Mormons In Space

If one tried to define the Zeitgeist breathing through the New Right today one would be confronted with a seemingly undecipherable puzzle. On the one side these are the spokesmen for a scientific and technological revolution that a few years ago would have smacked of science fiction: gene-splicing, DNA computers, time-compression techniques, space colonies.

At the same time the circles of the New Right have witnessed a revival of religious tendencies and moral conservatism that one would have thought was buried once and for all with "our" Puritan Founding Fathers. Falwell's Moral Majority is the most vocal of this return to the values of Calvin and Cotton Mather, but by far not the only one. Wherever you turn, God-fearing-Satan-minded groups, determined to reshape the country on the model of the Puritan colonies, are sprawling like mushrooms: Christian Voice, Pro-Family Forum, National Prayer Campaign, Eagle Forum, Right to Life Commission, Fund to Restore an Educated Electorate, Institute for Christian Economics.

Seen in its general contours, then, the body of the New Right seems stretching in two opposite directions, attempting at once a bold leap into the past and an equally bold leap into the future. The puzzle increases when we realise that these are not separate sects, but in more than one way they involve the same people and the same money. Despite a few petty squabbles and a few pathetic contortions to keep up the "pluralism" facade, the hand that sends the shuttle into orbit or recombines mice and rabbits is the same that is fretfully pushing for gays to be sent to the stake and is drawing a big cross not just through the 20th, but the 19th and 18th centuries too.

To what extent the Moral Majority and Co. and the science futurologists are one soul, one mission, is best seen, if not in the lives of their individual spokesmen (though the image of the 'electronic minister' and of a President who in the same breath blesses God and calls for stepped up nerve gas production and the neutron bomb are good evidence of this marriage), then in the harmony of intent they display when confronted with the 'key issues' of the time. When it comes to economic and political matters, all shreds of difference drop off and both souls of the New Right pull money and resources towards their common goals. Free-Market, laissez-faire economics (for business, of course), the militarization of the country (what is called "building a strong military defense"), bolstering "internal security", i.e., giving the FBI and CIA free rein to police our daily life, cutting all social spending except that devoted to building prisons and ensuring that thousands will fill them; in a word, asserting U.S. capital's ownership of the world and setting "America" to work at the minimum wage (or below) are goals for which all the New Right would swear on the Bible.

A clue to understanding the double soul of the New Right is to realise that its mixture of reactionary social policies and scientific boldness is not a novelty in the history of capitalism. If we look at the beginning of capital --the 16th and 17th century to which the Moral Majority would so happily return-- we see a similar situation in the countries of the "take off".

At the very time when Galileo was pointing his telescope to the moon, and Francis Bacon was laying the foundations of scientific rationality, women and gays by the thousands were burnt on the stake throughout Europe, with the universal blessing of the modernizing (sic) European intelligentsia. A sudden craze? An inexplicable fall into barbarism? In reality, the witch hunt was part and parcel of that attempt at "human perfectibility" that is commonly acknowledged as the dream of the fathers of modern rationalism.

For the thrust of the emerging capitalist class towards the domination and exploitation of nature would have remained a dead letter without the concomitant creation of a new type of individual whose behavior would be as regular, predictable and controllable as that of the newly discovered natural laws. To achieve this purpose one had to destroy that magical conception of the world that, e.g., made the Indians in the overseas colonies believe that it was a sacrilege to mine the earth, or in the heart of Europe assured the proletariat that people could fly, be in two places at the same time, divine the future and (most important) that on some 'unlucky days' all enterprise had to be carefully avoided.

The witch hunt, moreover, ensured the control over the main source of labor, the woman's body, by criminalizing abortion and all forms of contraception as a crime against the state. Finally, the witch hunt was functional to the reorganization of family life, i.e., the restructuring of reproduction that accompanied the reorganization of work on a capitalistic basis.

On the stake died the adulteress, the woman of 'ill repute', the lesbian, the woman who lived alone, or lacked 'maternal spirit' or had illegitimate children. On the stake ended many beggars, who had impudently launched their curses against the refusal of some "ale and bread". For in the 'transition' to capitalism it was primarily the woman, especially the woman in rebellion, (destined to depend on a man for her survival) who became pauperised. The fathers of modern rationalism approved; some even complained that the state did not go far enough.

Notoriously, Bodin insisted that the witches should not be 'mercifully' strangled before being given to the flames. That today we find a similar situation prevailing in the U.S.A. is an indication of the depth of capital's crisis. Always, in its beginning as, we would hope, in its end, when uncertain of its foundations, capital goes down to basics.

At present this means attempting a bold technological leap which on one side (at the developing pole of production) concentrates capital and automates work to an unprecedented degree and, on the other, consigns millions of workers to either wagelessness (unemployment) or to employment in intensive-labor types of jobs, paid at minimum rates, on the model of the much acclaimed 'free enterprise zones'. This involves, however, a reorganization of the process whereby labor is reproduced --a project in which women are expected to play a most crucial role.

The institutionalization of repression and self-discipline along the line of the Moral Majority and the New Christian Right is today required for both ends of the working class spectrum: For those who are destined to temporary, part-time subsistence level of wages (accompanied by long hours of work or a perennial quest for jobs) as well as for those who are elected to a "meaningful wage" working with the most sophisticated equipment capital's technologists are now able to produce. That the holy trinity of God/Work/Family is always crucial in times of repression is a well tested truth capital has never forgotten.

What could be more productive than a life of isolation, where the only relations we have with each other are relations of reciprocal discipline: Daddy controlling Mommy, Mommy teaching the children that life is hard and survival problematic, neighbors getting together to keep the neighborhood 'clean', sociality shrinking to those occasions that help us find or keep a job??? And if life is pain there is always God, in whose name you can even justify nuclear war against the infidels who, like the rebellious Sodomites, deserve to be wiped out from the face of the earth (even if a few of the righteous get wiped out too). And you can even justify a nuclear war that will wipe out yourself too, for after all what is the big deal about life, if you have already accepted to bargain cancer for a wage, renounce all your desires and postpone your fulfilment to another world?

Let us not be mistaken. Haig needs Jerry Falwell, as does Stockman. From Wall Street to the Army-, all capital's utopias are predicated on an infinitesimal micropolitics at the level of the body, curbing our animal spirits and redefining the meaning of that famous Pursuit of Happiness that (so far at least) has been the biggest of all constitutional lies. And Jerry Falwell is even more needed for the development of the high tech (computer, information, energy, genetic) worker who, unlike those at the lower echelons of the working class, cannot be run by the stick (in case God failed), for the damage he can do (should he slip in his duty) is infinitely greater because the machines he works with are infinitely more costly. What the launching of high tech industry needs mostly today is a technological leap in the human machine --a big evolutionary step creating a new type of worker to match capital's investment needs.

What are the faculties required by the new being our futurologists advocate? A look at the debate on space colonies is revealing in this respect. All agree, first of all, that the main impediment today to the development of human colonies in space is bio-social rather than technological, i.e., you may be able to glue the space shuttle's tiles together but glueing the right space worker-technician is a project that even the present genetic breakthroughs are far from having solved. An individual is needed who can:

--endure social isolation and sensory deprivation for long periods of time without breaking down,

--perform 'perfectly' in an extremely hostile/ alien and artificial environment and under enormous stress,

--achieve a superb control of his bodily functions (consider: it takes an hour to shit in space!) and psychological reactions (anger, hate,inde-cisiveness)=our all-too-human frailties which can be disastrous in the fragile, vulnerable world of life in space,

--demonstrates total obedience, conformity and receptivity to commands for there can be little tolerance for social deviations and disagreements when the most minute act of sabotage can have catastrophic consequences to the very costly, complex and powerful equipment entrusted in their hands.

Indeed, not only will the space technician have a quasi-religious relation to his machine but he himself must become more and more machine-like, achieving a perfect symbiosis with his computer which, in the long nights of space, is often his only and always his most reliable guide, his companion, his buddy, his friend.

The space worker, then, must be a highly ascetic type, pure in body and soul, perfect in his performance, obedient like a well wound clock and extremely fetishistic in his mental modes. Where is this gem most likely bred? In a fundamentalist type religious sect. To put it in the words of biologist Garrett Harding:

What group would be most suitable to this most recent Brave New World (the space colony)? Probably a religious group. There must be unity of thought and the acceptance of discipline. But the colonists couldn't be a bunch of Unitarians or Quakers, for these people regard the individual conscience as the best guide to action. Space colonies' existence would require something more like the Hutterites or the Mormons for its inhabitants... integration could not be risked on this delicate vessel, for fear of sabotage and terrorism. Only 'purification' would do.

Not surprisingly, a few days after landing, the space shuttle astronauts were greeted by Elder Neal Maxwell at the Mormon Tabernacle. "We honor tonight men who have seen God in all his majesty and power," he said and the 6000 member congregation responded, "Amen."

But --we hear the objection-- if these religious dinosaurs are the best allies of science fiction capitalism, why do they feud among each other, as it has recently happened in the creationism versus evolution legal debate? Isn't this a sign that even today there is a war between science and religion?? Not quite. The creationists do not necessarily -object to Darwinism as a theory- after all, a biblical day can be millions or billions of years long; neither do they object to the technology of gene splicing, for the Book saith:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The real problem with evolutionary theory is strictly one of social control, particularly in its application to children, the future generation of workers, who notoriously dislike discipline, have "little understanding" and are thus prone to draw the "wrong" conclusions from the realisation that we come from the apes.
As Rev. Curtis Thom says:

I wonder if the fact that in classrooms now kids are being taught that everything evolved from a natural order, if that has some effect on the students' minds, that "Well, I'm not responsible to a creator?" If students understand that there may be a creation with a creator it could possibly make a child think that "If I did come from a creator, then perhaps I am responsible to that creator and before I violate somebody's rights, I'd better remember that I am responsible to somebody."

Similarly, when the head of the Creation Science Legal Fund was questioned in California as to his objections to evolution he replied that it reduces a child's respect for his elders because they were 'closer to the apes"!

"Evolution spawns a disrespect for authority, for moral values and for God himself," claims the author of a fundamentalist physical science text book, affiliated with Bob Jones University. "It destroys man by convincing him he is a mere accident of nature, a clever animal at best."

We may smile at the directness and naivete of these statements. Yet, they reflect an unadulterated acknowledgement of what are the foundations of capital's rule. A worldly scepticism may be tolerable --even advisable-- in a well trained adult. But when it comes to children, nothing can be as effective as the fear of God, Hell and Damnation to give them a proper and life-long mold. The future workers, whether they will deal with computers or a broom, must be formed in the cradles and breaking their will in the good, old time puritan fashion is a sine qua non condition of awakening their moral instincts.

Instilling fear of God's wrath --the main concern of the creationists-- is only the first step. To make the message clear, physical terror is conveniently added. Not all fundamentalists have gone as far as that minister in the Southwest who teaches catechism with the help of an electric chair, convinced that an electric shock administered every time God's' name is pronounced is the best means to imprint its memory in the child. "Doing away with the 'permissivism' in child rearing," it is called, which is but a ferocious determination to breakdown the child. (This is a constant, obsessive theme of the New Christian Right.)

The reintroduction of corporal punishment in the school and its complete legitimisation in the family is openly demanded, e.g., by the Family Protection Act which even proposes to cut all funds from any agency asserting the right of the child to defend him or herself from the violence of their parents and authorities. Thus recently, in Pennsylvania, when a child brutalised by his parents was placed by a center in a foster home, the local Moral Majority chapter went to court claiming that whipping was approved by the Bible, provided the child does not die.

The fight between creationism and evolutionism, then, is just an internal capitalist squabble as to what are the most adequate means of control. Until our social biologists and genetic engineers –the heros of today's scientific breakthrough-have found the means to create a perfect robot, the whip will do, particularly in an age still infected with the anarchic ideologies of the 60s, when a lot of bad germs have already been implanted in children and parents alike.

Moreover, the asceticism, self-control, the flight from the earth and the body which is the substance of puritan teaching, is the best soil in which capital's scientific and economic plans can flourish. Indeed, today, more consciously than ever, in its attempt to relocate itself on safer shores, capital is embracing the dream of all religion: the overcoming of all physical boundaries, the reduction of the individual human being to an angel-like creature, all soul and will.

In the creation of the electronic/ space worker, the priest of scientific exploration-exploitation of the universe, capital is fighting once again its historic battle against matter, attempting to break at once both the boundaries of the earth and the boundaries of "human nature" which, in its present form, present irreducible limits that must be overcome. The thrust to the organization of industries in space and the dematerialization of the body go together. For the former cannot be accomplished without the remolding of a whole nexus of needs, wishes, desires, that are the product of billions of years of material evolution on the planet and which up to now have been the material conditions of bio-social reproduction -- the blues, the greens, the nipple, the balls, the hair of the anus, the texture of oranges, beef, carrots, the wind and sea smell, the day light, the need for physical contact, SEX!!! The dangers of sexuality are emblematic of the obstacles capital encounters in the attempt to create a totally self-controlled being, capable of spending nights and nights alone, talking just to his computer, with his mind focused on nothing but the screen.

Can you afford to be horny or lonely in space? Can you afford to be jealous or have a marital breakdown?? What's the right attitude in this respect is indicated by a report on the South Pole Station in Antarctica that ostensibly was set up to study meteorological, astronomical and geographical conditions at the pole, but in reality is a big center for human experimentation: the study of human beings in conditions approaching that of space (isolation for many months, lack of a sensuous contact, etc.) This report states: As for sexual relations... all candidates were warned of the 'dangers' of sexual liaisons under the supercharged conditions here.

Celibacy was the best course...men think of nothing but sex for the first few weeks, then it is submerged until nearly the end of the winter. One worker reported, 'You just basically put it out of your mind. You are working all the time; there is no privacy.' Celibacy, abstinence: it is the last step in a long process whereby increasingly capital has decreased the sensuous-sexual content of our lives and encounters with people, substituting the mental image to the physical touch.

Centuries of capitalist discipline have gone a long way toward producing individuals who shrink from others for fear of touch. (See the way we live our social spaces: buses, trains, each passenger closed in its own space, its own body, keeping well defined, though invisible, boundaries; each person its own castle.) This physical as well as emotional isolation from each other is the essence of capitalist cooperation. But it as well as the dematerialization of all forms of our life finds their culmination in the inhabitant of the future space colony whose success depends on his ability to become a pure, totally purified, angel --who does not fuck, does not require the sensuous stimulations which are our daily nourishment on earth, but can live by solely feeding on its self-sufficient, self-centered will power.

Food as well goes out the window. Not even hamburgers and french fries any longer, but dehydrated food, recycled urine and (why not?) feces. Given the importance of oxygen and the closed nature of the space pod, the control of biological growth is essential to prevent diseases; thus, waste must be recycled: eat your awn shit and drink your own piss. For what is important is the "analytic diet" which is to provide the standardized chemical ingredients that the standard body needs in sufficient quantities and rates. The form this diet takes is not essential with the proviso that it must be completely antiseptic in order not to infect the surfaces of the space pod.

Here is a description of space food since the Mercury project days:

It's always been freeze-dried food which you add water to reconstitute, or what are called thermal-stablized foods, almost exactly the same thing you would get in canned peaches or pears, the type of food which don't need to add water to, or in the case of Sky Lab we also had about 10-15% of frozen foods, including filet mignon, and lobster and roast pork and vanilla ice cream for that matter.

So describes the happy astronaut: not far different from "earth" food. What is sinister about this menu is that much of our earth food is already approaching this "ideal" and "heavenly" food. It is clear that the vanguard in popularizing and developing this analytic diet on earth are the fundamentalists and Mormons themselves who, in preparation for the day of the Apocalypse, have already organized large mail order houses stocked with dehydrated food, thermal-stabilized food, canned foods as well as reserve gas tanks and arms (to defend your fundamentalist hole against commiee-faggot-lesbian-black-demons overlooked in the day of Judgement by the omniscience of the Lord). Their life-problematic is the same as that of the space worker, as they are preparing to survive for an indefinite period, surrounded by a hostile, likely radioactive, environment as well as remnants of enemy tribes.

For example, each Mormon or Latter-Day Saint, as they like to call themselves, is ordained to have a years’ supply of food on hand in readiness for the Apocalypse. Nuclear war and Apocalypse, flight to space and flight underground, urine drinking in earth as it is in Heaven: here Falwell and Weinberger have a lot to tell each other, much information to share, many clues to exchange...much reciprocal advice and enlightenment.

Not only are food and sex, but even the aggressive instinct, so to speak, is being dematerialized. No more hot hatred of a visible, dangerous enemy taking you by the throat or pointing his rifle at you. You must learn to kill a faceless enemy, a figure, a spot on a video screen plotted by your faithful computer. The training for this type of work comes from the contemporary video games ---U.S./Japan style-- which combine the abstractness of the opponent with the presence of your own self, undergoing attack, in the game. This, in fact, we are told, is the secret of their hypnotic power. Increasing the abstractness of the enemy body, reducing the person you destroy to a blip on a video machine: this is an essential element of death production which is likely to be the central product of space industrialization. Indeed, electronic war can become so abstract that unless your image is put into the video screen you're likely to forget that you can be destroyed yourself. The abstractness of the object of aggression is the essence of the lesson that is being taught to fundamentalist youth, who from an early age are told that all 'deviants' are the same --perfectly interchangeable-- as equal expressions of the abstract powers of evil.

Communism=Homosexuality=Drugs=Promiscuousness=Subversion=Terrorism=Lesbianism=...=Satan.

From this point of view, all questions of "who", "what", "where" and "when" become irrelevant: a good practice for a politics of repression, and an excellent one for a policy of massive nuclear destruction, which requires building a type of. being who can accept the destruction of millions of bodies as an unpleasant, perhaps, but nevertheless necessary goal to cleanse the earth from all social deviation and struggle --a pollution much worse in the eyes of the fundamentalist than strontium 90.

To achieve this, a strategy of systematic isolation is necessary: breaking all bonds between ourselves and others and distancing ourselves even from our own body. (See the sexless space suit which creates a virtual bulk against all contact with other bodies and your own as well: you won't even be able to masterbate in space!!) Isolation is the name of the game and the electronic-TV preacher is the true hero of this game. The old bible-belt evangelists put their hands on the sinners. True, it was in an assembly line fashion: here a cancer, there some blindness. But it still had some contact; even in large revival meetings one could see the body of the healer and the bodies of their fellow creatures, feel their heat. (Hence the potential for trouble.)

The electronic church completely dematerializes the healer, who becomes a cool image duplicated on thousands of screens or a 'personal' comment in a letter written by a computer. One's main 'feedback' with the preacher is the monetary one: you send your money and he begins to pray for you. If you fall back on the payments, the prayers begin to lose their fervor until they end with the 'final notice'.

With the electronic preacher, social relations become so abstract that they are virtually substituted by an image. Interestingly enough, the followers of Falwell and Co. are mostly "southern" folks over 50 (there are about 10 million of them) for whom the radio-TV sermon serves the same function as the home computer for the high tech family: reproducing for you, in a purified-disembodied form, the relations/experiences of which you have been deprived in day-to-day life. They substitute dangerous, because unpredictable, human encounters with a gadget-produced sociality that can be turned off and shut down at will. It goes directly to the soul without passing through the body; clean, efficient, infinitely available at all hours of day and night. (In fact it can be recorded and replayed whenever you want--time too, not only space, is won!!!)

The Jerry Falwells of the land are for the poor, white, old folks what the Atari cassette and Apple mini-computer are for the moneyed youngster: the final training in a fetishism that is to lead to a longed-for symbiosis with the machine. Take Frank and Deirdre Patrick, an old couple living in a Bosstown suburb, who spend 30% of their income to support electronic ministers. Why? They cannot get out. Living in such a suburb there is no way you can move without a car, and the churches don't supply transportation much anymore --the state certainly won't.

So, what the hell do you do? At least you get some contact. "What a racket!" we say. Its base, however, shows an essential tendency of capitalist development, that is presently reaching its peak. This is the tendency to break the limits of matter and dematerialize life in all its forms, beginning with social life, increasingly reduced to a machine-produced package of images that substitute, duplicate and cover up the (much more dangerous) real thing. TV games, TV sex, TV preachers, TV shopping, TV thinking, TV living and dying...

Living with the machine, becoming like a machine: a desexualized angel, moving in the interstices of the engine, perfectly integrating work-space and life space as in the astronauts' pod, infinitely weightless because purified of the force of gravity, of all human desires/temptations --the ancient refusal of work finally negated. Capital's old dream of "human perfectibility" that loomed so prominent in the 16th and 17th century utopias, from Bacon to Descartes, seems ready at hand. Not only can we now answer the famous Puritan question, "What do the angels do in heaven?" but we even know how they feel. Here it's Wally Shirra talking:

Feeling weightless...I don't know, it's so many things together. A feeling of pride, of healthy solitude, of dignified freedom from everything that's dirty, sticky. You feel exquisitely comfortable, that's the word for it, exquisitely...You feel comfortable and you feel you have so much energy, such an urge to do things, such an ability to do things. And you work well, yes, you think well, you move well, without sweat, without difficulty, as if the biblical curse In the sweat of thy face and in sorrow no longer exists. As if you've been born again.

How petty life on earth seems from such heights... Said the nurse of some of the first astronauts:

Don't pay any attention to people who tell you they have such a wild look because of tension, of exhaustion, or joy at having made it. It's got nothing to do with these things. It's rage at having to come back to Earth. As if up there they're not only freed from weight, from the force of gravity, but from desires, affections, passions, ambitions, from the body.

No wonder capital is so careless with our earthly home, so eager to destroy it --the big bang of nuclear explosion-- destroying in one second millions of tons of matter --the perfect embodiment of the victory of the spirit over the earth-matter --as creative as the first act of God! Big Bang Big Phallus reduced to its pure, power-hungry essence, fucking this rotting Earth in its god-like aspiration to be free from all constraints. Faust in an angel/astronaut/space-worker face, a superman who does not need anybody, neither his own nor an other's, to have his will, not just on earth but in the universe as well.

So far however, few have reached this degree of perfection. If the human colonies project and industrialization in space must take off (by the mid-90s GM has calculated), the number of 'elects' must be drastically increased alternativist astronaut Russ Schweikart says…

I think that's the kind of gut reason that people react against the space program – the feeling that here is a pristine environment and we can’t take the present fallible character up there. We’ve got to perfect ourselves before we enter this new domain…

Here Calvin’s question becomes pregnant again. Many are called but who are the chosen? An essential ingredient of election is clearly a purified body. This is where, in assistance to the work the will, genetic engineering becomes all-important. For if a mouse can become a rabbit, so to speak, then it is certainly possible to create biological strains in humanity that literally would not shit.

Although the biological aspects of space colonies are usually discussed in terms of agriculture and husbandry, the question of human biology (especially the genetic material) is first on the agenda. One of the “commercial uses” of space colonies is the fast development of genetic strains:

…zero-g environment will assist in producing forms of genetic strains faster for use in the fields of agriculture, fermentation and animal husbandry. Once such agricultural or animal strains have been developed in orbit, the subjects may be transported to Earth for subsequent propagation.

Genetic engineers are not alone in their efforts. For decades now, under the guise of medical experimentation, a wide range of scientists have been working on methods of body control. From the [Themic?] Project, developed under the Eisenhower administration (and revived during the Vietnam war) that studied the body under ‘stressful conditions’ [note?] sensory deprivation, high acceleration, to the more recent research in the 1970s on the center of aggressivity and sexuality in the [????] (which presumably allowed you to bombard the brain with laser beams to produce the appropriate response, while avoiding the massive destruction of the tissue caused by lobotomy which makes one unfit for work) to the CIA experiments with hallucinogenic drugs: body-control, mind-control over the body has been a long ongoing obsession of capital’s planners.

Today, devices that were reserved in the past for the happy few are being popularised, consistent with the increasing need for a larger pool of the derivative new beings. Thus, you can now have home computers who say “hello” to you when you wake up in the morning, work with you from nine to five, entertain you at night with video games--easy playmates who won't quarrel...won't bother you.

"Good morning, this is Breslin," says the computer giving the daily wake-up call over the intercom. Following this message, it gives the time, forecasts the weather, mentions the day's appointments and turns on the radio for the news. Breslin also starts perking the morning coffee, monitors the burglar alarm, keeps track of checking accounts, opens the garage door, controls the heating, cooling and lighting systems, addresses Christmas cards and plays an electronic "Happy Birthday" when appropriate.

This certainly beats the old TV and even the love play between oneself and the car. Home computers are responsive to their owners, you can do things together – it is the ideal tool for an efficient, clean untroublesome emotional reproduction, capable at the same time of computational depths that easily rival the intellectual requirements of our usual social relations – particularly when these social relations have been already so mechanised and alienated by overwork, stress and all the other amenities of our present life. Reproduction, then, becomes extremely simplified and at the same time we gain, presumably, a useful if not indispensable training for our passage to the new world.

Along the same lines is the current vogue for ‘sensory deprivation tanks’ that are being sold already to thousands of people and advertised as the ultimate tool for home relaxation.
Here too, the pauperisation of our social relations and their transformation into work is a necessary condition for appreciating the joys of hearing nothing, seeing nothing and nobody – forgetting the world and yourself with it.

No wonder then, that capital’s planners and scientists today claim they are on the verge of breaking a new frontier, whose effects on peoples’ minds will be of the same magnitude as Marco Polo and Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World. The model, in fact, of the colonisation in space and the concomitant new worlds of the mind is the colonisation of the world by European capitalism in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

Interest in this new frontier will be largely American, we are assured. It will fulfil “our” need to escape an overpopulated world, Earth, with its sad spectacle of warring tribes, dwindling resources and insufficient realisation that American interests reign supreme, for clearly nothing but God’s will is manifested in it.

The Catholic Church [presented?] and followed the armies of the conquistadors, joining the cross to the sword in their [co????] genocide of the Indian populations of [????] America. This time, as no infidels waiting to be converted seem to be living in space (so far), the work of our fundamentalist Christians is much simplified.
All they have to do, is to be seen and prepare the technocratic angels who will enter the new sacred realm and [assist?] [?????] making sure that no disturbing element can climb in the space craft.

Following a well established NASA tradition, one can be sure that blond, white and male will be the winning recipe. Most important, no conflicting values will be allowed on board. As Garrett Hardin points out:

A space colony is a precision instrument, far more delicate in its construction and far more vulnerable to sabotage than is our massive earth. How can such a fragile craft withstand the buffeting of warring tribes? ...People of great originality and independence of spirit would be intolerable in the spaceship community, particularly if they belonged to different tribes...to survive it would have to have only one tribe in it.

This means Totalitarianism. In fact, all discussion about the social structure of space work ends with the agreement that the political form of the future space station will be a "rationalistic dictatorship". In the words of Gerald O'Neill, the enthusiastic promoter of the space colony concept:

If you look at the situation of sailing ships when they were out for months or years at a time...it's been found that a dictatorship is what works ....It's a survival mechanism essentially because it reduces conflict. There's nothing that produces conflict more than an ill-defined situation of authority.

A society of angels, ruled by God, and motivated by purely spiritual-religious-patriotic concerns. The adventure of space colonization will not be a "New America" in the sense of being the dumping ground of castaways, misfits and slaves. The need for total identification with the work-project, total obedience, total self-discipline and self-control, is so high that, according to NASA, even the old forms of reward should be immediately ruled out:

High monetary incentive should not be used for space colonization recruiting because it attracts the wrong people. Furthermore, it would be unhealthy for the community as well as for the individuals concerned to make efforts to retain 'misfits' in the extra-terrestrial community. It would be healthier to return them to Earth, even though this might seem more expensive.

Work without a wage. It is the essential capitalist utopia where the work and repression becomes its own reward and all the refusers are cast out into the cold stellar night. We have finally reached their limit.

SIDEBAR:
Rev. Falwell came to L.A. in Nov. 1981. The Convention Center was hired and 3000 people were expected. With their usual care, using a computerized mailing, the Moral Majority succeeded in keeping Falwell's arrival an open secret, though thousands knew he was coming they were the 'right ones'! Electronic preachers never want to meet the devils in the flesh. But here the Leak occurred. An employee of the Center leaked the news to the gay community only three days before the dinner.

How could an effective action be raised against him quickly? Luckily there was a Charlie Murphy concert on the night of the leak, Falwell's visit was announced at the concert and at midnight a group got together with only two principles: anyone making a suggestion should be prepared to carry it out; though each task group ran according to consensus, the action decisions of the task groups were binding on the larger group. They agreed the demo should look good to the media AND be fun for the demonstrators: The people coming to the demo were asked to bring large pink triangles and just a few banners like "BEWARE OF PROPHETS".

So there was a carefully prepared backdrop behind the two spokespeople, a man and a woman in gold headbands. The demonstrators were there for the fun, to sing a lot of new songs, dance and play with a beauty of bodies and faces to show the passing Falwell diners there was an attractive alternative not out to eat them. By the way, though the dinners were free and Falwell invested $40,000, he got back $200,000. The profits are going to his latest project: a huge "Tomb for the Unborn". Some of the demonstrators also went to dinner and now are on his mailing list: Falwell Beware, the Channel Widens.

DINOSAURIC BATTLES
Ironically, in their struggle to subvert the absolutism of the scientific educators, the creationists took up a kind of "methodological anarchism" and claimed for "creation science" a relativistic status, i.e., as a theory among others with pluses and minuses (as every theory has!).

As the professional scientists huffed and puffed about Arkansas Act 590 of- 1981, the 'equal treatment' act, they failed to take up a possibility the Act offered, viz., an opportunity to question the absolute value of science itself. When S.J. Gould so self-righteously inveighed: "scientific creationism was a 'ruse' to purvey religion (and a narrow sectarian concept of religion at that) in science classrooms," he might have wondered whether the method of teaching science "in the classroom" now is as absolutist as the "sectarian" form he so openly despises!

A curriculum including a number of theories (why stop with the creation story) might very well have brought to the fore the question: what makes the present theory so right? What about alternatives? Judge Overton, who ruled against the creationists, was more worried about the consequences of the loss of authority of both science and religion if mixed, for then the kids could see the authoritarianism of both. That would be letting too much of the stage machinery show at too tender an age.