According to Tom Wolfe, our space program needs a philosophic justification to get the “godlike” adventure that gave us all that right stuff going again. Here are a few random thoughts in that direction. I’m not saying I agree with them or that I’m volunteering to be a pioneer to Mars or that I’m not aware that there’s a powerful case in the other direction. These are points for discussion, and I’m always for giving Tom Wolfe his due.
1. JFK understood that the space race with the Soviets was a key part of a military contest that we were stuck with taking with dead seriousness. We still need a space program for military reasons, although that probably doesn’t involve going to Mars. We have no choice but to remain techno-dominant, and our likely eventual war with the Chinese may well be fought in space. People can retreat to their porches or not as the please, but technology will continue to develop whether we like it or not. I’m saying this first because Wolfe doesn’t say it and because Obama (contrary to the sagacious advice of Gates) doesn’t even see that modernizing our nuclear weapons is the best way to save lives and liberty. I could say something similar about the need to keep ahead in nanotechnology, no matter how scary or potentially “dehumanizing” it may be. Describing the prospect of nanotechology combined with space travel is above my pay grade.
2. Actually, Wolfe says NASA did have a philosopher–Wernher von Braun, whose word didn’t catch on, he speculates, because he was a German with a Nazi background. But Americans are pretty open to listening to Germans (like Leo Strauss) and even Germans with Nazi backgrounds (like Martin Heidegger). So I can’t help but add that von Braun’s word just didn’t get out.
3. Wolfe heard that word in a dinner speech and can’t point us to any text. Here’s my version of it: Only human beings are open to the truth about all things. Only human beings live meaningful lives. With their disappearance, the truth about Being would have no one to know it, and the universe would become meaningless matter and nothing more. So far, we’re stuck in a very vulnerable position on this planet. It might be pulverized by an asteroid at any time; we might accidentally blow it up or trash it beyond repair. The sun will stop shining some day, no matter what we do. We have a duty–in the name of meaning and Being–to spread ourselves out around the cosmos, giving philosophy, as Strauss would say, the longest possible future–not to mention virtue, dignity, poetry, and (some would impiously say) God.
4. That duty seems deeper, from an anthropocentric view, than merely our duty to “the environment.” No matter how well we treat our planet, eventually it will turn on us. We’re getting increasingly paranoid about “climate change,” forgetting that we have no “natural right” to a stable climate, one that will support lives such our ours. Surely our duty to preserve “man” is more profound than our duty to do what we can to preserve earthly nature. (The two duties are obviously not incompatible.)
5. It seems pretty likely that we can employ our technological freedom to make other planets inhabitable. That will increase our experiences of “displacement” and produce various neuroses connected with earth deprivation and earth nostalgia. But it won’t change fundamentally who we are. If we find other meaningful life, that won’t prove there’s no God, and we’ll remain stuck with virtue and “born to trouble” out there, as we are here.
6. Von Braun’s philosophizing makes a lot more sense than Carl Sagan’s silly thought that planet hopping be justified by making conscious and sacred our natural inclination to species preservation. To the extent animals become conscious, they become less driven by what’s best for the species. But the duty the German describes does seem noble and distinctively human.
7. Sagan was also animated by the silly thought that we search the cosmos for much more intelligent and so benign extaterrestial intelligences that can cure us of what ails us. If there are super-intelligent ETs, we should not make ourselves known to them. We have no evidence that there’s any connection between being really, really smart and techno-advanced and being peaceful. The ETs in ET and CONTACT are baloney. MEN IN BLACK–the first one–seems closer to the truth. Really smart beings–like Heidegger–are likely to be really perverse, screwed up, and a danger to themselves and others. Von Braun’s philosophizing is based on what is to me the more reasonable thought that there are no other really brainy beings out there, that we are in crucial respects on our own in the cosmos.
July 19th, 2009 | 11:18 pm
Why do you think we will eventually fight a war with China?
July 20th, 2009 | 9:55 am
Peter, thanks for this, just great stuff! You’ve raised questions via phenomenology, ontology, and eschatology that I hope our insightful bloggers and ‘commentors’ might pursue.
I found that your remark that, “People can retreat to their porches or not as they please, but technology will continue to develop whether we like it or not,” requires a response on the part of the Front Porchers. How does a culture that is purposefully lo-tech, wholistic, back-to-the-land, humane living (FPR) confront/challenge hi-tech potential enemies?
Further you raise an interesting question here, “We have a duty–in the name of meaning and Being–to spread ourselves out around the cosmos, giving philosophy, as Strauss would say, the longest possible future–not to mention virtue, dignity, poetry, and (some would impiously say) God.” Elucidating a rather daunting challenge considering our current condition.
And, what about the Gospel of Jesus Christ?
So, are you the holy man in Father Zosima (and, yes, philosphers can certainly be holy), aware of fallenness, or are you Dimitri Karamozov, who learns from Zosima that “all are responsible for all,” and suffers for the sins of his thoughts. (See Touchstone, July/August, Russia’s Gospel Writer, by Dr. Ralph C. Wood.)
July 20th, 2009 | 9:59 am
[...] finally, this week in Straussian philosophy: the philosophical justification for space exploration, at Postmodern [...]
July 20th, 2009 | 10:11 am
Perhaps we have lost our capacity for greatness in this country, like Rome in the fifth century.
Also, how does a space program figures in the context of our Christian eschatology? For a Christian there are aliens out there; angels, demons, spirits.
China’s military basic war scenario taught to their cadres is of winning a war against the U.S. when trying to retake Taiwan. Our perceived weaknesses embolden the Chinese to try their luck.
July 20th, 2009 | 10:34 am
Bob, In the manner of sundry Germans, I “abstracted” from Christianity in my “philosophic” post. I will explain eventually that there’s no particular Christian position on space travel, but the urgency displayed in my post doesn’t make any sense either.
July 20th, 2009 | 2:13 pm
It’s been a long time since I read Sagan but I seem to remember he saw space exploration as a “sacred project” (in Pale Blue Dot?) that provided a noble opportunity for us as human beings to express our essential capacity for wonder. However, his view of this wonder can be surprisingly banal (he linked it to to our desire for safety) and dissapointing (since the wonder consummates itself in the final recognition of our own insignificance).So Sagan’s preoccupation with human transendence consummates itself in an on odd kind of surrendering to ultimate immanence.
July 20th, 2009 | 5:24 pm
Tom Wolfe offers one of the few notable bits of simple wisdom coughed up by the Times in recent memory and it is reduced here to a discussion of Alien-angst, nanobots, the supposition of an automatic wisdom of nuclear gamesmanship and an inevitable war with China. Sure , technological advances are with us, in one form or another for the duration. Who doesn’t enjoy living into their 80’s on a hip replacement and hopping a flight from New York to points south in February.
Unfortunately, we are currently confronted with a kind of anvil-beating technocratic lust that fails to find time for repose and so misses the forest for the trees. It is technological advancement for the sake of armored technological advancement and it is proceeding apace , in an ever consolidating manner as the local… our charming rustic goatherds….. are ignored in favor of the Moloch of Advancement and Centralization …which , unfortunately, seems to have a Greek Chorus of Irony caterwauling in the background. A progress that is satisfied by wealth and a Whole Foods Market in a few places but not-so-benign neglect for the majority of places is no progress at all.
Wolfe calls for the inclusion of a little philosophy within the brass band of technological achievement so that the public might ponder the lovely spectacle of our cloudy blue orb in the vacuum and in so doing , enrich the technological compulsion with a larger helping of our full humanity. This might enrich the idea of technological progress as a result, include a little beneficial reflection and allow the remarkable event of men on the moon to transform into something greater than the current sideshow of a nation sputtering out into a formidable array of diminishing returns.
Wolfe laments the absence of a little poetry in our great scientific leaps…just a tad more romanticism dare we aver and in response, we are treated here to the kind of gun-waving triumphalism the Prussians got over a long time ago when they found their Brass Band Progress had gone flat due to incoming.
July 20th, 2009 | 7:25 pm
DW, I can’t help but think you’ve caricatured my comment and even miss Wolfe’s point about having a philosophic justification–von Braun was not famous for his poetry.. There’s no gun-waving triumphalism in saying that we still have to take having a space program seriously, first of all, out of military necessity. And I didn’t say war with China is inevitable, only likely. Future war is always likely, and the Chinese are obviously preparing for that likelihood, including by buying up something like 60% of the world’s nanotechnology patents. Still, I kind of like the poetic tone of your comment.
July 21st, 2009 | 11:31 am
As I recall, Wolfe did seem a little curious about the fact that von Braun , hardly a poet was the only person making any big picture comments on our Space Program. Hence his lament at the absence of philosophers. This, of course , could be said about virtually any human endeavor in this technocratic age
Seems to me the term “likely eventual war with China” flutters pretty close to a reasonable definition of “inevitability”.
I grant you that “Future Wars are always likely”, particularly when we have a major portion of the debt-saturated budget devoted to the military and a media that enjoys carrying water for military adventurism.
Nanotechnology aint the only thing China is buying, a couple years ago, they waded through the junkyards of America like a combination magnet and drag-net fishing trawler, wiping us clean of everything from car fenders to plastic jugs and aluminum cans.
But as to your claims of my caricaturing in offense….guilty as charged…how else is one supposed to throw dirt,……… at least picturesquely?
July 21st, 2009 | 12:00 pm
DW, Your last par. is spoken like a gentleman and in the spirit of the pro-wrestling that is blogging.
August 4th, 2009 | 2:33 am
[...] of the human genetic code for the purpose of living beyond earth complicates Peter Lawler’s customarily sanguine claims that wherever we happen to live, ”it won’t change fundamentally who we are.” [...]
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