Martin LeFevre: Forty Years From the Moon

This week America has been celebrating the moon landing 40 years ago, when Neil Armstrong took man’s first steps on another world. That tremendous technological accomplishment, born of intense Cold War rivalry, was the apogee of the American spirit, which is now at its nadir.

A man who would make Obama look like a hothead accomplished a perilously close landing. Neil Armstrong coolly guided the spidery LEM down to the moon’s surface with less than a minute’s fuel remaining.

His memorable words, inscribed into human consciousness — “that’s one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind” -- were born of an American pragmatism so pure that it often omitted little things like adjectives and pronouns.

With his characteristic self-effacement, Armstrong recently said of one of the most important utterances in the history of language: “On flight tapes, I leave a lot of syllables out. I'm not particularly articulate. I think reasonable people will realize the "a" was intended. I hope history would grant me the leeway. They can put it in parentheses.”

When asked for further comment on his perfectly chosen if not perfectly articulated words marking the momentous moment of man’s first step on another world, Armstrong simply said: “I didn't think it was particularly important. But I knew other people might.” That’s Neil, and America, at their best and worst--not a philosophical or poetic bone in the body politic.

The creed of the fighter pilot forbade any excursions into human feeling. But all the astronauts that walked on the moon were deeply changed by the experience. Alan Shepard, the first American into space (on a sub-orbital lob after Gagarin’s monumental orbital flight) who also went to the moon, was later to say that he wept as he looked back at the earth.

And consider his pithy observation: “Because it’s much smaller than the earth, everywhere you stand on the moon the surface curves away from you. There could be no flat-earthers on the moon.”

Why do the moonshots continue to fascinate so many people (though not many young people it seems)? I think it has to do with the lost reality of wilderness.

For tens of thousands of years, wilderness defined human experience. The North American and Australian continents were the last great wildernesses, though of course both landmasses had been explored and inhabited by indigenous peoples for thousands of years before Europeans discovered them.

The idea of “space, the final frontier” is the ultimate unexplored territory, an infinite wilderness that, even within our own solar system, is too vast for the human mind to comprehend.

Michael Collins, who orbited the moon in the Command Module as Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the surface, was referred to as “the loneliest man in the universe.” Collins himself said he never felt lonely, but rather enjoyed his time alone, which allowed him time to view and experience the wonder of the earth as he circled the moon, some 250,000 miles away.

Where there are two people, there is humanity, in all its sociality and discord; but where one person alone, there is the possibility of experiencing the universe as a whole.

Now that wilderness, in the sense of a “region in its natural uncultivated state” is all but gone, the world has become a wilderness, in the sense of “a place that makes one feel confused, overwhelmed, and desolate.” The world has become a place in which we are all essentially alone.

It’s true, we have always been essentially alone, but human social life was, for uncounted millennia, a successful veneer covering that which we most fear—being deeply alone.

Insight, which is a moment of creation in the mind and heart of a sentient species, permeates the universe, but man’s consciousness is nearly impervious to it. Why? Is it simply because thought produces self, egoism, and will, which become the densest matter in the universe?

Humankind will not become creatures of the cosmos until we learn how to be a truly sentient species on earth. Man cannot expect to destroy all space on earth and then take his polluting, junk-strewing ways to other planets.

That’s why ‘terraforming’ Mars is an absurd idea. There is a dynamic order and immanent intelligence in the universe, and if we don’t awaken and stop decimating the earth, it will snuff us out like a smoky candle before allowing us to spread to other planets.

The real journey is within. The human brain has the capacity to collapse time, and contact, indeed participate ever more deeply in the infinite, through the portal of the present.

Time ends in passionate, undivided attention to the movement of thought/emotion. And when there is no time, there is no space. Then, to some degree the whole universe is present within one, and one is present in the whole universe.

Humans do not become human beings by blasting outward into space but by delving inward into consciousness. If the universe is enfolded in every atom, then what stars and galaxies can the billions of synapses of our brains hold?

As Emily Dickinson wrote, “The brain is wider than the sky, for, put them side by side, the one the other will include with ease, and you beside.”

It’s fitting that man has not returned to the moon in nearly 40 years Scientifically and technologically, humankind has progressed a great deal since then. But we are essentially the same tribal, self-centered creatures that planted a stupid flag on our barren sister planet, as barren as we seem hell-bent on making earth.

The cliché that because we are a curious, explorative species, space is man’s future, no longer holds water. Space does not inspire when half the life on earth is about to expire at the hands of man.

Our obsessively externally oriented days are behind us. That doesn’t mean that space can’t and won’t be explored. It simply means that we have come full circle, and are finding out that what the ancients said is unavoidably true: Know thyself.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

© Scoop Media