engineer, who experimented with sleep patterns for himself and then was puzzled that his colleagues could not keep up, can or should have anything to say about the workings of the human soul.

Buckminster Fuller's genius lay in the observation, management and manipulation of matter - and he should not have strayed from that territory. show less

Five stars for what this book is, a short explanation of the philosophy of technical optimism of R. Buckminster Fuller.
However, Fuller writes in a dense style that is sometimes hard to read.
By the way, this is not an operating manual at all, it focuses more on concepts rather than tactics. Spoiler alert - the key is that we work together and stop creating false differences between people (nations, rich and poor, races).

What, forty-four years on, is the future of Spaceship Earth? Ol' Bucky does, to his credit, grasp some essential truths about our environmental position. We have limited resources, we consume too much too fast, and we have no organized means of managing them for our future survival. Hence something must be done. This idea rightfully endures.

I must, however, disagree with his future characterization of the earth as a spaceship - that would imply some military hierarchy, international cooperative order, strict roles and assigned positions. With the present international situation, I suspect that those wealthy ones among us live in cruise ships, and some hundred millions of others are living on the giant plastic garbage island in the show more Pacific, lashed to our pleasure flotilla and shoveling coal into the boilers.

What else does he offer us, besides this memorable, if flawed, image? Some woolly historicism about Great Pirates who control information. Some Alex Jones stuff about banks. Some strange attempts at metaphysics. The idea of a system being greater than the sum of its parts, coining that hideous cliche of inarticulate business majors everywhere, "synergy". Something about specialization, baby chickens, general systems theory, and so on and so on. Idyllic plans for attempting to rewrite human nature. You start to wonder if he's lost it.

I end with Fuller's closing words:

"Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe."

This is supposed to be a final call to action. Fuller may have been a good scientist, creative engineer and a designer, but a manifesto-writer and coherent futurist he is not. show less

This is a classic, published in 1969, first read by me back in 1970 or 1971, when we thought we would soon experience either the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius or, alternately, the Eve of Destruction. Definitely Utopian, still visionary, and in some ways quite wrong, Fuller makes interesting reading even now, 40 years later and 26 years after his death in 1983. One important area in which Fuller has turned out to have been wrong was his prediction that global population would stabilize at the then current 4 billion thanks to world-wide industrialization, which he expected to be complete by 1985. Now almost 7 billion, world population has nearly doubled since he wrote this book and has not yet even peaked.
Another issue that Fuller show more wasn’t exactly wrong about, but that he didn’t take fully into account, is that of waste; for example, what to do with all the plastic, such as the Texas-sized mat now floating out in the middle of the Pacific ocean, or nuclear waste (though it must be said that he categorized atoms similarly to fossil fuels as non-renewable capital, to be used only sparingly and then only for start-up purposes). He doesn’t mention climate change or global warming except by implication (i.e., if we don’t smarten up soon, we will use up or destroy our life support and enhancement system on this planet). However, Fuller placed great faith in human evolution proceeding in such a way as to result in a favorable outcome for humans on this planet. What has saved us in the past, he said, is our built-in (by evolution) trial and error approach in conjunction with a bank account of energy resources. Meaning, we have evolved in such a way as to enjoy enough breathing space to be able to make errors and then adjust our behavior accordingly and progress.
Some of his prognostications seem uncannily prescient considering the world's current economic crises, for example :
"The constantly put-off or undermet costs and society’s official bumbling of them clearly prove that man does not know at present what wealth is nor how much of whatever it may be is progressively available to him," and "The wisest humans recognized in 1810 only one three-hundredth of 1 per cent of the immediately thereafter 'proven value' of the United States’ share of the world’s wealth-generating potentials. Of course, those wisest of men of the times would have seen little they could afford to do."
R. Buckminster Fuller is still well worth reading, if only to ponder his definitions of democracy and wealth:
"Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgment what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect’s function in universe. . . . .
Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.” show less

I was drawn to this book by its wonderful title and the recognition that I’d collected a number of quotations by its author without really knowing anything about him.

I found this book to be something of a curate’s egg. In places it uses language to develop ideas in a really clear way. In other parts the language and structure of the description seems to make the ideas rather impenetrable. On balance, however, the ideas win through.

(Having found out a little more about R. Buckminster Fuller I have learned both that this is one of his more accessible volumes, and that his other books may well be worth the challenge.)

It is a book with some wonderful ideas, not least the one captured in the title, that the Earth is a spaceship show more travelling through space escorted by the Moon and following its mother ship, the Sun. Though written in the 1970 this metaphor, or perhaps its simply a realisation, provides a framework which encompasses many of the problems of sustainable living we are currently grappling with.

Equally the book has some very vivid and enlightening imagery with which to entice the reader to see and begin to challenge their current paradigm. It for example begins with a story of Global Pirates which is used to describe the recent history of western civilisation, its creation of empires and the division of the world into those that have and those that have not. In a dozen pages or so it describes our current paradigm for how the world works and some of the key characteristics of our environment and the thinking this has created.

For example our understanding of need and scarcity, the role of nationality, the use of knowledge. I found the description very thought provoking and began questioning many of the assumptions that drive my, and possibly our current behaviour. He outlined the assumptions that there will always be shortages of resources and food, which underpin a view of haves’ and have-not’s and our need to protect what we have, often at much greater cost than sharing what we have.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a fellow speaker Mr. N Ramanathan (Ram) in Iran last year. He asked me
“When you have an idea. Who does it belong to?”
He didn’t expect an answer, nor do I have one, but what is clear is that it doesn’t belong to me It’s the result of a million connections and so must in some way belong to all of them.

This is a thought provoking book, which though in parts challenging, is concise enough to warrant some re-reading. The ideas may shake your understanding and beliefs, which may be one of the most powerful ways of enabling change. show less

The name R. Buckminster Fuller brings up images of geodesic domes for most people. I found a paperback 1973 printing of the 1969 book with a properly psychedelic deconstructed sphere/face on the cover. Only after reading the book did I find out we already had a copy (much newer edition) without the cool cover. Fuller's premise is that the earth, like a spaceship, needs to have all its systems working as one, that there has to be a balance between resources and their use. He carries the metaphor through various scientific explanations (most of which were beyond my knowledge) to show why our lives depend on the maintenance of our spaceship. A wonderful premise and metaphor -- seems really a propos as we look at climate change becoming show more irreversible by 2030. It's also scary that in the time since this was written not many have paid heed. show less

This book is a time capsule that helps us see our intellectual progress since it was published. Actually, it is almost useless. Back then we thought it was great stuff, but only because almost everything else was even worse. One might get excited over the fact that there is a chapter titled General Systems Theory. Actually the chapter is so vague it is almost useless.