Three Views of Earth from the Moon

Stewart Brand, Martin Heidegger, and Ursula K. Le Guin each saw something different.

1.

You may know about the first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog, the original seed for internet culture before the internet. Stewart Brand put the late William Anders' famous Apollo 8 "Earthrise" photo on the cover, and inside proclaimed:

"We are as gods and might as well get used to it."

Later issues say, "...we might as well get good at it."

Brand's point was that the power of technology was being distributed to individuals (at first by mail order) instead of being monopolized by large governments and corporations.?

2.

As he entered his last decade of life, the philosopher Martin Heidegger allowed a private interview on the condition it would be published only after his death. It was titled "Only a God Can Save Us" in?the 1976 issue?of?Der Spiegel. At the time of the interview, Heidegger had just seen the first images of Earth from the moon in August 1966, and he described the shock and dismay he felt over it to the interviewer.

The images he saw would have included?this one from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1. Earlier,?a patchwork of images from the edge of space?had been taken from V-2 rockets launched by the United States military after the war, but these were not made public.

At this point in the interview, Heidegger was talking about the problem of modern societies confronting (or failing to curb) what he called technicity — “the attempt of modern man to dominate the earth by controlling beings that are considered as objects”

SPIEGEL: But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for. We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us??

HEIDEGGER:?Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is uncanny [Unheimlich], that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don't know if you were shocked, but [certainly]?I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon.?We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us] — the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today. Recently I had a long dialogue in Provence with René Char — a poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.

3.

In The Dispossessed (1974), there's a well-known passage at the end of the sixth chapter that's spoken by the novel's protagonist, Shevek, who was based on J. Robert Oppenheimer, a personal friend of Le Guin's parents:

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you loose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."

If we read this as Le Guin talking about our earth and moon — and that's how this quotation tends to be read — it's a solid insight. But in the context of The Dispossessed, it's not about our solar system. From Shevek's perspective, "the moon" is a verdant but war-torn twin planet, Urras, and "the earth" is his bleak and ambiguously utopian homeworld, Annares, colonized by political outcasts from Urras. ("An Ambiguous Utopia" is the novel's subtitle.)

When Shevek travels to Urras, this perspective is reversed, but in this passage, he is on Annares and responding to his partner, Takver. She has been musing how Urras can look so beautiful when it is full of war, poverty, and authoritarianism.

In the book — as opposed to quotations taken from it — Shevek actually says, "The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon." As the moon, not from the moon — as people on Urras see Annares, as their moon. Takver doesn't like this and retorts: "That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon — I don't want it!"

I think Shevek (and Le Guin) are proposing a radically uprooted perspective here — it goes beyond seeing the beauty of the familiar from afar, of your home when you are away. Shevek seems to say we don't fully see our familiar world and home until we experience it as unfamiliar and alien, the moon rather than the earth, the periphery rather than the center.

The essay has been?revised and expanded, and a fourth view from Ivan Illich has been added.