The summer of ’69

When I was three years old, my father tried to trick me into believing a tall tale – or so I concluded at the time. He told me that a man named Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the Moon twelve years before, and had said “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Now it had not escaped my notice that my mother called my father Neil instead of Daddy, whereas “Arm-Strong” sounded like the name of a story-book giant; and also, somewhat crucially, Dad neglected to mention anything about a spaceship. I therefore pictured a world-bestriding Titan with Dad’s face and beard (because of the name) lifting up one monstrous foot into the heavens. Even to three-year-old me, this seemed a bit beyond the bounds of physical possibility. Yet Dad kept an utterly straight face and clearly expected me to believe him.

What did Neil Armstrong and his companions actually accomplish? What has humanity gained that we wouldn’t have gained without going to the Moon? Was it merely an “unlikely piece of art”, albeit a “triumph of our aesthetic instincts” constituting “the culmination of the Romantic cult of the sublime”, but “undertaken for no meaningful scientific purpose”, as a recent opinion piece would have it? Not according to at least one astrophysicist:

In case you didn’t play the video for whatever reason, Dr Smethurst identifies five pieces of scientific knowledge we wouldn’t have had without the Apollo missions. One, surprisingly to me, is the distance to the Moon. One is an explanation of a phenomenon called solar wind. More as you’d expect, we learned what stuff the Moon is made of and how that stuff is arranged, which then allowed us to figure out how the Moon was originally formed. (Turns out to be quite dramatic, if you haven’t seen it before.)

NASA nowadays gets about an eighth the proportion of the US budget that it did back then – from 4% down to 0.5% – and yet you still see people arguing that space research should be defunded to pay for hospitals. Guys, there’s vastly more money being sunk into corporate subsidies and the military; why not complain about those instead of squabbling over the tiny scrapings they leave behind? The thing about science, the point of acquiring knowledge for knowledge’s sake, is that you cannot know what that knowledge is going to turn out to be useful for until you’ve got it. You like hospitals? It would be a pretty poor hospital that didn’t have an X-ray machine, but X-ray machines could never have been invented if people hadn’t been doing purely curiosity-driven research on radiation decades before. As far as I know space research hasn’t turned out anything quite that directly useful for human health. Yet.

Also, let me be direct: people want to know stuff. Quite a lot of debates in ethical philosophy become a whole lot easier if you allow that happiness is about knowing fortunate truths as well as having pleasant sensations. That’s why it wouldn’t be ethical to make everybody happy by spiking the water-supply with some euphoriant drug, or to euthanize an old lady’s pet when she moves into palliative care and tell her for the remainder of her life that it’s being looked after. People want to know the truth. We’ve always wanted to understand what the Moon is and how it got there. Finding the answers was a service to humanity.

All the same, it seems kind of a small return for the phenomenal amount of money that the American taxpayer poured into Apollo throughout the 1960s. Come to think of it, the government’s commitment to the project is remarkable in itself. Public support for Apollo was far from unanimous, given the many other social and economic concerns facing the country at the time. It had been pushed along for seven years by Lyndon B. Johnson through his Vice-Presidency under John F. Kennedy and his own term as President. Then in 1968 the Republican Richard Nixon was elected (Kennedy and Johnson having been Democrats). Nowadays the story would end with Nixon cancelling Apollo on a promise to free up the money for social rejuvenation, then actually spending it on a massive tax-cut for the top income brackets. Apparently Presidents didn’t disrespect their predecessors’ legacies quite that much in the ’60s.

Three other names help to explain why Apollo had to go ahead come what might: Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, made it undeniable that the Soviets could pull their weight in science and technology, a field in which the US had previously been rather complacent. Gagarin, the first man in space, showed it hadn’t been a one-off. And when Oswald shot Kennedy dead in 1963, Johnson’s Presidency stood or fell on how well he was seen to honour Kennedy’s aspirations. In fact a month or two before his death Kennedy had decided to scrap Apollo in favour of a joint Soviet-American Moon endeavour, but that never became public knowledge.

Unfortunately Kennedy also left another legacy: the Vietnam War. Not that he started it, exactly – there had been conflict there, and the United States had been meddling in it, for years before – but Kennedy was the President who committed the US to military intervention. It raged on, dividing the American public, throughout the ’60s, and ended up outlasting the Apollo programme by several years. Odious and expensive though it was, neither Kennedy nor Johnson nor Nixon wanted to be the first American president ever to lose a war. It has been speculated (and is repeated as fact in some quarters) that the real purpose of Apollo was to distract Americans from what was happening in Vietnam.

Whilst a certain degree of cynicism is warranted and indeed necessary in political studies, I don’t find that the rule “Always assume the worst possible motivation” generates much better predictions of government policy than “Always give the benefit of the doubt,” except insofar as it errs on the side of vigilance. Better is “Politicians are no more altruistic, honest, or intelligent than anyone else, and to get things done they have to placate millions of people with conflicting priorities.” A much cheaper way to distract the public from Vietnam would have been to distribute psychedelic drugs en masse. As things turned out, psychedelics became identified with the anti-war subculture shortly before getting banned, but that wasn’t inevitable in the mid-’60s.

Looking at the period from fifty years’ distance, it’s hard not to see a certain congruence between the psychedelics and the Apollo programme. Both were motivated to cross the boundaries of the very world and see things no-one had ever seen. It doesn’t feel coincidental that the ’60s was also the decade of the Civil Rights movement and the Sexual Revolution and, a month or so before the first Moon landing, the Stonewall riot. The phrase “To boldly go where no man has gone before” predates “One giant leap for mankind” by less than three years.

So then what happened? The science fiction writers who were bold enough to foresee a Moon landing before 1970 also all thought we’d be on Mars by 2000. It’s always easy to think up ways that problems and disappointments are one’s political opponents’ fault, so it won’t surprise you that I place a large chunk of the blame on Reaganism. You can’t slash taxes for decades and still fund an Apollo. The Space Shuttle programme that was meant to follow it was plagued by the characteristically Reaganistic combination of cutting corners on safety measures and requiring conspicuous success from every project, with predictably disastrous consequences.

Maybe that op-ed piece wasn’t completely off the mark: Apollo’s primary significance is as a work of art rather than a scientific venture. It became a symbol, a sign showing future generations forever after that we are not stuck in the world we know, that just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done – like, say, allowing people of the same gender to marry, or electing an African American to the White House. It takes commitment and care and perseverance and the humility to listen to criticism and learn from past mistakes, but it can be done. Every giant leap is actually a concatenation of small steps.

Just in case you were wondering – the time interval from the launch of Sputnik to Armstrong’s one small step was roughly as long as we now have to solve climate change. Worth thinking about.

I still look up at the Moon every so often and think about it – this thing so familiar and so remote, this alien planet that every generation of humanity has known from infancy. Contrary to some people’s fears at the time (C. S. Lewis, for instance), knowing that humans have touched it for me deepens the wonder rather than deadens it, because it brings the Moon out of the backdrop and onto the stage. Maybe we’ll go there again one day; maybe we need to let our wisdom catch up with our hope before that can happen. But we know it can be done, and that’s never going away.

Science belongs to every culture

I submitted this to Stuff Nation after this piece by one Bob Brockie, complaining about the New Zealand Royal Society’s choice to officially acknowledge the Treaty of Waitangi, came across my Facebook feed. They haven’t published it, so I guess I’m free to put it here.

Bob Brockie thinks that the Treaty of Waitangi is irrelevant to the scientific endeavour, and the Royal Society of New Zealand ought therefore to ignore it. I think he’s wrong, and I’ll show you why.

First of all, while the phrase “the principles of the Treaty” does sound worryingly vague, its twenty-year history in legal usage has pinned down its precise meaning. I don’t think Brockie is aware of this. The principles of the Treaty are often summed up as: partnership; protection; and participation. Partnership would mean granting Māori people and Māori institutions equal say with Pākehā in decision-making around science, such as what areas of research should be given priority over others. Protection would mean respecting Māori cultural sensibilities just as much as Pākehā ones in ethical deliberations over research on human subjects. Participation would mean ensuring that Māori and Pākehā have equal opportunities to become scientists and to benefit from science and technology. I can’t imagine that Brockie would object to any of that; so I presume he just didn’t know what “the principles of the Treaty” are.

Second, Brockie is simply wrong to assert that, in the humanities, “everybody’s opinions or beliefs can be of equal value and should never be challenged.” Of course, many humanities academics make the equal and opposite error of claiming that the sciences do not teach critical thinking, and therefore the humanities ought to be in charge. Nor are science and the humanities “parallel universes” with little to say to each other. To take just a couple of examples: history and archaeology greatly enrich each other, while literature and the arts contain a goldmine of long-term information about the human mind that can benefit psychology.

Personally I would go so far as to say that the humanities themselves constitute a science as rigorous and empirical as any other. As geology is the science of rocks, and astronomy the science of stars, the humanities are the science of meaning. I do share Brockie’s suspicion of postmodernist ideology, which in my opinion has greatly hampered progress in the humanities. But other scientific fields have also had their fads and fancies, such as behaviourism in psychology, or group selection in evolutionary biology.

Finally, while Brockie is strictly correct that traditional Māori belief “has its roots in the supernatural and vitalism”, he is mistaken if he thinks that this in any way distinguishes it from traditional Pākehā belief, with its heavens and its hell, its angels and devils and immortal souls, and its fixed Platonic or Aristotelian essences. I think Brockie here falls prey to a common confusion between two related, but distinct, meanings of the word “science".

If by “science” we mean any systematic endeavour to understand the world through strictly empirical investigation, then I quite agree with Brockie that this is the only source of reliable knowledge. But “science” in this sense does not exclude the knowledge of non-Western cultures, of which the traditional navigation methods that brought the ancestors of the Māori across the Pacific Ocean to these shores are a shining example.

If on the other hand by “science” we mean the body of knowledge that the West has gradually accumulated since Francis Bacon and Copernicus, then of course this tradition has drawn more heavily on European thought than on other cultures’. But “science” in this sense has no especial claim to be more reliable than other systematic, empirical traditions of knowledge.

I don’t claim to know very much about traditional Māori lore, and yet I can name four points on which it beat the West to the scientific punch off the top of my head:

• Western tradition gives the universe an eternally pre-existing God; Māori lore states that it began from nothing (Te Kore).
• Western tradition has God create plants and animals in separate kinds from the beginning; Māori lore acknowledges the familial kinship of all life.
• Western tradition puts the seat of consciousness and will in the heart; Māori lore puts it in the head.

And on a more mundane but practical note,

• When Western doctors were still cross-infecting patients left, right, and centre, Māori practitioners had long been guarding against sickness by washing their hands after dealing with blood.

I imagine it’s this sort of thing that the President of the Royal Society had in mind in recommending that scientists “embrace the research methodologies of multiple knowledge systems”, as Brockie complains. I can report that pharmacists are only now beginning to investigate traditional Māori healing practices (rongoā); an initial study found that many of the plants used contain pharmacologically useful substances – and that’s as far as they’ve got.

Obviously more progress needs to be made, and obviously it won’t be made by uncritically accepting whatever cultural traditions tell us. But it won’t be made by uncritically throwing them out either. Nor will it be made by walling off the different fields of knowledge from each other. “Sticking to one’s knitting” is not the way to go.

Reason is not the property of the West

The University of Otago’s second semester ends in October. I knew there were Summer School classes in January and February, because I’ve taken notes in them. I never knew there were also classes in November and December. But here I am. Turns out there’s a five-week course on titled “Introduction to the Māori World”, and one of the students taking it wants notes. My first class was last Tuesday. The lecture was about fundamental concepts in Māori culture, such as tapu and mana, and the polytheistic cosmology which underpins them.

A quick summary of that class. Tapu is of course the origin of the English word taboo, but it’s pronounced differently – both syllables are short and the stress is on the first one. Tapu is the presence or influence of an atua, a god. The gods are present everywhere, and one must treat them with deference and caution. But sometimes it is necessary to lift the tapu so that we humans can go about our ordinary lives without having to worry about it. Then, it becomes noa, which is simply the converse of tapu.

Which gods? On Tuesday we were introduced to four: Papa-tū-ā-nuku, Mother Earth; Tāne-mahuta, god of light and life and the forest; Tangaroa, god of all water, including the water in people’s bodies; and Ranginui, the Sky, Papa-tū-ā-nuku’s lover, who was separated from her by Tāne-mahuta to create the world of light. The gods are the ancestors of all life, including human beings. Most iwi (chiefdom-nations, though the word is usually translated “tribe”) trace their genealogy back to Tāne-mahuta. The chiefs belong to the elder line in each case.

Tangaroa’s dominion over water seems to be responsible for the tapu of blood, which in turn explains why women have a special power over tapu. A man can lift tapu by saying an incantation (a karakia) or using water, but a woman can lift it simply by virtue of being a woman, because women handle blood every month. When you enter or leave a marae – the space built at the hub of every Māori community to house formal gatherings – you pass through a gateway that symbolizes a woman’s legs, so that you don’t bring in any tapu you may have picked up on the outside.

Having just come back from Japan, I can’t help noticing the parallels with Shintō. There again, the kami are immanent in water, earth, and forests. Again, the kami are ancestors rather than creators of the human race, and the Imperial Family is the elder line of descent. And again you have that detail of the symbolic gateway, the torī in front of the shrine, through which you enter or leave the presence of divine power.

But there’s also a big difference. Japan is much more centralized than traditional Māori society, and you might expect to see that reflected in their religions – that Māoritanga would have lots of local spirits and Shintō would have a few big, important gods, like the pre-Christian Greek or Norse pantheons. In fact it’s the other way around. Each mountain, lake, river, and ancient tree in Japan has its own personal kami, but in tikanga Māori it is Tāne-mahuta in every patch of bush and Tangaroa in every body of water.

Mana is the other Māori word, besides tapu / taboo, that has been borrowed into English outside of New Zealand. Both syllables are short, so that to a New Zealand English speaker it sounds like “munna” – “monna” to an American. It’s been appropriated in crap fantasy books and games to denote a limiting resource for magic-users, like pixie-dust but slightly more badass. In fact mana is prestige, charisma, honour, dignity, authority; social power, not magical power. It’s about one’s standing with the gods. Duties and privileges in Māori culture are doled out entirely according to who has what kind of mana.

The Silver Chair

Lady Luna,

in light canoe,

By friths and shallows

of fretted cloudland

Cruises monthly;

with chrism of dews

And drench of dream,

a drizzling glamour

Enchants us – the cheat!

changing sometime

A mind to madness,

melancholy pale,

Bleached with gazing

on her blank count’nance

Orb’d and ageless.

In earth’s bosom

The shower of her rays,

sharp-feathered light

Reaching downward,

ripens silver,

Forming and fashioning

female brightness,

– Metal maidenlike.

Her moist circle

Is nearest earth.

        

My brother is wrong

Just in case this is the post where I pick up a reader outside of my circle of family and close friends: My brother’s name is Patrick, he’s five years younger than me, he used to have a LiveJournal but I presume he isn’t using it any more because he posted this as a Note on Facebook instead. It’s set to “public”, so you can read it here as long as you have a Facebook login, but you needn’t worry if you haven’t because I’m going to quote the whole thing in sequence through this response. (Although, as you’ll see, he does take after me to a certain extent in the general area of philosophical wibbling, he doesn’t write to quite the kind of length that I do.)
Patrick’s Note is uninformatively titled “A few ideas” and begins as follows:

In the beginning, the universe was created.
There are two things that together convince me of this:

1. The physical law of entropy; and
2. The philosophical ‘First Cause’ argument.

On running videos backwards

Not so easy, of course, with DVDs. You can search backwards, of course, but it skips back in little still-frames, you don’t see the action run backwards as you could with a video cassette if you rewound it without stopping it first. We didn’t have a TV at our house, let alone a video, but we got to watch a movie on the last day of school one year (I think it might have been Herbie Goes Bananas) and they ran the tape backwards when it was finished and we six-year-olds just laughed and laughed, it was all so funny.
I’ve heard, though without any titles or names that would help me Google it, that someone once actually made an entire movie that way – acted everything backwards, and also filmed everything backwards, so that when it was played things happened forwards but everything was subtly weird. But what makes it weird? What were we all laughing at when I was six?