Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
LET’S ALL
SNEER IN UNISON
I’ll
just reconstruct a little of 1969 for you.
I
was in my last year at high school.
The
Apollo 11 mission had succeeded. As Michael Collins guided the return vessel
around and around the moon (becoming the first man to see the dark side of the
moon with his own eyes), Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the pod, stepped
out of it and walked on the moon’s surface. For the first time we saw men
bouncing about in limited gravity, and pictures of what Earthrise looked like from
the moon and what a small cloudy-blue thing our planet was. I was not totally
starry-eyed (or moonstruck) about the moon-landing. Even as it was playing out,
I was sceptical of Neil Armstrong’s “One
small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” statement as he stepped off
the ladder. To me it sounded, and still sounds, suspiciously like something he
had been briefed to say – a sententious piece of scripting designed to get into
the history books, but actually playing as bad Hollywood dialogue. To
Armstrong’s credit, he looked distinctly embarrassed in later interviews when
the statement came up, and usually wanted to rush on to other things. In other
words, he himself clearly knew the sententious statement was bogus.
But
apart from this small, jarring detail, the news of the moon-landing was a
wondrous thing and we teenagers were all giddy with delight over it. I was
acting in a school production of King
Lear at the time of the moon-landing, and I remember that when Lear swears
“Now by Apollo!”, some schoolroom
wits said the line should be amended to “Now
by Apollo Eleven!” More important, though, I remember how different the
moon looked to me. In Form 7, I was studying German, but we had no German
teacher at our school, so three days a week I was allowed to walk down to
another nearby school and join their German class. A few days after the
moon-landing, I was trotting past the school’s chapel, on my way to the other
school, when I looked up and saw the large moon (I cannot remember if it was
full or gibbous) right above me in the daytime sky. I thought what an
incredible thing it was that men were walking on this great rock, hundreds of
thousands of miles away. Am I allowed to call this moment a religious
experience? It felt like that.
And
that was fifty years ago and of course, as a very old Buzz Aldrin said not too
long ago, after all the high hopes raised in 1969, since then the further
exploration of the moon has been a paltry thing.
Recently,
there were commemorations of this first moon-landing, as there properly should
have been. But with them came what are now the ritual sneers about the whole
project. (I’ll ignore the conspiracy theorists who say the moon-landing never
happened. They’re not worth arguing with.)
The
sneers focus on saying “It was just about
the Cold War”, belittling the great achievement that the moon-landing was.
Well of course it was played out in an era of intense rivalry between the USA and
the USSR. And although I have heard a Russian deny the fact (“We weren’t interested in getting to the
moon. We were exploring other things in space”), the reality was that both
that USSR and the USA hoped to win the prestige of being the first on the moon.
The recent release of a cache of Soviet posters from this era includes images
of the hammer-and-sickle being planted on the moon, which was clearly the
Soviet government’s hope.
But
the obvious point here is that rivalry between nations, or between individuals,
has stimulated many great achievements throughout history. In the space of less
than twenty years, aircraft developed with remarkable speed from the
canvas-and-wood contraption that took off at Kittyhawk to the sleek and
efficient machines that were already flying by the 1920s. Like it or not, the
great stimulant in this case was the First World War, with enemies month by
month racing each other to improve aircraft armament, manouevrability, stalling
speed, angle of dive and so forth. Saying that the moon-landing was the result
of national rivalries, is simply saying that it was played out in a certain
time in history. “It was just about the
Cold War” says nothing more than “It
happened at a particular historical moment.” As all things do.
The
other avenue for sneers is the “conspicuous consumption” argument. Why were so
many millions of dollars spent on the space progamme when they could have been
spent on improving the world?
The
phrase “conspicuous comsumption” was first used by the Norwegian-American
sociologist (and – frankly – satirist) Thorsten Veblen in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, which
was designed to ridicule plutocrats and their idle families. Veblen was not a
Marxist, but his handy phrase has often been taken up by Marxists to belittle
the more ostentatious aspects of capitalist life. It is “conspicuous
consumption” when decadent Westerners raise skyscrapers or manufacture
non-essential consumer goods. (But it apparently is not “conspicuous
consumption” when huge Motherland statues are raised, or when ostentatious
mausolea are constructed for Lenin, Mao etc.). I grant that in many societies,
much money is wasted on non-essentials, but the logical endpoint of this line
of thought is Thoreau’s fatuous idea that we don’t need houses – we could all
live in simple wooden boxes that protected us from the rain.
The
fact is, the “non-essential” things – the things that deliver more than just
the basics for staying alive – are often the things that make life worth
living, like great works of art, space for intellectual discussion, sports and
so on. Sure, millions of people spend millions of dollars on utter trivia. Not
all “non-essentials” are of any merit. But to put things into perspective, the
whole Apollo moon mission cost LESS than the USA was spending per month on the
Vietnam War (or, as a documentary pointed out, the whole space programme cost
less that American men and women spent each year on cosmetics). Can we always
say, as Judas did “the money should have
gone to the poor”? The “conspcuous consumption” argument really implies a
completely utilitarian view of society in which no great building or public
statue would ever be raised, no “non-essential” research would be pursued, and
no space programme would be undertaken.
The
Apollo mission was undertaken during the Cold War? True. All things happen in
an historical context. The Apollo misssion cost a lot of money? True – and so
do many far less worthwhile things that are taken for granted.
Neither
of these objections can negate the fact that the Apollo mission was a great and
wonderful thing. The sneers add up to very little.
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