IIIb: Belloc and "Rogue Raft" (1967/1973)

Today I found myself thinking again about Hilaire Belloc, which brought to mind Lafferty’s satirical “Rogue Raft.” The piece lampoons the self-assured certainties of science, specifically how public boosters can go too far, missing the larger questions. While the theme isn’t unique in Lafferty, his thought-experiment and essayistic approach is. Everyone takes a turn in the crosshairs, including Lafferty himself, who colors his persona as tender-hearted, dreamily scientific, and a touch naive.

The big pretense of the essay is to be deeply, seriously concerned with Ice Ages and sea levels. It lays out out what everyone now knows: Ice Ages lower the seas, because water locked in massive ice caps is drawn from the oceans. In reverse, if today’s ice caps melted, most of the world’s ports would vanish underwater. This theory accounts for the land bridges that once linked continents—between Asia and America, or across the North Atlantic—allowing people, animals, and plants to migrate during glacial periods.

Lafferty then recalls that Belloc once questioned this and lost a debate with H. G. Wells. Marcellin Boule, whom Belloc cited and whom Wells mocked him for citing, had actually argued even more strongly that Ice Ages were times of high seas. Both Boule’s and Belloc’s views were dismissed as illogical. This is what Lafferty attacks. His tone is dry, his strategic disingenuity masterful:

“And it was on this point that Wells whipped him, completely and to be remembered forever, with his magnificent display of scorn. And so the day was saved for ‘science’. Belloc had been leading on points up till then; a good sportscaster would have carded him about seven rounds out of nine.”

Note that the victory is chalked up to scorn, to not logic.

To demonstrate the established theory’s logic, Lafferty does a thought experiment. He gives an analogy of continents as rafts floating on Earth’s magma, then invites us to imagine a real raft. When water is pumped into a tank on the raft, the surrounding water level (the pond water around the raft) drops, causing the heavily-loaded raft to ride higher. This leads to one of two wonderful images in the essay: the reductio ad absurdum of a raft that has so much water poured into the tank that it ends up floating in the air over the lowered water level of the pond.

The essay’s other beautiful image is the nearly Edenic Sangamon land bridge. Lafferty imagines (compassionately but performatively and with irony) how much easier it would be to explain anomalies in geology, archaeology, and anthropology if sea level worked the other way. He pictures a world of grassy, sub-tropical land bridges and frostless migrations, where species could spread "leisurely and pleasantly."

But this is impossible, Lafferty says. The orthodox theory must stand, no matter how many inconvenient questions it raises or how unpleasant its vision of history is. We are stuck with cold human migrations.

So how does this satire work? We need to go back to the debate itself.

Belloc argued that Wells had presented a complex and unsettled issue as a simple, settled scientific fact. He outlined that there were two forces at play: melting ice caps would add water to the oceans, but at the same time, landmasses relieved of that weight would rise. Belloc asked, “Which of the two factors predominated?” and concluded that since “the matter is still debated,” Wells’s confident claim was an example of “bad science.” Belloc’s main objection was not to the conclusion itself (he was really going after natural selection), but to the scientific certainty with which Wells was committed. “Mr. Wells,” he wrote, “is evidently a man confusing theory with fact.”

Instead of addressing the substance of Belloc's point, that two factors conflicted, Wells mocked him. With the ridicule was acidic condescension. He dismissed Belloc as an uninformed amateur who had been duped, suggesting that "some facetious person seems to have written to Mr. Belloc" or that he was the victim of a "leg-pulling friend." Lafferty suggests that Belloc might have been in on the joke. I find this exceedingly unlikely, but Lafferty’s deeper point is Belloc had humor and Wells was humorless. For understanding Belloc’s influence on Lafferty this is significant. Lafferty defends his hero.

How? By satirizing how Wells sidestepped part of the argument entirely, choosing instead to attack Belloc's credibility and imply intellectual dishonesty, even accusing him of deliberately altering words "in order to allege an inconsistency." This is the rhetorical victory that Lafferty memorably describes as Wells whipping his opponent "with his magnificent display of scorn." It’s the scorn that Lafferty returns to sender.

Lafferty thus bites the bullet. He concedes the immediate point (sea levels are lower during ice ages) to show how scientistic Wells was in fact being. That is a brilliant satirical move. Although Wells was of course right about the dominant outcome of ice ages, his model was simplistic, and Belloc was right to attack its simplicity.

The actual sea level is determined by both a global eustatic effect (the change in the ocean's volume) and a local isostatic effect (the vertical movement of the land). Wells championed the eustatic factor as the only one that mattered, while Belloc correctly pointed out that the isostatic rebound was a real phenomenon that complicated the issue.

Did Wells know this? Isostasy was formulated in the mid-to-late 19th century decades before the Outline of History debate, primarily by George Airy and John Henry Pratt. However, the application of isostasy to post-glacial rebound gained increasing scientific recognition in the early 20th century, following field studies in Scandinavia and Canada that demonstrated measurable uplift. By the time Wells was writing his major works (1890s–1930s), rebound had been observed, but it wasn’t the fixture of mainstream geology as it is today. In neither the Outline of History (1920) nor in The Science of Life (1930), where Wells discusses ice ages, does he go into isostatic rebound.

Here is Lafferty making Wells levitate:

And when the maximum amount of water has been pumped out of the pond and into the water-tank on the raft, the level of the pond will be so lowered that the raft (with its added load) will now float freely in the air above the lowered level of the pond. We love logic and its relentless conclusions. It is so much more solid a thing than the wispy novelties. But in this case we feel a certain nostalgia for a thing that is impossible.

Because Wells does not acknowledge Belloc’s point, Lafferty can pillory him with the floating raft.

I’ll wrap up with Belloc’s apology to Wells. After conceding his own tactical error in being "too positive" on science in the Outline of History debate, he returned to isostacy: "Mr. Wells was obviously wrong in treating it as certain upon his side, for the whole debate still remains doubtful." Both men lost here but in different ways—Belloc by being forced into a partial public retreat, and Wells by being scientistic—but Lafferty has a clear view on who was the bigger loser. He even showed us his scorecard.

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Mr. Wells suffers, in this connection, from another fault besides thatof stating the old and exploded theories of his youth as facts. He alsoaffirms as fact what is doubtful. Thus he builds a whole series of assertions on the—at first sight—apparently obvious, but, infact, much disputed idea that as the ice receded the sea-level rose. It is clear that the melting of great quantities of ice would, other thingsbeing equal, raise the sea-level. It is also presumable, on the isostatic theory, that the earth rose when and where relieved of icepressure (the raised beaches seem proof of this). That—other things being equal—would mean a lowering of sea-level when the ice melted (thus the highest-known raised beach of glacial times in America indicates a fall of the sea-level since the ice melted by nearly 700 feet). Which of the two factors predominated? Only observation of such phenomena as raised beaches, fossils, submerged forests, etc., can decide, and the matter is still debated. Boule in 1906 affirmed a high sea under glacial conditions. The periods of high glaciation were, according to him, the periods of high sea-level, and the interglacialepochs the periods of low sea-level. Wright (in 1914) inclines to theopposite. The Scandinavian observers noted in one locality a rise ofsea-level at the first receding of the ice, then a lowering of it. The latest opinion is mainly in favour of a rise in sea-level since the last Ice-age. Coleman, the last authority, tentatively suggests a rise. But to affirm a rise as proved is bad science. In these and many other points Mr. Wells is evidently a man confusing theory with fact. — Hilaire Belloc, A Companion to Mr. Wells’s Outline of History (1926)

From Mr. Belloc’s feats with Natural Selection we come to his adventures among his ancestors and the fall of man. These are, if possible, even more valiant than his beautiful exposure of the “half-educated assurance” of current biological knowledge. He rushes about the arena, darting from point to point, talking of my ignorance of the “main recent European work in Anthropology,” and avoiding something with extraordinary skill and dexterity. What it is he is avoiding I will presently explain. No one who has read my previous articles need be told that not a single name, not a single paper, iscited from that galaxy of “main recent European” anthropology. With one small exception. There is a well-known savant, M. Marcellin Boule, who wrote of the Grottes de Grimaldi in 1906. Some facetious person seems to have written to Mr. Belloc and told him that M. Boule in 1906 “definitely proved the exact opposite” of the conclusions given by Mr. Wright in his Quaternary Ice Age (1914), and quoted in my Outline. Mr. Belloc writes this down, elevates M. Boule to the magnificence of “Boule” simply and follows up with the habitual insults. By counting from his one fixed mathematical point, zero in some dimension unknown to me, he concludes that I must be twenty years out of date, though the difference between 1906 and 1914, by ordinary ways of reckoning, is really not minus twenty but plus eight. The same ungracious humorist seems to have stuffed up Mr. Belloc with a story that for the last twenty years the climate of the earth has ceased to vary with the eccentricity of the earth’sorbit, and that any natural consequences of the precession of the equinoxes no longer occur; that climate has, in fact, cut loose from astronomical considerations, and that you can find out all about it in the Encyclopædia Britannica. You cannot. Mr. Belloc should have tried. Some day he must find time to puzzle out M. Boule’s curve of oscillation of the Mediterranean and correlate it with Penck’s, and go into the mystery of certain Moustierian implements that M. Boule saysare not Moustierian; and after that he had better read over the little discussion about changes of climate in the Outline of History—it is really quite simply put—and see what it is I really said and what his leg-pulling friend has been up to with him in that matter. It may be kinder to Mr. Belloc to help him with a hint. Croll made an excellentbook in which he pointed out a number of astronomical processes which must produce changes of climate. He suggested that these processes were sufficient to account for the fluctuations of the glacial age. They are not. But they remain perfectly valid causes of climatic variation. Croll is no more done for than Darwin is done for. That is where Mr. Belloc’s friend let Mr. Belloc down. But Mr. Belloc does not always work on the information of facetious friends, and sometimes one is clearly in the presence of the unassisted expert controversialist. When, for example, I say that the Tasmaniansare not racially Neanderthalers, but that they are Neanderthaloid, he can bring himself to alter the former word also to Neanderthaloid in order to allege an inconsistency. And confident that most of his Catholic readers will not check him back by my book, he can ascribe to me views about race for which there is no shadow of justification. Butit is disagreeable to me to follow up such issues, they concern Mr. Belloc much more than they do the living questions under discussion, and I will not even catalogue what other such instances of unashamedcontroversy occur. — H. G. Wells, Mr. Belloc Objects to the Outline of History (1926)

(5) He says that I have attacked him for not accepting the theory thattimes of high glaciation were also times of high sea-level, and viceversa. He says that he has followed in this authorities later than theauthorities of twenty years ago which I quoted. He is perfectly right. I owe him an apology for this, and when mybook comes out the passage shall be wholly modified in consonance withrecent work. I over-emphasised the certitude of Boule and others;I admit that the point is in doubt and ought not to be treated ascertain. Mr. Wells was obviously wrong in treating it as certainupon his side, for the whole debate still remains doubtful (as, forinstance, in the latest work of all, Professor Coleman), but that doesnot excuse me for having been too positive on my own side. — Hilaire Belloc, Mr. Belloc Still Objects to Mr. Wells’s Outline of History (1927)