July 20, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 successfully landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface of the moon. It was the greatest singular achievement in history, and the one thing we ever did as a unified people that was truly beyond our immediate reach, requiring us to surpass even our imagination of what was possible. The moon landing was without question the high point of the Great American Experience, and humankind has not only failed in the past half century to top the accomplishment, the human race in general and America in particular has unquestionably devolved from that moment of shared glory.
The hard fact is inescapable when one looks at the state of the U.S. and the world today: The human race peaked fifty years ago and is on a not-so-slow decline to eventual self-extinction. Sooner than you think.
Just hear me out before you clutch your breast and proclaim that humanity will be saved from itself because, “Hey, humans are inherently good deep inside.” No, they aren’t, humans are greedy and rotten on the whole, so save us both some time and get on board the doom train before it becomes a bandwagon. In order to track and isolate the peak of , and the society in which we live and thrive. That may be taken either as one or as parallel entities, but there is no way to separate them for the purposes of this study. We begin with society.
If democracy is the least imperfect type of government, and the human race is the most evolved species on earth, then we can connect those dots and arrive at the conclusion that the Great American Democratic Experiment is the fruition of all societal evolution up to this time. America is simply the best we have ever done for ourselves. So if America is the gold standard, then the peak of humanity had to have occurred on these shores.
(Native tribes who live as one with nature are beautiful and probably better examples of humans living in a natural state, but they also don’t have Beethoven or Velcro and they still shit on the ground, so…)
Most people, when they speak of “the good old days,” are referring to a time between the end of World War II and an undetermined moment when popular music didn’t suck, around 1996. That is a pretty fair gauge of America’s best years, but we can refine the search further.
World War II lifted the United States to a new position as the preeminent world power. In the years that followed the civil rights movement finally provided at least a legal guarantee of equal opportunity for all citizens. It was a time when people still believed in the American dream, still strove for that which was beyond them, and still looked up to heroes without contempt. With these prerequisites considered, our period of peak Americanness is narrowed down to a sliver of time following the successes of the Civil Rights Act but before Watergate and the appearance of disco, so some time between 1965 and 1974.
Throughout time, mankind always evolved just ahead of technology, controlling it’s development as need arose. From the discovery of fire to the the polio vaccine, society grew and prospered for its own betterment with each creation. The accumulated knowledge of a society was brought to bear each time a person carved a wheel or built a printing press or worked out the intricacies of aerodynamics to get an airplane in the air. Each time an idea was turned into reality, it was at the point that the idea was finally within reach of the inventor to create it. Technology never ruled mankind, but was a tool of his evolution.
IQ can be measured. Height and weight can be measured. The accumulation of money is measured every single day. None of these things are permanent nor do they truly capture the essence of what makes humans special, and why we bother to evolve. How do we measure those things that make us transcend our circumstances to evolve? How do we measure “true greatness?” For that, we must step beyond the bounds of earthly accumulation and look within the animal, beyond the society and to the soul of man. The truest measurements of the evolution of humanity are three undeniable and easily understood metrics: 1. Originality. 2. Cool. 3. That thing called “It”.
“It” can’t be defined, exactly, but you know it when you see it. Everyone wants “it,” but “it” is reserved for a select few, usually those humans on the cusp of evolution who have crossed over to the next level and are setting the stage for the rest of us to follow. Alexander the Great probably had it, The Buddha and Jesus and other charismatic leaders had to have had it, and it seems likely that in American history it was also a feature of luminaries such as Benjamin Franklin, Lincoln, Einstein and Mae West. You know it when you see it.
Which brings us to the peak year in history, the time of perfection that all human evolution had been building toward: July 1968 to July 1969.
In the tumultuous year of 1968 the species known as homo sapiens was on the verge of accomplishing something so monumental, so beyond the scope of human understanding, that the body and the brain of man would never recover. 1968 was a year of upheaval and change, social strife and the turning against a war. It was the year that America grew up and grew serious. It was a year of evolution and the point of no return. The time had come for one of us to transcend on behalf of all of us.
Fortunately, a person and an event that could easily been lost to myth and legend was recorded. This is the very definition of original cool.
For Elvis Presley – 1968 – That’s Alright Mama.
Homo sapiens had achieved perfection, had evolved to a point where even staying on the planet seemed a letdown. How would the earth hold us after such cool, sexy “itness” as that? Had we stayed true to our previous path and pace of evolution the obvious next step would have been to save the environment for future generations, bring peace to the world, and create an inclusive society where all children live and love and never go hungry. Of course, we didn’t do any of that.
We went to the moon. Somehow, some way, against all common sense, the country that has never had adequate healthcare for its citizens flew a capsule out of orbit and landed it on the lunar surface. Then men got out and walked around. On. The. Moon.
Sixty-three years prior to the Apollo 11 mission, humans did not possess the power of flight, most people still rode around on horses, and commercial radio didn’t even exist yet. In one person’s lifetime U.S. citizens went from believing that electricity was deadly and powered flight was impossible to watching three men strapped to a rocket fly to the moon and back. The scope of the accomplishment and the speed with which it occurred are both staggering. Two hundred thousand years of human history were eclipsed in one sixty-six year span.
The Internet is an amazing development, and certainly changed our lives, but it wasn’t a great singular accomplishment. It is the result of all the communications achievements that came before it, with the earliest online information sent via phone lines that had already been old hat for nearly a century. Like so many technological achievements through time, all of the accumulated achievements stacked on top of each other until, when it was time for the Internet, a bunch of people wanted it and it happened. The Internet was simply evolution.
This is not the case with the moon shot. John F. Kennedy set the country on a mission to the moon as a singular effort in the face of an international enemy. This was a case of national pride, and a thing that would bond the entirety of the human race like nothing before. Much of the knowledge that put us on the surface of our satellite rock was either gleaned from the minds of Nazi German rocket scientists or learned in the labs of NASA specifically for the purpose of accomplishing the feat. Going to the moon was NOT the logical next step in man’s evolution. It wasn’t even the five-hundredth next step. Going to the moon was a lark with no immediate practical use to the average person, and one lifetime before, heck, a half of a lifetime before, it would have seemed like impossible science fiction. It was truly, “A giant leap for mankind.”
When Elvis put on that black leather suit and sang Rock & Roll in the round for “The Comeback Special,” he achieved the ultimate realization of The American Dream and fulfilled the promise of evolution. He was all of us as good as none of us could ever be. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, they also did it on our behalf, and every human being watching felt as if they were also taking those small steps and giant leaps.
If the American Democratic Experience is the highpoint of social development, and Elvis in black leather was the highpoint of cool, and standing on the moon was the ultimate achievement of technology, then there can be no doubt that 1968 – 1969 was the pinnacle of human society, achievement, and evolution.
It was also the last time that we had complete control of the technology we rely on. Armstrong had to take over and hand steer the lunar module onto a safe spot on the moon’s surface when the onboard computer sounded repeated warnings. These days cars drive themselves, computers control our lives, observe our every movement on the internet, and have replaced human interaction with bots and artificial intelligence. Those same computers are now training robots to take our jobs, making us obsolete in our own world.
The United States has had fifty years to surpass or at least equal the greatness of the ’68 Comeback Special and the moon landing. In that time it has instead stumbled through multiple pointless wars, managed to murder Rock & Roll, fallen to 31st internationally in education, and elected a racist Twitter-addicted “President” who thinks that windmills cause cancer.
But once, in a loftier time, we were cool, we had “it,” and we took giant leaps.