And I think I've finally got an overall narrative/logical shape for the piece. Some Ross Douthat's thoughts on decadence have been helpful. I'm thinking they'll get me over the hump. We'll see.
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Douthat opens his current book (The Decadent Society) by referencing the first Apollo moon landing:
The peak of human accomplishment and daring, the greatest single triumph of modern science and government and industry, the most extraordinary endeavor of the American age in modern history, occurred in late July in the year 1969, when a trio of human beings were catapulted up from the earth’s surface, where their fragile, sinful species had spent all its long millennia of conscious history, to stand and walk and leap upon the moon.
“Four assassinations later,” wrote Norman Mailer of the march from JFK’s lunar promise to its Nixon-era fulfillment, “a war in Vietnam later; a burning of Black ghettos later; hippies, drugs and many student uprisings later; one Democratic Convention in Chicago seven years later; one New York school strike later; one sexual revolution later; yes, eight years of a dramatic, near-catastrophic, outright spooky decade later, we were ready to make the moon.” We were ready—as though the leap into space were linked, somehow, to the civil rights revolution, the baby boomers coming into their own, the transformation in music and manners and mores, and the hopes of utopia percolating in Paris, Woodstock, San Francisco.
Mailer’s was a mystical take on history, but one well suited to its moment. For the society that made it happen, the Apollo landing was both a counterpoint to the social chaos of the 1960s and the culmination of the decade’s revolutionary promise. It proved that the efficiency and techno-optimism of Eisenhower-era America could persist through the upheavals of the counterculture, and it represented a kind of mystical, dizzy, Age of Aquarius moment in its own right. As much as anything that happened here on earth, the fire on the moon helped make the summer of ’69 seem like a beginning, not a peak—an opening into a new era, in which the frontier would no longer be closed, the map no longer filled in, and human beings would expand their explorations, their empires, their arguments and imaginations and ambitions into the very stars.
This was the space age, which lasted for about thirty years: from Sputnik in 1957 to the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986. And we who live in its aftermath have forgotten just how confidently it was expected to continue.
I note that there was no greater evangelist for the Space Age than Walter Elias Disney, aka Walt, who died in 1966.
He goes on to reprise a version for Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier thesis that America's political, social, and character was formed by pressing against the frontier. That came to a halt at the end of the 19th century. But then, Douthat argues, the Wright brothers first became airborne in 1903 and just under seven decades later we set foot on the moon. And then we stopped. OPEC declared and oil embargo in October of 1973 and America's car culture got a rude shock. And 1973 is when economic growth began to slow down, giving rise to what Tyler Cowen has called The Great Stagnation in his 2011 book of that name.
A bit later Douthat says:
It is not a coincidence that the end of the space age has coincided with a turning inward in the developed world, a crisis of confidence and an ebb of optimism and a loss of faith in institutions, a shift toward therapeutic philosophies and technologies of simulation, an abandonment of both ideological ambition and religious hope.
Of course, this shift might have happened anyway, even if Mars were closer and more habitable or light-speed travel a more realistic possibility. The existence of a frontier does not guarantee that it will be a destination, and past civilizations have given up on exploration for essentially internal reasons, even when new horizons were very much in reach. (The abandonment of major sea voyages by China’s Ming dynasty, in the same era as Columbus, did not come about because the world’s oceans were too wide but because of the empire’s changing intellectual fashions and political priorities.) Already when Neil Armstrong took his first small step, there were many voices making the case for the wastefulness of NASA’s voyages, for the pointlessness of “whitey on the moon,” and some of the turn toward pessimism preceded the realization that we would not be sending astronauts to Jupiter by the year 2001. A great deal of post-1960s thought—postcolonial, environmentalist—is premised on the idea that Western expansion was mostly cancerous, and this critique has been extended even to the idea of galactic colonization, with the exact same sort of ideological language applied. When the nonagenarian space optimist Freeman Dyson wrote hopefully about stellar exploration in a 2016 issue of the New York Review of Books, three letter writers chastised him for not counting the ecological cost and warned that “a human-designed outer space ‘teeming with life and action’ sounds like a nightmare out of Joseph Conrad.”
Still, sometimes this application of anti-imperialist and environmentalist ideas to space travel feels like a kind of excuse making—that like the fox in Aesop’s fable, we enjoy telling ourselves that we wouldn’t want the fruit anyway, or that eating it would be immoral, so as to soothe the pain of knowing that it’s there but out of reach.
Either way, whether the closing of the stellar frontier somehow caused the West’s post-1960s turn toward pessimism or simply interacted with trends already at work, it remains a turning point in the history of the modern world. Before Apollo, it was easy to imagine that “late” was a misnomer for our phase of modernity, that our civilization’s story was really in its early days, that the earthbound empires of Europe and America were just a first act in a continuous drama of expansion and development.
Since Apollo, we have entered into decadence.
And so Douthat goes.
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Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution discusses The Decadent Society with Douthat The discussion begins with Douthat's invocation of the Apollo lunar landing.
This discussion between Robert Wright and Ross Douthat is worth thinking about. Tyler Cowen comes up 10 or 15 minutes in and Douthan references Andreeseen's "Build" manifest in the final section, which is about the Covid-19 pandemic.
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