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January 28, 2006
The Task of the Living
Nemo and Brian have both noted the terrible anniversaries this week brings: the losses of Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. For anyone who believes, as I do, that we must go into space, as a species, in order to survive, in order to thrive, these are terrible dates to remember, indeed. But there are other dates of equal terror: April 23, the loss of Vladimir Komarov when his parachute failed to open on re-entry; June 30, the loss of three cosmonauts on board Soyuz 11, when a stuck valve suffocated them; and there may be others shrouded in the old Soviet programs' secrecy. These dates are terrible because they are the dates when brave men and women were lost in the exploration of space.
Their reasons for going were a complex mix of national pride, a sense of duty, a sense of adventure, a desire to advance mankind and countless other reasons. But above all, they died to advance an idea: that we need not live in a demon-haunted world; that our powers of reason are sufficient to overcome any obstacle; that man can be better tomorrow than today. These ideas, all of them, are undergoing the sternest challenge that they have faced since their spectacular rise during the Enlightenment, and possibly their sternest challenge since the barbarians, with the help of the indolent and pampered Romans themselves, overran Rome and brought a thousand years of darkness to the world. This challenge is being brought by the jihadis, and by the indolent and pampered in our own society. Their shared idea is that nothing is real and meaningful in this world; they differ only in thinking this is because only their god and his invariant commandments are real and meaningful, or that it is because nothing is meaningful at all except their own selfish lives. As Wretchard notes, a great many of us are embracing the coming darkness.
But it is the task of the living to make meaningful the sacrifices of the dead, and so it is to my mind the most fitting memorial to those who sacrificed for knowledge and meaning and light, to commit to the advancement of those great principles, and to stand against ignorance and debasement and darkness. That is the way to make their sacrifice meaningful.
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