"Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer"
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Progress has escaped orbit; our ethics are still arguing in sandals.
Antonioni’s jab lands because it takes a triumph usually framed as collective enlightenment - “scientific man… on the moon” - and yokes it to something almost embarrassing in its longevity: “the moral concepts of Homer.” He’s not sneering at Homer so much as at us, for treating ancient epics as if they were a sufficient operating system for a world of satellites, nuclear brinkmanship, and mass media. The moon stands in for modernity’s most photogenic proof of capability; Homer stands in for a moral imagination built on honor, conquest, vengeance, the hero’s entitlement, the collateral damage of glory. Put them in the same sentence and the mismatch becomes the point.
As a director who anatomized alienation and the hollowing-out effects of prosperity, Antonioni is diagnosing a lag: technology accelerates, interior life doesn’t keep up. The subtext is less “we need new morals” than “we keep outsourcing meaning to old scripts because they’re comforting and legible.” Homer’s world offers clean narratives - heroes, villains, fate - while contemporary life, in Antonioni’s films, is murkier: power is bureaucratic, desire is ambient, responsibility diffused.
The context matters: postwar Italy and Cold War Europe watched “progress” arrive as consumer abundance alongside existential dread. Antonioni’s line crystallizes that unease. It’s not anti-science; it’s a warning that engineering solutions don’t automatically generate ethical upgrades. We can build a rocket. We still haven’t learned how to live with each other once we land.
Antonioni’s jab lands because it takes a triumph usually framed as collective enlightenment - “scientific man… on the moon” - and yokes it to something almost embarrassing in its longevity: “the moral concepts of Homer.” He’s not sneering at Homer so much as at us, for treating ancient epics as if they were a sufficient operating system for a world of satellites, nuclear brinkmanship, and mass media. The moon stands in for modernity’s most photogenic proof of capability; Homer stands in for a moral imagination built on honor, conquest, vengeance, the hero’s entitlement, the collateral damage of glory. Put them in the same sentence and the mismatch becomes the point.
As a director who anatomized alienation and the hollowing-out effects of prosperity, Antonioni is diagnosing a lag: technology accelerates, interior life doesn’t keep up. The subtext is less “we need new morals” than “we keep outsourcing meaning to old scripts because they’re comforting and legible.” Homer’s world offers clean narratives - heroes, villains, fate - while contemporary life, in Antonioni’s films, is murkier: power is bureaucratic, desire is ambient, responsibility diffused.
The context matters: postwar Italy and Cold War Europe watched “progress” arrive as consumer abundance alongside existential dread. Antonioni’s line crystallizes that unease. It’s not anti-science; it’s a warning that engineering solutions don’t automatically generate ethical upgrades. We can build a rocket. We still haven’t learned how to live with each other once we land.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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