On a different tack, Yarvin wrote recently that he is "still dreaming like a child of a sci-fi future, I hope Elon Musk never gets to Mars. Mars is a gnarly place. At this level of difficulty, does a planet buy you that much? Why not build L5 colonies instead? ".
This was promoted by the physicist Gerard O'Neill in the 1970's, and the CoEvolution Quarterly pushed the idea. In response, the novelist Ken Kesey wrote that "A lot of people who want to get into space never got into the earth. It's James Bond. It's a turning away from the juiciness of stuff. That's something that's lost its appeal for me. "
The historian, sociologist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford wrote that "I regard Space Colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all of its resources on expanding the nuclear means for exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies.".
The best, the most logical, detailed, mature, commonsense and human rebuttal of O'Neill's proposal came from the poet Wendell Berry. I loved Star Trek techno-utopian fantasies at the time and I hated Berry's arguments, but couldn't fault most of them. Stewart Brand, the CoÈvolution editor, came across as a naive child when he tried to support O'Neill.........
"Mr. Gerard O'Neill's space colony project is offered in the Fall 1975 CoEvolution Quarterly as the solution to virtually all the problems rising from the limitations of our earthly environment. That it will solve all of these problems is a possibility that, even after reading the twenty-six pages devoted to it, one may legitimately doubt. What cannot be doubted is that the project is an ideal solution to the moral dilemma of all those in this society who cannot face the necessities of meaningful change. It is superbly attuned to the wishes of the corporation executives, bureaucrats, militarists, political operators, and scientific experts who are the chief beneficiaries of the forces that have produced our crisis.
For what is remarkable about Mr. O'Neill's project is not its novelty or its adventurousness, but its conventionality. If it should be implemented, it will be the rebirth of the idea of Progress with all its old lust for unrestrained expansion, its totalitarian concentrations of energy and wealth, its obliviousness to the concerns of character and community, its exclusive reliance on technical and economic criteria, its disinterest in consequence, its contempt for human value, its compulsive salesmanship........
This brings me to the central weakness of Mr. O'Neill's case: its shallow and gullible morality. Space colonization is seen as a solution to problems that are inherently moral, in that they are implicit in our present definitions of character and community. And yet here is a solution to moral problems that contemplates no moral change and subjects itself to no moral standard. Indeed, the solution is based upon the moral despair of Mr. O'Neill's assertion that "people do not change." The only standards of judgment that have been applied to this project are technical and economic. Much is made of the fact that the planners' studies "continue to survive technical review." But there is no human abomination that has not, or could not have, survived technical review. Strip mining, fire-bombing, electronic snooping, various forms of genocide and political oppression - all have been technically feasible, and usually economically feasible as well.
Stripped of the glamour that we associate with adventures in "space" and of the romantic escapism left over from our frontier experience, Mr. O'Neill's project is clearly not a solution, in any meaningful sense, to any problem. It is only a desperate attempt to revitalize the thug morality of the technological specialist, by which we blandly assume that we must do anything whatever that we can do.
Mr. O'Neill's testimony is littered with the evidence of his moral bewilderment. His concern for the environment leads him directly to a plan to strip mine the moon. He says, "I have a deep suspicion of governments," but he does not hesitate to promote a scheme that would vastly increase the power and influence of government. He apparently sees no chance of political corruption in an expenditure of a hundred billion public dollars. He says that he "would far prefer to see a cooperative multinational program formed" to carry out his project, but only flve paragraphs later he speaks of the project as a way to return to the "traditional role [of the U.S.] as a generous donor of wealth to those in need." Nowhere does he see the absurdity of trying to solve on a grand scale by expensive technology a problem that can probably be solved on a small scale, and cheaply, by moral means (see E.F. Schumacher's article, same issue). Nowhere does he see the absurdity of trying to solve with existing technology a problem that, as Schumacher suggests, "has been produced by the existing technology."
Mr. O'Neill predicts readily that his scheme will promote diversity and freedom. But he neglects to consider that the machine is already a renegade concept that sees people as spare parts, and uses them as such. Exactly how, one wonders, is this to be corrected by building an even bigger machine and causing people to live inside it, in absolute dependence on it? What, exactly, would be the effect of a completely controlled environment on human character and community? What, exactly, would be the influence of space colonization on earthly political and social forms? Mr. O'Neill does not know, and he has no way to know. He is not, then, merely asking for a public subsidy in the amount of a hundred billion dollars. He is proposing that he and his colleagues should be permitted to experiment with fundamental values.This is the violence of the specialist. This kind of thing is familiar enough. What is new here is the scale.
Perhaps most important of all is Mr. O'Neill's failure to see that the so-called energy crisis is a moral crisis. He assumes that it is simply a matter of scarcity, which can be remedied by the time-honored method of getting more from somewhere else. But it has been obvious for some time that the energy crisis has at least as much to do with the uses of energy as with its availability. The world will tolerate the use of even less energy than it can supply. The question is not of how much energy we can get, but of how much we can use without destroying, at a minimum, our ability to enjoy the use of it. The question of restraint is much more pertinent to the problem than the question of supply. And Mr. O'Neill has apparently never thought to ask what good might be accomplished by the proliferation in space of a mentality that cannot forbear to do anything at all that is possible.
Mr. O'Neill has failed to think of these things because temperamentally he is a scientific super-star. His ambition can comprehend only the grandiose. He is a professional mind-boggler. With the apparent simple-mindedness of the true-believer, he sees himself as the evangelist of the next "giant leap for mankind." He makes the overwhelming presumption of the evangelist - that he knows better than we do what is good for us. And he is asking for an influence over the material means of our lives which will require our spiritual capitulation. Like an evangelist, he wants both our faith and our money......
Your promotion of the space colony idea is getting more and more irresponsible. Like O'Neill and Vajk, you begin with an air of critical reasonableness, and promptly resort to the glib logic of a salesman. None of you has yet foreseen a problem without at the same time foreseeing a more than adequate answer; indeed, as you represent it, a space colony will be nothing less than a magic machine that will automatically transmute little problems into big solutions. Like utopians before, you envision a clean break with all human precedent: history, heredity, character. Thanks to a grandiose technological scheme, nothing is going to happen from now on that is not going to improve everything; as you say, even if it fails, we will be much better off. You people are operating at about the cultural depth of an oil company public relations expert. All this prophetic-ethical computer-mysticism! What is wrong with it is that it is simply failing to make sense - unless, of course, one is looking at it as a sycophant of science, or from the point of view of a government agency or a corporation. That is exactly what worries me: that your coverage of this issue, whatever you mean it to do, will serve to recruit and train a company of intellectual yahoos to justify the next power-grab by the corporations and the government."
A little bit more from Wendell Berry. I promise this is the last!
"The most striking feature of Mr. Q'Neill's testimony is his lack of doubt, what I would take to be his unscientificness. He does not speak to us as the appropriately skeptical or dispassionate student of a possibility, but as its salesman. He sees no good alternative to his plan. He has no reservations. Or, rather, he has one reservation: he thinks that "it's very wrong to assume that something like this is going to promise happiness to all people. . ." - a point that will not greatly discomfort the plutocrats at whom ultimately this pitch is aimed.
As a salesman, Mr. O'Neill faithfully utters every shibbolith of the cult of progress. If we will just have the good sense to spend one hundred billion dollars on a space colony, we will thereby produce more money and more jobs, raise the standard of living, help the underdeveloped, increase freedom and opportunity, fulfill the deeper needs of the human spirit etc., etc. If we will surrender our money, our moral independence and our judgment to someone who obviously knows better what is good for us than we do, then we may expect the entire result to be a net gain. Any one who has listened to the arguments of the Army Corps of Engineers, the strip miners, the Defense Department or any club of boosters will find all this dishearteningly familiar.
The correspondence between the proposed colonization of "the high frontier" of outer space and the opening of the American frontier is irresistible to Mr. O'Neill. I find it at least as suggestive as he does, and a lot more problematical. The American prospect after, say, 1806 inspired the same sense of spatial and mental boundlessness, the same sense of limitlessness of physical resources and of human possibility, the same breathless viewing of conjectural vistas. But it is precisely here that Mr. O'Neill's sense of history fails. For the sake, perhaps, of convenience he sees himself and his American contemporaries as the inheritors of the frontier mentality, but not of the tragedy of that mentality. He does not speak as a Twentieth Century American, faced with the waste and ruin of his inheritance from the frontier. He speaks instead in the manner of a European of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, privileged to see American space and wealth as conveniently distant solutions to local problems.
That is to say that, upon examination, Mr. O'Neill's doctrine of "energy without guilt" is only a renewal, in "space-age" terms, of an old chauvinism: in order to make up for deficiencies of materials on earth we will "exploit" (i.e., damage or destroy) the moon and the asteroids. This is in absolute obedience to the moral law of the frontier: humans are destructive in proportion to their supposition of abundance; if they are faced with an infinite abundance, then they will become infinitely destructive. Mr. O'Neill sets it down as a false premise "That any realistic solutions to our problems of food, population, energy and materials must be based on a kind of zero-sum game, in which no resources can be obtained by one nation or group without being taken from another." That is the lesson that the closing of the earthly frontiers puts before us; it calls for an authentic series of changes in the human character and community that, if made, will afford us the spiritual resources to live both within our material means and with each other.
Mr. O'Neill proposes to learn no such lesson and to make no such changes. He proposes to outflank the lesson entirely. What we obviously need - as any old buffalo hunter or strip miner would also tell us - is a "new frontier :" some place, that is, where the mentality of exploitation may proceed without restraint, "correcting" the ruin of one place by the ruin of another.
Haven't had time yet to read Yarwin's article in the NYT, but here's some thoughts on his work....
Yarvin previously wrote "My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice of a mature adult." Carlyle toured my country, Ireland. during the famine, sneering at the poverty and starvation, and writing about how Ireland was a "human swinery..... a black, howling babble of superstitious savages........Can it be a charity to keep men alive on these terms? .....shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his neighbors ) to be a deceptive human swine...". 1 million died during the famine, another million fled the country within 5 years. We don't like people like Thomas Carlyle. I recommend "The Great Hunger", by the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith (Appointed Commander of the British Empire in 1960 by Queen Elizabeth II).
When Yarvin's "Victorian Jesus" wasn't calling Ireland a "human swinery", he was calling black people in the West Indies "pigs with pumpkins". He thought they had no right to own land, and needed to be forced by a "beneficient whip" to work for superior white people who were "born wiser". This white superiority was apparently, according to Carlyle, established by God. It's all making sense now - Trump, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin, Carlyle, Marko Elez ("Normalise Indian hate").
Yarvin thinks that "The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself." I recommend "The Brutish Empire" by Des Ekin, once, like me, a foolish, ill-ínformed believer in the basic benevolence of British imperialism outside of Ireland. Read about the massacres, the genocides, the man-made famines, the hunting of black human beings for sport after family picnics, the mass hangings without trial, the display of human heads on trophy walls, all carried out with utter arrogance.
I recommend reading about the tens of millions of Indians who died in famines during this barbaric empire that Yarvin claims "worked too well" : "mortality in the Great Bengal famine of 1770 was between one and 10 million;[6] the Chalisa famine of 1783–1784, 11 million; Doji bara famine of 1791–1792, 11 million; and Agra famine of 1837–1838, 800,000.[7] In the second half of the 19th-century large-scale excess mortality was caused by: Upper Doab famine of 1860–1861, 2 million; Great Famine of 1876–1878, 5.5 million; Indian famine of 1896–1897, 5 million; and Indian famine of 1899–1900, 1 million.[8] The first major famine of the 20th century was the Bengal famine of 1943, which affected the Bengal region during wartime; it was one of the major South Asian famines in which anywhere between 1.5 million and 3 million people died."
It's absolutely astonishing to me that intelligent, (half) educated people in the US and elsewhere can possibly be openly advocating a return to fascism or authoritarianism or imperialism or monarchy. Thank you for opposing this. Good luck to all in the US resisting Yarwin, Musk, Trump and co. It must be tough out there at the moment.
On a different tack, Yarvin wrote recently that he is "still dreaming like a child of a sci-fi future, I hope Elon Musk never gets to Mars. Mars is a gnarly place. At this level of difficulty, does a planet buy you that much? Why not build L5 colonies instead? ".
This was promoted by the physicist Gerard O'Neill in the 1970's, and the CoEvolution Quarterly pushed the idea. In response, the novelist Ken Kesey wrote that "A lot of people who want to get into space never got into the earth. It's James Bond. It's a turning away from the juiciness of stuff. That's something that's lost its appeal for me. "
The historian, sociologist and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford wrote that "I regard Space Colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all of its resources on expanding the nuclear means for exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies.".
The best, the most logical, detailed, mature, commonsense and human rebuttal of O'Neill's proposal came from the poet Wendell Berry. I loved Star Trek techno-utopian fantasies at the time and I hated Berry's arguments, but couldn't fault most of them. Stewart Brand, the CoÈvolution editor, came across as a naive child when he tried to support O'Neill.........
"Mr. Gerard O'Neill's space colony project is offered in the Fall 1975 CoEvolution Quarterly as the solution to virtually all the problems rising from the limitations of our earthly environment. That it will solve all of these problems is a possibility that, even after reading the twenty-six pages devoted to it, one may legitimately doubt. What cannot be doubted is that the project is an ideal solution to the moral dilemma of all those in this society who cannot face the necessities of meaningful change. It is superbly attuned to the wishes of the corporation executives, bureaucrats, militarists, political operators, and scientific experts who are the chief beneficiaries of the forces that have produced our crisis.
For what is remarkable about Mr. O'Neill's project is not its novelty or its adventurousness, but its conventionality. If it should be implemented, it will be the rebirth of the idea of Progress with all its old lust for unrestrained expansion, its totalitarian concentrations of energy and wealth, its obliviousness to the concerns of character and community, its exclusive reliance on technical and economic criteria, its disinterest in consequence, its contempt for human value, its compulsive salesmanship........
This brings me to the central weakness of Mr. O'Neill's case: its shallow and gullible morality. Space colonization is seen as a solution to problems that are inherently moral, in that they are implicit in our present definitions of character and community. And yet here is a solution to moral problems that contemplates no moral change and subjects itself to no moral standard. Indeed, the solution is based upon the moral despair of Mr. O'Neill's assertion that "people do not change." The only standards of judgment that have been applied to this project are technical and economic. Much is made of the fact that the planners' studies "continue to survive technical review." But there is no human abomination that has not, or could not have, survived technical review. Strip mining, fire-bombing, electronic snooping, various forms of genocide and political oppression - all have been technically feasible, and usually economically feasible as well.
Stripped of the glamour that we associate with adventures in "space" and of the romantic escapism left over from our frontier experience, Mr. O'Neill's project is clearly not a solution, in any meaningful sense, to any problem. It is only a desperate attempt to revitalize the thug morality of the technological specialist, by which we blandly assume that we must do anything whatever that we can do.
Mr. O'Neill's testimony is littered with the evidence of his moral bewilderment. His concern for the environment leads him directly to a plan to strip mine the moon. He says, "I have a deep suspicion of governments," but he does not hesitate to promote a scheme that would vastly increase the power and influence of government. He apparently sees no chance of political corruption in an expenditure of a hundred billion public dollars. He says that he "would far prefer to see a cooperative multinational program formed" to carry out his project, but only flve paragraphs later he speaks of the project as a way to return to the "traditional role [of the U.S.] as a generous donor of wealth to those in need." Nowhere does he see the absurdity of trying to solve on a grand scale by expensive technology a problem that can probably be solved on a small scale, and cheaply, by moral means (see E.F. Schumacher's article, same issue). Nowhere does he see the absurdity of trying to solve with existing technology a problem that, as Schumacher suggests, "has been produced by the existing technology."
Mr. O'Neill predicts readily that his scheme will promote diversity and freedom. But he neglects to consider that the machine is already a renegade concept that sees people as spare parts, and uses them as such. Exactly how, one wonders, is this to be corrected by building an even bigger machine and causing people to live inside it, in absolute dependence on it? What, exactly, would be the effect of a completely controlled environment on human character and community? What, exactly, would be the influence of space colonization on earthly political and social forms? Mr. O'Neill does not know, and he has no way to know. He is not, then, merely asking for a public subsidy in the amount of a hundred billion dollars. He is proposing that he and his colleagues should be permitted to experiment with fundamental values.This is the violence of the specialist. This kind of thing is familiar enough. What is new here is the scale.
Perhaps most important of all is Mr. O'Neill's failure to see that the so-called energy crisis is a moral crisis. He assumes that it is simply a matter of scarcity, which can be remedied by the time-honored method of getting more from somewhere else. But it has been obvious for some time that the energy crisis has at least as much to do with the uses of energy as with its availability. The world will tolerate the use of even less energy than it can supply. The question is not of how much energy we can get, but of how much we can use without destroying, at a minimum, our ability to enjoy the use of it. The question of restraint is much more pertinent to the problem than the question of supply. And Mr. O'Neill has apparently never thought to ask what good might be accomplished by the proliferation in space of a mentality that cannot forbear to do anything at all that is possible.
Mr. O'Neill has failed to think of these things because temperamentally he is a scientific super-star. His ambition can comprehend only the grandiose. He is a professional mind-boggler. With the apparent simple-mindedness of the true-believer, he sees himself as the evangelist of the next "giant leap for mankind." He makes the overwhelming presumption of the evangelist - that he knows better than we do what is good for us. And he is asking for an influence over the material means of our lives which will require our spiritual capitulation. Like an evangelist, he wants both our faith and our money......
Your promotion of the space colony idea is getting more and more irresponsible. Like O'Neill and Vajk, you begin with an air of critical reasonableness, and promptly resort to the glib logic of a salesman. None of you has yet foreseen a problem without at the same time foreseeing a more than adequate answer; indeed, as you represent it, a space colony will be nothing less than a magic machine that will automatically transmute little problems into big solutions. Like utopians before, you envision a clean break with all human precedent: history, heredity, character. Thanks to a grandiose technological scheme, nothing is going to happen from now on that is not going to improve everything; as you say, even if it fails, we will be much better off. You people are operating at about the cultural depth of an oil company public relations expert. All this prophetic-ethical computer-mysticism! What is wrong with it is that it is simply failing to make sense - unless, of course, one is looking at it as a sycophant of science, or from the point of view of a government agency or a corporation. That is exactly what worries me: that your coverage of this issue, whatever you mean it to do, will serve to recruit and train a company of intellectual yahoos to justify the next power-grab by the corporations and the government."
A little bit more from Wendell Berry. I promise this is the last!
"The most striking feature of Mr. Q'Neill's testimony is his lack of doubt, what I would take to be his unscientificness. He does not speak to us as the appropriately skeptical or dispassionate student of a possibility, but as its salesman. He sees no good alternative to his plan. He has no reservations. Or, rather, he has one reservation: he thinks that "it's very wrong to assume that something like this is going to promise happiness to all people. . ." - a point that will not greatly discomfort the plutocrats at whom ultimately this pitch is aimed.
As a salesman, Mr. O'Neill faithfully utters every shibbolith of the cult of progress. If we will just have the good sense to spend one hundred billion dollars on a space colony, we will thereby produce more money and more jobs, raise the standard of living, help the underdeveloped, increase freedom and opportunity, fulfill the deeper needs of the human spirit etc., etc. If we will surrender our money, our moral independence and our judgment to someone who obviously knows better what is good for us than we do, then we may expect the entire result to be a net gain. Any one who has listened to the arguments of the Army Corps of Engineers, the strip miners, the Defense Department or any club of boosters will find all this dishearteningly familiar.
The correspondence between the proposed colonization of "the high frontier" of outer space and the opening of the American frontier is irresistible to Mr. O'Neill. I find it at least as suggestive as he does, and a lot more problematical. The American prospect after, say, 1806 inspired the same sense of spatial and mental boundlessness, the same sense of limitlessness of physical resources and of human possibility, the same breathless viewing of conjectural vistas. But it is precisely here that Mr. O'Neill's sense of history fails. For the sake, perhaps, of convenience he sees himself and his American contemporaries as the inheritors of the frontier mentality, but not of the tragedy of that mentality. He does not speak as a Twentieth Century American, faced with the waste and ruin of his inheritance from the frontier. He speaks instead in the manner of a European of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, privileged to see American space and wealth as conveniently distant solutions to local problems.
That is to say that, upon examination, Mr. O'Neill's doctrine of "energy without guilt" is only a renewal, in "space-age" terms, of an old chauvinism: in order to make up for deficiencies of materials on earth we will "exploit" (i.e., damage or destroy) the moon and the asteroids. This is in absolute obedience to the moral law of the frontier: humans are destructive in proportion to their supposition of abundance; if they are faced with an infinite abundance, then they will become infinitely destructive. Mr. O'Neill sets it down as a false premise "That any realistic solutions to our problems of food, population, energy and materials must be based on a kind of zero-sum game, in which no resources can be obtained by one nation or group without being taken from another." That is the lesson that the closing of the earthly frontiers puts before us; it calls for an authentic series of changes in the human character and community that, if made, will afford us the spiritual resources to live both within our material means and with each other.
Mr. O'Neill proposes to learn no such lesson and to make no such changes. He proposes to outflank the lesson entirely. What we obviously need - as any old buffalo hunter or strip miner would also tell us - is a "new frontier :" some place, that is, where the mentality of exploitation may proceed without restraint, "correcting" the ruin of one place by the ruin of another.
Haven't had time yet to read Yarwin's article in the NYT, but here's some thoughts on his work....
Yarvin previously wrote "My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice of a mature adult." Carlyle toured my country, Ireland. during the famine, sneering at the poverty and starvation, and writing about how Ireland was a "human swinery..... a black, howling babble of superstitious savages........Can it be a charity to keep men alive on these terms? .....shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his neighbors ) to be a deceptive human swine...". 1 million died during the famine, another million fled the country within 5 years. We don't like people like Thomas Carlyle. I recommend "The Great Hunger", by the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith (Appointed Commander of the British Empire in 1960 by Queen Elizabeth II).
When Yarvin's "Victorian Jesus" wasn't calling Ireland a "human swinery", he was calling black people in the West Indies "pigs with pumpkins". He thought they had no right to own land, and needed to be forced by a "beneficient whip" to work for superior white people who were "born wiser". This white superiority was apparently, according to Carlyle, established by God. It's all making sense now - Trump, Musk, Thiel, Yarvin, Carlyle, Marko Elez ("Normalise Indian hate").
Yarvin thinks that "The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself." I recommend "The Brutish Empire" by Des Ekin, once, like me, a foolish, ill-ínformed believer in the basic benevolence of British imperialism outside of Ireland. Read about the massacres, the genocides, the man-made famines, the hunting of black human beings for sport after family picnics, the mass hangings without trial, the display of human heads on trophy walls, all carried out with utter arrogance.
I recommend reading about the tens of millions of Indians who died in famines during this barbaric empire that Yarvin claims "worked too well" : "mortality in the Great Bengal famine of 1770 was between one and 10 million;[6] the Chalisa famine of 1783–1784, 11 million; Doji bara famine of 1791–1792, 11 million; and Agra famine of 1837–1838, 800,000.[7] In the second half of the 19th-century large-scale excess mortality was caused by: Upper Doab famine of 1860–1861, 2 million; Great Famine of 1876–1878, 5.5 million; Indian famine of 1896–1897, 5 million; and Indian famine of 1899–1900, 1 million.[8] The first major famine of the 20th century was the Bengal famine of 1943, which affected the Bengal region during wartime; it was one of the major South Asian famines in which anywhere between 1.5 million and 3 million people died."
It's absolutely astonishing to me that intelligent, (half) educated people in the US and elsewhere can possibly be openly advocating a return to fascism or authoritarianism or imperialism or monarchy. Thank you for opposing this. Good luck to all in the US resisting Yarwin, Musk, Trump and co. It must be tough out there at the moment.