From Nationalism to Scientific Civilization to Spacefaring Civilization
A Plausible Pathway from Nation-States to Interstellar Civilization
In Space Exploration Escalation I considered the counterfactual of the Apollo moon landings being a spur to Soviet space efforts, so that an American achievement in space was followed a Soviet achievement in space (as was more-or-less the case during the Founding Era of 1957–1972), in a tit-for-tat escalation that led to growing spacefaring capacity on the part of the two nation-states. Such a counterfactual would have represented an idealized form of non-violent conflict. This ideal is not merely speculative, but has some basis in history.
In my Bound in Shallows I quoted Eleni Panagiotarakou to the effect that:
“The US and USSR utilized the space fight and planetary exploration programs as an assertion of superiority. What made this conflict extraordinary was the fact that it was a nonviolent war.” (Eleni Panagiotarakou, “Agonal Conflict and Space Exploration,” chapter 47 in The Ethics of Space Exploration, edited by James S.J. Schwartz and Tony Milligan, London: Springer International Publishing, 2016)
In another paper by Panagiotarakou, she elaborated the same theme, and made the connection between non-violent conflict and the Greek agon:
“Insofar as the Cold War was nonviolent, and insofar as it prompted the two main political and military protagonists to engage in a competitive endeavour of superiority (e.g., Space Race), it resembled the ancient Greek spirit of agon whereby the objective was not to annihilate one’s opponent but to surpass them in a struggle for excellence.” (Eleni Panagiotarakou, “War — What Is It Good For? Nonviolent War as an Impetus for Space Exploration”)
Panagiotarakou, in drawing upon Homer’s agon (ἀγών) is drawing from an ancient tradition that had also interested Nietzsche, who, in his short essay, “Homer’s Contest,” spelled out the nature of Greek competition:
“Every talent must unfold itself in fighting: that is the command of Hellenic popular pedagogy, whereas modern educators dread nothing more than the unleashing of so-called ambition… And just as the youths were educated through contests, their educators were also engaged in contests with each other. The great musical masters, Pindar and Simonides, stood side by side, mistrustful and jealous; in the spirit of contest, the sophist, the advanced teacher of antiquity, meets another sophist; even the most universal type of instruction, through the drama, was meted out to the people only in the form of a tremendous wrestling among the great musical and dramatic artists.”
The agonal conflict of Homer’s Greece was often violent and brutal; the quest for excellence (which, for the Greeks, was the same as virtue — areté) did not come without a price. There is an inscription from the island of Thera that graphically illustrates the reality Greeks vying to prove their excellence:
“A boxer’s victory is gained in blood” (Kaibel, G. 1878. Epigrammata Graeca. Berlin, no. 942)
Of Greece during its Golden Age Alfred North Whitehead wrote:
“Even if you take a tiny oasis of peculiar excellence, the type of modern man who would have most chance of happiness in ancient Greece at its best period is probably (as now) an average professional heavyweight boxer, and not an average Greek scholar from Oxford or Germany. Indeed, the main use of the Oxford scholar would have been his capability of writing an ode in glorification of the boxer.” (Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Chap. XIII, “Requisites for Social Progress”)
Still, “games” like boxing were better than outright warfare (cf. “Ancient Combat Sports: Combat at the ancient Olympics,” by Michael B. Poliakoff and “Boxing Gloves of the Ancient World,” by Steven Ross Murray), though games and warfare were not mutually exclusive. We recall that, in The Iliad, the Trojan War was temporarily halted in order to celebrate the funeral games in honor of Patroclus:
The hero’s words the willing chiefs obey,
From their tired bodies wipe the dust away,
And, clothed anew, the following games survey.And now succeed the gifts ordain’d to grace
The youths contending in the rapid race:
A silver urn that full six measures held,
By none in weight or workmanship excell’d:
Sidonian artists taught the frame to shine,
Elaborate, with artifice divine;
Whence Tyrian sailors did the prize transport,
And gave to Thoas at the Lemnian port:
From him descended, good Eunaeus heir’d
The glorious gift; and, for Lycaon spared,
To brave Patroclus gave the rich reward:
Now, the same hero’s funeral rites to grace,
It stands the prize of swiftness in the race.
A well-fed ox was for the second placed;
And half a talent must content the last.
Achilles rising then bespoke the train:
“Who hope the palm of swiftness to obtain,
Stand forth, and bear these prizes from the plain.”
Thus the most brilliant civilization in the western tradition, and the point of origin of most of the distinctive concepts of western civilization, was driven by competition that was often violent, and this violence often took the form of wars between Greek city-states (the polis) and alliances of Greek city-states. Agonal conflict in the ancient world was not a substitute for warfare, but rather an accoutrement of war.
The same could be said of agonal conflict in the modern world, that is, that it has been an accoutrement of war and not a substitute for war, but we have at least glimpsed the possibility of some kind of surrogate form of warfare, and have acted upon this to a limited extent. The Cold War revealed a spectrum of forms of conflict, from the non-violent competition of the Space Race to brutal proxy wars in third world nation-states. At its best, this superpower agonal conflict was inspiring and offered hope to all the world; at its worst, it was as brutal as any conflict in human history, ancient, medieval, or modern.
And the same could be said again today of hybrid warfare, which has taken over from the Cold War and postulated a spectrum of conflict across many theaters of war and many modalities of conflict. Today we are better at avoiding open conflict, and limiting open conflict when it does occur, so that the vision of a purely non-violent agonal conflict seems near to being within our grasp.
Elsewhere in his “Homer’s Contest” essay Nietzsche says of Hesiod’s praise for the goddess Eris (strife):
“She urges even the unskilled man to work, and if one who lacks property beholds another who is rich, then he hastens to sow in similar fashion and to plant and to put his house in order; the neighbour vies with the neighbour who strives after fortune. Good is this Eris to men. The potter also has a grudge against the potter, and the carpenter against the carpenter; the beggar envies the beggar, and the singer the singer.”
In this way there is not only competition within societies, but entire societies enter into competition with rival societies, and during the Cold War we saw such a planetary-scale rivalry as two geographically consolidated powers — NATO and the Warsaw Pact — vied with each other for control of our homeworld. As with the Greeks, who eventually ruined their civilization through the Peloponnesian War, at times this Cold War rivalry was aspirational, and at times it was contemptible. Despite our many contemptible failures, the Cold War was defused without recourse to a great war between the rival powers engaged in that struggle; the outcome could have been far worse.
Today the rivalry that entertains the geostrategic community is that between the US and China (less so that between the US and Russia), and there is, in some quarters, a certain sense of inevitability about a future great conflict between the US and China as the Chinese economy grows to eventually take its place as the largest in the world, and these two largest economies in the world face each other down over the Pacific Ocean. But there is nothing inevitable about a great war between the US and China, but whereas it would be utopian to suppose that these rival powers could simply forget their rivalry, it would be eminently reasonable to suppose that the rivalry could be sublimated into non-violent conflict.
What could take the place of a violent conflict, with its attendant destruction of life, treasure, and infrastructure? We can hope that some heroic agon will be preferred to military conflict, as was most constructively the case during the Cold War with the Space Race. If the rival energies of China and the US could be directed into some form of sublimated conflict in which destruction played no part, or a very small part, the entire world could benefit from the resulting escalation of two rival societies attempting to best each other.
For example, the US has been the leader in science and technology, and in the educational institutions that produce science and technology, but China is catching up to the US and potentially threatens its scientific preeminence. (Cf. “Western Academia’s Activism Gridlock Threatens Its Global Status” by Wael Taji) China has a particle accelerator under construction that will be larger than the LHC (cf. China’s Planning to Build The World’s Largest Particle Collider, Twice The Size of The LHC). Given the failure of the US to fund the SSC, once China has completed its construction of the largest particle accelerator in the world, China will become the preeminent venue of experimental particle physics. China has already constructed FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope), one of the largest radio-telescopes in the world.
The willingness of China to fund major scientific projects such as these points to their desire to compete in science on a planetary scale. Does the Chinese leadership understand that contemporary Chinese civilization is driven forward by science no less than western civilization? Do national governments more generally invest in research for their future viability, or for reasons of prestige and the ability to build better weapons systems? Does it matter? Should it matter? If civilization advances, politicians enjoy prestige, and military contractors get rich, can rivalry over scientific achievement serve as a form of agonal conflict?
National competition over science — e.g., my particle accelerator is bigger than your particle accelerator — could be another form of non-violent competition with constructive rather than destructive consequences, as I described in “Space Exploration Escalation,” Deng Xiaoping, who presided over China’s transition to a market economy, pragmatically said, “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” If science could serve as a focus of competition, it could catch mice by serving the purposes both of humanity and of nationalism. If scientific competition were to become the accepted form of rivalry and currency of national prestige, rather than more conventional forms of rivalry, from such a rivalry a properly scientific civilization — a civilization that takes science as its central project — could emerge as an epiphenomenal byproduct of national competition. This would benefit every human being on the planet.
One could easily imagine scenarios in which scientific competition among nation-states for national prestige could take on a darker tone, and reveal itself to be a brutal as Greek boxers; we would have to accept this darker side of science in exchange for the end of destructive conventional conflict, but it would be a deal worth making. To give a concrete instance of what I mean, Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto once said that if India built a nuclear weapon, “…we will eat grass, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own.” Could we rally this kind of national competition to the support of scientific preeminence? Would people be willing to eat grass or go hungry in order that an ambitious nation-state might build a bigger radio-telescope or a bigger particle accelerator than its neighbor? It would be this level of commitment that would be necessary in order to shift conflict from a destructive form to a constructive form.
In the film Rollerball, violent sports competition had come to replace war, though the sports teams in the film represented brands and industries, not nation-states. Even this would be better than the destructiveness of war, and we can see a limited form of this in contemporary spectator sports culture, in which sports teams serve as surrogates for group identity and interests, focusing the emotional energy of large swathes of the public. It can be done if the motivation is there — if the stakes are sufficiently high, any demand for sacrifice will be met as long as it is understood that this sacrifice will contribute to ultimate success, or even a reasonable chance for success. As Nietzsche once wrote, he who has a why can bear any how. Thus if the population of a nation-state has to eat grass in order to fund ever larger particle accelerators to fulfill the megalomaniac ambitions of the political class, the struggle and the sacrifice would be worth it; this is better by far than that nation-states should bomb each other.
If the transformation of big science into gigantic science is perceived as a danger to Earth, we can put these experiments in space. With gargantuan particle accelerators in space we would get two-for-one existential risk mitigation: removing a potential danger on Earth, and building infrastructure in space, which could lead to human redundancy through an off-world population — again, epiphenomenally. Another gargantuan scientific project that could only be built in space and would have the same space infrastructure knock-on effects would be this: “An infinitely expandable space radiotelescope” by V. I. Buyakas, et al. Gigantic particle accelerators or radio-telescopes in space could mean the epiphenomenal emergence of a properly spacefaring civilization from the epiphenomenal emergence of properly scientific civilization, originally driven by national competition.
This is how we must learn to think about history: our future history will of necessity be a human, all-too-human affair, but it does not need to be a destructive affair. We can harness the energies of human, all-too-human rivalry and conflict, even of nationalism, national pride, and indeed jingoism, and use it to better ourselves if only we can disillusion ourselves of the utopian dream, which turns out, upon closer inspection, to be a dead end.
