Samuel Butler's dystopian article "Darwin among the…
March 1863 CE
Butler was born on December 4, 1835 at the rectory in the village of Langar, Nottinghamshire, to the Reverend Thomas Butler, son of Dr. Samuel Butler, then headmaster of Shrewsbury School and later Bishop of Lichfield.
Dr. Butler was the son of a tradesman and descended from a line of yeomen, but his scholarly aptitude being recognized at a young age, he had been sent to Rugby and Cambridge, where he distinguished himself.
His only son Thomas wished to go into the Navy, but succumbed to paternal pressure and entered the Church of England, in which he led an undistinguished career in contrast to his father's.
Samuel Butler's immediate family had created for him an oppressive home environment (chronicled in The Way of All Flesh).
Samuel's relationship with his parents, especially with his father, had been largely antagonistic.
His education began at home and included frequent beatings, as was not uncommon at the time.
Samuel will write later that his parents were "brutal and stupid by nature."
He later recorded that his father "never liked me, nor I him; from my earliest recollections I can call to mind no time when I did not fear him and dislike him.... I have never passed a day without thinking of him many times over as the man who was sure to be against me."
Under his parents' influence, he was set on course to follow his father into the priesthood.
He was sent to Shrewsbury at the age of twelve, where he did not enjoy the hard life under its then headmaster, Benjamin Hall Kennedy, whom he would later draw as "Dr Skinner" in The Way of All Flesh.
Then in 1854 he went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a first in Classics in 1858 (the graduate society of St John's is named the Samuel Butler Room (SBR) in his honor).
After Cambridge he went to live in a low-income parish in London 1858–59 as preparation for his ordination into the Anglican clergy; there he discovered that baptism made no apparent difference to the morals and behavior of his peers and began questioning his faith.
This experience will later serve as inspiration for his work The Fair Haven.
Correspondence with his father about the issue had failed to set his mind at peace, inciting instead his father's wrath.
As a result, he had emigrated in September 1859, on the ship Roman Emperor to New Zealand.
Butler has come here like many early British settlers of privileged origins, to put as much distance as possible between himself and his family.
He writes of his arrival and life as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station in A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), and will make a handsome profit when he sells his farm, but the chief achievement of his time here are the drafts and source material for much of his masterpiece Erewhon.
Erewhon reveals Butler's long interest in Darwin's theories of biological evolution
In 1863, four years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the editor of a New Zealand newspaper, The Press, publishes a letter captioned "Darwin among the Machines."
Written by Butler but signed Cellarius (q.v.,) it compares human evolution to machine evolution, prophesying that machines will eventually replace man in the supremacy of the earth: "In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race."
The letter raises many of the themes now debated by proponents of the technological singularity, i. e. that computers evolve much faster than humans and that we are racing towards an unknowable future through explosive technological change.
Butler also spends much time criticizing Darwin, partly because Butler (himself a man living in the shadow of a previous Samuel Butler) believes that Darwin has not sufficiently acknowledged his grandfather Erasmus Darwin's contribution to the origins of his theory.
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