The Election

For once and maybe forever, this year's student elections are actually important.

These are troubled times—on both the global and the domestic front—and next year's student body president will unfortunately be given the right to decide exactly which pennies we're going to pinch. Anderson Hall has also just backed into a new president of its own, and his relationship with SGA next year will probably inform student/administration relations for the duration of his tenure. And most relevantly, SGA themselves have been an embarrassment this year, everyone knows it, and if they don't make some better choices next time around, you can bet that I won't be the only one complaining. Hopefully through all the overblown rhetoric about voices and choices, we'll make a decent choice.

There's an interesting concealed point; our university's recruitment crew makes an awful lot out of the fact that our student government is so comparatively powerful, but is this something about which we should actually be proud? I don't think so, and amidst all their bloodletting, I further wonder: why hasn't anyone thought to turn the gun on them?

We have on more than one occasion this year had fully-tenured professors with decades of relevant experience forced to plead for their lives to inept, self-important kids who neither know nor care about any of the relevant considerations. Of course the situation has ultimately turned out to be a disaster; it should have. But even aside from the matter of disrespect, we ought to also be asking how exactly our student government managed to get so much authority in the first place.

It's not because Anderson Hall is so interested in the pulse of the students; if they were, they'd use the referendum and actually find out. It's also not because the administration actually trusts the student government; no, when the grown-ups feel sufficiently compelled, they're perfectly willing to intervene—à la the marching band fiasco—and nudge SGA back into its kennel. It's not as if the absurdity wasn't already apparent; last year a presidential candidate nearly won the election on the back of the “Ninjas vs. Pirates” meme, and this year he's back, promising to “save the world through juggling.” Why would any reasonable administration ever allow these kind of people power? SGA ought to deciding between Funyuns and Corn Nuts in the campus vending machines, not deciding whether or not the campus arts or media get their necessary funding, and allowing them an inch more is asking to be treated to more of the same confused, obstructionist behavior we've seen this year.

I don't wish to be misunderstood on the general point; many of the student senators are good people who just quietly go about their jobs. Many of them—maybe even most—promptly answer their emails, earnestly listen to their constituents and vote accordingly. I suspect our next student body president is one of these senators. But whoever he might be, he needs to strive for transparency, to never forget that the ultimate prize is a student body not a bolstered resume, and to never forget that he serves at our pleasure rather than the other way around. The person we need to elect president is the person who can best make himself vanish.

The Space Race

How is it possible that there's even a debate about whether we ought to fund our space program?

Forget about imagination for a minute: its costs are relatively low and amortized over time, and its contribution to the long-term health and survival of our civilization is probably essential. (Stephen Hawking thinks we won't survive another millennium cramped together on Earth alone; I remain slightly more optimistic.) The exploration of the cosmos is the paradigmatic example of a good global expenditure, and to forsake it for some kind of supposed economic reason is to miss the point of our existence in the most misguided kind of way.

And if we are to consider our imagination, then there could not possibly be an investment that pays better dividends. Mars might seem positively ordinary by now, given its extensive coverage, but if you've been paying attention, you've been rewarded for it; the Martian expanse is inconceivably marvelous and paradoxical. Those vivid, Technicolor pictures from midday are themselves already enough of an achievement, but even more evocative are those panoramic shots of the long Martian dusk, which could be mistaken for portraits of evening in the American Southwest. Well, they almost could; the dull blue sunset and the miniature sun on the horizon betray the fact that this eerily familiar landscape is actually very, very far from home. (The few photos we have from Venus, on the other hand, are instead only mere glimpses into a murky heart of darkness; at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and ninety atmospheres of pressure, the Venusian surface only allows our cameras to survive long enough to tell us how much sharper we'll have to become before our footsteps may follow.) And the iconic photos taken during our visits so many years ago to our nearest celestial neighbor—which, in lacking any atmosphere, has both a surface bathed in blinding Saharan sunlight and a sky blacker than the darkest Terran night—have long provided us with a kind of surreal beauty. But most extraordinary of all, I think, is the single grainy image captured by the Huygens probe not five years ago: it might as well just be a photo of some rusty, rock-littered undeveloped property in the middle of Riley County, except that it happens to have been taken on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, nearly a billion miles away.

These humble images—easily accessible through a Google Image Search or even on some of their respective Wikipedia pages—provide us with a haunting sense of cosmic insignificance and a profound sense of human achievement; they provide the seam between the past and the future of our species, and they leave us spellbound in the process.

This month, NASA will have to decide between some very important competing projects. They'll have to decide whether they should fund a comprehensive voyage to the Saturnian system or a comprehensive voyage to the Jovian system, and if some other project ultimately looks more inviting, they won't fund either. To select Saturn is to return triumphantly to Titan to analyze its ocean of hydrocarbons and to visit Enceladus, with its volcanic activity and suggestion of microbial life; to select Jupiter is to visit Europa, with its rolling hills of water ice and its subterranean oceans, and to meet Ganymede and Callisto, two moons certain to be future outposts. In any case, a very large and significant portion of the outer Solar System will go uncharted, for the foreseeable future. Perhaps all of it. And for what? So we can build a couple more ephemeral monuments at home?

We must fund our space program. We simply must.

The Lower Mammals

Someone recently made the following inquiry of me: “Given your other predispositions, how can you consistently justify your consumption of meat?” After a few terrible moments of fluster, I had to admit that my interlocutor had taken the point; I was only Thomas Jefferson at his most vulnerable and disingenuous, inwardly holding the moral view but outwardly insisting on the immoral institution for the economy and shrugging away the objections.

But the same sinister hypocrisy haunts us all; we shrivel in horror at the grotesque cases of cruelty toward domestic animals, yet we meet their advocates in the street with disinterest and irritation. Why, yes, I'll accept a copy of your pamphlet, we respond pleasantly. Anything to placate you. Of course I care about Scruffy, but not the nameless calf hammered into velvety meatloaf with a blunt instrument; why would I ever feel differently? Why should I?

And just in case the notion that our privileged position in the biosphere seems like it might provide the seedling for a good argument, suppose there were some exotic breed of creature who stood in the same supervisory and intellectual relationship to us that we do to, say, the intelligent and sensitive barnyard pig. Would it follow that they would have ethical license to do with us what they pleased—including, perhaps, gouging out our eyes, drowning us in Armagnac and devouring us whole, as we do the Ortolan—simply for the sake of it? Of course not. We would protest desperately that we're sentient creatures and are endowed with rights against such barbarism. You can't fold us into an omelet; we have Aristotle! We have Dostoevsky! We have quantum mechanics!

And even if Papillion dogs and Lowland gorillas cannot nestle cameras inside their own blood cells, our anti-cruelty laws demonstrate that we are wont nonetheless to recognize something like their natural rights, too. We have a natural aversion to needless brutality that clearly extends beyond the scope of our species, and if we insist on housing such thoughts in our heads and housing such laws on the books, then we had better either explain why some animals do not fall under the purview of the law specifically created to protect them as a class or why there are extenuating circumstances so important that it doesn't matter.

Perhaps there actually are extenuating circumstances, like considerations about the survival of mankind. Well, perhaps there once were; vegetarians in modernity, armed with supplements and a mountain of empirical data, no longer need strive only to demonstrate the mere feasibility of their choice, but can rather convincingly—spotted a few supplements—argue its positive moral and nutritional superiority.

The fact of the matter is, no matter which way we turn or which utilitarian calculus we invoke, in the end we have only cold explanations of our behavior, not justifications for it. The flesh of animals is a culinary pleasure that tickles taste buds otherwise dormant, and if its owners need suffer a blindfold and a cigarette to provide it, that's not exactly too bad for us, is it? In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that this issue is not even particularly dear to me, but I also must recognize that it is quite dear to some, and clearly for good reason. So, I suppose all along, the sobering thesis was the following: even if we don't ourselves abstain from eating meat, we ought to take seriously the objections of those who do, and admit that either we're not civilized enough to have a coherent ethics distinct from lower mammals, or that we're just too savage to follow them.