All-American nightmares - a response to johncwright
I will never understand the American habit of treating the State as something that has nothing to do either with the law or with the country, a sort of bloodsucking fungus attached by chance to the healthy body of the nation and needing nothing so much as periodic sprayings of weed-killer. Having grown up in a tradition where to be called a “servant of the State” is a compliment and not an insult, I simply do not understand how so many Americans - of the left as well as the right - expect public employees to be fed on a diet of insults, disregard and deliberate denial of their very legitimacy, and not degenerate.
I will admit that mine starts as a gut reaction. To be sure, an Italian knows as much as anyone about public corruption and inefficiency. But our whole idea of what is wrong with these things is different from that of many Americans. To us, it is a given that the State exists to serve and protect the citizen; therefore, it is described as inefficient when it does not perform the services expected from it (by law), and corrupt when some real moral collapse motivates its inefficiency. To an American such as my friend johncwright the State is corrupt and inefficient because… well, because it is corrupt and inefficient. It is under a divine curse of never doing anything except badly and viciously (as compared, one supposes, to the sterling morality and mighty efficiency of Bill Gates and Wal-Mart). One smells a whiff of Calvinist original sin here; and, like Calvinism, it is hideously limited and question-begging.
Take the case John features, that of the murderous inefficiency shown by NASA in recent years. To be sure, it is bad; it is especially bad in that, having suffered one dire loss in 1987 (if I remember it correctly), it should essentially have covered up all its lessons and gone on to suffer another, wholly foreseeable one. John, however, seems not only willing but eager to bury the history of NASA and judge the whole prospect of the agency, past, present and future, wholly from the corrupt state it had clearly reached in the eighties; and then ascribe its faults to the whole notion of public activity. That is little more than scapegoating.
We know the history of NASA. Very little is better known. In the year of the Lord 1957, having scored a number of political triumphs - survived without serious dislocation the death of its dictator; squashed two major revolts in its recently acquired empire - the second with the active connivance of America - the Soviet Union startled the world by adding one satellite to the Solar system. With the exception of a few freaks, Western scientists and engineers had been spending their time until the very dawn of Sputnik ridiculing the whole idea of space flight. The humiliation was colossal, and it contributed to a renewed feeling that the Russia of Khruschev was a young, thrusting and progressive country and that it would, in its leader’s words, “bury” the West.
America and other Western countries scrambled to keep up; and the humiliations continued. By the time America could send up any kind of satellite, Russia was sending up dogs. By the time America was ready to try animals, Russia was confidently sending up a young air force officer, chosen for his looks and charm, whom they later sent on a friendship mission all over the West - where he became for a while a serious rival to Elvis Presley on the walls of teenage girls’ rooms.
America’s new president, who had come to power on the promise of a fresh and invigorated American policy, was faced with a disaster as bad as a lost war. Just by sending up a man in space, the Soviets had taken what seemed like a genuine lead in world affairs. Other countries did not have the resources to try - Britain, which did, ended up wasting mountains of taxpayers’ money on a series of interrupted projects. There was only one thing America could do; and so, with a steely look in his eyes, the Irish-American politician committed himself and his successors to landing an American on the Moon within a decade. (By the height of irony, it was Kennedy’s deadly rival Nixon who actually put his name on the achievement.)
All the time, the American leadership knew perfectly well that no practical returns were to be expected from this project. Once a man had reached the Moon, there was nothing to do there. Colonization, if anyone dreamed of it, would be unpractical for decades to come at least. Any minerals to be found would be killingly expensive to ship to Earth. The real money, as people quickly found, was in satellites for communications and remote sensing, which served a real purpose and quickly paid for themselves. Sending a man to the Moon amounted only to that: sending a man to the Moon.
Nonetheless, it was desperately important. One of America’s great strategic advantages since 1776 was its progressive and vigorous image. Since the 1920s, the Soviets had worked hard to undermine it in the eyes of the world, working up a new image of America as violent, reactionary, narrow-minded, repressive, and corrupt. That, for instance, was what the Sacco and Vanzetti case was all about (with the added irony that Sacco and Vanzetti would both have been shot out of hand, as Anarchists, by any victorious Communist revolution). Now, at least since 1800, these things came, in the eyes of the world, as a package deal. There was a universal feeling, an intuition, that you could not have scientific and economic progress without having the political set-up that went with it. Italy and Japan, decayed countries of high culture and with the ambition to count for more in the world than they currently did, adopted parliamentary rule and representative government at the same time as they committed themselves to economic and scientific progress. Conversely, all those parties which opposed representative government for any reason - such as for instance such Russians as Pobdenostzev, or the rising German nationalism - attached themselves to the idea of Tradition and Conservation, even though in fact their policies were, and could not help but be, aggressively forward in matters of industrialization and economics.
The fundamental challenge of Communism to the West was that it was the first political movement to offer a notion of social and economic progress without the grubby and unstable realities of representative government. The “Tradition” tradition in European politics, from Burke to De Maistre to Pobdenostzev, had consistently been in bad faith because it had to postulate, or to silently accept, a progressive framework in economics, even as it insisted on tradition in politics. De Maistre, the greatest of all reactionary writers, was disgusted by the unprogressive and tribal attitude of Sardinian peasants who refused to learn to irrigate and scientifically rotate their land. It follows that they were doomed to lose, since they willed the means but not the end. Communism, on the other hand, offered a positive short-cut to all those hopes - universal prosperity, equality, mighty industrialization, economic planning to deal with the risk of worlwide crises, the spread of high culture to the uncultured masses, scientific progress, physical and moral education, the scientific improvement of the race - that seemed to glimmer like a haze of light across the horizon of representative government’s future developments.
This was the challenge that it offered the West, and foremost across the West, to America, the land of “progress”; and that is why Third World countries desperate for swift and fundamental socio-economic progress fell into its lap like ripe chestnuts. That is why, above all, the Russian invasion of outer space was such a triumph: because it seemed to validate at a blow all the claims that had been made for Communism ever since Lenin. Thanks to a century of science-fictional writing, beginning with Jules Verne’s De la Terre la Lune and Autour de la Lune, travel in outer space had been the very image of scientific progress in all imaginations - although most real scientific and technological progress had little enough to do with it. And now, out of nowhere, the Soviets had offered in reality what everyone else had only dreamed. They had built their new fortress in the lands of the imagination; they must be driven from it, by any means necessary, before the fortress grow into another fully settled and colonized province of the Empire of Lies.
And so they were - by a long-term military campaign as deliberate, as committed, and as generously funded, as any in American history. Washington DC as a whole understood the importance of this effort. At all costs, the thrusting and effective image cast by the Soviets must be broken. And so, from the beginning, NASA was never stinted anything. A shower of public billions fell on Cape Canaveral, Houston and other places, and the cream of half a dozen disciplines and of the USAF was sent to Florida to play with rockets. America went to the Moon as she had gone to Normandy, to Okinawa, to Korea and Vietnam, in a blaze of military-industrial power backed by mountains of dollars. Finance as a weapon, after all, had been a key feature of American war-making ever since the Civil War. And they won. The Russians never even managed to send a single cosmonaut to our satellite: the best they could manage was an unmanned vehicle. The war for the lands of fantasy had been fought and won.
And here was the problem. Once wars are won, armies are disbanded or dramatically cut back. NASA, however, though in essence a military unit, had been given for political reasons the aspect of a public authority. What is more, it was not a troop of conscript grunts who may easily be expected to fit right back in into civilian life - indeed, to fit in there rather better than they ever had in uniform. It was an elite body recruited among the young and ambitious, who, after nine years of concentrated team effort, did not at all relish the prospect of being disbanded, let alone finding another job, even in the huge American technology and higher education field; much less to find one’s own former teammates and colleagues as rivals.
This was a case where, really, to be cruel would have been to be kind. If NASA had been closed down or fiercely scaled back in 1973 or so, no doubt thousands of graduates and specialists would have suffered - for a while. Eventually most of them would have found new employment and settled down. Instead of which, nobody was steadfast enough to look at facts in the face; and NASA were left to make the case for their own corporate survival. Because they were genuinely brainy and confident of their own elite abilities, and because they were still fresh with the glory of the most glimmering success in American history, they had no trouble running rings around bewildered Congress committees and getting the media to tell the stories they wanted.
Politically, the basic problem was in the original decision to profile NASA as a kind of public authority rather than as a military operation. It is assumed that public authorities are permanent, because they deal with permanent features of the social landscape. Policing, sanitation, transport, industrial and financial regulation and oversight, litigation, military defence, public health, are perpetually contemporary problems. But sending a man on the Moon was not a perpetually contemporary problem. Once done, there was no reason to do it again. The war was won. It was time to go home.
NASA, therefore, looked for another imagination-grabbing stunt. Like the Soviet flight into space and the American man on the moon, this was to be essentially science fiction turned into fact; and NASA fastened on the concept of a reusable space craft - the “space shuttle”. Of course, it was a flawed notion. It was right outside the chain of evolution that had led to Saturn-5 and Apollo, which meant that all the accumulated expertise and technology of the Agency needed reworking. It was profoundly unnecessary: the Soviets, having finally got used to their defeat in the space race, had turned their hand to building dull, useful space trucks - that is the best definition for modern Russian spacecraft - which paid for themselves, to the point where even Yeltsin’s shattered two-thirds of the former URSS were able to keep the space program going. Experts across the world protested at their immensely expensive and not even innovative design (it is based on 1970s concepts - nobody would build a car like that). And save for the vague idea of a space station, nobody even knew exactly what they were supposed to do that Russian space trucks and unmanned missiles could not do at a tenth of the cost.
Of course, all these things, though flaws from the point of view of rational exploitation of space, were advantages from the viewpoint of NASA. The break in the line of evolution between Saturn-5 and the Shuttle meant that a whole new wave of inventions and patents had to be designed, often from scratch. The vast expense of the whole meant that thousands of posts would not be cut. And the design, though inefficient and expensive as compared to Russian space trucks and unmanned Ariane and Long March missiles, still prevailed on that battlefield on which NASA had been ordered to fight from the beginning - the battlefield of the imagination. It was designed to seem to the average mortal the first step on the road to spaceships as they had seen them on Star Trek and the like - large, permanent, reusable vessels, comfortably housing hundreds of humans, travelling in space for months or years, yet capable of landing and taking off directly from Earth with no more trouble than an airplane. Nobody can get enthusiastic about the umpteenth launch of an unmanned rocket, even if the rocket carries satellites that will affect the life of every human being; and the Russian cosmonaut program had quickly taken the routine nature of just another military or scientific program. The Shuttle, now - there was something to get excited about.
So NASA won. But it did not win completely. Whatever the strength of the spell it cast over the Beltway and over most public opinion, it was impossible to resurrect the drive and sense of need and pride that had fuelled the race to the Moon. Senators and Representatives just could not get quite as excited, even if the Shuttle appealed to their imagination as much as anyone else’s - they were human, after all. And so NASA started suffering a serious funding decline in real terms; and the organization once famous for inventing the triple redundancy reacted by cutting corners and developing a culture of institutional cover-up. The rest we know.
In all this, NASA did not behave in any way as a public authority engaged in a legitimate contest for funding. It did not have a real service that needed performing. It acted, rather, like an increasingly corrupt private contractor trying to keep some pork-barrel contracts alive; with the further corrupting factor of a not entirely undeserved self-image as the home of the best and brightest, which encouraged it to do anything to keep itself in being.
This is my interpretation, johncwright. It covers all the facts, explains why things went as they did - and does not have to waste any time with chimerical notions of absolute public corruption. NASA was a national political operation, military in all but name, that was allowed to run on too long. It has nothing essential in common with public services such as the courts, the land registry, the police, the water authorities, the health and safety inspectors, the armed forces, the fire brigade, the registration of births, deaths and marriages, the supervision of education and health - things that the State must perform and always performed. Rather, it is comparable to a single operation ran by any one of these authorities - say, to clean up a polluted river, or to establish new standards in schools - which, for political reasons, is allowed to last past its usefulness; or, even more closely, to a corrupt private company trying to keep itself in being at the public’s expense. And it follows that your whole vituperative assault on the public sector is groundless. You will need better arguments.
Soon to come: the service of the public.
I will admit that mine starts as a gut reaction. To be sure, an Italian knows as much as anyone about public corruption and inefficiency. But our whole idea of what is wrong with these things is different from that of many Americans. To us, it is a given that the State exists to serve and protect the citizen; therefore, it is described as inefficient when it does not perform the services expected from it (by law), and corrupt when some real moral collapse motivates its inefficiency. To an American such as my friend johncwright the State is corrupt and inefficient because… well, because it is corrupt and inefficient. It is under a divine curse of never doing anything except badly and viciously (as compared, one supposes, to the sterling morality and mighty efficiency of Bill Gates and Wal-Mart). One smells a whiff of Calvinist original sin here; and, like Calvinism, it is hideously limited and question-begging.
Take the case John features, that of the murderous inefficiency shown by NASA in recent years. To be sure, it is bad; it is especially bad in that, having suffered one dire loss in 1987 (if I remember it correctly), it should essentially have covered up all its lessons and gone on to suffer another, wholly foreseeable one. John, however, seems not only willing but eager to bury the history of NASA and judge the whole prospect of the agency, past, present and future, wholly from the corrupt state it had clearly reached in the eighties; and then ascribe its faults to the whole notion of public activity. That is little more than scapegoating.
We know the history of NASA. Very little is better known. In the year of the Lord 1957, having scored a number of political triumphs - survived without serious dislocation the death of its dictator; squashed two major revolts in its recently acquired empire - the second with the active connivance of America - the Soviet Union startled the world by adding one satellite to the Solar system. With the exception of a few freaks, Western scientists and engineers had been spending their time until the very dawn of Sputnik ridiculing the whole idea of space flight. The humiliation was colossal, and it contributed to a renewed feeling that the Russia of Khruschev was a young, thrusting and progressive country and that it would, in its leader’s words, “bury” the West.
America and other Western countries scrambled to keep up; and the humiliations continued. By the time America could send up any kind of satellite, Russia was sending up dogs. By the time America was ready to try animals, Russia was confidently sending up a young air force officer, chosen for his looks and charm, whom they later sent on a friendship mission all over the West - where he became for a while a serious rival to Elvis Presley on the walls of teenage girls’ rooms.
America’s new president, who had come to power on the promise of a fresh and invigorated American policy, was faced with a disaster as bad as a lost war. Just by sending up a man in space, the Soviets had taken what seemed like a genuine lead in world affairs. Other countries did not have the resources to try - Britain, which did, ended up wasting mountains of taxpayers’ money on a series of interrupted projects. There was only one thing America could do; and so, with a steely look in his eyes, the Irish-American politician committed himself and his successors to landing an American on the Moon within a decade. (By the height of irony, it was Kennedy’s deadly rival Nixon who actually put his name on the achievement.)
All the time, the American leadership knew perfectly well that no practical returns were to be expected from this project. Once a man had reached the Moon, there was nothing to do there. Colonization, if anyone dreamed of it, would be unpractical for decades to come at least. Any minerals to be found would be killingly expensive to ship to Earth. The real money, as people quickly found, was in satellites for communications and remote sensing, which served a real purpose and quickly paid for themselves. Sending a man to the Moon amounted only to that: sending a man to the Moon.
Nonetheless, it was desperately important. One of America’s great strategic advantages since 1776 was its progressive and vigorous image. Since the 1920s, the Soviets had worked hard to undermine it in the eyes of the world, working up a new image of America as violent, reactionary, narrow-minded, repressive, and corrupt. That, for instance, was what the Sacco and Vanzetti case was all about (with the added irony that Sacco and Vanzetti would both have been shot out of hand, as Anarchists, by any victorious Communist revolution). Now, at least since 1800, these things came, in the eyes of the world, as a package deal. There was a universal feeling, an intuition, that you could not have scientific and economic progress without having the political set-up that went with it. Italy and Japan, decayed countries of high culture and with the ambition to count for more in the world than they currently did, adopted parliamentary rule and representative government at the same time as they committed themselves to economic and scientific progress. Conversely, all those parties which opposed representative government for any reason - such as for instance such Russians as Pobdenostzev, or the rising German nationalism - attached themselves to the idea of Tradition and Conservation, even though in fact their policies were, and could not help but be, aggressively forward in matters of industrialization and economics.
The fundamental challenge of Communism to the West was that it was the first political movement to offer a notion of social and economic progress without the grubby and unstable realities of representative government. The “Tradition” tradition in European politics, from Burke to De Maistre to Pobdenostzev, had consistently been in bad faith because it had to postulate, or to silently accept, a progressive framework in economics, even as it insisted on tradition in politics. De Maistre, the greatest of all reactionary writers, was disgusted by the unprogressive and tribal attitude of Sardinian peasants who refused to learn to irrigate and scientifically rotate their land. It follows that they were doomed to lose, since they willed the means but not the end. Communism, on the other hand, offered a positive short-cut to all those hopes - universal prosperity, equality, mighty industrialization, economic planning to deal with the risk of worlwide crises, the spread of high culture to the uncultured masses, scientific progress, physical and moral education, the scientific improvement of the race - that seemed to glimmer like a haze of light across the horizon of representative government’s future developments.
This was the challenge that it offered the West, and foremost across the West, to America, the land of “progress”; and that is why Third World countries desperate for swift and fundamental socio-economic progress fell into its lap like ripe chestnuts. That is why, above all, the Russian invasion of outer space was such a triumph: because it seemed to validate at a blow all the claims that had been made for Communism ever since Lenin. Thanks to a century of science-fictional writing, beginning with Jules Verne’s De la Terre la Lune and Autour de la Lune, travel in outer space had been the very image of scientific progress in all imaginations - although most real scientific and technological progress had little enough to do with it. And now, out of nowhere, the Soviets had offered in reality what everyone else had only dreamed. They had built their new fortress in the lands of the imagination; they must be driven from it, by any means necessary, before the fortress grow into another fully settled and colonized province of the Empire of Lies.
And so they were - by a long-term military campaign as deliberate, as committed, and as generously funded, as any in American history. Washington DC as a whole understood the importance of this effort. At all costs, the thrusting and effective image cast by the Soviets must be broken. And so, from the beginning, NASA was never stinted anything. A shower of public billions fell on Cape Canaveral, Houston and other places, and the cream of half a dozen disciplines and of the USAF was sent to Florida to play with rockets. America went to the Moon as she had gone to Normandy, to Okinawa, to Korea and Vietnam, in a blaze of military-industrial power backed by mountains of dollars. Finance as a weapon, after all, had been a key feature of American war-making ever since the Civil War. And they won. The Russians never even managed to send a single cosmonaut to our satellite: the best they could manage was an unmanned vehicle. The war for the lands of fantasy had been fought and won.
And here was the problem. Once wars are won, armies are disbanded or dramatically cut back. NASA, however, though in essence a military unit, had been given for political reasons the aspect of a public authority. What is more, it was not a troop of conscript grunts who may easily be expected to fit right back in into civilian life - indeed, to fit in there rather better than they ever had in uniform. It was an elite body recruited among the young and ambitious, who, after nine years of concentrated team effort, did not at all relish the prospect of being disbanded, let alone finding another job, even in the huge American technology and higher education field; much less to find one’s own former teammates and colleagues as rivals.
This was a case where, really, to be cruel would have been to be kind. If NASA had been closed down or fiercely scaled back in 1973 or so, no doubt thousands of graduates and specialists would have suffered - for a while. Eventually most of them would have found new employment and settled down. Instead of which, nobody was steadfast enough to look at facts in the face; and NASA were left to make the case for their own corporate survival. Because they were genuinely brainy and confident of their own elite abilities, and because they were still fresh with the glory of the most glimmering success in American history, they had no trouble running rings around bewildered Congress committees and getting the media to tell the stories they wanted.
Politically, the basic problem was in the original decision to profile NASA as a kind of public authority rather than as a military operation. It is assumed that public authorities are permanent, because they deal with permanent features of the social landscape. Policing, sanitation, transport, industrial and financial regulation and oversight, litigation, military defence, public health, are perpetually contemporary problems. But sending a man on the Moon was not a perpetually contemporary problem. Once done, there was no reason to do it again. The war was won. It was time to go home.
NASA, therefore, looked for another imagination-grabbing stunt. Like the Soviet flight into space and the American man on the moon, this was to be essentially science fiction turned into fact; and NASA fastened on the concept of a reusable space craft - the “space shuttle”. Of course, it was a flawed notion. It was right outside the chain of evolution that had led to Saturn-5 and Apollo, which meant that all the accumulated expertise and technology of the Agency needed reworking. It was profoundly unnecessary: the Soviets, having finally got used to their defeat in the space race, had turned their hand to building dull, useful space trucks - that is the best definition for modern Russian spacecraft - which paid for themselves, to the point where even Yeltsin’s shattered two-thirds of the former URSS were able to keep the space program going. Experts across the world protested at their immensely expensive and not even innovative design (it is based on 1970s concepts - nobody would build a car like that). And save for the vague idea of a space station, nobody even knew exactly what they were supposed to do that Russian space trucks and unmanned missiles could not do at a tenth of the cost.
Of course, all these things, though flaws from the point of view of rational exploitation of space, were advantages from the viewpoint of NASA. The break in the line of evolution between Saturn-5 and the Shuttle meant that a whole new wave of inventions and patents had to be designed, often from scratch. The vast expense of the whole meant that thousands of posts would not be cut. And the design, though inefficient and expensive as compared to Russian space trucks and unmanned Ariane and Long March missiles, still prevailed on that battlefield on which NASA had been ordered to fight from the beginning - the battlefield of the imagination. It was designed to seem to the average mortal the first step on the road to spaceships as they had seen them on Star Trek and the like - large, permanent, reusable vessels, comfortably housing hundreds of humans, travelling in space for months or years, yet capable of landing and taking off directly from Earth with no more trouble than an airplane. Nobody can get enthusiastic about the umpteenth launch of an unmanned rocket, even if the rocket carries satellites that will affect the life of every human being; and the Russian cosmonaut program had quickly taken the routine nature of just another military or scientific program. The Shuttle, now - there was something to get excited about.
So NASA won. But it did not win completely. Whatever the strength of the spell it cast over the Beltway and over most public opinion, it was impossible to resurrect the drive and sense of need and pride that had fuelled the race to the Moon. Senators and Representatives just could not get quite as excited, even if the Shuttle appealed to their imagination as much as anyone else’s - they were human, after all. And so NASA started suffering a serious funding decline in real terms; and the organization once famous for inventing the triple redundancy reacted by cutting corners and developing a culture of institutional cover-up. The rest we know.
In all this, NASA did not behave in any way as a public authority engaged in a legitimate contest for funding. It did not have a real service that needed performing. It acted, rather, like an increasingly corrupt private contractor trying to keep some pork-barrel contracts alive; with the further corrupting factor of a not entirely undeserved self-image as the home of the best and brightest, which encouraged it to do anything to keep itself in being.
This is my interpretation, johncwright. It covers all the facts, explains why things went as they did - and does not have to waste any time with chimerical notions of absolute public corruption. NASA was a national political operation, military in all but name, that was allowed to run on too long. It has nothing essential in common with public services such as the courts, the land registry, the police, the water authorities, the health and safety inspectors, the armed forces, the fire brigade, the registration of births, deaths and marriages, the supervision of education and health - things that the State must perform and always performed. Rather, it is comparable to a single operation ran by any one of these authorities - say, to clean up a polluted river, or to establish new standards in schools - which, for political reasons, is allowed to last past its usefulness; or, even more closely, to a corrupt private company trying to keep itself in being at the public’s expense. And it follows that your whole vituperative assault on the public sector is groundless. You will need better arguments.
Soon to come: the service of the public.