A somewhat-long, but gen­er­ally fas­ci­nat­ing para­graph regard­ing ‘the future’ in the eyes of (par­tic­u­larly) 18th and early-19th cen­tury Evan­gel­i­cal moral­ists and their polit­i­cal coun­ter­parts. The “Soci­ety for the Sup­pres­sion of Vice” orig­i­nated in 1787 with a cor­re­spond­ing piece of leg­is­la­tion and is par­tic­u­larly asso­ci­ated with Wilber­force in the vol­ume quoted here.

Fortune-telling, for exam­ple, was one sur­pris­ingly salient tar­get. It was one of the social evils iden­ti­fied by the 1802 Soci­ety for the Sup­pres­sion of Vice, and in 1824 the Vagrancy Act made it pun­ish­able by a fine or three months impris­on­ment. Num­bers of plebian women and men were pros­e­cuted, on the under­stand­ing that their claims to pre­dict the future were a form of fraud or ‘gam­mon­ing’ money from the gullible. Other meth­ods of telling the future such as weather pre­dic­tion, dream visions, and prophecy attracted sim­i­lar sus­pi­cion, indica­tive of the fact that the rul­ing classes were com­ing to see the con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion of the future as a mat­ter of great sig­nif­i­cance. While vul­gar mil­lenar­ian prophets such as Richard Broth­ers were pre­dict­ing an immi­nent time of suf­fer­ing, lead­ing to redemp­tion, gov­ern­ments were eager to hold out the promise of progress. The future was to be con­ceived as new and bet­ter — fatal­ism and feck­less­ness needed to be erad­i­cated. Like the sim­i­lar con­cep­tual shift in the mean­ing of the term ‘rev­o­lu­tion’ from astro­nom­i­cal return to total trans­for­ma­tion, the future was now cut free from the past, notwith­stand­ing the irony that indus­trial cap­i­tal­ism demanded a con­sid­er­able degree of for­ward plan­ning. In sug­gest­ing that it was pos­si­ble to see the future, pop­u­lar pre­dic­tive or ‘super­sti­tious’ prac­tices threw an unquan­tifi­able fac­tor into this plan­ning. If indeed the flow of time was not as equable as Newton’s def­i­n­i­tion had claimed it to be, then the out­comes of sci­en­tific exper­i­ment, polit­i­cal pol­icy, and tech­no­log­i­cal advance were dan­ger­ously uncertain.

from McCal­man, I. & Perkins, M. “Pop­u­lar Cul­ture”. An Oxford Com­pan­ion to the Roman­tic Age: British Cul­ture 1776 – 1832. (1999) p.216

The Soci­ety were duly attacked in peri­od­i­cals and all man­ner of other pub­lic forums, as we antic­i­pate they would also be today, for bring­ing their ‘moral­is­ing’ influ­ence to bear upon wider soci­ety. But, here at least, the ‘sup­pres­sion of vice’ does not stem from any over­bear­ingly ‘moral’ source. Cer­tainly, fortune-telling, etc., is decid­edly out of step with Abra­hamic faith of most fla­vors (includ­ing that of late-18th cen­tury Evan­gel­i­cal­ism), but the cause given is osten­si­bly some­thing quite dif­fer­ent from that held by these faiths. Par­tic­u­larly, it is on the grounds of fraud­u­lent busi­ness con­duct that such prac­tices are out­lawed. In doing so, there is the tacit acknowl­edg­ment that such activ­i­ties could amount to more than idle enter­tain­ment, as most in the West today con­sider these prac­tices. Yet it is for the preser­va­tion of sta­bil­ity, in broader terms, that this pro­bi­tion is made.

In con­sid­er­a­tion for the ‘future’, we are told, the promise of moder­nity was held out by censorship.

For what it’s worth, I am against cen­sor­ship, equally against fortune-telling (con­sid­er­ing it either false, acci­den­tal, or evil), uncon­vinced of the neces­sity of modern-day prophecy but recep­tive to it inso­far as it does not claim that it is, and hes­i­tant to malign Wilber­force, etc. I am also not so much of a mod­ernist as to arro­gantly pre­sume the future will bring end­less improve­ment, that peo­ple are good, or that human­ity at this moment in his­tory is at it’s peak.

All of which leaves me in some­thing of a pickle mak­ing sense of this par­tic­u­lar episode in his­tory. Thoughts?