Confronting Nihilism and the Sublime
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2 WHAT DOES IT MEAN? CONFRONTING NIHILISM AND THE SUBLIME From: Moonwalking Into the Future: Confronting Nihilism and the Sublime Space Narratives — From Apollo and Hubble to 2001, Star Trek and Interstellar By Barry Vacker © 2016, Center for Media and Destiny 1. Trajectories of the Space Age — Faster, Forward, Upward Common history generally credits the Cold War with initiating space exploration and the space age, including the launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union in 1955, the formation of NASA in 1958, the launch of Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, and President Kennedy’s “moon speech” in 1962. But this is only partially correct. While the Cold War did indeed drive the “space race” to moon, the trajectories of the space age reach much deeper and further back. Things to Come. The potential for space travel was explored via the arts and sciences beginning in the late 19th century and continuing into the 20th. Pioneering science-fiction writers such as Jules Verne, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and H. G. Wells first popularized the notion of space travel in their novels and short stories. By 1926, Robert Goddard had invented the first liquid-fueled rocket, showing that space travel might be possible. At the end of the classic science-fiction film Things to Come (1936), which was written by Wells and produced in Britain, space travel is representative of the next phase of humanity’s technological and cultural evolution. The film posits that space travel is the logical continuation of industrial and aerial civilization, where planes fly around the world and humans inhabit industrial metropolises, communicate via powerful media technologies, and explore space. A similar concept was in evidence at the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition, a world’s fair-like event held at Dallas’s Fair Park that celebrated 100 years of Texas’s industrial accomplishments since the Battle of the Alamo (1836). Along with 6 million people, President Franklin D. Roosevelt attended the exposition and gave a speech. Much of the original Art Deco architecture has been preserved from the fair, including a spectacular series of oversized murals depicting the progression of science and technology, including mechanization, electricity, medicine, cinema, and architecture. One mural depicts a rocket streaking upward toward the stars, a woman grasping one side of the spacecraft and a man holding on to the other. (Three decades later, NASA’s Mission Control would be situated in Houston and send humans to the moon, a scientific legacy that is presently being lost in the proliferation of creationism, fundamentalism, and neoconservatism in Texas.) The main message of both Things to Come and the mural is both optimistic and clear: Space exploration is the next phase of humanity’s destiny. It’s in the stars. Decades before Star Trek and the Apollo missions, Things to Come and the Texas exposition represented the trajectories of modernity and the space age for the average person. Ultimately, modernity and space exploration emerged with the Copernican Revolution, the telescope of Galileo, and the “starry skies” of Immanuel Kant, where science, philosophy, and the human spirit were to be united in a culture that mirrored the planets and stars, a culture that would ideally be forever moving into the future via universal progress and mechanized technology. Around the world, Isaac Newton’s “clockwork cosmos” became the model for socio-technological organization, with towns and cities becoming mechanized metropolises, representing a mobile civilization ordered by clocks, machines, electricity, cars, planes, and skyscrapers. 1 Newton’s vision was dramatized in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) and celebrated at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Lang also directed Woman in the Moon (1928), which popularized space travel and the idea that riches might be found on the moon or other locations in space, a narrative that’s rather alive and well in the 21st century, with plans to strip-mine the moon and haul helium-3 and other minerals back to Earth. Given these examples, it is very clear that the concept of space exploration preceded the Cold War. In terms of the Cold War’s influence on space exploration, it would be more accurate to say that the Cold War facilitated the growth of space technologies as part of broader narratives of science fiction, space exploration, industrial society, and modern philosophy. Toward the starry skies. Since Kant and Newton, science and technology have sought to propel humanity from the superstitious past into the scientific future, from medievalism to modernity, ignorance to enlightenment, servitude to autonomy, scarcity to abundance, poverty to wealth, nature to culture, garden to machine, and yesterday into tomorrow. Modernity embraces the basic notions of material and cultural progress and a political belief in freedom and equality, which both the socialist communism and democratic capitalism of the Cold War era demonstrated.1 Modernity is about moving faster, forward, upward, from the dirt into the stars. With the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the trajectory of modernity gradually evolved from steam engines and electricity to trains and cars to planes and rockets, from cabins and castles to skyscrapers and space stations. Faster, forward, upward. What is a Saturn V rocket if not a skyscraper with a great penthouse view? What is the starship Enterprise if not a flying metropolis? Neither the Apollo program nor the original Star Trek TV series (1966-1969) emerged from a cultural void. The space age was born out of scientific and technological progress, and it greatly influenced our cultural life, whether through film, literature, architecture, or the world’s fairs. The starship Enterprise. In the 2009 Star Trek film, there is an early scene that perfectly illustrates this trajectory. Dr. McCoy and James Kirk (not yet a captain) board a shuttle in San Francisco that’s bound for their first trip to the space station in orbit above Earth. Just before they head into space, there is a shot looking down at San Francisco circa the 23rd century. The skyline features numerous futuristic, space-age style skyscrapers. In the very next scene, Kirk and McCoy are gazing upward toward the massive space station where the Enterprise is docked. This sequence captures the trajectory of modernity and the space age, the underlying goal of which is to accelerate out of the past and into the future into a mobile and aerial civilization like the very one Wells envisioned. After all, isn’t that cosmic destination just one of the implications of Galileo’s discovery in the 16th century, when he turned his telescope up toward the stars and subsequently dislodged humans from the center of the universe? 2 The Enterprise is a space-age icon, as are “real life” structures such as the Space Needle (Edward Carlson, John Graham, and Victor Steinbrueck, 1962) in Seattle, the Gateway Arch (Eero Saarinen, 1963) in St. Louis, and the Los Angeles International Airport terminal (Pereira and Luckman Architects, 1961). That such architecture was parodied in The Jetsons cartoon series (1962-1963) does not defile the greatness of these structures. They reflect more than a passing phase of technology and design that now seems mostly lost to the past. The design aesthetic integral to the space age features curvilinear forms, giving the impression of both acceleration and elevation. Speed and uplift are needed for attaining the necessary altitude and escape velocity not only to reach the moon, planets, and rest of the cosmos but to zoom into the future. That’s why the Enterprise always looks like it is taking off even when it is stationary. Even the logo on the Star Trek crew members’ shirts — an arrowhead pointing upward — gives a sense of acceleration and elevation. The Star Trek worldview professed that not only would science and technology evolve onward and upward, but so would human consciousness and philosophy via a more enlightened view of humanity and the cosmos. That was part of the hope and optimism of the 20th century itself — at least until space exploration challenged the limited narratives that humans have long used to explain their origins and destiny. 2. NASA’s Challenge Space exploration raises the most fundamental questions about human existence, including our meaning as a species and our hopes for the future. The profound discoveries we’ve made over the past century about our vast and ancient universe invoke the challenges of nihilism and the sublime, which are almost completely overlooked in discussions of space exploration.2 That’s why NASA’s ultimate challenge in the 21st century is not the technical issue of getting to Mars or the mission to finally encounter extraterrestrial life — it’s to confront the cosmic nihilism and the sublime that were presented to the entire world via the Apollo missions, the Apollo television broadcasts, and the Hubble Space Telescope (particularly the Hubble Deep Field [HDF] images). Cosmic Nihilism. Much has been written about contemporary nihilism in regard to politics, technology, religion, and art.3 For the critique of space narratives, the issue of nihilism is fairly direct and does not involve politics, economics, or morality. So by nihilism, I am not referring to a Nietzschean “will to power” that revels in the sheer destruction of civilization, where political and cultural values have no philosophical foundations outside of power and desire. Similarly, I am not referring to the Fight Club-style nihilism in the manly revolt against modernity, consumer society, and the lack of meaning in corporate cubicles and every day life.4 Rather, I am referring to an existential and cosmic nihilism involving the meaning (or meaninglessness) of human existence in the vast universe. Overcoming such nihilism, if possible, will require us to abandon the dominant narratives, which have technically already been demolished by Copernicus (our cosmic non-centrality), Charles Darwin (our evolution as a species), Edwin Hubble (the expanding universe), and NASA (the views of Earth from space and the views of the vast cosmos).