“Europe was once full of two kinds of people,” a German politician explained. “One type of European was obedient, rule-following, with their feet firmly planted in the ground. The second kind was risk-taking, adventurous, and independent. Then one day, the second group all got on a boat and sailed to America.”
This European “origin story” of America is a beautiful one. America’s history is one of explorers, frontiersmen, and rule-breakers. The pilgrims and early settlers, like the later immigrants from all over the world, all came here as an act of venturing out into the unknown. We have self-selected for explorers.
Our expansion West has occupied America’s collective memory for decades. There’s a reason Westerns are probably our most numerous genre of movie and pulp fiction. The “great American novel,” Huckleberry Finn, is about a boy and his companion venturing out beyond their known world.
The books we read our children are disproportionately about the frontier or about explorers. The Little House on the Prairie wouldn’t have made it big in any other country.
This wanderlust didn’t start with Americans, it’s from a seed deeply planted in Western civilization: There’s Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, about perilous journeys across the sea, The Hobbit and the Chronicles of Narnia, 20th-century children’s classics from Britain.
But America is where wanderlust and frontiersmanship is strongest. The great inventions of the past 150 years are American. Entrepreneurs are welcomed nowhere so much as America. And America led the exploration of the final frontier: space.
That is, until recently. We abandoned the space shuttle earlier this decade. We’re letting Russians be the gatekeepers to the International Space Station.
We’ve trimmed our sails. Why? There are valid concerns. Some of it is about cost. The benefits of space exploration are unpredictable and distant, and the budget crunch of the federal government is obvious and present. In a time when both parties want to trim spending, dreamy talk of space travel is first on the chopping block.
Also, safety is a big concern. Two fatal accidents in the past generation have terrified NASA about losing more lives. This is understandable. But risk aversion goes too far. And in America today, it has gone too far.
Excessive risk aversion would have prevented Americans from developing the world-changing airline industry. Zero tolerance for casualties would have stanched westward expansion before it began.
Lack of solidarity also thwarts the urge for expansion. In the 1960s, when Americans walked on the moon, the nation was still blessed with a strong sense of national cohesion left over from World War II. The story of America since the 1960s has been one of dissolving national bonds and loss of national purpose.
It’s hard to have common enterprises when we don’t have cohesion. But joining together and aiming for higher goods is what brings us together.
Nothing is higher than the stars. We should go there.
