455 



Technocracy mid Statecraft in the Space Age 1037 



from misdirected military and social spending encouraged by the same technocratic 

 mentality that inspired Apollo. The advent of the technological fix, streamlined 

 large systems-management techniques, compromise of the values embodied in 

 once-autonomous social institutions, the dominance of government by political and 

 social engineering — the entire drift of industrial democracies toward a materialistic, 

 manipulative approach to public policy under the post-Sputnik infatuation with 

 technique — these are also elements in the socialization of space technology. 



Depending on the explanation of the comparative responses of regimes and 

 societies to the challenges and temptations of the Space Age, some serious 

 assignments present themselves: rethinking the relationship between capitalism 

 and rationalization as it evolved in the new international technological environment 

 after 1957; reconsideration (or rejection) of the notion of convergence between the 

 political economies of East and West under the similar demands of expensive and 

 complex technologies; and reformulation of the very equation of economic with 

 political stability in an age of perpetual technological revolution. 



There is such a thing as the Space Age — defined by the discontinuous leap in 

 public stimulation and direction of research and development. Its ramifications 

 have only just begun and they are already obliging us to set aside categories of 

 political and economic history that have served more or less effectively for the 

 whole industrial age. But have these phenomena and the existence and promise of 

 ever more futuristic technology altered the bedrock of cultural values among 

 nations? Is the advent of spaceflight capable, as Tsiolkovsky dreamed, of elevating 

 mankind spiritually? Romantics after 1957 harbored such hopes. There was a 

 certain symmetry in the notion that mankind's escape from the world itself must 

 spawn a global self-consciousness, just as the Age of Discovery sharpened the self- 

 consciousness and self-criticism (as well as hubris) of Europeans. But if space 

 technology permitted some to visualize Spaceship Earth, it led others to see the 

 enemy of cultural values in technology itself. Jacques Ellul argued that technology 

 had so advanced that politics, economics, and art were not influenced by technique 

 but rather were situated in a technical milieu, while a technological morality had long 

 since supplanted inherited values.^^ Space technology is an effervescence of the 

 larger milieu that pre-exists and conditions its relation to modern culture. 



Lewis Mumford judged space exploration to be "technological exhibitionism" 

 and the latest expression of the "myth of the machine" that has dominated Western 

 civilization since the twelfth century. Embalming astronauts in an artificial skin and 

 blasting them into infinite vacuums in a skyscraper-tall rocket was for him the 

 analogue to pyramid-building in ancient Egypt.^^ Sociologist Amitai Etzioni also 

 interpreted space technology as the expression of an already flawed society: 



■" Ellul, "The Technological Order." Technolo^ and Culture, 3 (Fall, 1962): 394-421, 

 " Mumford, The Myth of tiie Machine, volume 2: The Pentagon of Power (New York, 1970), 303-1 1. Mumford's 

 exquisite iniagmation failed him in this caricature of manned space flight. The "mummified astronaut" will be a 

 primitive and romantic pioneer to the shirt-sleeved pilots and passengers of the next century, while the giant, 

 throwaway chemical fKX)sters of the early Space Age are already spurned as "big, dumb rockets." 



