ALAN writes:
Several months ago I had occasion to visit the planetarium in St. Louis. The James S. McDonnell Planetarium is in the same building I visited numerous times from 1963 through 1974. It stands within a cultural and metaphysical setting radically different from where it stood then: Trendy, cutesy, cutting-edge, and drenched in hip-and-cool. It is now part planetarium, part fun house, and part platform for political sloganeering.
The Planetarium in 1963:
The setting is one of traditional form and restraint. Well-attired, well-mannered grown-ups. Men wearing suits and serious hats, not blue jeans and ball caps. Women wearing dresses, not pants and t-shirts. No tattooed women. Parents in control of children. Grown-ups did not use profanity in public settings. No screens. Hour-long presentations. Classical music. Nothing overly loud. Classrooms and library of astronomical books and periodicals. No “play areas” for children. No ideological sloganeering. No mention of feminism, “diversity” or “inclusion”. People did not carry amusements with them.
The Planetarium in 2025:
The setting oozes hip-and-cool. Form is ignored or derided. Hyper-casual attire. Men in blue jeans and ball caps; women in pants and t-shirts. Tattooed women flaunting their tattoos. Conduct befitting adolescents. Children in control of parents. Play areas for children. “Adults” use profanity in public settings to show how hip-and-cool they are. Screens everywhere. Presentations lasting thirty minutes or less, with surround-sound at hyper-volume and hyper-fast editing of scenes. No classical music. No classrooms or library. Leftist ideology called Feminism, “diversity” and “inclusion” now permitted to shape vocabulary and frame of mind. People carry amusements with them.
That last especially illustrates the revolutionary change in frame of mind between the 1960s and the 2020s. The young and middle-aged have absorbed the propaganda that advanced technology makes for better-informed people. Such a concrete-bound frame of mind, inclined and encouraged to seek amusement, thrills, or diversion at the slightest whim, is incompatible with the presence of mind that is essential for understanding what a planetarium or museum is about. Such a frame of mind would have been inconceivable to Planetarium visitors in 1963.
One more difference between those 62 years: President Kennedy never used profanity in public settings, unlike many “public officials” today. Nor did reporters or the entertainment industry. Americans in 1963 would have been shocked –properly– if they had. I know, because I was there.
There are now areas for children to play among replicas of dinosaurs. The belief that children cannot endure restraint and decorum for an hour or two, or should not even be expected to, is an idea that Maria Montessori would have laughed at heartily and properly. The difference between her and modern parents is that she took children seriously, whereas modern parents fawn upon them (largely because they themselves want to remain children). It is one window into the hip, cool, modernist-parent frame of mind(lessness).
The carnival culture that confronts us everywhere today –in pictures, posters, and endless advertisements featuring people wearing goofy smiles — did not exist in the early 1960s. It is part of the deliberate dumbing down described decades ago by John Taylor Gatto and Charlotte Iserbyt. (It is astonishing to observe how easily grown men–which is not to say grown-ups — will agree to wear vapid smiles for photographs in this or that marketing or propaganda campaign, to show how squishy-soft agreeable and accommodating they are.)
At the hip, new Planetarium, gravitas is hard to find. There is little mention of abstract thought or the long history of astronomy or the achievements of those who played an important part in that history: Mostly white men and a few white women. Nor is there any hint that such things involve hierarchy, as they must.
The planetarium’s book counter was discontinued years ago. There is now a gift shop offering toys, trinkets, games, and books that are politically correct, which of course is now the default standard by which Americans are taught to think and speak. The old book counter had none of those things.
The classrooms and astronomical library that once occupied the building’s lower level are long gone. A few sensible exhibits can be seen there today, but they must compete with the cutesy-funsy ambience that is promoted throughout the building and in a long corridor that connects it with the “Science Center”.
The Star Chamber was demolished decades ago — the theater where visitors could attend hour-long lectures that explored the history of astronomy and were accompanied by classical music. I recall attending many of those pointer shows in the 1960s. All the speakers were men. I do not recall any shows presented by women or any women howling about that. Feminists had yet to conquer the Planetarium. Nor in those presentations was there any concern with trendiness or “special effects”.
The Star Chamber was the centerpiece of the building, where seats for 420 visitors were arrayed around a large Goto optical projector. The Star Chamber was encircled by exhibition space and glass windows. Today all those windows are blacked out. Opacity has replaced clarity, just as ostentation has replaced gravitas. I cannot see through those windows, just as younger generations cannot see through dumbed down standards or Leftist ideology. Where the Star Chamber was, there is now a big open space with no seating and where visitors are expected to lie down and look up. Did I do that? Would I do that? Aha, ha, ha, ha, ha! The key thing to remember is the frame of mind that agrees to accept such ideas. It is–and is intended as–a form of takedown, literally and symbolically, just as Americans have allowed their standards and their culture to be taken down over the past six decades.
One day in 2008, Lawrence Auster went to a movie theater in Manhattan to see a movie. Afterward he wrote:
“….but I didn’t see the movie. I left the theater after 20 minutes. It is a theater designed like a torture chamber, with surround-sound speakers turned up to a volume louder than the loudest sound
you’ve ever heard in your life…”. ( “Expelled…by Ear-Splitting Cacophony”, View from the Right, 2008)
He could have been writing about the St. Louis “Science Center”. The frame of mind is the common factor. A high-tech theater with steeply-arrayed seats is now the hip, cool place to visit to see movies that are of course overdone and include ear-splitting volume. That alone is enough to keep me away. Hyper is the word for it: Hyper-color, hyper-loud, hyper-fast changes of scenes, and hyper-special effects — all designed to appeal to the perpetual-adolescent frame of mind, a rut in which Americans have been stuck for decades. The point is to glorify sensation and demean the capacity for thought, a trend that philosopher Richard Weaver wrote about in the 1940s.
There were nights in the 1960s when I enjoyed hearing Antonio Carlos Jobim and Gene Lees’s lovely song “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars”. But there will be no quiet nights or quiet stars among people who are drunk on speed, surround-sound and hyper-volume.
That is why I never attended any of the “laser light shows” that the Planetarium presented in the 1980s, an early example of hip-and-cool. Why would I be impressed by artifice like that when I knew that the stars at night put on the greatest light show in all creation without involving any high-tech gadgets? Wasn’t that fact itself–and its promulgation and appreciation–precisely one of the reasons why planetariums were invented? And yet here were marketers promoting “laser light shows” as if to suggest that they were better than the splendor of the night sky. It was all about power, not about knowledge or comprehension.
Screens dominate the setting: Little screens to provide information and accompany exhibits, and big screens to entertain and distract. They are less about science and the sky than about spectacle and excitement. But today’s visitors are perfectly happy with screens, having been taught from infancy onward to look to screens for knowledge, wisdom, salvation, trivia, and everything in between.
In 1963, the new Planetarium issued an eight-page brochure in which its features and purposes were described in sober prose, not hype. The text makes no mention of “diversity” or “inclusion” because those agitprop terms had not yet been concocted. On Saturday mornings, a presentation for children was designed to aid Boy Scouts in fulfilling their Astronomy Merit Badge requirements. There was no mention of Girl Scouts, a measure of the culture-wide understanding in those years that boys and girls had different interests and that a hard science like astronomy would appeal mostly to boys, a common-sense understanding that Americans held for decades but then surrendered when they agreed to become squishy-soft gullible in place of hard-principled sensible.
There was still some degree of intellectual sobriety in the 1960s. The word “fun” did not appear anywhere in that brochure or in an article in Sky and Telescope magazine (June 1963) describing the new Planetarium.
The Planetarium came into being because city taxpayers in 1955 approved a bond issue providing for it. Neither they nor the building’s planners, architects, or staff claimed that selling “fun” was one of the reasons for building a planetarium.
