New Atlantis

Brown's New Atlantis discussion begins with a clue about how far back he thinks the story goes. Asked why he invoked a figure connected with John Dee, the Elizabethan court thinker, he points toward what he believes is a long history of nonhuman intervention in human affairs. The conversation then moves into colonization, occult interests and plans that might outlive their originators.

That is the part of his argument I find worth following. If you only look for a project that starts and finishes within one career, you could miss ambitions passed between generations. A later participant might inherit the work, change its purpose or use the old story to justify something new. Those would be very different kinds of continuity, and I'd want to know which Brown has in mind.

Michels introduces Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, a book imagining an extraordinary scientific society. Brown agrees with the idea of a metaphysical project on the human side, then says our usual perspective discounts planning beyond one lifespan. That is a strange shift from the usual question about who is in charge today. The person in charge could see themselves as a temporary caretaker of something they believe began long before them.

I can take that longer view seriously without treating Brown's proposed occult and nonhuman connections as established history. A durable ambition doesn't require every generation to understand it the same way. In fact, I'd expect the misunderstandings and revisions to be part of the story. Who kept the objective alive? What did the next group think it was inheriting? At what point would we be mistaking a reused symbol for an unbroken plan?

That possibility makes me think differently about secrecy. A person who thinks they're protecting an inherited project might regard a perfectly reasonable request for answers as a dangerous interruption. They could be sincere and still be wrong about what they inherited—or about their right to keep deciding for everyone else. Brown hasn't shown us an unbroken plan stretching across centuries. But his remarks do raise a question I find hard to leave alone: how much authority would people give an old purpose simply because somebody trusted them to carry it forward?