The Case for Being Better Humans - Part 1

Tonight I re-watched “The Dish”, an Australian movie about the true tale of the satellite dish operators who were responsible for making sure the images from Apollo 11 were broadcast around the globe, so that everyone could see Neil Armstrong taking his first steps on the moon.

I found myself profoundly moved by the re-watching, probably more so than I had been the first time.  (I honestly can’t even remember when I first watched it, although I think it was on a plane; it may have been on a flight to London in 2001.)  What moved me was very clear, though, and I can lay it out in three main points:

• ·      First, we lost Neil Armstrong this year.  It was easy to forget how consciousness altering that first moonwalk was to everyone who lived on the planet at the time.  I remember watching the TV as the event unfolded and stepping outside to look at the moon, and trying to reconcile what I saw on the TV with what I saw in my own eyes.  I was 5 at the time – I can’t imagine what my grandparents (who I watched it with and who lived through WWI, the Great Depression and WWII) were thinking.
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• ·      Second, I have been reading a great deal lately about the scientific approach to music, and specifically the debates that have raged through the centuries about temperament, or how to tune instruments.  What struck me most in the reading is how many great scientific minds in human history have weighed in on the topic of musical temperament: Pythagoras, Euclid, Aristotle, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton (to name just a few) all wrote treatises on music.
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• ·      Third, we are days away from an election in this country where one half of the electorate believes in things that fly in the face of scientific inquiry, logical reasoning and empirical data.  For them, global warming is a hoax, evolution is debatable, Jesus appeared in the Western Hemisphere, rape is “a gift from God” if it leads to pregnancy, and in all of the above cases it is perfectly suitable for Government intervention to ensure that viewpoint.

The people who have been reading my posts over the last years will not be surprised that I find the situation we face going into this election to be against the grain of everything that our greatest human minds have strived for.  I asked myself during “The Dish” if our great country could even be capable of mounting something like a moonwalk again.  To our credit, we have in the last year witnessed incredible images from Mars, and seen a man freefall from the highest point ever and live to tell the tale. 

But I ask, are we, in 2012, a species that believes in the scientific and logical processes that got us where we are today?  Or are we a species that succumbs to our greatest fears and superstitions?