As environmental, political, and public health crises multiply on Earth, we are also at the dawn of a new space race in which governments team up with celebrity billionaires to exploit the cosmos for human gain. The best-known of these pioneers are selling different visions of the future: while Elon Musk and SpaceX seek to establish a human presence on Mars, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin work toward moving millions of earthlings into rotating near-Earth habitats. Despite these distinctions, these two billionaires share a core utopian project: the salvation of humanity through the exploitation of space. In Astrotopia, philosopher of science and religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein pulls back the curtain on the not-so-new myths these space barons are peddling, like growth without limit, energy without guilt, and salvation in a brand-new world. As Rubenstein reveals, we have already seen the destructive effects of this frontier zealotry in the centuries-long history of European colonialism. Much like the imperial project on Earth, this renewed effort to conquer space is presented as a religious calling: in the face of a coming apocalypse, some very wealthy messiahs are offering an other-worldly escape to a chosen few.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein is professor of religion and science in society at Wesleyan University. She is coauthor of Image: Three Inquiries in Imagination and Technology, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and the author of Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters; Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse; and Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm one of your hosts.
I am Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Always glad to be with all of you and really excited today to be joined by Professor Mary Jane Rubinstein, who is a friend, a colleague, a mentor.
She is, among other things, Professor of Religion and Science and Society at Wesleyan University.
Where she is also affiliated with the Department of Philosophy, the Feminist Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.
She's the author of lots and lots of books, including most recently Astrotopia, The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race, which she's going to be talking with us about here for the next little bit.
But Mary-Jane, welcome and thank you so much for being with us.
Oh my gosh, I am so excited to be here.
Thank you so much, Dan, for having me.
Yeah, and I wish everybody could see Mary-Jane, too, because some of us in the academic world are sort of destined to just We're academics, which means we're not cool, and everybody's heard Brad in his comments about my dad jokes and cargo shorts, and they're all true.
It's fine.
I own it.
I love who I am.
But Mary Jane is forever glamorous, and I am always a bit in awe of this.
So I want to just dive in here.
Mary Jane, you wrote a book called, again, Astrotopia, The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race.
But I want to just start, if we could, With contextualizing a little of, you know, what we mean by the corporate space race, probably most people have some idea of Elon Musk and others.
But you describe all of this as a religion.
You use the R word for the religion of the corporate space race.
What do you mean by that?
When you talk about the corporate space race, what is that and why do you call it religion?
Why use the R word for it?
Yeah, cool.
Great question.
OK, so by corporate space race, I mean the era that really took hold, has taken hold within the last decade, in which private interests, corporations are increasingly not only doing the work of getting us into space, but setting the agenda for getting us into space.
So there's always been corporate involvement in space exploration since the very beginning, Boeing, Lockheed Martin.
But they've been private companies who've been subcontracted to go and do the bidding of NASA.
What's happened increasingly since some crucial legislation in about 2015, well 2011 and 2015, is that more and more of the reins are being given over to private corporations to act independently of any interest of a particular nation state.
So that's what I mean by the corporate space race.
I mean, private interest is now sort of unleashed to pursue its own ends and not just the ends of nation states.
The thing that makes it that the reason that I use the word religion is is twofold.
First, the effort to get into space has from its dawning as a real possibility in the 50s been presented, frankly, religiously, which is to say, we have been told since the dawn of the space race that America in particular
It has a calling to extend itself now into the cosmos, having extended itself across the entire continent, is now called somehow to extend itself into the cosmos.
And the American nation-state often uses the language of its destiny to refer to its extension into the wider universe, uses the language of God being with us.
It did in the 50s.
It did in 2019 and 2020.
So these kinds of civil religion, these invocations of civil religion, God is with the nation.
The same thing was also happening in the USSR, just for atheist perspectives, right?
So it's like that kind of atheist religion.
It's like that this nation state is destined to be the greatest nation in the world.
And then we're going to be the greatest nation in the universe.
And we're going to do it all by proving that there's no such thing as God.
So you get these kind of mirrored There's discourses happening even in the mouths of these national actors.
When it turns, when the sort of tables turn a little bit to these corporations, what we find are these very charismatic CEOs who have So personal visions of what I call following Donna Haraway, disaster and salvation, who start telling us there's a coming disaster.
This earth is not long for this world and we are not long for it.
Everything's going to be terrible.
But If you follow me, I will bring you to a new world where you will finally be free and your generations will live forever.
And that that story of disaster and salvation is a classic messianic threat and promise structure that feels to me pretty familiar as somebody who's studied religion for a while.
Yeah, you've spent a little time, you know, studying religion, writing about religion.
Just a little time.
Just a little time, right?
As have you and Brad.
Speaking of eternities, when I hear the way that they talk, the way that they speak, it's that crisis, salvation, also that sense of return within the kind of Hebraic traditions.
There's often this vision of a kind of primal, Edenic, perfect kind of world, and everything has fallen away from it, and there's the promise that we'll return to that, right?
This kind of repetition, and that's what I hear.
And in that there's, you know, if we were to make the Venn diagrams of like religion and just broadly say utopian thought, that's one of the places they would overlap.
You choose the title Astrotopia.
Is that part of what's in view, this kind of utopian vision of the future?
I also am always interested in the obverse of utopia, which of course is dystopia, and the two always come together.
And that's a theme I think In your book as well, right?
The promises that are there, but the threat that's also there.
We'll get into that.
So, yeah, what is the astrotopia?
Am I on track with some of those linkages?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, a couple things.
First, there is this distinction in religious studies scholarship between so-called locative religions and utopian religions.
Locative religions are practices, rituals, and beliefs that tie a community to its land, to the place that it lives, and say, you know, your ancestors were born here, your ancestors are still here, are buried here, your ancestors want you, this is how you are connected to the land, this is how you're connected to the mountains, this is how you're connected to the animals who inhabit this land, this is how you're kin with all of these things, and these are the things you need to do in order to keep this place to which you belong in balance, right?
Generally, locative religions.
Utopian religions say you were born into this world, but you are not of this world.
You belong to a different place.
You belong to another place.
And so your task is not to steward the place that you live, but rather to make yourself worthy of being delivered to the place that you actually belong.
A heaven, an ideal society in the jungles of Guyana, you know, Mars, right?
This is utopian thinking.
I think that the thing that strikes me again and again and again about the particular kind of utopianism at work in the so-called astropreneurs, right?
These entrepreneurs who are trying to get us into outer space.
Is that a utopia is supposed to be, right?
Yes, it's elsewhere.
Fine, right?
It's elsewhere, but it's elsewhere for the sake of imagining a society that's different.
You know, the Christian utopia is a place where the last are first and the meek inherit the earth and differences in economic status either don't matter at all or actually have a negative effect on the world.
It's like the kingdom on its head, right, in a Christian utopia.
The thing that's so striking about these corporate utopias is that they're just, it's the same structure.
It's the same system with wealthy, primarily white dudes running the show, controlling access to resources, just like on Mars or something like that.
So it's not actually a utopia at all.
I mean, it presents itself this way, but it's a sort of comical recapitulation, repetition of the same injustices, the same inadequacies that our social systems have now, just like in the sky, where it's actually going to be worse.
Because, you know, here we depend on, you know, we are At our employers behest for things like health care and we are at the we are at the mercy of the wealthy to set energy prices and things like that.
On Mars, you're going to rely on your employer for air, just oxygen.
And so it's the same system, just like a lot worse elsewhere.
So I guess what I was trying to do in giving the book this title is to question the genuine nature of these utopian imaginings.
They do seem more dystopian than utopian to me.
And then to sort of open up the possibility of actually thinking of a better society, whether we're thinking about space or we're thinking about Earth, to say like, this isn't it.
This isn't it.
There might be better ways to do it.
So sort of building toward that, you've already mentioned this notion of manifest destiny, and you do a great job in the book of talking about things like the so-called doctrine of discovery.
And that was basically when powerful, for those who may not know, powerful Western European nations Basically developed a Christian doctrine that they sort of were entitled to the rest of the globe and that whatever they quote-unquote discovered was theirs, despite the fact, right, that there were indigenous cultures already living there and things like that.
Manifest Destiny, the notion that the white European colonists and their heirs were, you know, we would possess all of North America, that it was our divine destiny to do that.
Settler colonialism, right?
The displacing of indigenous populations to take their land and kind of create a new Europe in North America, right?
All of these kinds of patterns.
Standard kind of expropriative colonialism aimed at getting resources and labor and whatever from other places, right?
It's always about expropriation, I guess, is what I'm getting at, right?
Expansion on the part traditionally on Earth, right?
Of European powers to extract resources or wealth or human labor or whatever it is.
And I feel like what you really highlight in the book is saying, despite how different it will be on some new frontier or whatever, it's fundamentally about this expropriation, right?
And you tie these really great, and to me, really interesting ways of existing historical patterns of colonial expansion into this.
So let me ask you to say more about it because I can understand somebody right now that say, well, that I kind of get that.
But like, this will be better because as far as we know, we're not going there aren't going to be any sentient species that we're going to be, you know, displacing.
We're not going to be taking anything from anybody.
I feel like that's part of this.
It's like, no, we can be expansive and colonialist, but we can be OK now because it's just stuff.
It's not indigenous populations.
And you really are trying to rethink that.
Take us into that.
I've got other questions we can get into, more of a discussion we can have, but...
Explain that to, we on the podcast always talk about the hypothetical Uncle Ron, right?
Your Uncle Ron who shows up at the cookout and whatever and he's like, yeah, but Mary Jane, there's nobody there.
We're not taking anything from anybody.
So what's wrong about going for resources or heavy metals so China doesn't have them all and so forth?
And then you get the utopian spin.
It'll be so much of this, it'll be great for everybody and there won't be inequalities and all that sort of stuff.
Draw those lines for us.
Color that in.
Connect the dots of why it's still a concerning vision of expropriation.
OK, so Uncle Ron says, yeah, but this time there's nobody there.
Right.
In relation to my saying, in response to my claim that this imminent conquest of space is using the same doctrines, the same justifications and the same logic as the settler colonialism that remade the so-called New World and Africa and Australia.
Right.
So I'm saying, like, this is the same story.
Ah, let's not do it again, right?
And Uncle Ron is like, OK, look, it might be the same logic, but this time it's actually OK, because there's nobody out there.
There's nobody in outer space.
Um, okay.
I have three responses to, but there's nobody out there.
And if any of them is compelling, then it should be enough at least to slow us down.
And it may be that folks find one, but not the other two, right?
There are basically three in, in ascending and ascending order.
The first is the plans to colonize the moon and eventually Mars.
Involve plans to establish mines on the moon, on Mars, on asteroids, to recover, in quotation marks, resources, also in quotation marks, because a resource is something that we know is for us, right?
And then use them, mainly insight, to build more stuff and to sell them to gain a profit.
So we're back to the mining game.
We're back to the extraction game.
The first order of business, the scientists and the historians who would love to be able to learn about the history of the moon, about the composition of asteroids and about the history of Mars, which may well, I mean, there's a small chance it might still have some microbial life, it probably doesn't, but it may well have done in the past.
These secrets, these clues, these answers, all lie hidden in the land of the Moon, in the terrain of these asteroids, in the land of Mars itself.
There's a history.
Each of these bodies has histories.
And if we race into them, sinking minds wherever we'd like and ravaging them within an inch of their lives for the sake of profit, we have now destroyed that history.
Not only interfered with it, but probably interfered with our capacity to understand it and to know it.
So, one might be able to appeal to a kind of geological sensibility in people and say, don't these planetary bodies have their own histories and formations that deserve at least to be understood before we undertake to destroy them?
Anybody on Earth might object to mountaintop removal for the sake of procuring energy.
We have a sense that, like, maybe mountains ought not to be removed.
Maybe there's something important about them, either for knowledge or just for the landscape itself.
So this is one concern.
Second concern.
Okay, so there's nobody on the moon, there's nobody on Mars.
Why does it matter if we mine those things?
What I want to ask is whether traditionally mining, as it particularly started taking hold in like the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe and then got exported to the rest of the globe, whether it's been good for laborers and how so?
And particularly in those places where miners have been compelled to maximize production for maximum resources, like that's a bad job.
Nobody wants those jobs.
They're not well paid.
They're not safe.
And those concerns about safety and remuneration and unionizing become compounded exponentially in outer space.
So don't think it's a good labor system to export into the cosmos, like to do anywhere else.
It's not great here, but it's going to be even worse, again, when you don't have control of, you don't have access to your own air and water.
The third, perhaps most, this may be a reach for some of our white listeners in particular, but the third response to the insistence that there's nobody there is, well, is there nobody there?
According to whom is there nobody there?
Well, according to the Mars rover.
I mean, have you seen those cameras?
Like there's absolutely nothing on Mars.
It's just like red dust forever and dust storms.
And it's a complete hellscape, which, by the way, makes me ask, like, why do we want to go if it's like actually a hellscape and there's nothing there?
Like, why would you want to go in the first place?
But OK, there's nothing on Mars.
There's nothing on the moon.
We've been there.
There's nobody there.
There are no people there.
So it's a totally different endeavor this time.
And there are even some some sort of big space colonizers who will say it is an insult To indigenous people on earth to liken this colonial endeavor to the earthly colonial endeavor, because after all, there's nothing out there.
And how dare you liken, you terrible person, how dare you liken indigenous people to like moon rocks or moon rocks to indigenous people?
If, however, you ask a number of representatives of Indigenous nations, the Ojibwe, the Boaca people of Northern Australia, the Inuit, they would say it is not the case that outer space isn't inhabited.
That they have ancestors who live on the moon and ancestors who live in the Milky Way and the stars beyond us and in the spaceways between us.
And that they, they're shamans, can travel to these other places and visit their relatives and visit their ancestors.
And they're actually concerned that the spacefaring nations are hoping to destroy those territories the way that they have run so haplessly over the land of the Earth.
So, I'd want to ask according to whom it's not populated.
I think all of those are really powerful, and people can't see as I... Things that drive me nuts, right, about these kinds of discourses.
One is, and you're hitting on it right, of just the, this doesn't end well.
Like, we know this story of expropriation.
It doesn't end.
Well, it's the ultimate of deregulation.
I think that's the other piece, right?
That's what makes it a utopian vision for these big corporations and why they're happy to take up the reins of what NASA used to do or what the federal government used to do and not just in the U.S.
and other places as well, right?
Because what I envision the sort of dystopian future is you're going to have some moon colony or Mars or whatever, but it's not going to be a U.S.
moon colony or Mars or whatever.
It's going to be You're going to be living on either Amazon or SpaceX.
Yeah, exactly.
It's going to be Musk or Bezos or whatever, and whatever corporate rules they put into place, right?
And if people want, they can go look at plenty of science fiction that envisions that dystopian future, right?
But one of the things you get into in that last point, And I think they're all in this is what I think is a really profound and significant kind of ethical and religious turn in the book, right?
So like, you've got the piece of here is what is envisioned with the corporate space race.
And here are the values in that.
Here is the way of viewing reality in that and so forth.
But you turn the page and say, but what if there's like a different way?
What if we imagine something different?
And we don't have to look very far to imagine it.
You talk about lots of, as you've just invoked, indigenous forms of knowledge and indigenous ways of thinking, of conceptualizing land, of conceptualizing matter and the material world.
What we would call maybe the material world in relation to the human world and how the two relate and so forth.
And how this brings about a kind of revaluation, right?
A revaluing or placing a different ethical impetus on the relation of, in this case, humans to non-human reality, right?
Not just our own world, but other worlds and so on.
And it leads you into, I think, a lot of really interesting things.
One is the concept of pantheism, right?
And your prior book was about pantheologies, and you talk about this notion of pantheism And what is that for you, and how does it relate to this idea, this notion of essentially viewing all of reality as divine?
What does that mean?
How does that tie in with this?
How would that change the way that we might orient ourselves?
To the cosmos, right?
I keep wanting to say to the world around us, but it's beyond that, and that's the point.
What does that mean?
And you have a really great story in the book about talking with one of your kids and trying to explain what pantheism is.
So what is that as you use it, and how does it How does it tie in with these other ways of knowing and these indigenous, among other things, or these other resources that you find that have not been the dominant voices in the Western intellectual traditions, religious traditions, and certainly capitalistic traditions?
Right.
Okay.
So, if the book has a broad thesis, It's something like a bad form of religion is underwriting the corporate space race.
And insofar as we can't get free of religion, and that's like the sneaky little subordinate clause, because I don't think that we can get free of religion if religion broadly means our set of highest values, our codes of conduct and behavior and of prescribed behavior, our ascribing of sacred status to some things and not other things.
Insofar as we can't get free of religion, the trick is not so much to throw atheism at this bad religion, because after all, the bad religion is presenting itself as an atheism.
But rather to find resources within some of our religious traditions to tell different stories.
So these are bad stories that are guiding us.
Why don't we find better stories to guide us?
Because we're always guided by stories.
Let's get clear about the stories that are guiding us.
Pick the ones we like and then try to form our societies from there.
The bad religion that is underwriting the space race is marked by a couple of things.
One is, again, this kind of utopianism that doesn't—it's a very flat-footed utopianism.
It doesn't just dream of an other way of doing things.
It just dreams of, like, another place you can do the same thing.
Right.
So that's a bad sort of form of religious utopianism.
And another big one is this.
This conviction that the only important actors on the earth and therefore in the universe are human beings.
And the West got this idea that the most important beings around are human beings from a like an unfortunate reading of a biblical tradition in which a disembodied God says, look, I'm making this world by myself with no help from anybody else.
And I am appointing human beings my avatars on earth.
Humans are made in the image of God.
Nobody else is made in the image of God.
Whether or not we believe that this particular God exists, whether or not we believe that this is it, this is the kind of story that has underwritten European conquest.
The idea that It is incumbent upon a particular class of chosen human beings to go into a new space, to make it anew as if out of nothing, and then to set up a hierarchy of beings in which those human beings, those chosen human beings, are most important and nobody else really matters.
So that's the bad religion.
That's the bad metaphysic undercurring the bad religion.
Does it come from imperial Christianity?
Yes, of course.
Does it exhaust everything that Christianity teaches?
Absolutely not.
There are all sorts of other ways of reading the Christian tradition, certainly of reading the Jewish tradition, of reading the Islamic tradition, and then certainly of reading our non-monotheistic traditions, including our indigenous traditions, that That find importance, agency and creativity, not just in humanity, but in the rest of the created world itself.
And not just in like upright animals or like important animals or big animals, but in like the whole microbial, fungal, mountainous, rivery, tree ridden universe itself.
It is my sense that what pantheism is, pantheism is the find the Pantheism is the proposition that God and the universe are the same thing.
Very straightforwardly.
What we call God is just the entirety of the universe.
Not so much like taken as a compendium, but the idea is that if what God means is creation and sustenance and destruction and then remaking, right?
That's what, that's, there's a big God functions.
All of those things, world making, world unmaking, world sustaining.
All of that goes on at the level of every agent in the world.
So every agent in the world, from trees to rivers to rocks to pigs to turtles, participates in the ongoing making and remaking of the world and destruction of the world.
And so that's what it means for me to think sort of pantheistically about the universe, that every everything that is participates in creation and destruction.
And as such, everything sort of shares in this kind of divinity.
I think you can find more or less pantheism, like little doses of it in all sorts of religious traditions, including the ones that really demonize pantheism, like Roman Catholicism, like, you know, our current Pope's position on the environment.
on ecology and on social justice is one that looks a whole lot like the sort of interesting parts of pantheism.
And does he affirm, you know, a singular male creator god?
Yes, but it doesn't really matter because he's asking us to treat the rest of the cosmos like siblings, like brothers and sisters, and to think ecologically, to work ecologically, and to stop ransacking the universe So I think, again, you can find these sort of pantheistic tendencies, certainly, again, in indigenous traditions.
But even in, you know, at the heart of Rome, at the heart of Roman Catholic power, you can find it there, too.
You can find it kind of all over the place.
It's essentially an idea that occurs to me is the way that we can sort of flip the script because I think there's a logic that says, well, these things aren't human, so we don't have an obligation to them.
And it's sort of like an intensified version of the same arguments you get about animal rights or animal welfare or environmentalism on Earth and so forth.
But you can sort of flip and say, well, you know what, actually, like maybe we as humans, we really suck at like taking care of the part of the creation that is most like us.
How much worse are we of taking, if you're using Christian language, the creation, right?
How much worse are we about taking care of everything else or in this more kind of pantheistic vision, We can't even get it right with the creatures, the part of the world, the part of the cosmos that is like us.
We have a lot more to learn before we run out and start stomping all over everything else.
I don't know if that makes sense or not, but it's something that occurs to me as you pitch this kind of idea, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, to take it to its sort of absurd extreme, Elon Musk is looking to warm up, quote unquote, Mars, which is very cold and the atmosphere is terrible, by hitting its polar ice caps with 10,000 nuclear warheads.
He wants to nuke Mars.
Whether or not he ever does this, just the idea Can do so much damage to think that it's admissible to nuke a planet.
And one thinks like we have such a terrible track record controlling the planetary evolution of our own planet.
You know, once we got in charge of things, whenever you mark the advent of the Anthropocene, Once we really took over, things started going very badly for our planet and I don't understand why we think that we can do so much better on another planet that starts out completely unbearable.
Why we think we can do better there than we can on Earth.
So yes, we've done a terrible job of taking care of the creatures who look like us and a terrible job of taking care of the biosphere itself and so then If on the largest and the smallest scale we're not doing well, I don't understand why we think we're going to do it better in space.
As NASA folks are fond of saying, everything is hard.
Space is hard.
Space is really hard.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tied in with this, and you brought this up a little bit, and I like, you know, we're both religion scholars among other things, and we spend a lot of times talking to students and others about these kinds of things, but this notion of story, this notion of narrative, you also talk about the notion of myth, right?
Not myth in the sense of something that's false, but myth in that sense of, I would say something sort of like a comprehensive, meaning-giving framework that sort of shapes who we are and our orientation to everything around us.
Including others in the world and the cosmos and so forth.
And you tell this, I referenced the story with your child and I think it's great because kids will ask these really strange questions sometimes and they're like super metaphysically loaded or philosophical and we're like, oh wow, we have no idea.
It's like the time my kid asked like if he was a dream before he was born and I was like, well, that's like, he was like three and I was like, I don't have any idea how to answer that.
It's a great question.
But you're talking about pantheism.
I can hear people now saying that sounds cool.
And I did an exercise with students in a class once where I said, what's the job description for God, right?
We're putting up a want ad.
I love it.
And like, you know, responsibilities include and like, what is it?
And, you know, you get eventually to the creation, destruction, sustenance, all of that.
And you're like, we're all made of the same stuff.
Everything is made of the same stuff.
It's just different combinations of the same stuff cycling over and over and over.
And boom, you're to a pantheistic sort of vision.
And I can hear somebody say, okay, I kind of get that.
But really?
Like, you really think that?
Or why call that God?
Or they get really caught up on that.
And I think you said that your child sort of says, do you believe it?
Or is it true?
Or something like that.
I can hear my students asking me that.
And I think you have this great answer in your book.
You say on page 185 for, you know, anybody out there wants to get the book and look on page 185.
You say, in kind of response to this kind of question, I'll stand by my usual tactics here and say that it doesn't matter whether this sort of pantheism, or any sort of pantheism, I'll throw out any sort of theism or religion or anything else, right?
It doesn't matter if it's true, in quotes, what matters is the way any given mythology prompts us to interact with the world we're part of, the world each of our actions helps to make and unmake.
And frankly, some mythologies prompt us to act better than others.
I love that account of what a myth, a mythos, a mythology does.
And you also open the book by saying that this space race, this corporate utopian It's an expropriative model.
It's no less of a mythos, right?
Can you say more about that, the power of myth?
And I think you've already sort of talked some, too, about the unavoidability of myth, because I think that that's really important, because I agree with you, right?
People say, well, let's just do without them.
We don't need myths.
You're like, we already have them.
The notion that we could be mythless is its own kind of myth, right?
How would you explain that idea of myth?
And I think another way of thinking about religion and stories and so forth, it gets beyond what I find is kind of not super helpful questions about, well, is it true or is it false?
Is it fact or is it fiction?
Sure.
How do you explain that if you're talking to your child or your students or others?
How do you articulate that to people?
Well, when I talk to my children, I say, well, some people say this and some people say that and some people say this other thing.
And then they'll say, oh, I like the other thing.
Right.
Like they'll have an aesthetic preference when they're presented with a range of options.
They'll have an aesthetic preference.
I do not ever tell them this thing is true.
I tell them, you know, these are the ways these are the ways that people have of making sense of the world and let them figure out what they'd like.
To live what kind of stories they'd like to live in relation to.
And part of the way that we do that is by pointing out what the what the results are of acting in the world under the sway of particular stories.
So yeah, so when I say that myth is inescapable, I mean very much down like what you were saying about myth, not that it's not true, but that it's a big overarching story that tells us who we are, where we came from, and where we are, where we're living and where we're going.
That give give us a sense of a community.
So the myth of Manifest Destiny, for example, is a myth that Americans hang on to as a story that tells them you were meant as a nation, you know, historically white supremacist nation.
To occupy this entire continent that is part of who you are.
In 2020 when Donald Trump called space, outer space, America's manifest destiny, he said it's who we are as Americans.
This past year when Joe Biden was talking about the Artemis mission, he said, you know, exploration and, you know, Danger hunting and finding new stuff is who we are as Americans.
Those stories that tell us who we are fundamentally as Americans, as Christians, as parents, as children, as whatever, as a group of a coherent group of people.
These are myths.
So I think it's helpful to study lots of myths, to learn from all sorts of people, not in order to take their myths, not in order to take other people's myths, but to ask, well, how would we behave If we acted in accordance with this kind of story.
So, for example, there is a mountain on the big island of Hawaii, Mount Akea.
It is for the Kanaka, the indigenous Hawaiians, a sacred mountain.
In recent years, the University of Hawaii, in relation to a couple of other actors, has tried to install a 14th telescope on this mountain.
And the Indigenous elders have been like, you know what?
Enough.
There are 13 telescopes on our sacred mountain.
This is enough.
There are too many.
We're putting our foot down now, not just because it's not just a telescope.
It's also like another road and more traffic and even more decimation of the landscape, of the population of birds and animals who live on this mountain.
And again, the sort of quick explanation is you may not do these things because this mountain is sacred.
What they mean is this mountain is sometimes they talk about it as a temple.
Sometimes they talk about it as like a dwelling point of the ancestors or a place of creation or the mountain as an ancestor itself.
There are lots of different ways of talking about this.
Now, so the question is then, that's a myth.
It's a myth.
It doesn't mean it's not true.
It just means that it tells a people where they come from and what's important to it and where they are.
Many of us are not Kanaka.
Does this mean that we don't have to pay attention to this myth?
I don't think so.
I think what it means is that we listen closely to the myth.
We try to understand it.
We try to understand the story.
And then what we definitely don't do is say like, ah, yes, I too am Mauna Kea.
The mountain is my ancestor because the mountain is not my ancestor.
The mountain is not Dan's ancestor.
The mountain is right.
But to say, OK, this mountain is ancestral to these particular people.
Therefore, I'm not going to build a telescope on it.
Or therefore, I'm not going to drive my ATV up it.
It's not mine, right?
My behavior, my respectful behavior is driven not by the stories being mine, but by the stories being somebody else's and my respect for the stories being somebody else's.
When you walk into the household of a family that asks you to take off shoes, even if you don't take off shoes in your own house, You take off shoes in that other house.
You don't have to believe that you have to take shoes off in order to do the work of taking your damn shoes off.
So this is what I'm trying to say.
What I'd like to try is relating to the stories of the people of the world who have managed to live on as the land without destroying it.
In such a way that allows all of us to think differently about the way we behave.
Not to think differently about, you know, who we are and suddenly everybody has to become something they're not or something like that.
And then ask, you know, okay, so what would it look like to take seriously the possibility that the moon might be a goddess?
Even the Greeks thought the moon was a goddess, right?
Like, even the Greeks!
This mission that's off to mine the damn moon is named after a goddess, so it's not even an appropriative activity.
How would we treat the moon if the moon were actually divine?
If the moon were actually a goddess?
I imagine the answer would not be, you know, stay away from it at all costs.
But how could we interact respectfully with this particular landform?
There's so much I like about everything that you just said.
You know, I talk about this in the podcast.
I talk about it with students.
You know, if we talk about things like privilege and social authorities, I tick most privilege boxes, right?
I'm straight.
I'm white.
I'm a guy.
I'm well-educated.
You're Jesus.
Yeah, that's right.
Clearly.
In cargo shorts.
You know, and students ask, right?
Students, I think, have a real place of concern if they're like, well, I'm concerned about the dispossessed in the world and the marginalized in the world, and I want to be an anti-racist, and I want to be an ally if I'm not queer, and I want, you know, these communities that I'm not part of, including Indigenous communities, including Uh, communities with their own traditions, their own ways of knowing, and so forth, and they often feel a sense of paralysis, right?
Like, well, what do I do if I'm not part of these communities?
What I tell them is what you do is you listen to those communities, right?
Like, you don't, you don't tell the communities things.
You certainly don't come in with some sort of white savior complex or, I don't know, straight savior complex or whatever.
You listen to those stories, you hear those stories, and you, for me, it's a sort of, I don't have a stronger word, I think, than empathy and like a really heavy sense of to suffer with, to feel with those and let that shape who you are.
And that's what I hear you describing, you know, is a sense of a kind of deep hearing, a deep listening that shapes us, that can change our own myths, right?
That can change our own Perspectives and ways of seeing things, because these are things that are operative on us all the time.
Like, we don't know that they're there.
They're not conscious.
They're not chosen.
I don't know anybody who ever woke up one day, they checked their day planner, like, you know, on my calendar today, it's it's myth choosing day.
I'm going to choose the myth that orients my world, right?
Right.
So it's really profound and powerful.
And I think it's really one of the really key parts of the book and something I value because I think It's easy to counter these kind of utopian visions with just doom and gloom.
And so like to talk about everything that can go wrong with it.
And I really love the way that you present this, this kind of positive vision of, well, here's an alternative, right?
Not just everything that's wrong with this, because that can be paralyzing.
I personally don't think there's much I'm going to do in my life that's going to directly impact Musk and no one.
And what he wants to do, and it can feel paralyzing.
So it's just another valuable thing that I found in the book as I was working my way through it.
So if I were wearing a hat, I would tip it to you.
I think it's really profound.
I could talk about this all day, but we don't have all day, unfortunately.
So I'll just recommend again, the book is Astrotopia, The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race.
One of the things that I was talking with Mary Jane about before we started is that this is a book that very much has her in it, and it feels like it's written... You don't have to be a science person to read it.
And one of the things I think, Mary Jane, about your work that's great, as you've gotten more and more into the science and religion work, is being able to both translate, I think, religion to the science-y types, the science-y people in the world.
They're kind of like, religion's weird.
Like, what do I do with that?
Yeah, but also being able to communicate the science-y stuff to those of us who, you know, may sort of see it from afar and be like, well, what is that?
How do we get that?
How do we begin thinking the two together?
And this is a, I think, a really profound attempt to do that.
So thank you and thank you for taking the time today to talk with me for a while.
Thank you so much.
I've loved your podcast for so long, so I'm really honored to be on it.
Thank you.
Great.
Well, thank you and thanks to everyone for listening, everybody who supports us, all of you who support us morally with the emails and the tweets and the kind thoughts and highlighting when we get things right and wrong and all of those.
Those of you who support us financially, we can't do what we do without you and without that.
And that financial support includes those of you who suffer through the ads.
And so thank you for those of you who do that as well.
As I say in my series, it's in the code.
Please be well until we meet again in this weird virtual format that we have.
