Is the sexiest new metaphor for social change sending us off course?
In the last decade or so, a certain approach to social change has become fashionable. It is characterized by a lofty, gargantuan goal — to cure a disease that we are very far from curing, to feed every hungry person on the planet, to reverse climate change.
It often purports to put unlikely suspects together in pursuit of this goal. For instance: “What if a sculptor and a kite surfer worked together to rethink how we harness the power of the wind?”
These visionaries, it should be noted, need not have relevant prior experience or any personal relationship to the problem; in fact, such an attachment might hinder their ability to think truly big — or to “kill” the project altogether, as is the noble thing to do.
More than anything else, this new approach is based on the idea that the solutions to our most pernicious and widespread societal ills have not yet been discovered and are likely technical. That fixing what’s wrong with us is a failure of imagination, not complexity or distribution of resources or, for God’s sake, moral will.
Moonshot.
Though these days you’re likely to hear this metaphor invoked in apolitical settings — elite conferences and “Jeffersonian dinners” and other gathering places of the rich and altruistic, it traces back to Apollo 11. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy Jr. gave a speech to Congress in which he declared that an American would walk on the moon before the decade was done:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It worked. At 10:56 p.m. EST on July 20, 1969, astronaut and self-proclaimed deist Neil Armstrong planted the first human foot on another world. With more than half a billion people watching on television, he famously said: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
That was the money shot. But what it actually cost to get Neil up there — $25.4 billion and 400,000 people — faded into the background of the American consciousness. We were so happy to have won.
Fast forward to 2018. According to Google Trends, there has been a steady uptick in the usage of the word since 2004, and a particular upswing since the spring of 2016.
Some of this may be directly attributable to GoogleX, a “moonshot factory” founded in 2010 (now called X and owned by renamed parent company Alphabet). Its goals are sector-agnostic; they’d like to make the world better — usually through some zany-sounding environmental solution — but no doubt, they’d also like to make a lot of money while doing it. X is currently working on a thermal storage system that uses salt to store renewable energy, for example. They explored a synthetic carbon-neutral fuel made from seawater, and a lighter-than-air ship that could reduce freight costs, but both projects were gleefully killed.
Or so Astro Teller, X’s “Captain of Moonshots,” would have you believe. In his 2016 TED talk he claimed the crew is invited to “Get excited and cheer, ‘Hey! How are we going to kill our project today?’”
While philanthropists don’t appear to be borrowing X’s joy at failing (certainly not when it comes to their grantees), they do appear to be intrigued by bigness.
For instance, there’s the MacArthur Foundation’s 100 & Change, a competition for $100 million to make “real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time.” A new initiative called Co-Impact will invest $500 million in “initiatives that are poised to achieve breakthrough results.” The Kaufman Foundation gathered a group of 45 movers and shakers last spring to discuss what a “moonshot” for job creation could look like.
Not all of these efforts use the language of “moonshot,” but they are all characterized by legacy-building philanthropy at unprecedented scale.
Vinod Rajasekaran, a trained aerospace engineer and co-founder of a conference on social impact, writes: “I believe social missions can be as compelling and as inspiring for the future as space missions.”
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Among his ten lessons that space exploration has for social entrepreneurs? Stop being such a downer. “People don’t say space exploration is needed because Earth has a scarcity problem or it needs fixing,” he says. “However, the narrative in the social impact space falls under ‘not having enough X’ or ‘fixing Y.’ The scarcity narrative isn’t an inspiring one.”
He’s got a point, but this abstract logic can be heartless when applied in the real world. Would Rajasekaran tell activists trying to liberate the 80,000 people held in solitary confinement in American prisons that they just haven’t landed on the right uplifting spin?
And the truth, often neglected by the social entrepreneurship sector, is that some valuable resources are limited. Money and time, for starters. If we spent less time peddling the delusion that everyone can have as much as they want, and more time talking about the ethical and environmental basis for living modestly, perhaps we’d achieve some moral moonshots.
So why has the metaphor of moonshot become so popular right now?
Perhaps it is a reaction to a fractured time. It’s a moment that seems to beg for big, bold philanthropy that unites people across demographic difference, that makes many privileged people want to behave bravely rather than watch the end of the world tick ever closer. Like in the late ‘60s, elite white guys are on high alert; Black Lives Matter protestors are disrupting their brunches, women are exposing their favorite TV hosts and movie producers as creepy at best and predatory at worst, and a hack businessman just took over their government, despite all the money poured into his opponent.
One might even venture to say that she lost, in part, because she is the kind of leader who is allergic to the language of moonshots. Practical and boring Hillary Clinton is more likely to put $25.4 billion in a social program than put a man on the moon. She’s never made great television.
The moonshot metaphor is a deeply male one. I did a pretty thorough scan of the word’s usage and didn’t find one woman invoking it. It’s not all that surprising when you consider the type of leadership most practiced and venerated by powerful men — heroic, hierarchical, sometimes even colonial. Leaders who aspire to move through the world in this particular way — whether men or women — want to be obscenely successful, not just effective. They want to be celebrated, maybe even feared. Think about Silicon Valley, where a preponderance of white men chase after the singular “unicorn” while women co-found efforts like Zebras Unite to call for “a more ethical and inclusive movement to counter existing start-up and venture capital culture.”
In journalist Naomi Klein’s 2010 TED talk she talked about a moment that, to my mind, perfectly encapsulates this distinctively toxic and predominantly masculine approach to leadership. While interviewing Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, Klein noticed that he had a plaque on his desk inscribed with the words, What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
“Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you’re training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TED Talk,” she says, “but personally, I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of Icarus hanging from the wall…. I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time.”
Here’s the thing: in a time of tumult, a moonshot makes terrible problems seem solvable.
The good news? They are.
The bad news? Most of the world’s most intractable problems have not gone unsolved because of a lack of ingenuity. They’ve gone unsolved because they exist within complex, interlocking systems that must be healed concurrently over generations. Most likely by the people who are most affected by them, not kite surfers and aerospace engineers. Those most affected by climate change are likely to have some of the best ideas for solving it, though they’ll need the resources and cooperation of the whole dang world.
Failing American high schools, for example, are not just the result of a failure of imagination or even a lack of funding (though more money, more equally distributed, would do a hell of a lot of good in public education). They are the result of underpaid educators, too few of whom look like the kids who are performing most poorly; decades of redlining that has created pockets of poverty where property taxes don’t begin to approximate the real costs of running a school; the result of whole communities of people given subpar healthcare, living in food deserts that don’t support them in getting their kids nutritious food…
The kind of social change we most desperately need right now is less about invention and more about integrity. We have to look soberly and collaboratively at the systemic inequality that has been made even more entrenched by decades of neglecting public institutions. We have to admit our environmental limitations and acknowledge the ways in which those of us with the most are making life perilous for those with the least. We have to admit that we live on a single polluted, politically polarizing planet and reckon with that reality.
To be sure, there is a role for the kite surfers and aerospace engineers. The elite — and I put myself in this category — must give up some things in order to genuinely be a part of systems change. We have to send our kids to neighborhood schools, even if they won’t learn Mandarin and have access to a kiln. We have to pay more, not less, taxes, so that kids who don’t have healthcare can get it.
And from a philanthropic perspective, we have to support the leadership of people most proximate to the world’s most pressing problems. We have to operate on the assumption that it is people — groups of people, not individual geniuses — that are the key technology in lasting social change. Wise donors will give these leaders even a small fraction of the permission to learn that Teller’s “Peter Pans with Ph.Ds” do. Paradigmatic change takes a long time; it should be prioritized — however slow — over the sector’s desire for fast, flashy results.
A captivating metaphor is a powerful motivator. Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review, writes: “I’m not sure that going to the moon had any practical use — astronauts brought back a few hundred pounds of rocks and some great pictures — but the psychological impact was immense. It positioned the U.S. to dominate aerospace for years to come.”
If the moonshot metaphor can motivate a whole new generation of the world’s wealthiest people to give their money away, that’s a good thing, but it has to go along with strong donor education about how systems level change actually happens (fitfully, uncomfortably) and a heavy dose of humility. Or else it could become one more mechanism for domination (Regalado’s auspicious word choice).
The change we need right now is not about colonizing some distant land — whether that’s the moon or the Bronx. It’s about looking anew at the earth we’re standing precariously on top of. How do we pull out the rotten roots and redesign the whole irrigation system? How do we rethink who deserves what of our fruits? What is the weather telling us about our own shared vulnerability and the wisdom of limitations?
JFK had some things very right, of course. We should choose to tackle injustice and inequality not because it is easy, but because it is hard. We must be “unwilling to postpone.” But we must choose our language wisely. It determines how we think change actually happens and who we think it is catalyzed by. It determines who gets funding and with what expectations attached. Our language determines our legacy.
Just as Neil Armstrong must have marveled at the vastness of the night sky out the windows of his floating vessel, philanthropists must be made to feel small by the galaxy of social change efforts that exist, small in the context of so much history, so much suffering, and so much ingenuity. It seems to me that the truly noble legacy to pursue at this time of presidential bravado and gender and racial reckoning is to be ambitiously humble and unprecedentedly generous. It won’t make for great TV, but it will increase our chance of being able to look our grandchildren in the eyes.