Apollo 11: Ayn Rand’s Journey Into Space
Omri Ceren from Dejafoo has written a very long blog post that uses an Ayn Rand essay about Apollo 11 to encourage suppport for the Burning Bush’s plan to make a pilgrimage to the Promised Land of Outer Space.
Before I go any further, let me say that if Ayn Rand couldn’t stand Ronald Reagan, there is not a rational mind’s chance in a mystical world that she would approve of George W. Bush. That doesn’t stop believers in the Burning Bush from invoking her name and quoting small fragments of her writing to justify their beliefs and actions, in the same way that Christians isolate single verses from the Bible that support their position while ignoring the overall context.
Rand said, “My philosophy [Objectivism] in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”(1)[pg. 343] Everything that she has ever written must be viewed in this context.
In her essay, “The Monument Builders,”(2) she discusses the moral bankruptcy of governments that seize freedom and private property for the sake of the “public good,” or for “prestige.” While she was specifically talking about the “undefinable chimera of a public monument–which is presented as a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or extorted money had paid for it,”(2)[pg. 89] the same principles apply to the forced public financing of space travel or anything else.
She writes:
Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.(2)[pg. 91]
It is not necessary to dig too deeply into Rand’s writing to find a quote that is anti-force or anti-tax; the quote above is just one example. Rand was consistent throughout her writings that taxation was immoral and a violation of human (individual) rights. A state-sponsored space program, financed by a mandatory seizure and redistribution of wealth produced by others, must be viewed as an assault on human rights.
Therefore, it is surprising that Rand would try to defend taxpayer-funded space exploration by calling those who object to it enemies of science and progress:
It is a protest against science and progress, it is the impertinent demand that man’s mind cease to function, that man’s ability be denied the means to move forward, that achievement stop- because the poor hold a first mortgage…
Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others - misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement… suffering is not a claim check and its relief is not the goal of existence… life is not one huge hospital… slums are not a substitute for stars.
In the context of her own definition of Objectivism, any individual who wanted to use his earned capital for something other than the Apollo 11 mission with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life would be an enemy of science and progress, when in fact he would just be living by Rand’s philosophy, holding reason as his absolute.
It is illuminating to look at Rand’s life at the time that she wrote this essay on Apollo 11. Her husband, Frank O’Conner had become an alcoholic. He had recently collapsed and been rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with arteriosclerosis. Rand was terrified of losing him. She was struggling “as she had always struggled, to keep alive her sense of life’s promise.” (3)[pg. 366]
She and Frank were invited by NASA to attend the Apollo 11 moon launching and she wrote euphorically about the event:
“What we had seen, in naked essentials–but in reality, not in a work of art–ws the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness. . .
No event in contemporary history was as thrilling, here on earth, as three moments of the mission’s climax: the moment when . . . there flashed the words: ‘Lunar module has landed’–the moment when the faint, gray shape of the actual module came shivering from the moon to the screen–and the moment when the shining white blob which was Neil Armstrong took his immortal first step . . . he spoke of man. ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”" (3)[pg. 366-367]
Apollo 11 took place at a time when Rand had:
…returned to writing articles for The Objectivist, which interested her less and less each month, and to teaching her young writers how to meet her literary requirements–she returned to a world she believed held nothing but irrationality and to a life that gave her, not rapture and fulfillment, but only dull, empty pain. The promise of life lived within her, but its voice grew fainter.(3)[366]
After she returned from the launch, Rand decided to stop publishing The Objectivist.
The circulation of the magazine had been falling dangerously; since the end of 1968–as her articles had grown more bitter, consisting predominantly of denounciations of evils–it had lost six thousand subscribers.(3) [pg. 367]
Rand’s state of mind when she wrote so glowingly about Apollo 11 is not foreign to many people in the world today. She was terrified of losing a loved-one and despondant over the irrationality of the world she lived in. Sound familiar?
We live in an age of terrorism, where we don’t know what will happen next, but we have the feeling that it won’t be good. A life free from government intervention and terrorist theats is almost a forgotten possibility. We are forced to accept the unscientific, irrational premise that others have a “right” to control our lives. Given this, the thought of using our resources and rational faculties to explore new worlds is very seductive; it plays on our desire to escape the day-to-day reality of our lives here on earth.
It is not necessary to leave planet earth to explore new worlds, however. There is a much less expensive path that will not cost billions but save billions. In the end we will be serving the highest goal of, to use his own mind to create his own happiness. It does not have to take years, it could happen in a single moment; a single moment that would change the course of human history in far more profound ways that taxpayer-funded space travel. That moment will come when individuals refuse to support mandatory coercive governments, when all government officials around the world resign.
Will this happen? Not likely. At this point in history, humans have been conditioned to live with institutionalized aggression and the mandatory irrationality of statism. The creation and enforcement of this artifical environment is putting selective pressure on rational minds in the gene pool. Before long, irrationality will be reason and reason will be irrationality, science will be mysticism and mysticism will be science. There will no minds left capable of telling the difference.
In response to my comment that it seemed uncharacteristic of Rand to give an unqualified endorsement of taxpayer-funded space program, Dejafoo updated the posting, including some passages indicating that Rand saw a possible contradiction in her euphoric praise of the Apollo 11 mission and the fact that it was financed by the use of government force. Rand wrote:
Is it proper for the government to engage in space [exploration] projects? No, it is not… [b]ut this is a political issue.
[…]
In judging the effectiveness of the various elements involved in any large-scale undertaking of a mixed economy, one must be guided by the question: which elements were the result of coercion and which the results of freedom? It is not coercion, not the physical force or threat of a gun, that created Apollo 11. The scientists, the technologists, the engineers, the astronauts were free men acting of their own choice. The various parts of the spacecraft were produced by private industrial concerns.
To say that it is not proper for the govenment to engage in a space program, then assert that it is a “political” issue is a contradiction. She is giving an absolute answer “No” then saying that it’s up to the whims of whatever political process is in play. Politics in any form is always a tool for some men to dominate others.
To say that Apollo 11 was the product of “free men acting of their own choice” or the product of “private industrial concerns” is a rationalization so obvious that it calls Rand’s genius in other areas into question. Nobody is completely free in a mixed economy. Individuals are forced to give up their wealth and then must line up at the public trough to get a portion of it back. It is true that the scientists, technologists, engineers and astronauts did not have a gun at their head, but those who were forced to pay for it did. Any scientist who believes that he has a right to stolen property in the pursuit of his career is more mystic than scientist for he believes in a right that cannot be proven to exist.
What will become of a world where we accept that scientists have a license to steal from others, thus violating the human rights of others, in pursuit of their own goals?
Dejafoo takes rationalization and compartmentalization even further than Rand:
Similarly, it may be the case that the Apollo mission was partly the result of government coercion (and thus partly the result of the will of great scientists and brave astronauts to reach the moon), but the part that drove it to success was not government coercion. Objectivists would feel a little more comfortable if it had been achieved by private enterprise rather than government coercion, but there is no intrinsic connection between Apollo 11 and taxation. Therefore, it is still an ethically valuable achievement.
Money without science and reason cannot get us to the moon. Agreed. But it is also true that scientific knowledge is unattainable and cannot be put into practice without money.
There is no guarantee that in a free market, individuals would choose to finance a space program. Freedom and reality are inextricably linked. We can’t know the reality of how people will act in freedom until they are free to make their own choices.
To say that there is no instrinsic connection between Apollo 11 and taxation is to assume that enough people would voluntarily contribute their money to a space program to make it happen; that is total speculation–no proof. If they would not have voluntarily support the space program, then Apollo 11 was inextricably linked to taxation; it would not have happened without it. All we know from history is that it can be done when some men are forced to support the goals of others.
Can an achievement be called “rational” and ethical if if forces whole segments of the population to accept irrational premises, thereby forcing them into an irrational state of mind? I don’t think so. Reason is the absolute. Remember?
They giant Pyramids of Egypt, also doorways to other words for a select few and also great technological achievements where also built by slavery. Their only use today is as tourist attractions and archeological curiosities of a once-great civilization.
The real question is: if individuals were free of the coercion of government would there be any reason or motivation to send a select few into outer space? We will not know this until all men are free. The debate is not about which priorities for stolen money are more rational, those of the left or those of the right. The answer is neither. The contest is between individual rights and the “right” of a state to dictate values and goals. Reason favors the individual over the state always; as an animate rational entity the individual has a value that no inanimate, irrational entity like a state can ever have.
Dejafoo closes with this acknowlegement that there maybe something irrational about how the Burning Bush spends other people’s money:
Objectivism is not exactly making overwhelming gains in this country - the most conservative man likely to live in the White House for the next couple of decades has turned out to spend more than a drunk buying rounds for everyone in a bar. The Left is predicting that this money will come out of the coffers of welfare recipients and public education - if you’re an Objectivist, wouldn’t you want to see money flow from something that you consider to have no ethical value to something of at least marginal ethical value? Support the Bush space plan. It is characterized by all of the highest goals of humanity - technological progress on the one hand, discovery for discovery’s sake on the other, and driving it all a basic desire to explore and expand.
Slavery is not a rational goal, nor is it one of the “highest goals of humanity.” No philosophy based on reason, no science will survive in a culture of mysticism, irrationality, and legalized slavery. Rand knew this and spank her little founder-of-Objectivism fanny for not making it more clear. We will never become more rational by engaging in the irrational. If the goal is to celebrate the fruits of reason, we can start right here on planet earth by making it a more rational place to live. This will only happen when every man is free to own and use his own rational mind to his own benefit without the use of force.
With 500 young American soldiers now dead in Iraq, thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, and a spend-now-think-later, self-annointed “compassionate conservative” in the White House, should we be surprised that the Burning Bush wants to lead us on a pilgrimage into space? Rand provided this discription of leaders who exploit others to their own ends:
When you consider the global devastation perpetrated by socialism, the sea of blood and the millions of victims, remember that they were sacrificed not for the “good of mankind” nor for any “noble ideal,” but for the festering vanity of some sacred brute or some pretentious mediocrity who craved a mantle of unearned “greatness”–and that the monument to socialism is a pyramid of public factories, public theaters and public parks, erected on a foundation of human corpses, with the figure of the ruler posturing on top, beating his chest and screaming his plea for “prestige” to the starless void above him.(2)[pg. 91]
Do we know any leaders like that?
(1) Binswanger, Harry, The Ayn Rand Lexicon, Meridian, 1988.
(2) Rand, Ayn, The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet, 1961.
(3) Branden, Barbara, The Passion of Ayn Rand, Doubleday and Co., 1986