Make Progress Exciting Again – The Weekly Standard

French Guiana

Arianespace is the French company that fires off huge rocket ships blasting great big things so far up into the sky that they dont come down again. Or, to put it in bland corporate language, Arianespace is the worlds leading commercial satellite launch provider.

And the corporation provided me with an excellent satellite launch. I was invited by my friend Aaron Lewis, Arianespaces director of media and government relations and former staffer for congressman Dana Rohrabacher, longtime chair of the House space and aeronautics subcommittee.

Aaron and Iand about 70 engineers, scientists, and executives involved with the rocket and its payloadflew to the Centre Spatial Guyanais, the European spaceport in French Guiana.

At 10 p.m. we went to an elevated viewing platform five kilometers from the launchpad, deep in a cinematically perfect jungle complete with strange bird calls and thick hanging vines. Of course this is French jungle. Me Tarzan. Toi joli femme de serveuse avec le plat de hors doeuvres de foie gras et caviar.

In the distance, brightly spotlit and towering over the triple canopy rainforest was the massive Ariane 5 launch vehicle. The Ariane 5 is a full stack, as rocketeers say. It has a main stage, upper stage, and payload capsule standing nearly 180 feet high, as tall as a 20-story building. This is flanked by a pair of 102-foot solid fuel boosters. The whole thing weighs 1,720,000 pounds (in case you were thinking of getting an Ariane 5 for use around the house).

The countdown began, naturellement in French, dix . . . neuf . . . huit . . . sept . . . six . . . cinq . . . quatre . . .

An earth-bound cumulus cloud enveloped the launchpad. Huge hoses were spraying the rocket engines to dampen the convulsive vibration of lift-off and protect the payload contents from the spacequake of almost three million pounds of rocket thrust.

And then . . .

Ill bet I was the only person on the viewing platform thinking about Adam Smith.

Here, with the Ariane 5, was progress incarnate. Progress is impossible without the three elemental human activities identified by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and trade. Therefore progress cannot be made except through the exercise of market freedoms.

The market freedoms may be exercised imperfectly, like my own exercise program. But the triathlon of capitalism must be run, swum, and cycled in some way, shape, or form. Otherwise progress comes to a halt. Venezuela. Cuba. North Korea. Q.E.D.

Arianespace pursues self-interest. It may have gotten its startup funding with French government and European Space Agency money, but its no NASA. Arianespace was always intended to make money, and it does. More than half of the commercial satellites in orbit today were put there by Arianespaces rockets.

Those rocketsthe light-payload Vega, the medium-payload Soyuz (a hot-rod version of the Russian launch vehicle), and the heavy-payload Ariane 5are division of labor perfectly exemplified. An individual could not build a rocket like these, no matter what his wealth or how much time he was allotted.

Hed have to be three Pythagoreans of a mathematician and a hundred kinds of engineer, a physicist-on-wheels faster than those of Stephen Hawking, the sort of computer whiz whod make Bill Gates call tech support, an electrician, a metallurgist, a welder, a bomb disposal squad (that being what a rocket at blast-off is really doing), and own a very long ladder and be able to count down from ten to one (in French).

As for trade, the launch was a business deal putting two privately owned communications satellites in orbit, one from the American company ViaSat and one from its European competitor Eutelsat. The deal was made by Arianespace in cooperation with its principal rocket-building contractor Airbus and Airbuss rival Boeing, which manufactured Viasats satellite. The invisible hand of the marketplace doesnt get much more unseen than what I was looking at.

Progress is made in an amazing fashion. But the Smithian principles behind progress seem to be, currently, unfashionable.

Pursuit of self-interest is tweeted away in the White House.

Division of labor remains an undifferentiated muddle in Congress. There are 500-some key presidential appointments that need Senate confirmation. As of June 21, 43 appointees had been confirmed.

And opposition to freedom of trade is hot in the Oval Office and the House of Representatives and bothered in the Senate.

Democrats are no better. Theyre pursuing self-interest by running off the lemming cliff of leftism, failing to divvy up labor while they all do the same thingshriek at Trumpand showing furious opposition to market liberties. Charles Murray was chased off the campus of Middlebury College when he attempted to engage in some free trade in ideas.

Progress itself is out of vogue. The food Luddites urge us to eat the locally sourced, organic, pesticide-lacking, GMO-free diet of our ancestors, who had average lifespans of well over 30 years.

Modern transport is rejected in favor of the primitive bicycle. Mature adults wearing Lycra cycling shorts are as barbaric in appearance as naked early Britons painted with woad.

Medical advances are renounced as the public consults the witch doctors of health care insurance instead of the M.D.s of health care treatment.

A regression to nave child-like thinking marks the concern with animal rights. Animals will have rights when animals have responsibilities. Ill quit shooting birds when birds feel obliged to clean the hood of my car that theyve soiled. And not exploiting animals means letting animals exploit us, as snacks perhapsthe kind the saber-toothed tigers of yore enjoyed.

Due to reactionary hysteria about the invention that did the most to advance civilizationthe gunId be severely restricted in my ability to defend myself against a saber-toothed tiger trying to eat me. As it is, in some state and local jurisdictions, gun use is already so limited by law that Id have to hunt deer by reasoning with them or using kung fu.

And alternative sources of energy mean a reversion to the kind of wind power that allowed Ferdinand Magellan to sail around the world in a mere three years. While solar power rebuffs every progressive human accomplishment since Homo erectus discovered how to make fire 600,000 years ago.

The very word progressive has been stolen by the savage pagan horde of speech thieves who previously made away with liberal, climate, privilege, gender, inclusion, safe space, and the trigger warning I was going to give the saber-toothed tiger.

I blame this lack of progressor this lack of interest in making any progresson progress having become boring.

Of course progress wasnt boring for me at the moment, with the Ariane 5 about to lift off. But I was in an exceptional situation.

Looking around at the unexceptional situations of modern daily life, progress appears to be tedious indeed.

With what excitement and anticipation did people once say, Theres a machine for that.

With what apathy and indifference do people now say, Theres an app for that.

Imagine a person from even 15 years ago being told that what the future holds is humanity looking at its phone all day.

Here are our contemporary great leaps forward:

The Internet so filled with cinders and slag that searching for information there is as much fun as sifting through the ashes of the Great Library of Alexandria.

GPS giving us directions in the manner of a New Hampshire Yankee farmer leaning on a fence rail and chewing a blade of hay. Go on down to where old Maude Frick used to live and then turn right at the place where the barn burned down in 1958.

Uber. If Taxi Driver gets remade it wont star Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, it will star Elizabeth Warren in a driverless car.

Driverless cars. Whats next, eaterless meals?

We have the means to binge-watch TV, which, speaking of eaterless meals, is as delightful as our having the means to binge-eat kale.

While wearing earbuds. Theyre a sort of reverse hearing aid that block out anything worth listening to. The millennial generations motto is Huh?

You can hear millennials proclaim their slogan in the proliferation of artisanal coffee shops (although what I really need is a bar) that have replaced brick-and-mortar retail establishments because of Amazon.

Amazon has transformed shopping from a pleasurable excursion and happy social interaction into something more like going into the outhouse with a Sears catalogue to browse and use as Charmin.

Amazon also takes all the sharp, eye-for-a-bargain intelligence out of shopping. But thats okay because we dont need real intelligence. We have artificial intelligenceeverywhere.

My toaster has a brain. What a way to kick off a gloomy Monday morningbeing outsmarted by a toaster.

Then I go to work in an office cubicle rather than an office. Instead of hanging out at the water cooler gossiping, flirting with co-workers, and making sports bets, Im overwhelmed by big data flooding my personal communication devices.

And I go home, exhausted, to a smart house. It was bad enough when the house contained nothing more than kids who were getting smart with me; now theyve got the thermostat, the burglar alarm, and the toaster on their side.

Heres a statistic: In a recent survey the Pew Research Center found that 43 percent of American millennials have a positive opinion of socialism. Only 14 percent of Americans over 65 harbor such a view. But if the progress weve seen lately is what passes for progress, who can blame the kids?

Ican remember when progress was exciting. My whole family would drive out to the airport just to see jet planes take off and land. Id get up at 6 a.m. on weekends to watch the test pattern on our new TV, followed by the farm report and Mass for Shut-Ins. Skyscrapers had observation decks on their top floors, not Russian billionaires. The introduction of next years new car models was practically a national holiday. H-bombs made for glorious mushroom clouds and fun fallout shelters in which to play post office with the neighborhood girls. Sputnik produced an excitement so strong that it led to bizarre behavior. Fourth-grade boys applied themselves to multiplication tables and long divisionso besotted were we with the wonders of science. And men landed on the moon. I was a hippie in 1969 and had spent most of the past two years in outer space. But I was riveted by the Apollo 11 news coverage nonetheless.

Even prosaic aspects of progress were exciting. The glass door on the electric dryer put on a good show for a boy used to struggling to keep wet bedsheets out of the dog doo and grass clippings as he hung them on the backyard clothesline. It was all good, including the pain progress brings. A polio shot was a small price to pay for getting an infantile paralysis-panicked mom to finally let me go to the municipal swimming pool and sip from a public drinking fountain.

If we want to avoid a future full of socialists, progressives, Birkenstock-wearing women in pink pussyhats, black-clad men in Guy Fawkes masks, gender-neutral shouters of Resistance!, vegans, PETA members, Middlebury College alums, and other pests who will be starving and begging in what used to be a marketplace but has become an Occupied camp . . .

If we want to avoid all that, we must make progress exciting again. We need a Big Bang theory of capitalism.

And that was what I was getting, not in theory but in fact, from Ariane 5. Trois . . . deux . . . un . . .

And there was light, The light of the world, or as close as mortals can do to radiate it. Vast luminosity reflected from the low cloud cover over French Guiana and night was made day.

I could have read print so small that it would have made for a Moby-Dick pocket edition.

The Ariane seemed still for a moment, like a mother phoenix brooding over her nest of fire. Then the 2,935,000 pounds of thrust took hold. The jungle was perfectly silent for 4.1 seconds, the time it took the sound waves to reach us.

When they did it was like nothing Ive ever listened to before. The uproar was not so much loud as deep, a swelling, a surging, a rolling more felt than heard. Sound waves are waves. It was a pounding surf of a noise.

The Ariane streaked toward orbit atop an arch of brazen fire supporting the firmament.

But, as Melville said in Moby-Dick, There is no steady unretracing progress in this life. And we wouldnt call the time we live in the Age of Irony if it lacked the ironic. The progress produced by the communication satellites atop the Ariane 5 is broadband WiFi connections for luxury cruise ships.

P.J. ORourke is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

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Make Progress Exciting Again - The Weekly Standard