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.

The Untouchables

If you were to solicit opinions on campus about the demographic factor that most divides us as a student body, you'd likely to get an motley assortment of answers—one's political persuasion, one's status as a Greek, one's financial wellbeing, and so forth. But having come from Kansas City, I'm sensitive to how narrowly-defined we come to be simply by virtue of our answer to a single binary question: are you from the Metro Area?

The tenor of the relationship between Kansas Citians and everyone else in the state is difficult to grasp and even more difficult to taxonomize. Perhaps it's best illustrated by comparison: it's less openly antagonistic than the cultural conflict between Americans and the French, but it lacks the novelty, exchange, and genuine curiosity that runs between Americans and the Japanese. It doesn't have any of the sinister and creepy undertones like the relationship between Americans and Russians, but is without the good-humored cheekiness of the relationship between Americans and Canadians. And although there's an explicit economic class component, there aren't any dark injustices lurking in the annals of history, so the struggle is not generally a personal one.

The truth is, for all the rhetoric about “small-town values,” and “big-town opportunities” (and all the other lazy and vague platitudes in between), people from inside the Metro Area just don't understand or care to understand the people outside of it—and vice versa—and other than the fact that “Johnson County” has been established as something of a slur, nobody has ever bothered to have a serious dialogue about it. The implied KC-centric dichotomy here is admittedly slightly false, but even that doesn't hurt my case: students from Wichita, Topeka, Salina, and possibly a few other places scattered around the state probably understand the nature of urban and suburban life, but they usually just ally themselves with the small-town folks, anyway. Students from the Metro Area stand alone.

This line drawn in the sand isn't exactly invisible, either; every freshman knows within two weeks of orientation which side of the tracks he or she lives on. Regional relations at K-State are a terrific mess, probably always have been, and although the disparity of wealth, education and opportunity between us does underlie some of the problems, I think the conflict is in essence a cultural one. I don't know whether the situation is getting better or whether it's even soluble at all, but I think it could be, if only some of my fellow suburbanites would take to heart the following:

Your obnoxious behavior has made us unpopular. Stop.

Righteously indignant rural folks certainly own some of the blame for perpetuating the conflict (every Kansas farmer feeds how many of us?), but the very fact that no explanation needs to be added to the above directive to make it coherent seems proof enough that we all know where the fault lies essentially. In a basic sense, the burden is on the city folk to understand that people who have until now lived their lives on farms and in small towns ultimately ask the same metaphysical and moral questions that we do (or at it's at least not necessarily the case that they don't), and that just like us, they're simply trying to make their way. I make this offering not to imply that I have any genuine understanding of “life in the country,” as it might be trademarked—I don't—but only to illustrate to my compatriots that there's a place under the sun for all of us, and if they figured this out, we would all be better off.

The Sacred

Last week, on campus, somebody swore at me from a distance. This happens not entirely infrequently, and usually seems deeply satisfying to its perpetrators. Who am I to stand in the way of their fun? I usually think in response. Let them holler.

All I could hear distinctly from him was the word “fuck,” which, if you ask me, was actually a demonstration of eloquence in the following way: at some point we've all had the kind of feeling aptly expressed by “fuck” in its various formulations, and he simply elected to use the corresponding language.

In the specific case of my anonymous antagonist, the motive was to express some kind of dissatisfaction with your poor, humble columnist (imagine the thought!), and in general, the locution of the subsequent utterance or thought is usually secondary to the feeling that provokes it. Now, can anyone claim to be so righteous that they've never even had a vulgar thought? Of course not, as anyone who has, for instance, ever attempted to make a left turn at the intersection of Tuttle Creek and Bluemont can attest. And furthermore, not only have we all had these thoughts, we've all voiced them, too; for some, it might come out as “darn it,” “shoot,” or some other euphemism, but the sentiment is common to us all.

So why not articulate these thoughts accordingly? It is hardly foolish or immoral to voice frustration or discontent; vulgarity for its own sake is the explicit purpose of at least some of our prohibited words, after all, and on those we ought to ignore the vacuous self-imposed ban. Now, this proposed permissibility comes with a laundry list of qualifications: moderation and diversity of vocabulary is still important, vulgar slurs and self-serving blasphemy are still probably inappropriate in almost any social context, and most of the sexual vulgarities are still somewhat socially unsuitable even in non-vulgar form. (How much more appropriate is it really in most nontechnical situations to talk of “penises” rather than “dicks?”)

Indeed, there are many prohibited vulgarities that would not benefit from the change at all, but some would, especially those that suffer from what I call, for lack of a better term, the “Voldemort effect,” an absurd kind of liminality in which the subject is permissible in conversation but the specific word denoting the subject is not. (And pardon my ignorance if there were, in fact, practical reasons why his unholy name should not be uttered.) One victim of this strange condition is “shit;” there isn't a prescriptive difference between “shit” and any of its variants, and there isn't much of a descriptive one either, other than that “crap” is acceptable, “feces” is stifled and technical, “poop” is just silly, and “shit” is vulgar and prohibited. Another example is “bitch,” which still has an important and widely used technical definition and several distinct vulgar definitions, one of which concerns the socially safe subject of crabbiness and has several synonyms that don't remove any offensiveness or intentionality from the concept but are somehow permissible (“shrew,” for instance). Stranger still is “bastard,” which has several other proper and distinct definitions, but whose unfortunate status as a vulgarity has rendered all of them unusable.

We are fortunate to speak such a vast and expressive language, and it is a gift we should not forsake, even if for all the right reasons; swearing for the sake of something else might be wrong (for a variety of reasons), but swearing for the sake of expression is sacred.