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1040 Walter A. McDougall 



and lamentations of lost technical supremacy. Ten years later the following was 

 overheard at a State Department dinner: "All inventions for a long time will be 

 made in the U.S. because we are moving so fast in technology, and large-scale, 

 organized efforts produce inventions." The eavesdropper was James Webb; the 

 speaker "a Mr. Brzezinski."^^ What had intervened to change a nation's mood was 

 the space technological revolution. Our technological civilization has evolved for 

 centuries. But the international rivalries of our age, culminating in Sputnik, 

 induced a saltation in the politics of technology through the transformation of the 

 state into an active, all-out promoter of technological progress. Alexander 

 Gerschenkron theorized that the more economically backward a country, the more 

 the state must play a role in forcing change. In the current age of perpetual and 

 rapid progress, all states have become "backward" on a permanent basis. Hence, the 

 institutionalization of wartime "emergency methods," the permanent suspension of 

 "peacetime" values, the blurring of distinctions between the state and private 

 institutions, and the apparent erosion of cultural differences around the world. 

 History is speeding up, and the leading nations justify their ever-accelerating pace 

 of innovation by the need to maintain military and economic security. Yet that very 

 progress may, at times, undermine the values that make a society worth defending 

 in the first place. This, succinctly stated, is the dilemma of the Space Age. 



One is tempted to conclude that the creation and use of still more power as a 

 solution to human problems is as vain as the effort of the American tourist to make 

 his English understood by steadilv raising his voice. "The worship of technology," 

 wrote William C. Davidon after Sputnik, "has reduced the differences between 

 totalitarian countries and those where human worth and dignity might be expected 

 to find more devoted champions. "^^ The fallacy of the early Space Age was that the 

 pursuit of power, especially through science and technology, could absolve 

 modern man from his duty to examine, affirm, or alter his own values and behavior 

 in the first place. The politicians climbed aboard. It was left to Wernher von Braun 

 to admonish "that man raise his ethical standards or perish. "^^ 



'* Memo, Webb to Frutkin, June 22, 1967, NASA Historical Archives. 



■'^ Davidon, "Soviet Satellites— U.S. Reactions," Bulletin of llie Atomic Scientists (December 1957). 357-58. The 

 contradictions of our "humanist religion" have been brilliantly exposed by David Ehrenfeld; see his The 

 Arrogance of Humanism (New York, 1978). 



'* Wernher von Braun, a founder of the first Lutheran church in Huntsville, Alabama, and a disciple of 

 Teilhard de Chardin. wrote the chapter on "Responsible Scientific Investigation and Application" in H. Ober 

 Hess, cd., The Nature of a Humane Society (Philadelphia, 1976). It amounted to a political and moral testament 

 since he died shortly after submitting it Von Braun called for a new system of values transcendmg the "old 

 American standards of material or technological efficiency." 



