Epilogue Post #7
The Doomsday Machine:
When the economist John Maynard Keynes took power in Great Britain, the country was in dire straits financially. After years of rationing, debt payments to the victorious powers of the Great War, and the destruction from the conflict that ousted the monarchy, the country needed stabilization and a shrewd hand in government to right itself. As it happened, Keynes was that man. Already a brilliant economist, Keynes and his parliament of loyal Common Wealth party members took control of many important British industries. Coal mines, rail lines, dockyards, and steel mills among other industries deemed vital to national security were seized or their corporate owners bought into loyalty. Britain quickly transitioned from one of the loosest regulated economies of the Western world to one of the most regulated economies. This was facilitated by the fact that many companies had been squeezed into bankruptcy with the years of economic stagnation prior to the British Civil War.
Keynes' policies were primarily those of a tiered command economy centered around a council of management, and embracing autarky in the British Isles as a method to restore British industrial capacity. John Maynard Keynes, or Lord Protector of Great Britain and Guide to the Revolution as he styled himself, was the ultimate authority on production across the British Isles, along with his Council of Management Experts. The Council of Management Experts brought together some of the brightest minds from across the former British Empire, and Keynes was not one to discount the brilliance of the colonies. Bengali statisticians Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and Satyendra Nath Bose both served on the Council of Management Experts, and this became one of the factors in Bengal retaining a closer relationship to Britain and other pro-British states such as Canada and South Africa following the decolonization of the former British Empire. Also on the CME were Canadian economist Cliff H. Douglas, who helped draft the Sovereign Incorporation Charter for the Hudson Bay Company. However, the two most influential members of Keynes's Council of Management Experts came in the field of computing.
The 1930s were an exciting time for advances in what is now known as computing. While the Analytical Engine had been used to calculate artillery trajectories with a fair amount of accuracy during the Great War, new theories on the applications of computing cropped up with varying success rates throughout North America and Europe in the decades following. What Alonzo Church was to the American field of computing and John von Neumann was for Germany, Alan Turing was to Great Britain. Keynes first met Alan Turing through Cambridge, where Turing studied under Keynes's friend the Welsh scientist Charles Eryl Wynn-Williams. Wynn-Williams left Cambridge to be part of Keynes's Council of Management Experts from the beginning, while Turing joined him shortly afterward in 1935 at the remarkable age of just 23. Alan Turing quickly rose through the ranks of the CME due to his brilliance, and as recently uncovered letters reveal, a romantic relationship with Keynes. While Britain under Keynes was one of the more liberal countries with respect to homosexuality, these letters found in the Cambridge University Archives among other documents from Lord Protector Keynes are still a startling revelation, particularly as Keynes had previously fathered two children with Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in a previous marriage[1].
Turing first demonstrated his brilliance in computing during the 1930s with the Council of Management Experts' creation of a tabulation machine that combined a tabulation machine with a difference engine, and became the first programmable machine that we can reasonably call a digital computer. It was an immediate success with the 1935 census in Great Britain, accurately calculating statistics vital to the management of the British economy for both London and Britain as a whole. Since the first use of these machines was to tabulate census data, the Council of Management Experts dubbed the computer the Doomsday Machine[2]. Starting in the 1940s, Alan Turing led a project that would expand the Doomsday Machine's capabilities and truly revolutionize the British economy and the field of computing itself.
By the mid-1940s, Lord Portector Keynes had consolidated his command economy, with a tiered system of national production across the British Isles, regional commonwealths in South England, North England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, as well as major cities including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester. After the regional data was collected, the Council of Management Experts based on aggregate supply and demand and set accordingly at the regional level. To make up for any errors in calculation and to appease the population, Keynes brought back the Roman tradition of Saturnalia[3], which became a week of festivities and "a natural yearly stimulus of demand" for the economy, as Keynes put it in his writings before the next price controls would go into effect. However, Turing's project to expand the Doomsday Machine with the aid of his protege the computer scientist Stafford Beer would revolutionize this tiered command economy. With the new system, the capabilities of the Doomsday Machine were expanded. Instead of inefficient and cumbersome trucks moving around the punch cards, a cross-country teletext network would send the data up a chain of command where it would be printed out on ticker tape and recorded on punch cards to be used in the Doomsday Machines. This alone sped up calculations phenomenally, but additional advances in memory and processing allowed for greater overall control. When the last incarnation of the Doomsday Machine was implemented following the 1960 census, the number of tiers had increased to seven with management council at each level, all the way from the CME at the top national level down to individual municipalities and wards. This system, which Stafford Beer called the Cybernet[4], led to Britain rebuilding its fully functioning economy while allowing for extreme control of imports and exports and movement of goods within Great Britain. When John Maynard Keynes died in October of 1962, the Cybernet continued to function with barely any disruption despite a constitutional crisis that lasted for nearly a month before his eldest son Neville Keynes became the next Lord Protector[5].
The Longest Word:
The longest word in the Columbiad Dictionary at a staggering 31 letters long is neoantidisestablishmentarianism. The term refers to a period in the later years of the John Maynard Keynes regime in Great Britain, during which a renewed effort arose to officially return the former British royal family and the Church of England to the British Isles. Keynes had abolished the Church of England shortly after taking power in 1928, at the same time that he sent the former Albert II and the rest of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha into exile in Denmark. The Church of England, as Keynes and philosopher G. K. Chesterton noted, was seen by the Keynesian regime as a holdout of temporal religious authority, which had gone into a large decline in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Chesterton, for example, approved of the Roman Catholic Church's renunciation of the temporal authority of the Papal States that caused the split between the Catholic Churches in Rome and Puebla.
However, while the Church of England had been disestablished in Great Britain in 1928, many people still effectively remained practicing Anglicans well into the 1930s. Keynes, for his part, had disdain for religion as a whole, especially organized religion, and according to his collected notes in the Cambridge Archives, was predominantly irreligious himself with little attending of services or even private observance beyond his childhood. Religion, in Keynes' mind, was ultimately a private matter, though he publicly considered it a distraction from the more pressing matters of the economic situation of Great Britain and its citizens. "The goal of one's work should be to enable leisure and happiness in one's lifetime, not in appeasing some intangible force or reaching happiness in a supposed next life. Theologians set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that once the storm is past, the ocean will be calm. For in the short run, we can achieve knowable happiness. But in the long run, we are all destined to die."[6] During the early Keynesian regime, Anglican Churches were repurposed as either historical museums and attractions, or kept as community meeting spaces.
However, despite the outward irreligiousness of Keynesian Britain to the point where in the 1950 census Great Britain was 15 percent atheist and 70 percent reporting no religious affiliation, private practice of Anglican, Roman Catholic, and other religions was still allowed. Indeed, it was around this time that the cause of neoantidisestablishmentarianism emerged in force. Initially, it was merely taken up as a call for the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to be permitted return to Great Britain from exile. However, with the Keynesian regime taking little action against religious expression on the matter, the cause grew to additionally call for the restoration of the Church of England with a member of the former royal family as its head. Keynes, who by this time rarely made public appearances, initially tarred the neoantidisestablishmentarianists as a radical reactionary group wishing to restore the British monarchy and send Great Britain back into ruin. The push for reestablishment of the Anglican Church continued, however, and after goodwill visits by the British ambassador to Denmark to Edward, Albert II's son and then current claimant to the British throne, and by the Danish ambassador to Britain as well as the Prime Minister of Denmark making a state visit to meet with Keynes in London in 1954, the Lord Protector announced a momentous decision.
According to the 1954 Proclamation on the Status of the Descendants of Queen Victoria, the Church of England was to be restored in Great Britain and permitted to operate as a public religious organization. The Proclamation made stipulations that despite this, the Anglican Church was not declared the official state religion of Great Britain. Also in the negotiations that led to the 1954 Proclamation, one of the ultimatums Keynes made was that Edward Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was forbidden from being the head of the Church of England. Instead, a member from the minor branch of the family was chosen to lead the church, with the stipulation that they renounce any and all claims to titles nominally in the British Isles. A granddaughter of King Albert II's younger brother George was selected, in part pushed for by Lord Protector Keynes as a praise for women. Despite claims from more conservative supporters of neoantidisestablishmentarianism that the appointment of a woman as the head of the Church of England would destroy the sanctity of the Church and render its renewal pointless, the 28 year old Elizabeth returned to Britain in 1954 with her two sons Charles and Albert Mountbatten, and Elizabeth acceded to the leadership of the restored Church of England.
[1] I had already planned Turing being a protege of Keynes in this, but after finding out Keynes was bisexual, well... it seemed like a natural leap.
[2] The common meaning of doomsday machine didn't come about until the 1960s and the detonation of the hydrogen bomb in OTL. So ITTL it's actually quite plausible that they might name the census tabulation computer after the Domesday Book.
[3] From
Am I a Liberal?, Keynes, 1925: "Drug Questions in this country are practically limited to the Drink Question; though I should like to include gambling under this head. I expect that the Prohibition of alcoholic Spirits and of Bookmakers would do good. But this would not settle the matter. How far is bored and suffering humanity to be allowed, from time to time, an escape, an excitement, a stimulus, a possibility of change?—that is the important problem. Is it possible to allow reasonable licence, permitted Saturnalia, sanctified Carnival, in conditions which need ruin neither the health nor the pockets of the roysterers, and will shelter from irresistible temptation the unhappy class who, in America, are called addicts?"
[4] The term Cybernet comes from Stafford Beer's studies of management cybernetics. as the word cybernetics was originally used as a general term to describe the study of all system dynamics. Even earlier, French scientist Andre Ampere used the term 'cybernetique' in 1934 to describe the science of civil government. The Cybernet itself, here, is modeled after Beer's Cybersyn system that was briefly in place in Allende's Chile.
[5] Neville is a fictional son of Keynes, named after his father's middle name.
[6] I hope you enjoyed my variation on the entire quote from Keynes'
A Tract on Monetary Reform, Chapter III, page 80,
which can be found here.