Work in Progress: Space Ethics and the Burden of the Highway Planner
Friday 23 September 2022
Today was the SESA (Space Education and Strategic Applications) Space Ethics Panel, organized and chaired by Michelle Hanlon of For All Moonkind, and with Frank White, Dan Hawk, and myself as panelists. Each of us spoke ten or fifteen minutes, then took questions from Michelle and from the audience. The panel was announced as follows:
Space Ethics — Addressing the Burden of the Highway Planner
Peter B. Fleming wrote in 1943 that “The highway planner needs to approach his/her tasks in a prayerful attitude. He or she is building not only for the present but for the long future, and thereby helping to shape civilization.” Indeed, the US highway system ultimately shaped and fundamentally altered society in ways that could not have been predicted. Humanity is now poised to lay the foundation for what is essentially an interstellar highway. We cannot prevent unintended consequences, but we can prepare for them. This panel will discuss ethical considerations of space exploration including the tyranny of distance, planetary provincialism and how our ethical thinking will, or must, evolve to sustain a future as a multiplanetary civilization.
Last year during another space ethics event, the Ethics, Regulation, Law and Treaty Working Group of the NSS-NIAC-TransAstra Space Settlement Workshop (mentioned in a PS to newsletter 157), I had brought this quote from Peter Fleming to the attention of Michelle (I had found the quote in Earl Swift’s excellent book The Big Roads, about the building of the US superhighway system) and she chose this as the theme of today’s panel.
At the end of the panel Michelle announced her intention to form the Institute on the Ethics of Space Exploration, naming those of us on the panel as the original members. If these plans pan out I will be very pleased to be associated with this effort. In writing up some notes prior to the panel I found that there are a great many interesting problems about the ethics of exploration that I would like to elaborate further, and there are any number of problems of space ethics that interest me.
For my brief presentation I wrote out about six pages (about the length of one of my longer newsletters), but I didn’t attempt to just read this out, since I have learned that reading a paper to a live event is a buzz kill. Also, I have been told that I drone on in a particularly soporific way when I read, but I know that I can be reasonably engaging when I speak extemporaneously. So I took my six page document, cut out all the fat and reduced it to talking points written out in incomplete sentences and a few quotes that I wanted to get right word-for-word. As I spoke (without slides; Frank and Dan had a few slides) I referred to my notes. This was a reasonable compromise as my notes reminded me of the points I wanted to make, but I wasn’t confined to a script. And indeed not being tied to a script allowed me to riff on a few themes. One thing I said extemporaneously that I will use when I write up this material later is that some of us explore the world through experimentation, while some of us experiment with the world through exploration. This was part of my exposition of how the concept of exploration is like experimentation, so that the two should be considered two faces of the same coin of scientific discovery: exploration and experimentation are complementary.
Another point I made spontaneously in my presentation, but which I had been working toward in working on the material, is that there is a tension between the effort to make our principles and our judgments coincide, and our cognitive bias that pulls our judgments in a direction that does not accord with our principles. Is there any force that distorts our principles as dependably as cognitive bias distorts our judgments? One could easily suggest that idealism, religion, and our desire to appear better than we are all pull our principles in a direction that has little to do with our judgments.
However, there is another problem here, which is that of self-deception. In desiring to appear better than we are, we may claim to believe in (and act upon) a principle that we do not in fact believe in (or act upon). If this desire is conscious, then we deceive others; if the desire is unconscious, then we deceive ourselves. Both forms of deception are distinct from being confused about what principles we actually hold. And here, too, in regard to being confused about what principles we actually hold, it can be a matter of deceptive appearances. We may mistake subtly different and apparently similar principles for each other, and we can make this mistake out of mere sloppiness, or because, again, we subconsciously want to appear to be the better person. All of these distinctions need to be made in order to understand exactly what is going on, which is usually not apparent prima facie. These are questions that are not only ethical, but also overlap with metaphysics (because of the appearance/reality distinction) and philosophy of history (because history, whether personal or communal, may be very different from our interpretation of it).
I wrote above that speaking from notes was a reasonable compromise, but it is still a compromise. A fully extemporaneous conversation tends to be more interesting and feel less canned, but a fully extemporaneous conversation is a different thing from a presentation. All presentations are a kind of compromise. At the beginning we all put too much on our slides, and eventually you learn to put only as much as you need on your slides to cue you on what to say next. Where the audiovisual setup is good, and you have a big screen behind you for the audience and a clearly visible computer screen in front of you, you can face the audience and have what you need in order to keep the presentation going without reading anything word-for-word. That is the ideal, and I have approached in a couple of times. It doesn’t always work so well.
In the conversation both Frank and Dan outlined positions that I consider quite close to the idea of space as a blank slate for humanity, which I have written against on my occasions. Insofar as we conceptualize space as a blank slate in which we will do things right for the first time, unlike our sad history here on Earth, we adopt a quasi-utopian position. Moreover, insofar as one acknowledges it as a law of history that utopian dreams will inevitably become dystopian nightmares, setting up space development as a utopian exercise is setting up the enterprise to issue in dystopian consequences.
However, there is something of a fine line between the idea of a blank slate and the idea of starting over from lessons learned. I have nothing to say against learning the lessons of the past, and indeed I would strongly advocate for all planning exercises to be understood in the light of history. The utopian impulse comes (in part) from the idea that we can cut ourselves loose from history, so that there is a profound difference between the idea of going forward in the light of lessons learned, and going forward to populate a blank slate; the former keeps history ever-present, while the latter denies or renounces history.
Here Nietzsche’s three categories of history from The Use and Abuse of History are relevant. Nietzsche posited monumental history, which consists of the heroic deeds of heroic men that serve as our inspiration and our model, antiquarian history, which is the reverence we have for the past, which can sap the spirit of the appetite to project itself into the future, and critical history, which brings history before the bar of justice, to condemn it if necessary. Now, if that history in the light of which our planning occurs is monumental history, that will propel us into the future. If, instead, our historical guide is antiquarian history, it will be difficult for us to define ourselves over and against the past, as an excess of piety toward the past can prevent us from transcending it. If, finally, our historical guide is critical history, we may be able to reform ourselves of formerly dishonorable actions, but an excess of zeal in condemning the past also condemns the exemplars of monumental history, and tends to nihilism.
The whole point of Nietzsche’s pamphlet is that history should serve life, and that when history becomes an end in itself, it tends to suck the vitality out of life. I don’t agree with this, but Nietzsche’s critique is one we cannot afford to neglect, and, as I have used Nietzsche’s categories above, it is relevant and applicable. The great age of space exploration, if it ever arrives, will need the resources of history at its command, and it will have need of exactly the kind of history that Nietzsche envisioned:
“Every man and nation needs a certain knowledge of the past, whether it be through monumental, antiquarian, or critical history, according to his objects, powers, and necessities. The need is not that of the mere thinkers who only look on at life, or the few who desire knowledge and can only be satisfied with knowledge; but it has always a reference to the end of life, and is under its absolute rule and direction. This is the natural relation of an age, a culture and a people to history; hunger is its source, necessity its norm, the inner plastic power assigns its limits. The knowledge of the past is only desired for the service of the future and the present, not to weaken the present or undermine a living future.” (section 4)
At the present juncture of history (the present conjuncture, in Braudel’s terminology), the critical spirit dominates, but clearly Nietzsche thought that monumental, antiquarian, or critical history could serve the needs of life, depending upon the society in question, its needs, and the ends it strives to realize.
As I see it, the projection of humanity beyond Earth is an heroic enterprise, and for an heroic enterprise it is monumental history that best serves; the present regime of critical history, by turns positivistic and nihilistic, will not serve that project. Is it serving society? That is to say, is the present regime of critical history adequately serving a society, such that that society is the kind to flourish in the light of critical history? If this question is answered in the affirmative, then we do not, at present, have the kind of society that can project itself out into the cosmos.
Of course, the world today is a hodge-podge of cultures, societies, and civilizations all sharing the same planet and impolitely elbowing each other for lack of room. We can easily see, from an outsider’s perspective, how much better it would be to gain some space and put some distance between competing factions, but to a great many people fully immersed in this planetary shoving match, it is not always so apparent.
Those who secretly — or not so secretly — like the pushing and the shoving and jostling and the competition find their excuses in critical history to undermine the vision of a spacefaring humanity in which all these energies, consumed at present in petty squabbles, would take on a heroic aspect and would project themselves upward and outward.
All this about Nietzsche and his categories of history was to illustrate how history can and does enter into present deliberations and actions. What needs to be done is to make a more careful analysis of what exactly is involved in learning the lessons of the past. Must we celebrate (monumental history), revere (antiquarian history), or condemn (critical history) the past in order to make use of it in the present? The idea of “lessons learned” is about as familiar and common-sensical as any idea could be, and precisely for this reason it has largely eluded closer examination. Now is the time for such a closer examination.
