propaganda
All the ways we tell stories to avoid, distort, tweak reality. Religion, politics, cultural narrative, for starters.
Elon Musk has a plan of salvation. It won't work.
Giving up and moving on is an American tradition. But where else can we go?
One warm night in my mid-twenties, I sat in a Florida parking lot with an electrical engineer. We were, alternately, making out and discussing plans for saving the human race. I was mostly dependent on God for this project at the time. His plan—to my astonishment— was to colonize Mars.
“It’s the only thing left,” he said.
Are you kidding me? I thought. It was the first time I'd ever heard such a thing. Imagine! I was indignant. Imagine living unprotected in waves of solar radiation (you couldn’t), or, more likely, in transparent bubbles through which you watch the fleeting rivulets of cold stewy unbreathable air? Imagine living off of the three tasteless plants you could cultivate under grow lights in hydroponic corridors under Martian soil?
Worse: Imagine doing all these things and remembering a planet once-upon-a-time, which produced millions of colorful plants and birds, which was strewn with crystalline lakes and rivers, which smelled like soil and honeysuckle and iron, and on which you’ll never stand again? The prospect was awful. I couldn't believe anyone seriously entertained it. But it turns out that my electrical engineer was one of many who believed that mankind's fallback plan should be a freezing, inhospitable planet 90 million miles away.
A more famous adherent to this idea, obviously, is Elon Musk—American deity extraordinaire!—whose Space-X rocket prototypes exploded a few months ago.
The Reuters article in my newsfeed paired it with an image of a thick tongue of flame, as though the rocket had been part of a funeral rite. What a sight! There weren’t any people aboard, of course; it was an unmanned probe, part of testing for the Spaceship project, destined—according to Elon—to take billionaires to the moon in 2023, and to lay the groundwork for Elon’s big ambition: Mars. According to reports, the test was a relative success—the rocket did successfully land before bursting into flames. An impressive technical achievement. The engineers would go back to the drawing board, tweak something about the fuel tank, and spend another million or so to test another prototype. A rocket in the sky would grace the sky again soon enough.
A few days before Elon’s rocket exploded, though, the Atlantic published a piece by Shannon Stirone that I wanted to wave in the face of every citizen of the country: Mars is a Hellhole. The article itself is great—you should read it—but you can get the gist from the headline.
Mars sucks. Mars is awful. It’s hot, and bleak, with an impossible atmosphere. As a prospect for future human settlement, it needs to go.
Mars sucks. Mars is awful. It’s cold, and bleak, with an impossible atmosphere. As a prospect for future human settlement, it needs to go.
It is manifestly unsuited for human life and no amount of technological prowess is going to turn it into a paradise. Can we just put this to bed this now?
Well, it doesn’t seem like it.
Okay, then.
Of course, Musk is a high-level god in the American pantheon, which is to say: He’s got the money and power to do just about whatever he likes, and he does it all in the brazen, devil-may-care spirit of the mythical American cowboy. He’ll spend millions on car elevators. He’ll name his kid an unintelligible string of babble. He’ll sell you a flamethrower. And for these reasons he is venerated from the sacred halls of Reddit to the boardrooms of startups in Silicon Valley. For these reasons some, at least, are inclined to believe him when he says he can do the impossible—say, for example, move humanity to Mars.
And, granted, maybe he can do certain nigh-unto-impossible things (like, say, popularizing the electric automobile on the shores of a gas-guzzling country). But we’ve got to put our collective foot down when he starts romanticizing Mars as a future place for humanity.
Elon's plan of salvation isn't even close to new. Moving on to the next "pure" place is how this country has always dealt with its problems. Ancestry.com informs me, personally, that I’m from a long line of leavers. My ancestors headed to the American continent on some of the first ships out of England, landed on the east coast, headed to Pennsylvania, then on to Ohio, then moved further on whenever we felt like it. That was how we coped, and how we still cope: When things get too crowded, dirty, or smelly, we leave. Find a fresh, untouched, pure place. Build something new.
And I think that's kind of the American assumption, right? There will always be fresh material. There will always be a new tomorrow and somewhere else to move to. There will always be a place to expand to, and materials to expand with, so...go ahead! Pull up roots, make more fuel, build more rockets, make more worlds. It all seems so possible because that is the assumption which has fueled our culture.
The problem, of course, is that this assumption is manifestly false. We are fragile beings on a fragile planet, subject to the laws of physics and biology. Neither or resources nor our time are endless. Limitless expansion has always been a lie, because limitless expansion is literally impossible. And evolutionary theory warns us of what happens when a species refuses to recognize and adapt to its limits.
"Limitless expansion has always been a lie, because limitless expansion is literally impossible. And evolutionary theory warns us of what happens when a species refuses to recognize and adapt to its limits."
To be fair, though, maybe Elon’s not completely wrong? Perhaps human life will, indeed, peel itself away from the crust of this planet and move elsewhere in remnants, in little Ark-like pods of explorers. Perhaps we will even form refugee civilizations capable of sustaining themselves on hydroponic plants and vitamin capsules. But even if that happens, I have zero expectation that that life will cease to be of Earth in the ways that matter. Any group of people, transplanted anywhere else, will face the same problems as we do here, but in a place that’s way less habitable and way less pleasant.
Can you see it? Our great-grandchildren growing up in pods on an inhospitable planet; eating mineral pellets and suiting up in veneers of airtight, flame-retardant...stuff?
I can. I imagine Earth sliding into myth. I imagine children of the future being told about this planet as children now are told about heaven, that ethereal, unreachable place, perfect for humans—but unattainable. I imagine mankind's culpability being slid through a thousand interpretive lenses until it is not our fault at all. I imagine the past morphing into the future, and the Earth as paradise, as unattainable utopia…
Yes, it’s bleak. That we have come to this, despite all our technology and all our best efforts, would lend itself to some version of the Christian prayer: “What must we do to be saved?”
Which is actually the wrong prayer, or at least, an outdated one. We already know what we must do. We have very little time to do it, and apparently no collective willingness to admit that we have no other choice. So I guess the prayer becomes now, “What will we do to be saved?”
As long as we persist in taking Musk’s very American idea seriously—that is, so long as we insist in denying reality—the answer will continue to be “Not much.”
Orthodoxy won't save the world. But orthopraxy might.
To channel Bruce Wayne, it's what we do that defines us.
As with many other young evangelicals, I grew up under the auspices of orthodoxy, which is to say that what one believed is what mattered. To save people, you got them to "believe in Jesus" and declare as such. Believe with thy heart and confess with thy mouth. Any admonitions to read the Bible and do God's work were decidedly after the fact. What one did was important, too, but only in a hazy, ill-defined way I never understood. What was clear was that if you screwed up you could be forgiven as long as you believed in the appropriate doctrines. In other words, you can raise hell your entire life, be converted on your deathbed, and skid into heaven on a technicality.
This culture of right belief over right action—of orthodoxy over orthopraxy— was a large part of my early and ongoing grievance against my evangelical upbringings. The more I became disillusioned with evangelical leadership and action, the more the pontificating on belief and public skirmishes over belief-centered artifacts began to grate.
Before my final exit from the Christian fold—although "final exit" is perhaps a bit too strong for my slow drift away from the altar and out the church door—I was drawn to more ancient practices of Christianity, mostly because they were practices. Physical objects appeared and were handled. On high holy days one fasted, or prayed, or threw confetti at a church altar, or something. People did things. Sometimes the Lutherans opened hospitals and cared for the poor. It was nice.
By the time I got as far as Roman Catholicism, though, it was too late. The well was poisoned. The drift bore me relentlessly out the door.
The combination of the DJT presidency and the utter lunacy of my former spiritual leaders has turned me a bit religious, though, in the sense that I feel devoted to things; I want to save the whole damn world.
But not by thinking the right things, saying the magic words, or joining another Good Guy Club. In truth, I find the intellectual posturing and political correctness of the left nearly as exhausting as the rabid ideological insanity happening on the right. There are so many rituals and code phrases—things one must think, things one must absolutely never say, and questions one really shouldn't ask in public or out loud. It's as as steep a purity spiral and as rigid an orthodoxy as any I ever saw.
In the aftermath of Charlottesville car attack—remember that?—there was a push on social media to stand up and declare which side you were on. It all felt very religious: Think the right thing—and then be sure everyone knows you're one of the cowboys in white hats. But how much declaration is enough? How many words will it take to sort out this mess? How many rallies do I need to attend before everyone sees I'm on the right side? How loudly and how long do I have to declare the doctrine before I'm one of the so-called good guys?
How many rallies do I need to attend before everyone sees I'm on the right side? How loudly and how long do I have to declare the doctrine before I'm one of the so-called "good guys"?
In the midst of the mêlée, the quote I've turned to the most is from Wendell Berry, who humbly suggests that "[m]aybe we could give up saving the world and start to live savingly in it."
Those who grew up with the same kind of evangelicalism I did will recognize this concept as pretty much fundamentally opposed to evangelical orthodoxy. Because everything in evangelicalism is about saving the world. Not the actual world you and I live in, mind you, but the theoretical, futurey-wuturey world that will be labeled as Saved when all the people in it (who are future people—not us) believe and say the right thing about God. It's an unreachable utopian ideal, as is so much of evangelical theology.
What I like about Berry's idea is that it's rooted in the real, the concrete. The word "living" is in the present perfect progressive tense. It must be done here—in the muddy and half-baked Now—and it will continue into the future with no specific expectation of an end. Living savingly has no finite goal and no real measure of success. It's a concept grounded in messy and unending reality—in the humans, relationships, and physical objects which surround us and which we have the power to affect.
What does living savingly look like? I've been trying to figure that out. I have an ache to figure that out. My own attempt at living savingly has looked largely like a series of adjustments: staying in conversations from which I'd otherwise excuse myself, a sputtering project to gather people in my home every week, carrying around a coffee carafe, changing where I shop, changing my writing goals.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The adjustments don't feel like much in the grand scheme of things. They are slight reorientations. Sometimes they are too slight.
So, in the end, I have no great revelation, but I have come to two conclusions. The first: No other human can tell you how to live savingly—or give you the conviction necessary to do it. Likewise, no one has the right to extract a confession of belief or demand that you flash a "good guy card." There are no lawful initiations to this game we're all born into, squalling. You must do the best you can by your neighbor. You must—to risk quoting an old nemesis—"work out your own salvation."
No other human can tell you how to live savingly—or give you the conviction necessary to do it.
The second: releasing oneself from the obligation to save the entire world—to "think of the small as large" as the Tao Te Ching puts it—is one sure step away from despair. The dismissal of Everything is what allows us to start on the road to our Something—whatever that might be. Of course, our Something will never be enough. But I don't think it's supposed to be. The cosmos of good appears to operate by a math I don't understand.
In his 2014 article Burn Your Indecision to the Ground, David Sessions outlined a plan of resistance:
"[S]tart living different ways, a little at a time. Start committing to people, places, things. Say yes to your friend’s party Saturday night, and go anyway even when something better comes up. Join an organization that fights for an issue you care about, and keep going even when the meetings are long, boring, and seem pointless. Fight for someone . . . . immigrants, minorities, the homeless, the incarcerated, whoever; you’ll realize you had more in common with them than you thought. Commit to a person or people; stay in the same city with them, live with them, marry them. Join a union, especially if you’re the only member under 50; if there isn’t one where you work, start one. If you can find one that hasn’t retreated into spiritual apoliticism or reactionary traditionalism, I don’t even care if you take up a religion. The point is to build human ties, add little by little to your network of solidarity, make it thicker and stronger. It won’t be enough, but it’ll be a start."
Sessions wrote this well before Trumpist hell broke loose, so the resistance he described was not against Trump or his cronies but against the very ideological current that later was to bear them up. His advice was even more sound for its prescience. After all, the year really makes no difference: be it in 2014 or 2017 or 2025, we deal not so much with the power of people as with the power of ideas, of too-simple narratives, of ego-stroking propaganda. We wrestle now not with fellow citizens, but with an old American demon—an ideology we have fought with since the beginning.
We wrestle now not with fellow citizens, but with an old American demon—an ideology we have fought with since the beginning. If it is to be defeated, it will not be by repeated declarations of horror on Twitter or by heroic acts in flames of glory.
If this ideology is to be defeated, it will not be by repeated declarations of horror on Twitter or by heroic acts in flames of glory, but by the stalwart obedience of a multitude of ordinary people able "to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways," as David Foster Wallace put it. In other words, a communal system of action, an orthopraxy of everyday justice, of bull-headed devotion to good work, and of deliberate attention to those things and people termed inconsequential by a for-profit culture.
Again, it's not enough. But for those of us orphaned from our faith communities and haunted by old gods, it is something: A rubric of sanity and a way to approach our days.
(This article was written in 2017 and updated slightly.)