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Settling Mars Can Lift Us From Our Antihuman Malaise

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https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...ve-of-mars

EXCERPT: . . . This problem — and it is a problem — is encapsulated in the uncertain place of Mars in the human conversation today. That conversation is dominated by matters of politics, science, and economics. Though it is obvious that these things should play a role in how people wrestle anew with the age-old question of our relation to Mars, something is badly and historically amiss in the absence of love, humanism, and poetry from these conversations. It is no excuse that ours is a time of fantastically powerful governments and technologists, one in which money, moreover, threatens to become the measure of all things. If the public imagination regarding Mars has been dimmed in the West, it is on account of our failing memory of the ancient role of the cosmic in practicing the art of humanism, and the failure of our poets to access and rehearse that role anew, amid conditions that ought to be recognized as hugely favorable.

The difficulty is not just one of disenchantment, although a disenchanted and unpoetic view of Mars will pose great difficulties. The disenchantment of Mars signals a deeper and broader disconnect with, and alienation from, the humanist wellspring of poetry: the love of being human. The antihumanism welling up in today’s utopian and dystopian visions of technological destiny not only pulls our view down from Mars, the cosmos, and the heavens; it turns our view against ourselves. Our technological destiny shifts from one in which human life radiates outward from Earth to one wherein humanity is so rotten that our future must cease to be human at all, whether by becoming subhuman or superhuman.

[...] Our public and private minds and hearts are reverberating with the voices heralding that the news of humanity and Earth is bad. These antihumanist voices are loud and diverse. Some speak in expressions of dread. People dread the Trump administration. People dread another world war. People dread a fresh economic or environmental or other kind of catastrophe. Dread-mongering encourages us to feel certain that something big and awful beyond our control is definitely coming, even if we can’t be sure what it is or when it will arrive. The intellectual landscape is filled with such voices.

Even more influential than expressions of dread are expressions of loathing. Much of the most recent presidential election was about who you loathe — not just who you deplore or who disgusts you, but who actually makes you feel worse about being human. This is becoming the political norm, the means by which group identity is formed and given agency. Turn on the news, log on to Twitter: The message that the horrible people are winning, polluting society, and dragging us all down dominates, cutting across all ideologies. Beneath the sense of smugness and superiority it breeds, it nurses a creeping conviction that the world’s growing class of bad people — defective, repulsive, loathsome — actually proves that we should not love being human. Perhaps we should fear and loathe it.

Retreating into the confines of our own friends, families, homes, and handheld devices does not alleviate this feeling. It often worsens it. Expressions of what classical and medieval thinkers called acedia — a depressed, melancholic boredom and disinterest in being human — are on the upswing. [...] our forms of rigorous self-isolation lack spiritual discipline. They turn us into workaholics, Internet addicts, hoarders, and hermits, or the just plain lonely.

So we’re pushed toward the option of greater worldliness — chasing after the supposedly great things of life, like notoriety, novelty, success, wealth, power, and so on. Unfortunately, what we discover is that inside the gleaming enclosure of greatness is a rotten center. We begin to feel bitterly like the Satan of Biblical allegory — born to fall. How could we choose love when everything around and inside us is bad?

Amid these antihumanist voices, people tend toward two options. The first is an increasingly fanatical devotion to the idea of using power to break human limits and to force perpetual progress. In *The True and Only Heaven* (1991), the Marxist-influenced communitarian Christopher Lasch condemned this “progressive optimism” for its “denial of the natural limits on human power and freedom.” He championed instead a humanistic “state of heart and mind” that “asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits.”

But those following Lasch who are sharpest in their criticism of the ideology of excess often now veer toward counseling the opposite — a surrender before the apparent rot of the world and a determination to abdicate power, retreating into circumscribed shelters with low but stable horizons. For them, modernity is increasingly becoming, perhaps has always been, an exercise in fatal self-deception about what humans are capable of. Modernity must be rejected accordingly, with all the costs attendant on such a radical ethic of honesty. [...] thinkers who attempt to tie cultural and political and economic flourishing to kindling a love of humanity are often cast as villains, perhaps as seekers after militaristic “greatness” projects — many view the Apollo program this way.

Despite our huge advances in technology and knowledge, only a few remarkable frontiers seem to exist any longer, and those that do, like radical life extension, seem to be the outlandish province of the privileged few. For the rest of us, exploration and adventure seem increasingly restricted to playing small-stakes psychological, sexual, and identitarian games of power, online and off. With so much earthbound loathing and lassitude, no wonder so few love Mars. Yet here Mars awaits, ready to offer us exactly the kind of frontier we think we’ve lost, or don’t deserve.

[...] Today we are seeing massive anxiety around the limits, disappointments, and pathologies of the Californian ideology. It now appears to be in danger of failing the defining myth of the West. California’s mastery over the West has not reproduced the true frontier experience — in its naturalness, its arduousness, and its bounded openness — from which we drew our experience of grandeur. Today it’s that frontier we still pine for. Too many of our West Coast tech “leaders” are following the rest of us into the habit of making merely private futures, drifting toward a virtual horizon with no discernable frontier.

What happens when these anti-pioneers arrive at the dead ends of their journeys into infinite inwardness? The antihumanists are sure they have the answer. But too many “innovators” today seem to be clueless. Those few who are leading crews back outward toward Mars, and a cosmic destiny, are still seen largely as a breed apart — or worse, as cynical, self-interested marketers using public money to hawk pie-in-the-sky boondoggles. Our suspicion of the limits and follies of greatness is sound, but we are too timid in refusing to look through that apprehension toward the grandeur beyond. To find a new shared frontier, one imbued with grandeur, we need to return to the physicality and particularity of love among concrete, tangible worlds.

Unfortunately, the antihumanists are not the only ones who have soured us so much on our circumstances and character that we have lost a love of life and its grand frontier. Some self-styled or would-be humanists have seen technology as a tool to help us perfect the most comfortably humane lives imaginable — with digital assistants and slave bots knowing what we want before we ask, and giving it to us on the cheap. Techno-plenty will end scarcity, conflict, work, anxiety, and involuntary competition, leaving us to revel in an Elysium of health, safety, and pleasure. Here already on the best of all possible worlds to come, why would we ever leave?

[...] One reason antihumanism is so popular is that so much of human life is just a mess. Technological progress, focused by a love of Mars, will help us to clean it up. When the path toward a love of Mars is opened to our pro-human imagination and memory, we can restore good order to human life in a way that’s transformative but not exactly revolutionary. In the new “age of man” — the meaning of the old Germanic term that gives us the English “world” — the even older Western words for “world” will regain their significance: The Latin mundus means clean and elegant, while the Greek cosmos denotes an orderly arrangement.

[...] The rediscovery of the grand frontier will smooth the way to that sort of tremendous pivot not by speeding up time, as we might imagine, but by slowing it down. It’s of the essence of grandeur — in contrast to greatness — to slow our human tempo in a way that makes circumstances more forgiving of a gracefully methodical approach. Such an approach reveals that the reality of the natural world, with its living beings and its inanimate objects, cannot simply be skirted, hacked, plowed under, or slapped around. It must be fully attended to, and, in that sense, honored. That is a matter of orienting our whole person, body, mind, and soul, to the reality of the natural world. It is also a matter of recovering and preserving the lived experience of natural and human time, and the fullness of both kinds of time. In so doing, the discipline of attention that practice entails can orient our whole person toward taking our place in poetic, cosmic, and ultimately divine time...

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