An essay today by Charles Krauthammer
comments on the ridicule that Bush's space proposal has been recieving, especially from the Left. His advocacy is entirely appropriate ("it would be the most glorious human adventure since the Age of Exploration five centuries ago") but he discusses the current debate as if it is one about different funding priorities. He seems to think that the quest for Mars is being opposed because of fiscal calculations, and he answers the critics on those terms, arguing that Bush’s plan would only call for "an annual 5 percent increase in the NASA budget -- which itself is now less than 1 percent of the whole federal budget."
I think that there's more going on with some of this criticism then simply a disagreement over funding. The debate we're having is not just grounded in budgetary disagreements - it's a profoundly ethical one. What we've seen in the last couple of days is nothing less than a naked display of hatred for achievement, for progress. And like many of the less morally palatable positions taken by the Left, it is being masked in smugness and faux indignation so as to deflect examination and criticism.
An excellent
example of this dynamic can be found in the usually funnier Get Your War On comic strip. The rhetorical move in this particular instance is exactly the snide principles-are-so-passe line that has been the Left's chic staple in the last decade or so (before that, the hallmark of the Left was starry-eyed idealism - we've rebounded from the stereotypical pot-smoking hippy being indignant about injustice to the stereotypical pot-smoking hippy saying "whatever" and smirking about anyone who still thinks that progress or achievement are meaningful):
There are two important things going on here: the idea that scientists should focus (and if they won't do it on their own, they should be forced to) on helping the most needy as a prerequisite to being allowed to focus on anything else and the idea that people who still believe in anything are just insufficiently sophisticated.
Ayn Rand (who, whatever you may think of her, spent a lot of time trying to describe the various motives of the anti-Industrial Left),
wrote an essay on Apollo 11 that is helpful here, especially in relation to this urge to shift priorities away from space exploration and toward some nebulous domestic agenda (right down to the oh-that's-just-too-perfect implied blackmail in the comic):
In The New York Times of July 21, 1969, there appeared two whole pages devoted to an assortment of reaction to the lunar landing, from al kinds of prominent and semi-prominent people who represent a cross-section of our culture...
"How can this nation swell and stagger with technological pride when it is so weak, so wicked, so blinded and misdirected in its priorities... we can send men to the moon [but]... we can't get foodstuffs across town to starving folks in the teeming ghettos"...
This is not an old-fashioned protest against mythical tycoons who "exploit" their workers, it is not a protest against the rich, it is not a protest against idle luxury, it is not a plea for some marginal charity, for money that "no one would miss." It is a protest against science and progress, it is the impertinent demand that man's mind cease to function, that man's ability be denied the means to move forward, that achievement stop- because the poor hold a first mortgage...
Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others - misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement… suffering is not a claim check and its relief is not the goal of existence... life is not one huge hospital... slums are not a substitute for stars.
Her analysis, and her indignation, are both appropriate. But I think that she gives these people a little too much credit:
It was astonishing to see how many ways people could find to utter variants of the same bromides. Under an overwhelming air of staleness, of pettiness, of musty meanness, the collection revealed the naked essence... of the base premises ruling today's culture...
The extent of the hatred for reason was somewhat startling. (And, psychologically, it gave the show away: one does not hate that which one honestly regards as ineffectual). It was, however, expressed indirectly, in the form of a denunciation of technology.
Today, to speak in terms of a hatred of reason is a misdiagnosis - debates today, both within the academy and in popular culture, don't usually reach that level of abstraction. The Objectivists' answer, of course, is that explicitly or not, the stakes are always reason vs. irrationality. But I don't think that there are necessarily stakes as far as some of Bush’s opponents are concerned. Contra Rand, I think that we've reached a point where, as a matter of brute empirical psychology, the anti-progressives are acting as much out of habit as anything else.
In the rest of the essay, there is analysis that helps to sharpen the other issue - that is, the Left's distaste for "simplistic" ideals (this is a variant of their viceral distaste for words like "evil").:
The question we are constantly hearing today is: why are men able to reach the moon, but unable to solve their social-political problems? Thsi quesiton involves the abyss between the physical sciences and the humanities. The flight of Apollo 11 has made the answer obvious: because, in regard to their soical problems, men reject and evade the means that made the lunar landing possible, the only means of solving any problem - reason."
I would add that what is really being rejected is the idea that there are absolutes at all - and with it, the idea that greatness and achievement and glory are meaningful concepts. A world without those things would be a world reduced to the lowest common denominator - and I'm suspicious that at least some of the people who have been sanctimoniously attacking Bush's space proposal know it.
Where there is some coherent motivation, it may be the ugly idea that misery loves company. There’s more than a little hint of resentment in some of the opposition. Many people (not least those on the Leftist who know that they're losing the battle for the future) are frustrated, unable to understand why, for all of their benevolent intentions, they seem impotent to accomplish anything. They're stuck in crummy jobs or in dull social networks or in journalism internships at marginal "radical" newspapers that nobody pays attention to ("because of the hegemonic centralization of mass media, don't ya see?") So they try to bring science and technology down to their level - they want scientists to devote themselves not to achieving great things - not to reach for the heights - but rather to things any of us could achieve (or better yet, to nothing at all).
Most of these people don’t care whether the money goes to AIDS or not - the feigned concern for people in Africa is just a pretext. If money was being given for AIDS research, these people would be complaining that the government is giving “corporate welfare” to the “powerful bio-medical complex.” We’d be getting facts and figures about Cheney’s connection to hedge funds that invest in biotech. The debate is over whether we should be allowed to go to space or whether the failures among us can rest comfortably at night knowing that no one else is achieving anything, because the best and brightest are being held hostage to the arbitrary and shifting whims of incompetent government bureaucrats.
UPDATE: I've gotten a couple emails of the the-government-space-program-is-fruit- of-the-poison-tree variety from Objectivists. Chip Gibbpons from
The Binary Circumstance was the most concise:
The references to Apollo 11, in Barbara Branden's biography of Rand, clearly indicate that Rand believed Apollo 11 to be a great achievement of reason. I couldn't agree with her more. But to divorce these great technological advances from the context in which they happen is to give a very compartmentalized view of Rand's philosophy.
If it is rational to abhor slavery as Rand claimed that she did, then one must also question anything that is accomplished through the keeping of slaves.
In her article, Rand had three answers to this line of attack (a line of attack that, remember, she basically argeed with). She argues first for the viceral admiration of the achievement.
Is it proper for the government to engage in space [exploration] projects? No, it is not... [b]ut this is a political issue.
From an Objectivist standpoint, this is not a compelling answer. It even sounds a little artificial when you read it. For Ayn Rand to divorce "political" questions from ethical questions seems almost unnatural - almost a contradiction in terms. It sounds like she was so emotionally overwhelmed by the majesty of the project that she was willing to become an apologist for the mixed economy that made it possible.
Her next two answers, however, are more compelling. The first is that the meaning of the mission as such should be divorced from its context.
In judging the effectiveness of the various elements involved in any large-scale undertaking of a mixed economy, one must be guided by the question: which elements were the result of coercion and which the results of freedom? It is not coercion, not the physical force or threat of a gun, that created Apollo 11. The scientists, the technologists, the engineers, the astronauts were free men acting of their own choice. The various parts of the spacecraft were produced by private industrial concerns.
There is an analogy here, although she does not make it, to the context of discovery / context of justification debate that occurs within philosophy of science. For example, it could be that the worst-case feminist epistemology argument that Francis Bacon only discovered what he did because he was a sexist pig who wanted to "penetrate" nature is true, but what made his experiments work was not the sexist part of his motivation, but the scientific part. Scientists know that because they can verify his results under non-sexist conditions - there is no
intrinsic connection between his work and sexism, even though everyone would feel more comfortable if he had talked less about “removing Nature’s veil and uncovering her secrets.” Similarly, it may be the case that the Apollo mission was partly the result of government coercion (and thus partly the result of the will of great scientists and brave astronauts to reach the moon), but the part that drove it to success was not government coercion. Objectivists would feel a little more comfortable if it had been achieved by private enterprise rather than government coercion, but there is no intrinsic connection between Apollo 11 and taxation. Therefore, it is still an ethically valuable achievement.
This argument is slightly different than the one she made before - it is not the argument that the question of funding is political but not ethical, but rather than argument that on balance (i.e. after we weigh the contributions of each element) government based space exploration is still an ethically valuable pursuit because it’s essential characteristic is not coercive taxation but the highest fidelity of humans to reason. She even goes so far as to say that it would have been more valuable had it been achieved entirely by private means, but that does not detract from its value as such.
Of course, the hard-core Objectivist will not be dissuaded even by this argument. As an ethical matter, he or she would argue that we should not have a government space program, and that's that. Rand's essay ends as follows:
[W]e do not have to have a mixed economy... but if we do continue down the road of a mixed economy, then let them pour all the millions and billions they can into the space program. If the United States is to commit suicide, let it not be for the sake and support of the worst human elements, the parasites-on-principle, at home and abroad. Let it not be its only epitaph that it died paying its enemies for its own destruction. Let some of its lifeblood go to the support of achievement and the progress of science. The American flag on the moon - or on Mars... will at least be a worth monument to what had once been a great country.
I can think of nothing to answer this claim. Objectivism is not exactly making overwhelming gains in this country - the most conservative man likely to live in the White House for the next couple of decades has turned out to spend more than a drunk buying rounds for everyone in a bar. The Left is predicting that this money will come out of the coffers of welfare recipients and public education - if you're an Objectivist, wouldn't you want to see money flow from something that you consider to have no ethical value to something of at least marginal ethical value? Support the Bush space plan. It is characterized by all of the highest goals of humanity - technological progress on the one hand, discovery for discovery’s sake on the other, and driving it all a basic desire to explore and expand.
Update from Stan: I'm kinda bummed that you could throw up a 4 page space-is-good post... without once mentioning Tang!
