OF REVOLUTION AND THE MOON

It was a year of revolutionaries--or would-be revolutionaries. Students and militants, black and white, neophyte radicals and New Leftists raised fists and hurled stones at the old order. The system must be destroyed; the Establishment must be laid low. Obscenities mingled with tear gas in Chicago. Black Panthers roamed the streets of Oakland. With a sense of deja-vu--of old, familiar furniture being dusted off--barricades once again surrounded the University of Paris. There were no programs, or few of them, for the future; there was only rage against the present. If the rage was often justified, the results of these revolutionary attempts (sometimes mere games) were doubtful. Here and there they did shake the established powers and did produce the beginning of reforms--although reform was not their stated aim. Predictably, they also provoked resistance and reaction, only entrenching the forces under attack. As the year ended, a different sort of revolution suddenly forced itself into the world's imagination. It was represented by the flight around the moon--perhaps the only event of the year to which, in the devalued coinage of the language, the word revolutionary might still be properly applied.

Incalculable Consequences

On the face of it, the space flight had little pertinence to the problems, the agonies of earth. It was possible to look at the moon over a Harlem or Watts rooftop and feel only bitterness at the money spent, the vast effort made, in a cause that would not alter a single life, a single dwelling in the ghetto. And yet the event was really incalculable in its consequences. Nothing comparable has happened in man's history, except possibly the great ocean voyages that led to the discovery of the New World --and to the transformation of Western man. In Columbus's day, as German Author Joachim Leithauser has pointed out, mankind believed itself to be in its old age, destined for poverty, sickness and evil. The famous Nurnberg Chronicle of 1493 predicted: "Conditions will be so terrible that no man will be able to lead a decent life. Then will all the sorrows of the Apocalypse pour down upon mankind: Flood, Earthquake, Pestilence and Famine; neither shall the crops grow nor the fruits ripen; the wells will dry up and the waters will bear upon them blood and bitterness, so that the birds of the air, the beasts in the field, and the fishes in the sea will all perish."

But the prophecy was false. What followed for mankind was not the Apocalypse, though there was to be abundant blood and bitterness. What followed was a tremendous resurgence of mind and spirit, a vast expansion of human knowledge and power, indeed a great age of reason.

The comparison, of course, is only approximate. Space, as far as man can now foretell, offers no treasures comparable to those sought and found in the New World, no immediate chance for settlement on a new frontier. But the most important fact about America's discovery was not material, not the wealth and territory that it added to the known world. It was rather the spiritual and intellectual challenge with which it shook that ancient, flat, small, circumscribed, warring village that was the world before Columbus. Thus, the age of space that emerged in the last days of 1968 may offer spiritual and intellectual challenge that will shake the new, vast, complex, circumscribed, warring cosmopolis that was the world before Apollo 8.

How? What the rebels and dissenters ask will not be found on the moon: social justice, peace, an end to hypocrisy--in short, Utopia. But to the extent that the rebels really want a particular kind of tomorrow--rather than simply a curse on, and an escape from, today--the moon flight of Apollo 8 shows how that Utopian tomorrow could come about. For this is what Westernized man can do. He will not turn into a passive, contemplative being; he will not drop out and turn off; he will not seek stability and inner peace in the quest for nirvana. Western man is Faust, and if he knows anything at all, he knows how to challenge nature, how to dare against dangerous odds and even against reason. He knows how to reach for the moon.

That is Western man, and with these qualities he will succeed or fail. It is possible to look at the moon flight and shudder at the vast, impersonal, computerized army of interchangeable technicians who brought it about. It is also possible to see in this endeavor the crucial gifts for organization and cooperation that alone will make survival in the post-industrial age feasible. It is possible to look at the moon flight and be dismayed at the crass expenditure of money, sweat and time, the sheer materialist effort, the ultimate triumph of gadgetry, the unabashed hubris of technique. But it is also possible to see in it the genius that is providing the abundance to end poverty, and the order and precision that may yet bring peace --or at least bring it somewhat nearer.

The hope is conditional and still remote. The triumph of Apollo 8 cannot erase the irony that it is easier for man to go to the moon than to wipe out a ghetto, easier for him to travel through space than to clean up his own polluted atmosphere, easier for him to establish cooperation in a vast technological enterprise than to establish brotherhood on a city block. Yet as man has conquered the seas, the air and other natural obstacles, he has also at each stage, in a small way, conquered part of himself. Therein lies the hope and the ultimate promise of his latest conquest.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.