The Webb telescope news has grazed my consciousness, but I've kinda been tuning it out along with most news. Back in like 2013 or so I hung out a bit at the NASA compound in Greenbelt MD cuz I had a friend that worked there. Got the tour of the place and watched the transit of Venus from there. I also saw the Webb telescope being built, from behind some thick glass into a cleanroom. Feels like a lifetime ago now.
I was thinking about how words and the concepts they point to sort of slowly glide past each other as if they were on different planes. They keep sliding and their links dissolve, other links appear. It happens sometimes fast enough for us to catch, and sometimes so fast it's not easy for us to keep up. Sometimes it's so slow we barely notice it. The concept that the word 'phone' points to has clearly shifted over time from a wall tether to a portable surveillance device and we seem to occasionally recognize and marvel at that shift. That was a slow one, happening over a few decades I guess.
Likewise, sometimes the word that points to the concept changes. This is usually a little more intentional, I would guess, because we have more control over words that we do concepts. The lead-up to the 2003 start of the Iraq and its execution had a bunch of these, ranging from the silly 'freedom fries' to the more important 'enhanced interrogation'. New words sliding in to point to the same old concepts. Or the mercenary corp originally named Blackwater becoming Xe Services and then becoming Academi. There are surely loads of other instances of these. This era seems to have really made an impact on me and how I read the world nowadays.
I've also been thinking about that inspirational quote that I started seeing the last couple years. It goes: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings." This said I guess by UK Le Guin and it inspires a welcome sense of changeability in this fallen world, you know, the 'Divine Right of Kings' is gone, think of what else might someday be gone.
But the stuff that led to the Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence and that sort of thing, the things that are indicative of the dissolution of that Divine Right didn't really upend the power dynamics all that much. We still have the pinprick elite minority in control over the masses. Sure there are arbitrarily many fine-grained distinctions between different types of rule, but it's still broadly the same ruler-rulee relation that has existed for the last fraction of human history.
I buy the idea that the big asymmetry that still defines human life got its start way back when a couple of things happened. 1) Adept hunters took the death-dealing skills that were of use on the hunt and expanded their remit, using them on their fellow humans. Basically a proto-police and military. 2) Clever sky-watchers developed increasingly recondite, and in turn propriety, knowledge and predictive capacity when it comes to the moon and the sun and used them to wow the preterite. Basically a proto-science and religion. These guys sorta, dunno, joined forces, Power and Justification, broadly stroking.
Being able to mace heads in and foretell the heavens of course took on new and progressive and mutually reinforcing forms as time went on, but the basic combo of cudgel and awe was only ever further cemented. The Justification courtiers started out as priest, soothsayer, magician in the role of explaining the world. And during their time the words Divine Right pointed to that Justification concept. Eventually the words scientist, economist, statistician came to point to those whose role it was to explain the world and Divine Right was no longer appropriate as the words we used for Justification. We can think of the words we use now, instead.
I think the Le Guin quote is really just an example of finding false comfort in what amounts to a re-branding. Sure, Divine Right isn't used as Justification anymore, but that's just a sleight of hand word trick and the priest class continues to bedazzle the masses with their Whitey on the moon and their Webb telescopes.
The moonshots and visions of farther and father galaxies serve the court. The court wields them to make you feel small and impotent in the face of apparent unimaginable scale and their command of those wonders justifies the ruling class's position. This is just another trick, one in a long line reaching back to those early days. We scoff at the bronze age priest but praise his modern day counterpart with a funny sort of peasant submission. But the moon is actually just an inert dark gray rock and it gets less real from there on out. My interior life and friends and family is vastly realer and greater.
A Lewis Mumford quote: In the light of human consciousness, it is not man, but the whole universe of still 'lifeless' matter that turns out to be impotent and insignificant.
That's kinda my approach to these things. They're dangling some pretty pictures in front of me like a ring of keys to a baby when I'd rather a tit
