October 29, 2021
Recently, William Shatner, who played Capt. James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek when I was a teenager, became, at the age of 90, the oldest person to travel into space, thus becoming a footnote to my previous newsletter about aging and the meaning of the second half of life. Immediately, and predictably, the skeptical comments began to appear.
The skepticism was partly warranted, although only partly. The allegations are roughly threefold. First, this new space race is merely a contest of billionaires’ inflated egos, a childish competition between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to prove whose is bigger: the phallic shape of Bezos’ New Shepard rocket has been satirically noted. True to a point, although “merely” should read “partly.” Second, these new space ventures are funded by elitists whose long-range goal is to leave the earth that their capitalism has done so much to trash and so little to save. I suspect that Bezos at least would dispute this. His company is named Blue Origin presumably to echo Carl Sagan’s famous comment about how from space our home the earth looks like a “pale blue dot,” tiny, vulnerable, and precious. Shatner remarked on his return that seeing the earth from space impressed upon him the urgent need to save it from climate and other catastrophes. But Bezos’ vision seems to be centrifugal, not centripetal: he imagines a far future with orbiting habitats holding millions of people. But to what purpose? A few million will not relieve population pressure on earth. What is more likely to happen is that space will be the Olympian refuge of the elite, at least if people like Bezos are running the show. And even if you are a worker, what does it matter that you are spaceborne if your working conditions are as inhuman as those in Bezos’ Amazon warehouses?
Which leads to the third and most sweeping charge, that all human spaceflight so far has been funded and controlled by a collusion of imperialism and capitalism. That is the vision of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction epic Dune, the latest film version of which, directed by Denis Villeneuve, has just opened in the theatres. The villains in Dune, both book and movie, are a power-mad Imperial dynasty in league with a wealth-crazed capitalist oligarchy, the Harkonnen, who are intent on continuing to exploit the desert planet Arrakis for the sake of its “spice.” The spice fulfils the promise of the original forbidden fruit, making those who ingest it like gods. Physically, it confers longevity; mentally, various parapsychological powers, including both prescience and the ability to fold space and thus operate interstellar spacecraft. The indigenous people, the Fremen, are a marginalized and persecuted band of guerilla warriors. People have been comparing Dune to Star Wars, but a closer parallel may be perhaps with James Cameron’s Avatar.
So the motive for space exploration, once the beautiful lies are stripped away, is the collusion of two expansionisms: the imperial expansion of the will to power, the economic expansion of capitalism perpetually seeking new markets. Bezos’ New Shepard spacecraft is named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space, but the Mercury program was funded only because of Cold War military hysteria and a need to compete with the Soviet Union. With the end of the Cold War, funding for human flight has dwindled: the shuttle is retired, and American involvement with the space station depends on the desire to honor an international commitment. So the capitalist oligarchs have taken up the baton, thereby providing a vindication of science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. For years, his short story “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” published in 1950, about a robber baron capitalist who used his fortune to finance a trip to the moon for the purpose of establishing property rights, was dismissed as naïve. Space flight was so expensive and so complicated that it would necessarily demand a government-funded institution like NASA. But Heinlein’s D.D. Harriman is exactly in the mold of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Are there, then, any good motives for space exploration? There is always the motivation of pure knowledge, not for any practical payoff but out of a sense of wonder at the mysteries of a sublime universe revealed by science. The general public, to its credit, is genuinely responsive to this sense of wonder. It thrills to the continuing saga of the two Voyager spacecraft, the first human-made objects to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space, bearing the Golden Record, designed by Carl Sagan and others, of both natural and human life on planet earth. It enthusiastically watched both versions of the television series Cosmos, the one hosted by Sagan and the later one hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. For years it has followed the journey of the two intrepid Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. And it has made a culture hero out of Stephen Hawking, who revealed secrets of the universe while confined to a wheelchair. Yet scientists tend to agree that the pursuit of scientific knowledge is more efficiently, or at least more economically pursued by non-human means: by telescopes and other observational devices, by flyby spacecraft, by landers and rovers. Is there any reason to send human beings into space?
The leftist view that space flight is just the latest gambit of imperialistic capitalism or capitalist imperialism is matched on the conservative end of the spectrum by the attitude of someone like C.S. Lewis in his science fiction trilogy, which sees every rocket as another attempt to build the Tower of Babel. All that humanity can do is export its corrupted nature to other planets, perhaps endangering innocent species that, unlike us, did not fall. Moreover, beyond these ideological objections are purely empirical ones. Space is hostile to us physically: in the solar system, there is nowhere we can live without elaborate protection, and as for travel to other star systems, that is, in the present state of knowledge, a mere wish-fulfilment fantasy, since the journey would take years or centuries. When science fiction employs the convention of a “warp drive” that circumvents the barrier of the speed of light, it essentially becomes fantasy, not science fiction. FTL, faster-than-light travel, is just another form of magic. And in some science fiction the interstellar void is hostile to us mentally: those vast, inhuman spaces will drive us mad. The stories of Cordwainer Smith speak of “the Great Pain of Space.”
However, William Shatner spent four years helping to embody Gene Roddenberry’s dream of space exploration. For behind Star Trek is a genuine dream, one that is neither imperialistic nor capitalistic. The Enterprise was in effect a traveling utopia. Many people have attested to the thrill of seeing on the command deck a crew including an African American woman, a white Southern male, a Russian, and a Japanese man (who later in real life came out as gay) all working together as friends and equals. The audience got the message without preaching: the Federation is a future society that has moved beyond the bigotries and political rivalries of our time to become truly civilized, the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, or for that matter of Christ’s. And what was the mission of the Enterprise? Not to colonize: the Prime Directive expressly forbids interference with other cultures, especially for “their own good,” the old colonialist rationalization. Not to boldly seek out new markets to exploit, but to “seek out new worlds and new civilizations” on what was originally a five-year mission clearly (to me, anyway) intended to evoke the five-year voyage of Darwin’s ship, the Beagle. So: a mission of knowledge and the possible extension of community, of membership in the Federation, open not just to all human races and genders but to aliens of all types as well. In 1997, part of Gene Roddenberry’s ashes were launched into space in a personal, though posthumous, satisfaction of his yearning for the stars.
Yet why should we dream of establishing utopia “out there” and in the future? Isn’t that just running away from the task of establishing it here, right now? This is an objection as old as space flight itself: that we have problems enough on earth and should focus on solving them and not flying off into space. Earth is our home, and it is a kind of immaturity or irresponsibility to dream of abandoning it. But at this point the discussion opens out beyond current controversies, into a debate about human nature. What is home? Home is the symbol for security, belonging, and rootedness in a traditional way of life, with close ties both to other people and to the natural environment. According to the Christian narrative, we lost our original home, the paradisal Garden of Eden, and live in exile until the end of time when we will get it back. In the podcast version of Expanding Eyes, I have been talking about two epics, Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy, which I have also just now packaged into a half-semester course called The Quest to Get Home: Classical and Christian Journeys. Odysseus, struggling to make his way home after the Trojan War, and Dante, politically driven from his earthly city-state of Florence and struggling to gain his true community in heaven, are both exiles striving to return home.
But Odysseus is conflicted. Home means so much to him that he is willing to give up immortality with the nymph Calypso to regain it. At the same time, he is possessed by wanderlust, by an urge to delay getting home for the sake of adventure, for new experiences. In words put in his mouth by Tennyson, he wants to “sail beyond the sunset”—in other words, to seek the horizon instead of the center. The things one learns researching a newsletter: I had not realized that part of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto (along with many other things), were on board in 2015 when a spacecraft passed the “Plutonian shores,” as Edgar Allan Poe would have said, on its way beyond the limits of the solar system. The name of that spacecraft is New Horizons. Its mission is part of a program that NASA calls New Frontiers.
“Space, the final frontier.” Is there anything genuine in the myth of the frontier that has been taken to be the defining narrative of American identity, anything beyond aggression and genocide? Alexei and Cory Panshin titled their history of science fiction The World Beyond the Hill (1989). A tradition-bound way of life is secure, rooted, connected to others in shared experience and shared ways of thinking. This is no small thing, and it may be that we have lost too much of it too fast. C.G. Jung, my other mentor besides Northrop Frye, feels that the mass psychosis of modern times has resulted from far too many people ripped from their traditional roots, having no anchor either in nature or in culture, and thus highly susceptible to cultlike authoritarian movements promising a place to belong. Jung had his eye on the Nazi and fascist movements of his time: we are witnessing the rise of a second wave.
On the other hand, the tradition-bound life of what the Panshins call the Village is narrow and limited, circumscribed by a narrow horizon. There can be a need to break out of its strict limitations as powerful as the need to belong. The rebelliousness of adolescence is a part of coming of age. Most adolescents break out of the restrictions of childhood only to settle into the new restrictions of adult community and its conformist demands, but some are driven to seek a wider freedom. Or that wider freedom comes to them, as it did to Bilbo Baggins when he answered his door and a pack of dwarves and a wizard whisked him away to a quest far beyond the pastoral limits of the Shire, a quest in which, like it or not, he will have his horizons widened, will come to experience the world beyond the hill.
This is far from being just a convention of popular adventure tales. As a college professor, I watch it happen every year to 18 year-olds. Many Baldwin Wallace students come from small towns in Ohio, but even those from the suburbs have a fairly narrow range of experience. At university, they are exposed to new ideas and new kinds of people, some of them non-white, some of them not heterosexual. They may learn for the first time of religious and political ideas alien to their parents and relatives, who know only the gospel according to Fox News. Most of all, they learn what is meant by critical thinking, the discipline of examining any ideological assertion from all angles, of testing for logic and asking for proof, so that they may choose their own values and are not compelled either to choose or to reject those of the group. It is an adventure as potentially transformative as flying by Pluto, and in fact it is Plutonian in the sense of being a death to an old self and a birth to a new one, Pluto being Hades, the god of death. I know: I was one of those freshmen many years ago, although I had already found on my own a way of leaving the village and setting out for the world beyond the hill: I was a reader. In a famous moment, Wordsworth spoke of a bust of Isaac Newton as the “marble index” of a mind “voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” As with mathematics, so with words: setting sail on the great ocean of stories and symbols can have fateful consequences.
What does this have to do with space exploration? Whole societies may commit themselves to the progressive vision of seeking the world beyond the hill, breaking with the older, tradition-bound model. When the United States broke with Britain, it was about more than the price of tea. American democracy broke with the European model of traditional monarchies and aristocracies. American freedom of religion broke with the model of an authoritarian, hierarchical church. In theory, capitalist free enterprise and the promise of social mobility challenged fixed class systems and hereditary wealth. Gene Roddenberry’s Federation is a dream of the genuine American ideal triumphing and expanding into a universal human ideal. Each of these three ideals has its shadow: the fascist cult of the authoritarian leader, the ruthless oligarchy that results from unregulated capitalism, and fundamentalist hysteria in religion have recently combined to attempt an overthrow of the true American ideal, and the outcome is uncertain, although I remain hopeful in the long run.
But there is indeed a final frontier, not just for the United States but for the human race, and it is the reason that Roddenberry set his utopia in space. It may be that our present reality principle, that of a subjective consciousness, isolated, alienated, and staring outward at an inhuman and indifferent world of nature is merely an illusion of our limited, provincial perspective. What if we broke with it as well? To some, that prospect would be a form of narcissistic New Age wish fulfilment. Reality is a set of hard facts, of “cold equations” in the words of a famous science fiction story, and it ends with the heat death of the universe. Get over it. But strict empiricism has had a bad track record. A little over a century ago, empirical science believed that outer space was filled with a substance called aether, that Mars had canals and Venus had oceans and jungles. The modern astronomical picture, with its black holes, dark matter and energy, its quarks and quantum uncertainty, makes the scientific perspective my parents were taught as children look unsophisticated, naïve.
The yearning to travel to the stars is, in its genuine form, the desire for higher education in all senses, the desire to outgrow our present perspective, to seek a reality that transcends the human condition as we know it, only to find that that human condition was a false limitation. The fact is, we don’t know what reality is, or what human nature is. We yearn for the stars because somewhere, somehow out there, we hope to learn enough, to be changed enough, to find out.