Beauty and Innocence in a Damaged World

Artemis II Through a Child’s Eyes

“And the man who made Iris the child of Thaumas was perhaps no bad genealogist.”

My eleven-year-old is daydreaming about the Moon. Thinking of what stands behind the new lunar flyby, I first wanted to say – as Max Horkheimer in 1956 – that I couldn’t care less about sending a spacecraft to the Moon. But I quickly found myself drawn into the same orbit, quietly following his attention, the spark in his eyes. To share in that excitement is not indulgence; it is a small suspension of the closures that accumulate with age. In his fascination, the world remains provisionally open, the low expectations of the present day not yet naturalized. To accompany him there is not to shield him from reality, but to preserve, within it, a space where other scales of thought and desire can still be rehearsed. I watch him, and in doing so, I am reminded that the shape of things is not yet fully fixed; it can still be imagined differently, still malleable a little longer, if only from where he stands, before it hardens again.

One can, as Brecht insisted in another context, still speak of beauty amid injustice, but only by striking the dissonant note. The rocket rises, its brightness briefly overwhelming what persists below; the world remains out of joint. The sentiment that “we are all Earthlings” has a certain resonance when viewed from orbit, but it leaves intact the distribution of who is housed, who is protected, and who is left to absorb the shocks – of poverty, war, displacement, and an increasingly volatile climate. Most of humanity remain exposed – always have.

And yet, if he is captivated by Artemis II, this is not something to be corrected by an early introduction to astronomical budgets, fraught geopolitics, and shady corporate agendas. The prospect of space exploration pushes the boundaries of the imaginable; it continues to project mankind as a single, if abstract, collective. Against a background of utter fragmentation and managed scarcity, it carries a utopian charge that exerts a stubborn pull. It offers, however briefly, a standpoint from which identification can exceed borders and circumstances, as if, for a moment, they might be set aside, returning us to Earth under a different description: not as a patchwork of jurisdictions and control, but as a shared and finite habitat, turning slowly in the dark.

As we watch the Moon-bound capsule leave Earth behind, I do not speak to him of the interests that converge on the “peaceful” use of outer space, nor of the familiar actors who debate the extension of property relations beyond the atmosphere. Nor do I pair, alongside the spectacular views, the catalogue of terrestrial emergencies and catastrophes that define the present – fires, floods, and the slow violence of unaffordable housing and health care – all of which form the persistent background of adult knowledge and contrast sharply with the pseudo-urgency of revisiting our natural satellite.

Even as we marvel at the mission’s planetary sweep, it remains embedded in political economy. It presupposes (and demonstrates) the existence of extraordinary capacities: vast resources, accumulated knowledge, coordinated institutions, and long planning horizons. “Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of”, said one of the astronauts. The issue, however, is not whether large-scale action is within human reach, but under what conditions, and to what ends, it is undertaken.

The thing is not to oppose wonder with critique, nor to sequester critique in order to preserve wonder. Wonder opens the world; it marks the sense that what exists is not exhaustive of what could exist. But left to itself, that impulse is easily folded back into narratives that celebrate capacity while leaving its distribution untouched. If the coordination and ambition required to send humans around the Moon and safely bring them back are clearly within our reach, why are they applied so selectively?

Wonder – what Plato and Aristotle name thaumazein – need not be an escape from reality. It can be the threshold of a more exacting engagement with it. I hope my eleven-year-old will continue to look at the Moon with the same openness, holding onto that interruption, even as he begins to see the world’s uneven ground beneath it.

Reason in Chains

A Last Look at Habermas

In an effort to read Habermas charitably – on the assumption that an immanent critique of his work remains fruitful – in my previous post I didn’t go into much detail about what is actually the most problematic aspect of his approach. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere still stands for me as his strongest work, not least because it preserves the horizon of a self-governing society. The decisive shift occurs later, with his turn from Marx to Parsons. At that point, the impersonal subsystems of the market and state bureaucracy are no longer treated as historically contingent forms open to transformation, but as functional prerequisites of a rational, civilized society.

More troublingly, these domains are effectively insulated from any significant democratic intervention from below. Capital and its institutional apparatus – despite the rhetoric of “domestication” – are in the end to operate autonomously, as though on autopilot. Any attempt to extend popular control into the sphere of production is dismissed in advance as a dangerous regression. The result is a theoretical framework that preserves the language of rationality and critique while foreclosing the very possibility of a democracy of producers. What presents itself as communicative rationality becomes a closed circuit, incapable of interrogating the material foundations of power. 

In this respect, as I argue in my earlier piece, Habermas’s later framework appears less as a correction of first-generation Critical Theory than as a stabilization of the existing order under the guise of procedural reason. Yet, as Marcuse had already observed:

The slogan ‘let’s sit down and reason together’ has rightly become a joke. Can you reason with the Pentagon on any other thing than the relative effectiveness of killing machines – and their price? The Secretary of State can reason with the Secretary of the Treasury, and the latter with another Secretary and his advisers, and they all can reason with Members of the Board of the great corporations. This is incestuous reasoning; they are all in agreement about the basic issue: the strengthening of the established power structure. Reasoning ‘from without’ the power structure is a naïve idea. They will listen only to the extent to which the voices can be translated into votes, which may perhaps bring into office another set of the same power structure with the same ultimate concern.

Habermas’s faith in the redeeming force of communication thus tends to overlook how deeply communicative processes are embedded in, and constrained by, systemic imperatives. Perry Anderson, from a different angle, identifies a parallel tension internal to Habermas’s own theory:

In situations ‘where social power relations cannot be neutralized in way rational discourse presupposes’, the discourse principle can still ‘regulate bargaining from the standpoint of fairness’, by ensuring that there is an ‘equal distribution of bargaining power between the parties’. In other words, no matter how unequal the actual balance of power between [...] capital and labour, the legal outcome of a bargaining process between them will be ‘fair’, provided they are given an equal opportunity to talk to each other. With this wave of the wand, inequality becomes something like equality again after all.

Here, the problem is no longer merely that discourse is confined within power structures, but that it is credited with compensating for them without altering them. The formal symmetry of participation substitutes for substantive equality, allowing deeply asymmetrical relations – between capital and labor, in particular – to appear normatively justified. What remains then is a conception of democracy confined to the management of given structures, no longer capable of seriously imagining, let alone effecting, their needed transformation.