I have for the most part, written off reading Charles Krauthammer because he has become as predictable as death and taxes in his disparagement of everything that Barack Obama says or does or tries. And he is one of the most consistent purveyors of the right wing line about Obama-as-Off-the-Grid: redistributing income, coddling and apologizing to our enemies, disavowing American exceptionalism, and shamelessly pandering to the progressive left. (Never mind how disappointed the progressive left has been in Obama). And Krauthammer is unrepentant about the Iraq war and in general the entire neo-con approach that reigned for eight (ruinous) years.
But I have come across, a few weeks late, this brilliant and beautiful column by Krauthammer about the search for intelligent life in the cosmos. Money quote:
“As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.”
And this:
“…this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.”
And, finally, this:
“Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.
“There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.
“We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.
“Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.”
Here’s the article in full. http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer123011.php3
And it follows another really brilliant piece he wrote about the discovery of neutrinos that travel faster than the speed of light. http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer100611.php3
I wonder if Krauthammer could be persuaded to give up writing about politics and take up being a full-time science writer.
