Every Age Gets the Mythology It Deserves
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lareviewofbooks.org
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux
Greek mythology became very popular because there was a spotlight on mainland Greece, the Peloponnese, and the islands around it. The Greeks had felt a reason to change for the better. Many traders would bring new innovations like the alphabet and a simple notion of wanting to be better off than their parents before them. They believed in progress. Many ideas of thought and telling stories brought that progress.
The very fact that our language, thinking, and many ways of modern life are directly inspired by Greek myth goes to show the foundation they laid for us.
This is exactly how I feel about space exploration around this time. There's just something special when there's a first time in history where there's a spotlight on one major challenge and the culture of thinking and progress emerges.
The amount of stories that has came from space exploration has brought some kind of fantastic resonance. They tell us about ourselves in ways that are not religious or preachy. Some may even serve as warnings just like the Greek stories of Icarus flying too close to the sun and drowning in the sea. But we come to admire these stories as well. There's something glorious in trying to do something never been done before, even if it's doomed.
The best part about myth is that nobody can tell you what it means. It's personal. It speaks to each of us differently and how we think about the world.
Great article!
This is an 'interesting' analysis, by which I absolutely do not mean anything close to 'correct'.
There's a lot that's strange here, I'll just pick out one example. > wanting to be better off than their parents before them
Can you explain how this is a particular Greek thing and how it's missing from neighboring contemporary cultures? And how do you square this with, say, 'Works and Days' and the various Ages within?
I'm assuming 'it' refers to: > wanting to be better off than their parents before them and I'm pretty much coming up blank in terms of examples. If you're thinking of the Uranus->Chronus->Zeus sequence, that's hardly the same thing.
Cronus and Zeus were both motivated by revenge: > But great Cronos the wily took courage and answered his dear mother: “Mother, I will undertake to do this deed, for I reverence not our father of evil name, for he first thought of doing shameful things.”
and > But when she was about to bear Zeus, the father of gods and men, then she besought her own dear parents, Earth and starry Heaven, to devise some plan with her that the birth of her dear child might be concealed, and that retribution might overtake great, crafty Cronos for his own father and also for the children whom he had swallowed down.
And in fact Zeus took steps to ensure the cycle did not continue: > Now Zeus, king of the gods, made Metis his wife first, and she was wisest among gods and mortal men. But when she was about to bring forth the goddess bright-eyed Athene, Zeus craftily deceived her with cunning words and put her in his own belly, as Earth and starry Heaven advised. For they advised him so, to the end that no other should hold royal sway over the eternal gods in place of Zeus; for very wise children were destined to be born of her, first the maiden bright-eyed Tritogeneia, equal to her father in strength and in wise understanding; but afterwards she was to bear a son of overbearing spirit, king of gods and men. But Zeus put her into his own belly first, that the goddess might devise for him both good and evil. (all from Theogony, https://www.theoi.com/Text/HesiodTheogony.html)
Now for heroes, which ones do you mean? Not Cadmus, not Orestes, not Odysseus, not Achilles, not Bellerophon, not Hercules. Oedipus killed his father and Perseus killed his grandfather, but neither was intentional.
I still believe many of the stories you list here remain relevant to my original comment (especially Uranus->Chronus->Zeus) and I'd even add a few like Prometheus, Apollo, and Jason who had motives of improving the next generation/humans/children/etc.
Now if the article had stated that space flight was ONE of the fields in which much progress was I wouldn’t have argued that?
Just take a look at 'fictional mythology', as in 'stories and media': one or several folks take a long trip and fight a common foe. That's the kind of story you'd tell around a campfire in Europe, ca. 5000 BC, and that's the story you can tell in cinemas today. One guy sat down and thought really hard until he got an idea? Bo-ring.
The Space Race fulfils that structure: You got your heroes cadre (astronauts), their journey (both figuratively in meticulous training and actual in the journey across space), a common foe (the deadly emptiness of space // the cosmonauts // the communists).
We don't have Star Wars-like movie phenomenons about computers and vaccines, and we especially don't have music like this [1] that would make us dream about computers the same way it makes us dream about space.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMoCM_FgLP8
Later edit: I'll just blatantly copy-paste a high-voted comment from that YT link which better explains it:
"""
I was born in the USSR, and in the 80s we thought about space, other planets, stars. We read good science fiction. We dreamed of participating in all this. We wanted to be pilots, build rockets, explore space. We listened to news about cosmonauts, without distinction of Soviet or American. We thought that space was a place for cooperation of all mankind. We wanted peace and development.
But, everything collapsed in one moment. Now children do not want to go into space. They don't want to be like Gagarin or Armstrong. They want to be like Kardashian or Deripaska. This is a tragedy for many of us.
And this music is just a reminder of what we have lost.
"""
Man, this really hurts to read.
But there is some hope. As I was was saying to a prominent lisper just the other day, I think "space and the planet" is something young people are refocussing on. I sense a long overdue and deep rejection of "fast cars, money and fame" in the air.
Actors/actresses, singers etc. would be famous, well regarded and so on, but I think they were seen more like a sort of "aristocracy" while, at least for boys, the aspirational models were more in the field of sports.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026596460...
The collapse is a tragedy for all of us.
I do see a change, we are starting to see that people look at i.e. Greta Thunberg as a heroine/role model. So there is a shift underway.
but it is a slow shift, and takes a generation to play out.
This is some idealistic view of the past that most people succumb to. Not sure if it’s hardwired in our brains or just a consequence of fading memories.
The kids will be just fine, don’t worry.
The kids will be fine. They're getting better every generation.
The disappointment of a "space-age" generation, who grew up on promises they'd be living on moon-bases and zooming about in spacecraft, turned to emptiness when around 2000 the new millennium turned out to be about just more Earth bound in-fighting. 2001 should have been the great Odyssey, but tuned out to be a drab journey towards neo-fascism and isolation. Psychologically, as a result we started to create our own personal space capsules, cut off from the rest of humanity.
The militarisation of space was glorious in 1977. The Battle of Britain redone with X-Wings, in our mythology George Lucas cast space as a battleground "Far Far Away". If the "Home before Christmas" of WW1 is any indication, young men romanticise far away battlegrounds, as do hawks and pacifists alike, because at least they are somewhere else. The reality of space militarisation is unfolding 50 miles above our heads, as spy satellites and drones delivering death from above. For poor, brown people in Overthereistan, space has been the enemy for a decade, and cloud cover is a friend.
Colonisation, cooperation, and trade are another part of our mythology. Sworn enemies could unite against a common foe of the void, With infinity in all directions, humans would finally be freed of their petty border disputes and overcrowding amidst infinite resources.
But the ISS is coming to end of life, with no replacement in the planning. I was saddened by the effect of the Russo-Ukraine war on the departure of astronauts from the ISS. It seems like a breakdown and taint of parochialism beyond Earth straight from Arthur C. Clarke's story book. Yet I was mocked and down-voted here on HN for expressing the mildest solidarity with Russian geeks who might also be feeling the same disappointment.
Around 2000 I also remember feeling that some of most dangerous minds on the planet are lawyers, who at the turn of century were trying to give serious credence to people owning Moon plots. Despite international agreements, territorial disputes over orbital space and ridiculous "claims" to bits of other planets looks set to grow.
It is our Kierkegaardian paradox that humankind loves mythologies we can't quite live up to. But that's what mythologies are for I guess.
What people in 2000 years care about will be... pretty arbitrary, I think.
The author of this piece seems to think space is the ur myth of modernity which I don’t think it is. One of the characteristics of our age is many myth narratives that overlap and ebb and flow.
The coolest thing about our age though is that many of them come true to some limited extent at least. We don’t get Star Trek but we do go somewhere.
To me it feels like the "new space age" has been ending since at least the mid-2010s. Note how Trump's Space Force was largely met with ridicule, public awareness of SpaceX petered out as it went from experimental to production, and more recently Putin's threat to pull out of the ISS largely didn't have any impact beyond worries about where it might crash if it did.
The question is what the next mythology will be (or already is). Since the 2010s we've seen instability in the EU, a rise of the far right in Western nations and Christian conservatism in the US, conspiracy groups like QAnon (or its equivalents, often tied to Covid denialism) entering the mainstream, a global pandemic being mostly allowed to run its course, the catastrophic end (for now) of the American forever war in the Middle East and multiple supply chain disruptions. Where do we imagine ourselves going from here?
SpaceX's Starship rocket is in very active development. If Starship flies and lands, it will fundamentally change humanity's relationship to space. Given the the success of SpaceX's Falcon rockets, there's good reason to believe that they'll be able to pull it off.
The point-to-point travel on Earth is no less vaporware than the Tesla truck. No, not the Cybertruck. The EV truck envisioned to eventually run with FSD. The thing that sounds revolutionary until you do the maths and realize it can transport barely any cargo compared to all existing alternatives because of the weight of the batteries it needs, even if you use the most optimistic pie in the sky promises of storage efficiency Tesla published at the time. Even if you ignore the health issues (e.g. horrible G forces, travelling on a massive tank of explosives) to do this safely requires such a distance between the "spaceports" and population centers that it barely comes out on top of existing aircraft (let alone high speed aircraft like the Concorde, which was ultimately scrapped because the speed advantage wasn't worth the drawbacks).
So this leaves either travel to/from a space station or travel to/from a planetary body.
The ISS is a research project and already showing its age, so "space station" probably would have to be something else. Humans don't deal well with prolonged stays in zero gravity, so a "space hotel" is probably not going to work out even if you work out the economic problems and ignore the social ones (e.g. staff either having to be cycled out very frequently or being worked to death). Building "space infrastructure" comes with many of the same problems but also requires continuous resupplies, which will still cost an incredible amount of fuel if the cargo is at all heavy (as industrial supplies tend to be).
The moon could be a more practical idea given it at least has some semblance of gravity and at least shields you from the cosmic horrors on one side (i.e. from below) but any attempt at permanent residency would still impose massive health problems and require a constant stream of supplies and moon dust simply isn't all that profitable a resource.
Mars sounds cool but is simply too far away. Any attempt to make it hospitable would likely take on the order of thousands of years if not more while still requiring a constant stream of supplies (but now at an even greater distance, a much more constrained time window and with radio communication having a very noticeable delay). Plus anyone actually going there would have to not only not go crazy on the journey but also maintain mental health sitting in a featureless desert with no atmosphere and knowing that this is where they will die.
Space is exciting, but humans are very much made for living on Earth and any attempt at expansion will require first stabilizing life on Earth for at least the next few thousand years -- which is pretty much the opposite direction we're currently heading in even if you ignore Climate Change. A bigger badder rocket ship won't change that.
Don't get me wrong, I very much used to be a Musk stan for a while too and I actually got the Hotwheels model of the Tesla he sent to space sitting right next to me right now, but even at the time I realized that for all my excitement about that stunt, nobody outside my tech bubble actually cared about that.
Reusable rockets were cool outside my bubble, for about the thirty seconds it took to watch the recording. The black hole I mentioned was met with amazement, but realistically the reactions were in the same ballpark as those to the usual "super moon" news reports. None of this stuff had a profound impact and neither will a bigger rocket or a new space shuttle.
I think the general state of the Republican party is worse than Q cult. The elected officials are scared of their constituents. And the constituents are overwhelmingly white nationalists who are scared of losing white dominated civil society. And have moved past mere vocal opposition to representative democracy, to that of using violence to inhibit representative democracy. We have examples of this in American history even aside from the Civil War, Bleeding Kansas and Jim Crow era laws, and the KKK, and American Nazi rallies at Madison Square garden.
It's not surprising to me that a majority of registered Republicans consider January 6th patriotic, not sedition. They don't believe in everyone being represented as much as they don't believe (or like) the idea of soon being a racial minority as if there's something wrong about how this country treats second class citizens. Thee psyche of the culture is they know this second class citizenry bad for that's class and they like it this way and insist on preserving it. You see this worry strikingly every night in Tucker Carlson's show. Insisting the end of white privilege is coming, that this would be terrible, and should be prevented.
100 years ago people didn't have electricity, indoor lighting, cars, appliances, dishwashers, highways, roads, airplanes, the internet, radio, film, TV, internet, mobile, GPS, taxes were 5% and the gov. provided almost no services i.e. no fire services, hardly any police, barely healthcare anywhere, maybe 3% went to University (strictly elite) and maybe 40% finished high school, running clean water (!), plumbing, voting for non land-owning men and all women, there was no contraception, abortions were dangerous and unheard of, infant mortality was 10% under the age of 1, there were no vaccines, no penicillin (~80% of operations were amputations! you could die from any wound that became infected), no insulin.
And that's just getting started.
'Space Flight' is a cherry.
The 'second phase' of the industrial revolution of the 20th century is a total 'explosion' of things happening unlike any time in history.
Sadly I think we are becoming postmodern and disconnected, cultural foundations are fraying (we will treat culture like nature i.e. 'we like it but really an afterthought'). I think we will be 'materially prosperous' in the future, but I have little hope that we will necessarily be 'great'. We'll see.
Maybe indoor plumbing - but that was only 'kind of common' in the cities, not in rural areas, and cities weren't even quite half the population, tipping point for even that wasn't for a few more decades. Radios were just starting, they were not common.
Space flight is not the significant 'thing' of the 20th century.
It's just an experiment.
We are not going to colonize Mars or travel the Solar System in any meaningful way for a long time.
Life on Mars would be brutal and inhumane - locked in a dormitory forever? We will put a few people there, but that's it probably for many decades.
We could have feasibly done this on the Moon already - we haven't because it's just too expensive for not much benefit.
Maybe mining some asteroids.
Otherwise, nothing hugely meaningful is going to happen in space, it's just too empty, too difficult and the benefits are marginal.
Meanwhile on earth, the pace of 'change' is nothing like we've seen it before.