Francis Bacon was a nasty piece of work. His utopian novel,
The New Atlantis, published in 1627, is a eulogy to artifice and
control. It is set on an island of engineers who honor a statue of
Columbus. They live surrounded by the wildness of the ocean,
and they hate those seas. Nature, self-willed, unpredictable, and
glorious, is Public Enemy Number One for Bacon and the engineers. She must be “bound into service”; she is something to
“conquer and subdue.” Passages of The New Atlantis are eerily
prescient—and approving—of novel technologies including
genetic engineering and types of weaponry much like napalm or,
indeed, Agent Orange.
In Bacon’s time, the torturing of witches was common. In
1542, the Pope had made the Spanish Inquisition a papal o;ce,
and Bacon applauded, encouraging the scientist to see himself as
the torturer and nature his victim, writing of the “inquisition of
nature” “in constraint.” Real women being tortured to reveal
their real wisdom was fine by him—a man should not “make
scruple” about doing so “when the inquisition of truth is his
whole object—as your majesty has shown in your own example,”
he wrote in 1623, referring to King James, who had brought in
laws condemning to death any practitioners of witchcraft. Bacon
also sought “a blessed race of heroes and supermen” to dominate
nature and society, and these supermen translated perfectly into
Nietzsche’s “Übermensch.” When you know that Nietzsche
influenced the Nazi movement, and Nazi eugenics can be seen
as rooted in Bacon’s philosophy, you see a tainted genealogy of
ideas. At the heart of fascism is a love of the fake, engineered
world and a hatred of diversity; this is its persistence—not so
much in those who overtly call themselves fascists but in deep,
covert philosophies and aesthetics.
The art movement of the Italian Futurists, spearheaded by
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” of
1909 and promoting an explicit loathing of the past, expounded
and supported the aesthetics of fascism, and did so in Baconian
tradition, admiring speed, technology, and a hatred of nature:
“Hoorah! No more contact with the vile earth!” was Marinetti’s
