Dreaming into Being a New Political Vision
Two things can be true at the same time.
I personally don’t have any aspirations to go to space. Trip to the moon? I’ll take a hike through the rainforest, thanks. That freezing barren rock they call Mars? Ew(!), you’ll find me at the beach. But the amount of half-baked cultural commentary I’ve seen on how “shameful” and “disgusting” it is to see a group of women get on a space ship – because, I don’t know, the earth is dying, the snow caps are melting, billionaires have too much money, and the trees are turning into A.I. (or whatever) is just the latest example of simplistic, superficial “analysis” parading as critical thinking. The old adage that “two things can be true” was once common sense, but like with so much folk wisdom, that adage now feels like a dead artifact.
If two things can be true, then humanity is at the very least capable of managing multiple projects simultaneously. We hold the capacity to be vigilant and proactive about the ecological crisis while also celebrating moments that express that all-too-human desire for adventure – for plunging into the unknown.
“But only rich celebrities can do it, and everyone else can’t afford eggs, it’s so offensive!” Rampant and unprecedented wealth inequality is definitely offensive, no doubt about it; but what feels like a stretch to call “offensive” is the inaccessibility of new technology for everyone immediately (even when certain individuals they choose for that publicity stunt space mission may be cringe – *cough* Katy Perry *cough*). But when has truly new technology ever rolled out in an egalitarian way, and when did the fact that it doesn’t become a justification for arguing that we shouldn’t be doing it in the first place?
When that rich girl Sara in my high school had a cell phone before everyone else did, the school didn’t explode with misdirected rage at something we couldn’t yet afford. When commercial planes started flying (which I don’t remember because I was living my previous life as a very wise house plant), it took nearly 50 years before airplanes were accessible to the broader population. Why? Because, like it or not, new technologies are expensive. The original IBM computers, for example, cost over $15,000 (adjusted for inflation), and yet no one was creating a proverbial black list of the obscene individuals who disrespectfully purchased one of those computers when no one else had the means as yet to.
“Sure, Jacob, but the political and cultural circumstances are uniquely unjust and unequal. We’re spending billions of dollars on space missions and not feeding the hungry or using those resources to build universal health care.” The United States being the most wealthy nation on Earth, I think its safe to say there’s definitely enough money for both; we just happen to currently have a system that works fast for private space obsessions, and works far too slow to create the healthcare system we need. And while we may want to fight for a world where billionaires contribute more to the system that supports health care or to lowering prices, it isn’t currently the legal responsibility of wealthy space-obsessed CEOs to balance their space investments with contributions that create universal healthcare.
It is OUR responsibility to animate the political process and put pressure on our local and federal governments to change the structure that has made universal healthcare so impossible. But before that’s possible, we have to have the will to participate in that process (yes, even the frightening one we have now), and to fight for a radical shift in our political and economic structures – which takes a lot more will and discipline than what it takes to get on TikTok and broadcast your outrage as if it’s an ultimately effective form of political activism.
“Okay, but if nothing changes, the rich will destroy the planet with their greed and then use their advanced space technology to leave the poor behind to suffer on a dying planet.” Okay, that’s a fair hypothetical, but the issue here doesn’t seem to be the phenomenon of space exploration, but the system undergirding it that would allow billionaires the power to flee the wasteland of a festering planet. How is an egalitarian world ever going to be built by stifling the awe, wonder and imagination of those inspired by the “final frontier” of space travel? If we don’t want to see these technologies controlled by a few wealthy douche bags (I’m looking at you, Elon Musk. And Mark? I wore JNCOs in high school but I still wasn’t cool), then direct your critiques to the system that created them.
Musk totally sucks, it’s true, but go back through history and you’ll find an endless list of shitty people doing otherwise incredible things. Conflating the art with the artist, or the maker with what he/she/they have made is one of the most blindingly pervasive idiocies of modern progressive morality. Van Gogh was a bad guy, but I don’t want to live in a world without his art. Most writers are narcissists, and probably a lot of them make bad partners or friends, but getting rid of all books written by people we deem reprehensible doesn’t make the world less ugly – it makes it less beautiful. As Sondheim wrote in Sunday in the Park with George, “give us more to see.” Electric vehicles and space travel are astonishing achievements of the human imagination; we can say that without sacrificing our values. We can admit that and still work for a world that puts safeguards in place around the disproportionate and corrupting power of billionaires.
But let’s take some responsibility as well. Billionaires didn’t arise from a vacuum of evil; they emerged from a system that we allowed to thrive for decades. Getting fixated on the morality of individuals or the technologies they had the resources to create is an exhausting form of virtue signaling that might make someone feel ethically superior in the short term, but at the end of the day it changes nothing – except perhaps the number of followers who feel vindicated by some enraged Tiktoker’s shrill, undergraduate diatribes. While I have had my feet firmly planted on the Left since the events following 9/11, I am concerned now that the Left has lost its imagination. It has squandered its creativity by normalizing and even “objectifying” its ideological commitments (call them addictions, even), and then doubling down, instead of adapting, when it is clear that these ideologies do not resonate with enough people to make a real difference.
Becoming suspicious of adventure and exploration, and rushing to accusations of privilege to police the excitement these moments engender in others is like walking into a party with the explicit intention of ruining the vibe, kicking over the punch table, telling everyone they are bad to be enjoying themselves when others can’t enjoy, and then farting on your way out the door. What if we shifted our approach to progressive politics from one that is currently addicted to apocalyptic shame and blame (and a strangely ironic Christian obsession with the “original sin” of individuals who have power we find morally reprehensible) to one that embraced a more affirmative vision of adventure and exploration as a core value of building a more egalitarian world? In other words, what if we spent more time cultivating a vision of collective collaboration and freedom, and less time being self-appointed jurors in the courtroom of public opinion?
Saving the world from ecological crisis might become less depressing (and therefore something people actually want to get involved with) when it is animated by vision of a future earth that affirms and adds to people’s sense of themselves, rather than a vision that is all about austerity and a demand that people change into a version of themselves that they don’t recognize. People change usually because they are inspired to change, not because they’ve been shouted down and convinced that, if they don’t, they are evil enablers sinning against the planet.
Perhaps we need more love-drunk myths of future possibility, and less narratives of anxious self-righteousness about how “those people” are to blame, and if they don’t get it right, we’re all going to die. If we want to win the culture wars, we have to tell a more beautiful and compelling story than the ones as yet available. We have to tell beautiful, epic stories that are meaningful, and that people want to live in. Telling stories about the meaningless of everything, the pointlessness of life because humanity will be extinct in 20 years may feel like an “objective” narrative, but like every narrative, it has a mood, a flavor, and if you want people to read it, it has to stoke a fire of curiosity, creativity, and possibility – even if we do ultimately all die from ecological collapse or because an asteroid manifested by the lizard people burns us all up in a fiery blaze.
Would we rather move toward a future we cannot really know with our eyes brimming with wonder and amazement, or do we want to walk into the unknown depressed, anxious, and existentially lost? We have a choice in the stories we choose to tell, and it’s a necessary choice to make. If we neglect that responsibility, the stories that are going to win are often the ones that evoke division, hatred, and ignorance (hello, conspiracy theories) – and this is a symptom that arises from both Left and Right.
We don’t have to simply regurgitate the political knowledge that we believe fully represents the situation; in fact, we shouldn’t, because it clearly isn’t working. We can become not just political activists, but political artists – or political theorists who critically imagine a better world in the light of a realistic and pragmatic understanding of humanity’s habits and limitations. We also should feel comfortable admitting that some of the previous ideas were simply wrong. None but the most masochistic among us want to live in stories of the apocalypse; everyone else will ignore, avoid, and escape these stories so as to live in their more comfortable fantasies. But whether we traffic in a fantasy of the apocalypse or a fantasy of political utopia, it is all still fantasy. Fantasies can take us out of the world and away from each other, or they can connect us.
Fantasies are things we can create out of fear, or on the basis of a wiser political imagination. And if we play the game right, and if we tell the story well, that fantasy of a collective, collaborative humanity might actually become something that we can live within. May we all learn the lesson that it isn’t sustainable to ask others to live in our nightmares. However, if we can dream a seemingly impossible dream (whether it is born in sleep or in conversation or in community), and if we can communicate that dream compassionately and clearly, we might find ourselves in the company of others who want to build that dream with us. But first, we must dream, imagine, and create – and, while cultural critique can be a necessary aspect of any creative process, it need not default to the impotent, paralyzing, and ultimately powerless impulse to destroy the wonder of human curiosity that, like a child, courageously ventures into a boundless forest to discover magical creatures and “whosits and whatsits galore”