Minerva, Spring 2008 (Volume 32) - Citizens for Global Solutions

Pioneering Spirit
Last time, in a riff on besottment with
calamitous or comitologically triumphant
“end times”, Minerva considered purported
elements of agency in evolution, focusing
on snares of wishfulness that both inspire
and hinder the development of truly useful
survival instincts in a global citizenry.
The musing included references to an August
2007 essay in the Philadelphia Inquirer
by WFI Fellow Tad Daley, who reminds us:
“Bertrand Russell taught that the greatest
moral imperative [is] this: ‘One must care
about a world one will never see’.”
Do the traditional mantras of adaptation
and mitigation, now echoing louder in
discussions of environmental change and
other threats, involve earthbound scenarios
exclusively, or should they include looking
beyond our biosphere? Shall we look even
beyond the “high frontier” that the US
Space Command intends to control, with
its Vision for 2020 plans for “counterspace
operations” supporting a policy of “full
spectrum dominance”? It is hardy reassuring
that, as James Carroll writes (Boston
Globe, 12 May 2008), “The world-historic
decision about carrying warfare across the
last threshold into outer space” — “into the
‘fourth battlefield’ of the very cosmos” —
already is “being left to defense contractors,
military commanders, and their wholly
owned subsidiary” in Washington DC: a
government “refusing to discuss a treaty
aimed at preventing an arms race in outer
space” at the United Nations Conference
on Disarmament in Geneva for the last
six years.
So how do we avoid traipsing among the
scorched corpses of Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road, their dreams “ensepulchred
within their crozzled hearts”, or relaxing
in the grim comfort of Alan Weisman’s
The World Without Us, or befuddlement by
the current proliferation of similar thought
experiments? What if nature, trapped by its
human leg, chews us off? Or if humanity
merely functions as a modulating retrovirus
in the body of earth? Or we’re avatarobsessed
figments in a universal brain’s
game, played in almighty singularity or in
contest with brains of other universes?
In that context, it is not so far-fetched to
consider that, aside from natural temptation
to escape, it may be invigorating to re-assert
a sovereign sense of human purpose by
contemplating, with Tad Daley, that “all
of us now alive, on behalf of all those not
yet alive, have only just barely embarked”
on an “endless expedition” to colonize
other planets.
Others speculate that there may be an asyet
unidentified advancement-inhibiting
factor (called “the Great Filter” by some)
that civilization(s) can’t penetrate in each
other’s direction (and so it could be ominous
rather than promising to find signs of former
life on Mars, suggests Nick Bostrom,
director of the Future of Humanity Institute
at Oxford University).
Maybe the filter is that the wrong synchronizing
organization is always put in charge!
For example, the deputy director of the
recently established US Northern Command
describes Northcom as the United
States’ “global synchronizer — the global
coordinator — for pandemic influenza
across the combatant commands”.
“Of all the frontiers of expansion, perhaps
none is more striking than the Pentagon’s
sorties into the future,” comments Frida
Berrigan, Senior Program Associate at
the New America Foundation’s Arms &
Security Initiative. While most government
agencies “project budgets just around the
corner of the next decade,” she observes,
“only the Pentagon projects power and
possibility decades into the future, colonizing
the imagination with scads of different
scenarios under which, each year, it will
continue to control hundreds of billions
of taxpayer dollars” (TomDispatch, 27
May 2008).
Daley notes that Carl Sagan “claimed
that spaceflight was actually subversive
[because, a]lthough governments have
ventured into space largely for nationalistic
reasons, ‘it was a small irony that almost
everyone who entered space received a
startling glimpse of a transnational perspective,
of the Earth as one world’. Seeing our
planet as a whole, apparently, enables one
to see our planet as a whole. … Space may
someday deliver to us arguably the greatest
progressive value of all. The ethic of human
3 • Minerva #32 • June 2008
unity that space seems inevitably to engender
may, down the road, ultimately engender
permanent human peace as well.”
But if that perspective from beyond — in
the earliest exploratory stages — helps us
develop a salutary sense of unity on earth,
as Daley observes, perhaps it also presages
that we will cling elsewhere to the revolutionary
new “planetary patriotism” we’re
endeavoring to advance at home, as stubbornly
as we do now to ethnicities and and
nationalisms. And therefore (especially if
we encounter — or even engender — other
life forms beyond earth) are we doomed to
accomplish nothing as travellers?
“Science fiction” literature is full of struggling
federations of planets, burgeoning and
imploding galactic empires, and — alas —
epic wars. But we who projectively read or
write that literature simply do not know a
world without war, so far. Historically, we
have not imagined it well, without trapping
ourselves in various utopian delusions that
turn violent, claims John Gray, professor
of European thought at the London School
of Economics, in his recent study of the
dangers of apocalyptic religion — “reemerg[ing],
naked and unadorned, as a force
in world politics” (Black Mass - Apocalyptic
Religion and the Death of Utopia).
Decrying the untold suffering caused by
“the myth of the End” that prompted “the
secular religions of the last two centuries”
to imagine a break in “the cycle of anarchy
and tyranny”, Professor Gray recommends
construing politics as “the art of responding
to the flux of circumstances”, requiring
“no grand vision of human advance,
only the courage to cope with recurring
evils” such as “the opaque state of war
into which we have stumbled”. Having no
patience with political “projects of worldtransformation”,
left-wing or right, or with
“the clash of fundamentalisms” among
transcendental religions that have lost
“the civilizing perception” that their task
is to “attempt to deal with mystery” rather
than insist that mystery has been or will be
“unveiled”, he bleakly expects only that,
“[i]nteracting with the struggle for natural
resources, the violence of faith looks set to
shape the coming century”.
Meditating on the Middle East & beyond
in a different spirit, South African