Below is a fine example [more of the same in the link below] of how academics are actively working to distort American Exceptionalism - deconstructing what was one of the last holdouts. It’s a good insight into why the U.S. space program is being destroyed - greened up, toned down, melded into a global co-op. NASA [manned space exploration] is useful because it is symbolic but it must be transformed as it props up one of the last vestiges of American Exceptional thinking.
http://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-chapter25.pdf
“.....This brief historical review has shown how the rhetoric of space advocacy has sustained an ideology of American Exceptionalism and reinforced long-standing beliefs in progress, growth, and capitalist democracy. This rhetoric conveys an ideology of spaceflight that could be described, at its worst, as a sort of space fundamentalism: an exclusive belief system that rejects as unenlightened those who do not advocate the colonization, exploitation, and development of space. The rhetorical strategy of space advocates has tended to rest on the assumption that the values of “believers” are (or should be) shared by others as well.
Although the social, political, economic, and cultural context for space exploration has changed radically since the 1960s, the rhetoric of space advocacy has not. In the twenty-first century, advocates continue to promote spaceflight as a biological imperative and a means of extending U.S. free enterprise, with its private property claims, resource exploitation, and commercial development, into the solar system and beyond. Pyne,among others,has addressed the problematic nature of these arguments: “the theses advanced to promote [solar system] settlement,” he noted, “are historical, culturally bound, and selectively anecdotal: that we need to pioneer to be what we are, that new colonies are a means of renewing civilization.”
Spaceflight advocacy can be examined as a cultural ritual, performed by means of communication (rhetoric), for the purpose of maintaining the current social order, with its lopsided distribution of power and resources, and perpetuating the values of those in control of that order (materialism, consumerism, technological progress, private property rights, capitalist democracy). Communication research has shown how public discourses—those cultural narratives or national myths—“often function covertly to legitimate the power of elite social classes.” And this review has shown how the rhetoric of space advocacy reflects an assumption that these values are worth extending into the solar system.
Everything now suggests,” Nisbet wrote 25 years ago, “that Western faith in the dogma of progress is waning rapidly.” This faith appears to have remained alive and well, however, in the ideology of spaceflight. Christopher Lasch wrote 15 years ago,“almost everyone now agrees that [the idea of] progress—in its utopian form at least,” no longer has the power “to explain events or inspire [people] to constructive action.”
But in the current cultural environment, perhaps it does—at least among space advocates. Progress is, indeed, modern American dogma and a key element of pro-space dogma. But it does not resonate well—as Pyne and others have noted—in the current postmodern (or even post-postmodern) cultural environment, where public discourse is rife with critiques of science, technology, the aims of the military-
industrial complex, and the corporate drive for profit.
Pyne observed almost 20 years ago that space exploration was “not yet fully in sync” with its cultural environment. Modern (seventeenth-to twentieth-century) Western (European-American) exploration functioned as “a means of knowing, of creating commercial empires, of outmaneuvering political economic, religious, and military competitors—it was war, diplomacy, proselytizing, scholarship, and trade by other means.” But the postmodern exploration of space is different. outer space is not simply an extension of Earth and the era of space exploration is not simply an extension of the modern era of transoceanic and transcontinental exploration. Its cultural context is different. The modern phenomenon of spaceflight has outlived the modern era and its purpose is not clear in a postmodern or even post-postmodern world, characterized by uncertainty, subjectivity, deconstruction, and a rejection of so-called master narratives such as the story of frontier conquest. The moral imperative of the myth of pioneering the space frontier could be interpreted as a narrative that is in tune with its postmodern cultural environment in the sense that it conveys the values of the dominant social order—that is, what communication scholar Herb Schiller has called “the transnational corporate business order” and its ideology of private property ownership, resource exploitation and profit building.............”
From: Section VI
“Spaceflight, culture and ideology”
From your keys to God’s ears!
Have not hit the link you provided yet, but thanks in advance and complete agreement on the summary. Over Christmas got into the whole exploration / space debate and it always pains me to hear the miserable excuses people have for NOT doing something grand. Often well meaning but not well informed!
Rise to the Challenge, folks!