At 8:07 PM -0400 01/11/2000, Dan Minette wrote:
>"Crystall, A.L." wrote:
>>Andrea wrote:
>>>I'd like to think that we can use this experience, of living in >>space
>>>for extended periods, to move on to better things; a return to the Moon,
>>>and someone on Mars. I'm twenty-four, and nobody in >>my lifetime has
>>>gone beyond Earth orbit. I find that unutterably >>sad. Maybe, hopefully,
>>>this is the start of something.
>
>Andrea, is there any reason for this besides the romantic factor?
It's interesting. I was thinking the same thing when I read what Andrea
wrote, but then I rethought it, and I decided that there is more to it. So
I was interested when she said that there isn't.
First of all, I think that it's wrong to dismiss what you call "the
romantic factor". I know you're very interested in GDP's and all (*grin*)
but really, I think there is more involved in this issue than that. Let's
look at the romantic factor seriously, rather than dismissing it out of
hand.
One thing you might bear in mind is that the word "romantic" has its roots
in the word "Romance", which originally was used to specify vernacular,
rather than Latin, writings of any type. You had religious screeds,
diaries, edicts, and fiction and poems all being written in Italian and
French and Spanish, etc. "Romance" was later more exclusively linked to
fantastical tales, such as the Romances of the Grail/Arthurian Romances.
Romances were historically important for several reasons, including the
fact that they lay the groundwork for even a vague possibility of demand
for print media -- because the revolutionary discovery was made that real
serious writing could be done in the vernacular, in the High-Late Middle
Ages (for example, the first collection of troubadour song was made in the
1200s, I think around 1250, much of it from trobars who flourished roughly
100 years before and whose work survived mainly through oral transmission)
and exploding in Dante's _Commedia_ in Italy, and in Middle English during
the mid-1300s.
What has this to do with Mars, you ask. Well, the romance was a subersive
genre. Until it appeared, the Church had a stranglehold on the
powerstructure of Europe, yes, but through its hold on literacy, on the
dissemination of ideas in the secular realm (since religious writing was
banned in the vernacular in many places, and at the same time most
political critique took the form of religious writing) it also had a hold
on the self-conception of the people under its rulership. The High Medieval
"discovery of love" (as it is termed) was facilitated in part by an
artistic aestheticizing of *love* -- and through "love", all kinds of
other things. For example, one that should hit home to us Westerners on
the list, this "discovery of love" was synchronous with a massive
development of the notion of _individuality_ as opposed to communality that
had previously predominated Christendom: was reflected in everything from
burial practices to religious experience (such as the rise of the private
confessor among those who could afford him, a job very similar to its
current incarnation as psychotherapist).
I'm not sure to what degree one can argue that the romance -- the secular,
vernacular text -- itself facilitated these changes, but it's pretty clear
that it played a part in a massive shift in culture around the end of the
Middle Ages, including the development of an early capitalist system, a
different political and religious landscape, and so on.
So when dismissing the "romance" element, one must be extremely careful.
Now, I wouldn't have explained all of that if it didn't have to do with the
next point I'm going to make, which is a critique of Dan's supposedly
pragmatist arguments against manned space projects.
Dan wrote:
>>There are teams out there developing commercial reuseable launch >vehicles
>>that will probably be ready before NASA's efforts. And how >long will it be
>> before some of those multinations decides to >establish, say, a Mars
>>base.
>
>I'd guess 500 years. What commercial value can a mars base have?
Dan follows up with questions like:
>"Real scientific research is rarely done by companies
>now."
>"But what company will shell out the cost for the PR
>value. "
>"Is anything else in space profitable if you factor in the
>whole cost of the satellites?"
First off, I'd say any guess beyond about 50 years into the future is
*bound* to be massively wrong -- not because it's either too reticent or
too pie-in-the-sky, but rather because significant historical change seems
to be elusive -- perhaps, it runs orthogonal to the planes on which we
make our predictions, which are the planes that are central to our current
society and baseline-worldview. Would people 500 years into our past have
guessed anything of the world we live in now? Not much of it. After all,
500 years ago we were just coming out of a Church-run Europe. You never can
tell what will happen, and I think hasty dismissal of possibilities is not
a good idea. You're presupposing that corporations and their goals will be
the prime motivating factor of industry and development for another 500
years. Personally, I'm skeptical... the peasants are already mumbling, in
my opinion.
I would argue, and I am taking (though skeptically) a cue from a lecture I
saw online by Greg Benford, that a prime misapprehension of the importance
of such endeavours as space programs is that they must deliver some "value"
like economic or knowledge capital -- that perhaps they should be
considered in the context of a whole society, including its imagination,
its self-valuation, its assessment of challenges, and so on. All of your
questions, Dan, presuppose that money is in itself an end . . . and for
right now that's a good assessment of a lot of the business world and
economic functioning. But this is a very new, and very strange, and
obviously unbalanced way of looking at the world, in the history of human
beings. Did people paint herds on the walls of Lascaux for economic
benefit? Or even solely for the appeasement of gods? Maybe. But the Temple
in Jerusalem as we see it described in the Bible? The Taj Mahal? The
Acropolis? There is a reaosn I bring up architectural examples, though
others are possible and in no way to I mean to make an argument from a
materialist version of Frobenius's notion of the paideuma (brrr). I give
the following example only as a way to articulate a possible model...
I would present, as a counter-model to this value system, the Medieval
cathedral. Those things took ages to build, lots of money, and cultivated
amazing advances in architecture (including use of sometimes sophisticated
understanding of the behaviour of light and sound) and art (not only the
stained glasses and statues and paintings but also the music and the
musical technology such as pipe organs). I think the only structures that
demanded remotely as much sophistication (and occupied to much the cutting
edge of that sophistication) were military structures, such as castles and
fortresses.
"People built the cathedral for the glory of God." It's easy to question
that often-asserted statement, of course, especially from our cynical
modern perspective -- especially those of us who don't think there is a God
or ever was one. But what is interesting is that it certainly took a long
time before strong criticisms of the material forms of worship, such as the
building of cathedrals, was questioned. It was often indulgences,
pardoners, and peddlers of junk; the control/outlawing of vernacular sacred
writing; the wealth and greed of the Church; but even when Protestant
churches formed, many continued to build great houses of worship.
One thing I read recently discussed the poetic metaphor of building in the
middle ages, as used often by troubadour poets in reference to their songs.
The author had to take time to remind the reader that when this metaphor
was used, the poets were not talking about J&R Construction (Since 1981) .
. . the common examples were of castles and especially cathedrals, many of
which took several generations and whole communities worth of labour power.
In fact, the poem is in some ways the secular verison of the cathedral, in
an oral culture like that of the troubadours: it was "built" by
transmission through many "builders" (singers and transmitters), and its
final existence is not directed at a monetary or "pragmatic" good. Just as
the cathedral celebrates the transcendant value of God, the chanson
celebrates the transcendant power of "love" as conceived by the troubadour
(and remember, they went so far as to speak of "the Religion of Love" in
many cases). The oral transmission of these songs caused troubadours to
invent whole new systems of composing and organizing verse that could be
durable and withstand such transmission [1] -- and as their influence
spread, whole new ways of interacting within society and new ways of
conceiving the self -- and just as the building of cathedrals required and
catalyzed all kinds of new techniques (or rediscovered ones) in the arts
and architecture,
If we apply this model to the present day, I would argue that similarly,
taking on the endeavour could embody some kind of pursuit and embrace of
some value that is "transcendant" of the grey, stifling money-as-an-end
version of capitalist society that we are living in. Do we want to live in
a money-centered world, or can we choose to live in a world where other
values are central? I think that it was quesitonable to have a world in
which the glorification of an already-glorious God through slave labour
was, well, questionable. I think the glorification of love was an
interesting counter-weapon that led quickly to the glorification of the
human being in humanism. But somewhere along the way, we started to glorify
money instead of people. The center shifted from the end -- the eventual
emancipation and beneficent existence of human beings to their full
potential -- to the centrality of "profit" in the most basic and
unvisionary sense.
In some ways, it's this very lack of visionary thinking that allows us to
be so blind to what's going on in our own world, to not know who Laurent
Kabila is for example (I didn't till last week, *sigh*) or not know what's
happening in Burma, or on the positive side to be so consumed with the
packaged products on TV that we don't even participate in our own electoral
governments or know what's happening in the sciences or the arts even in
our own communities. Now, don't get me wrong, I think that there are
priorities on Earth that need to shift WAY up the scale too, but I think
that something like an internationally cooperative crewed space program
*could* be one of those things that helps to remind us of our commonality
in the universe, our shared interdependence and our real ability to change
the world we live in, excel, and go places we doubted we could go.
Romance-as-imaginative expansion, as in striving and risking and even the
pursuit of greatness and dreams, is like poetry and fervent belief: is
should not be dismissed merely because it is not "marketable" or
"profitable" or deemed worthwhile by capitalist interests. Like love, it is
powerful and subversive and perhaps even stands to challenge us to rethink
our assumptions, our value-systems, our way of understanding the universe
and ourselves in it. And unlike money and capital, it is fundamentally
inseparable from what it means to be human, and at least potentially it is
also fundamentally transformative.
I would tender therefore that, while a crewed space program is only one
possible endeavour of many -- and let it be known I'd certainly embrace
some others before it, priority-wise -- it is exactly the kind of project
that (despite the fact that it would require money and inevitably to some
degree be commodified) fundamentally challenges the worldview that you are
approaching it from, Dan...
*********************
[1] An excellent text discussing this aspect of oral transmission and
"mouvance" in manuscripts related to troubadour song-composition is _Memory
and Recreation in the Troubadour Lyric_ by Amelia E. von Vleck (Berkeley: U
of California P, 1991). One whole chapter, entitled "Rhyme and Razo" [Rhyme
and Reason], is devoted to the formal concerns of the rhyme and structural
devices used and the reasoning for the development of such schemes...
