Shooting for the Moon, Missing the Point – BRIGHT Magazine 3/25/18, 10*35 AM

Courtney Martin Follow

author of Do It Anyway and The New Better O:, co-founder of @soljourno & @FRESHSpeakers,
@TEDPrize strategist, electric slider, momma, lover, Mghter
Feb 22 · 10 min read

Essay
Shooting for the Moon, Missing the Point
Is the sexiest new metaphor for social change sending us
o: course?

Illustration by Barry Falls for Bright Magazine

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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 Hxing 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 “JeLersonian 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:

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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 Hrst 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?’”

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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 eLorts 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.”

This Is Why I Give. What About

You?
We live in an era of 24/7/365
charitable asks, whether from
friends, Twitter campaigns, or
crowdfunding sites. But…
thedevelopmentset.com

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
Hxing,” he says. “However, the narrative in the social impact space falls
under ‘not having enough X’ or ‘Hxing Y.’ The scarcity narrative isn’t an
inspiring one.”

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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 conHnement 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
diLerence, 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.

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The moonshot metaphor is a deeply

male one. I did a pretty thorough scan
of the word’s usage and didn’t Hnd
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
eLective. 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
eLorts 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.

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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 aLected by them, not kite surfers
and aerospace engineers. Those most
aLected 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.

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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, pashy 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 (Htfully, uncomfortably) and a heavy dose
of humility. Or else it could become one more mechanism for
domination (Regalado’s auspicious word choice).

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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 poating
vessel, philanthropists must be made
to feel small by the galaxy of social
change eLorts that exist, small in the
context of so much history, so much
suLering, 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.

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