Eulogy for Frontiers

Owned space and the death of exploration

No one really wants to die off Earth. Mars might be Elon Musk’s aspirational cemetery, but I remain sentimentally attached to the motherrock. I imagine I’ll die on Earth, like every human before me. It wont be the most novel setting. Google satellite images will know the spot.

Let’s talk about freedom and disenchantment.

When I look up at the night sky I don’t see constellations of heroes and legends. Thanks to light pollution, much of the time I see hardly anything at all. And while I can imagine extraterrestrials from some distant galaxy awaiting signal of our species’ maturation to initiate contact, like a butterfly who can’t commune with larvae — observant benevolent (or maleficent) outsiders peering down on our tiny rock — the feeling of awe is but a momentary contemplation of the vastness that surrounds, and the terrifying fate that awaits a being in recognition that they are truly, utterly, uncaringly alone.

Not that we haven’t gone looking. In the first piece of this newsletter, I riffed on recent discoveries that complicate our sense of galactic isolation. I ask you to suspend these unconfirmed anomalies in service of considering confirmed normalities.

When the twin heretics of the microscope and the telescope enhanced our powers of sight outward, both down and up, only to discover no material god to be found in the nooks and crannies beyond the naturally evolved tools of basic perception, humanity began its gradual disenchantment. The wonders to be found Out There still existed, but the progress of science promised to render them intelligible. What came out of the occult teachings of alchemy (proto-science) was not the Philosopher’s Stone, but the assurance that the Mystery would be revealed, and in being so, disappear completely. Now that’s transmutation. To be disenchanted with the world of which one is a part is to lose belief not only in a personal, all-loving god, but also in oneself. If we are composed of but matter operating under secular and decidedly non-mysterious rules of physics, chemistry, and biology, then from whence comes divinity? And while the prima materia is not a substance that is known, the atomic and subatomic particles that populated the universe shortly after the (apparently secular, though at root, inexplicable*) event known as the Big Bang are increasingly documented and understood**.

Nietzsche says our science clothes itself in the will to truth, stolen from the domain of philosophy, but in actuality is a will to nothing at all.

The nihilism that plagues contemporary society comes from the inescapable (though false) certainty that nothing grand and magical will ever be discovered again. Instead, we are told that what remains to be discovered cannot be found through adventurous exploration of the exterior world (all but the most remote Amazonian frontiers have been mapped), or even mystical revelation from deep interiority (there’s a reason weekend psychonautics has become a favorite pastime of our cognitive and cultural elite), but rather by submission to rigorous, repetitive, mind-numbing, inhuman processes that yield predictable, replicable results. By this standard the scientist is merely the most faulty and unreliable part of a process*** on its way to truth. If he could be removed altogether, with processes proceeding apace, leaps and bounds might be made with little fussing over such human things as biases, careerism, p-hacking, or reputation. Imagine a labcoat whose main job is submitting grant applications and you’re not too far off from where we are already. Oddly, it is the things that make us who we are, which stand the greatest chance of getting in the way. To be truly objective, then, is to be solipsistic to an impossible degree. Alienation runs deep, and maybe there’s nothing all the way down.

Too much of our alienation is blamed on capitalism. While capitalism has co-opted and commodified much of what it means to be human, from food, sex, and social relations, to spirituality, morality, and even knowledge itself, it is not sufficient to attribute the immensity of our isolation and disconnection to an economic arrangement that is chiefly enabled by a deeper epistemological crisis. Our crisis is, after-all, epistemological rather than metaphysical, because it is our knowledge which separates us from the conviction of belief. Banished from the Eternal Garden, we wander fruitlessly seeking a way back to the time before time when everything was perfect, with no hunger or need unprovided; to an unblemished ignorant existence, void of err save temptation. To want, then, is to thirst unquenchably for a satiation that is forever elusive. Wow, this is starting to sound a lot like consumer demand.

The Great Alexander wept when he saw there were no more worlds left to conquer. Caesar wept when he contemplated how much Alexander had conquered; or so the saying goes.

It is worth considering whether the freedom enabled by modern markets, democratic governance, institutions like human rights, etc…. are actually freedoms at all, or rather, products of our enclosure. A tiger roaming about in a zoo, not a tiny exhibitionist one, but a nice conservationist one with open spaces large enough to hide in, replete with pseudo-prey, and the faux-ontological reversal of tourists gawking from inside their mobile cages, probably thinks of itself as free. Still, the tiger knows there are limits it cannot cross, places the little meat cages go that it will never comprehend. Even here, it is denatured by a vague, gnawing sense of domestication. It doesn’t want for food or even wonder where its next meal will come from — the meat appears at the same time everyday on a familiar concrete slab at the edge of its enclosure. To accuse it of wanting to leave an otherwise idyllic existence is merely to accuse it of being a tiger. Knowledge of the outside world would require leaving the Garden.

If, on the other hand, there was no urge to leave. If the conditions of enclosed space had become so thoroughly internalized that given the choice to leave, a wide open gate, a creature would simply obey the memory of its borders and not even seek to discover what lies outside them, then it would be completely, utterly domesticated. The chief characteristic of its domestication not being the fact that it will surely live and die in enclosed space, but that it wouldn’t go find out, even if it could.

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*See: “Turtles all the way down.”

**As Feynman said, “If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it.”

***Here, process is personified as in “trust the process”.