Posthuman Blues

Interestingly, the author of this commendable article doesn't even mention the looming demise of the Hubble Space Telescope:

Our Incredible Shrinking Curiosity

"It would be less disheartening if the move to kill the Voyager program were an isolated example. But the U.S. scientific enterprise is riddled with evidence that Americans have lost sight of the value of non-applied, curiosity-driven research -- the open-ended sort of exploration that doesn't know exactly where it's going but so often leads to big payoffs. In discipline after discipline, the demand for specific products, profits or outcomes -- 'deliverables,' in the parlance of government -- has become the dominant force driving research agendas. Instead of being exploratory and expansive, science -- especially in the wake of 9/11 -- seems increasingly delimited and defensive."





As much as I agree with the body of the story, I have to take issue with the title; I don't think there's anything "incredible" (or even anomalous) about the wasting away of scientific curiosity. Rome fell, in part, due to apathy toward scientific research. We seem to be trapped in a similar intellectual malaise, a disorder that has infected our politics and geographic self-hood just as it has the way we go about asking fundamental questions about reality.

We've become solipsistic and greedy, addicted to the bread-and-circus routine of impulse spending and mass-marketed entertainment; we celebrate the fallacy of our ruling class with fascistic logos; we balm our wounded sense of the future with visions of an impending "Rapture," in which the world ends in a spectacle of uninspired special effects.

Lamentable, yes. Incredible, no; this has been in the works for a surprisingly long time.