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When I was in college I was close to the poet-professor Nikki Giovanni, who wrote a poem called "Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We're Going to Mars)". The thesis was that the only way we'll be ready for a journey to Mars was if we first reckon with Middle Passage.
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Hearing her explain it at the time, I thought it sounded crazy. I didn't get it. It's such a bizarre experience hearing nearly the exact same argument come from you 16 years later. And bizarre that I (almost) understand it now. Makes me feel like I owe her an apology.
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I think (part of) her thesis in that poem specifically is that embedded within African-American culture is a kind of technology for dealing with fear, isolation, feeling inhuman, + other things. And you can't hope to get to mars without understanding and embracing that technology
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I’d buy an economic argument perhaps, that an unjust society cannot produce the magnitude of per capita surpluses required to sustain programs past a point. But cultural essentialist arguments about lack of specific bits of moral progress holding back specific technologies, no.
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I agree Venkat: it can’t be a universal principle (that a civilization can’t succeed until it fixes its moral failures). Maybe Simon and Giovanni’s argument is that *our civilization,* right now, is doomed unless we rectify ourselves.
Not sure that's what he is saying, I understood it as arguing that the scale & nature of our current moral shortcomings are preventing us from progressing. And no one in history has been able to obliterate another people sitting at the other end of the globe. Uncharted territory.
Read the poem, that’s not the point of it all. I understood it as two descriptions of an alien encounter - we either show up to Mars under the same dehumanizing expansionist logic of new world colonization, or with the humility and humanity of the Middle Passage experience
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It’s not backed up by history or rational understanding. Werner Von Braun and Operation Paperclip got the USA into space. “It’s all so obvious to me? How can’t people see it??” rhetoric reminds me of an ex girlfriend who couldn’t understand why I didn’t see god in all things.
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