American Virtues, Part 1: Celebrities

One of my favorite novels is The Tides of War by Steven Pressfield, a historical fiction novel that describes the role of Alcibiades in the Peloponnesian War.  In one poignant scene the Spartan Polemarch Lysander gives a speech to his fellow Spartans, some of which I think will be useful in introducing the topic and thought process of this article.

"We, Spartans and Peloponnesians, possess courage.  Our enemies [the Athenians] possess boldness.  They own thrasytes, we andreia... Boldness is impatient.  Courage is long-suffering.  Boldness cannot endure hardship or delay; it is ravenous, it must feed on victory or it dies.  Boldness makes its seat upon the air; it is gossamer and phantom.  Courage pants its feet upon the Earth and draws its strength from God's holy fundament.  Thrasytes presumes to comman heaven; it forces God's hand and calls this virtue.  Andreia reveres the immortals; it seeks heaven's guidance and acts only to enforce God's will." (pages 333-334).

Though this is a fictional book, I think Lysander's discussion of society-wide virtues can be readily applied to American life.  The above quote is all about the war between Athens and Sparta, but I'm not going to discuss American virtues in terms of its military here, I'll save that for part two.

This article is about the American fetish for celebrities, which has long baffled me.  Sure, other countries and cultures have celebrities, but we are far and away the celebrity creating-and-stalking capital of the world.

We Americans value the explorer, the astronaut, the pioneer, and the frontiersman.  We idealize the cowboy on the open range of the western frontier, or Captain Jack Sparrow exploring the edges of the then-known map.  We value individualism- those that dare strike out to do something alone, that go into the darkness and leave and trail for the rest to follow.

Earlier I wrote an article (http://thusspokithyu.blogspot.com/2011/04/psychological-analysis-of-sports.html) discussing how sports fandom is a manifestation of one's inability to achieve that which sports stars do.  I think our fetishization of celebrities is born of a similar force, but at a much deeper and profound level.

I think that we've found our virtue of individualism to ultimately be hollow.  I think that our individualistic nature, combined with our Protestant work ethic as described by Max Weber, has led to hyper individualism, where interpersonal social ties are few in number and low in strength, and where family bonds have weakened beyond any point in history.  I think that we as a society are lonely.

To compensate for our own lack of deep personal ties and for the lack of a social life, I think people turn to celebrities to vicariously live out lives they don't have access to otherwise.  We pretend that the actions of one celebrity out of a population of 300 million Americans matter, because we don't have anything else in our lives that does.  In a very existentialist and nihilistic sense, our consumer culture and our rabid appetite for celebrity attempt to fill the gaping hole that is our lives.

I think we should find meaning elsewhere.

I'll write up part 2 soon, which'll be a discussion of American/Greek virtues as they relate to our recent military history.

Witnessing History: The Privatization of Outer Space

I had brief vision of the future, and I thought I'd share it with you all.  I am an atheistic prophet.

Anyone who has ever talked to me about stocks knows that I'm a huge bull regarding Tesla Motors.  One of the reasons why I am is because of their CEO Elon Musk (Jon Favreau's inspiration for Tony Stark in the Iron Man Movies).  But this article isn't on Tesla Motors, although they are kicking ass in the market as I write this, it's on the other company he's CEO of, SpaceX.

2012 was widely proclaimed the year of private space flight, and for good reason.  SpaceX made history by being the first private company to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.  Not only has SpaceX succeeded, but a host of other companies are starting to compete here too.  Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, as well as a host of smaller startups come to mind.  I don't really care which business ends up dominating this market, I'm more concerned with the drastic impact these companies will have on the course of human history.

Elon Musk's stated goal behind SpaceX is to hedge the survival of the human race by making us a multi-planetary civilization.  He plans to launch a manned mission to Mars in 10-20 years.  Another company, Golden Spike, plans to land mining equipment on the moon to gather lunar resources.  Another company with even bigger ambitions, Planetary Resources (funded an run by a huge list of entrepreneurial billionaires) plans to mine the extraordinary amount of precious minerals in asteroids.

I often think about how fun it would be to travel back in time and astound people there with our smart phones, our airplanes, our computers, etc.  In my vision, I met myself from the future and had my mind blown.

With the privatization of space, travel between planets will become as ordinary as taking a flight from Dulles to Miami.  Think about that.  Within a definite timeframe after making the decision, you'll be standing at the Martian Spaceport staring back at the Earth.  Extraterrestrial mining will increase the raw resources available to the human race a million fold, driving costs of producing down, increasing the proliferation and facilitating the development of higher technology.

Permanent human settlements will grow on other planets and moons until they cannot be simply governed by international treaty like the ISS, they will need a permanent human government of their own.  Our current concept of "countries" may become equivalent in the future to the concept of planets.  Or maybe the human race will remain splintered in their terrestrial nations, in which case there will be a race to grab extraterrestrial land and resources.  We may even have wars spanning space, planets, and moons.

So many of Earth's current problems will be solved.  We could drastically reduce Earth mining in favor of asteroid mining.  Settlements on other planets and moons will serve as a pressure valve for our burgeoning overpopulation.  We can get rid of any unrecycleable waste by simply shooting it into deep space.  This all sounds like science fiction, but it is realistically within our grasp.  It's happening now.

We are at a special moment in human history, as we as a species grow into a Type 1 civilization. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale)  I am proud and honored to have witnessed the moment in time when man took his first steps venturing forth into the cosmos.