Recently a writer named Caroline Haskins published a piece in the Outline, a New York-based media platform, with the somewhat provocative title “The Racist Language of Space Exploration.”
The piece has elicited much eye-rolling on social media and at least one rebuttal in Reason Magazine. The arguments in the article will be all too familiar to those who were forced to read “A People’s History of the United States” by the bad historian and Marxist scholar Howard Zinn while in school.
Essentially the article suggests that when people talk about colonizing space, they are invoking what, in the opinion of its author, is the unrelenting genocidal and racist settlement of the Americas. Writers such as Zinn maintain that the United States is an inherently evil country because it was built on a history that featured the dispossession of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. Therefore, the very words “colony” or “colonization” have inherent implications that will prove unsettling to some people.
The rebuttal in Reason puts away the whole forbidden word argument. Words have a context that can change their meaning. A colony, for instance, that dispossesses native peoples could be argued to be a bad thing. But the same colony can be a good thing if it evolves to become part of the greatest country in history (New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo aside) and a light and defender of human freedom. Both definitions can be true. Which one a person regards as most important reveals his or her attitudes toward America as a country.
Haskins goes further, however, and suggests that space exploration and colonization are inherently evil because they divert money needed for social programs, presumably including “Medicare for All.” The evil exists, even considering the fact that the conquest (to use a trigger word) of space will be undertaken in part by private entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These are rich, white men who are spending money for their self-aggrandizement, in Haskins’ view.
The argument that space spending is immoral because it comes at the expense of social programs is both ancient and discredited. Liberals like former Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale and former Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., inveighed on the floor of the Senate against the Apollo program for diverting money, in their view, from the Great Society anti-poverty programs. The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, a ’60s civil rights leader, led a protest of the launch of Apollo 11 to argue the same thing these white politicians were stating in Congress.
But the United States has already conducted a real-world experiment delving into the question of space vs. social programs. The federal government canceled the last three Apollo missions to the moon, delayed the building of a space station, and deferred the dream of lunar bases and expeditions to Mars indefinitely. Meanwhile, Washington poured trillions of dollars into social programs over the ensuing decades. The result is that humans have never returned to the moon or gone to Mars and, by all measures, social problems such as poverty and lack of education and healthcare have become worse for those at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.
The significant feature of President Trump’s push to move America into deep space is that it does involve commercial partnerships. This space alliance will not only reduce the cost of space exploration but also monetize it by gaining access to the almost limitless mineral wealth that exists on the moon and asteroids. That wealth could spark a space-based industrial revolution that could generate economic growth and job creation unprecedented in human history.
Indeed, growth and job creation are the keys to addressing social problems, not socialist schemes of wealth redistribution. Trump has made a great start along those lines by cutting taxes and regulations. The economic boom has been shared by all Americans, including African-Americans and Hispanics. Space exploration and space colonies, even if the words trigger some people, will serve to supercharge that process.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space and politics, has published a political study of space exploration titled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?, as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond. He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.
