It is not a new thing for the old to decry the young as lazy, irreverent or immoral. My generation is rightly said to believe little and honor less. This is true, in so far as it goes. We do not honor the gods of community, chastity or charity which our fathers threw down. We were taught not to honor them.
When the 60's ended and the Boomers grew up, they mostly accepted the traditions against which they had rebelled in their youth, but with one difference: The fallen idols of the gods were dusted off and placed not on public altars, but private ones. A man came back to the faith, a woman took responsibility for her own career, but it was an individual, personal thing. And so they taught us to live as well.
Those of us who came of age at the turn of the millenium learned that each of us has a duty to his principles and to himself. We learned that integrity mattered in a man, and kindness to others mattered in groups of men. We were instructed to be good teammates and good coworkers, not good Christians or good citizens.
This does not excuse us.
But duties are not what I wish to write on today, and that discussion will keep. This morning I asked myself why else we see the past as better than the future. One reason among many catches my interest: We are ignorant of the future.
Human beings quite naturally know that the past better than the present, for they have experienced it. Of the future we can hardly know anything, but the last fifty years teach us that we will not live the same lives as our fathers. Technology and mores move so much swifter in our day than they did in our grandfathers' that it is difficult to imagine our own lives in ten years, much less those of our children.
Imagination is required to explore the land of the future, but nothing is necessary to predict decline. It comes easily and one finds new things to denounce the more he denounces. I know many men who proclaim the impending moral and political downfall of America--very few of them reinforce their jeremiads with anything more than spit and fire. Why is tomorrow the day we must fall? Why did we not fall during the 1960's, with the Sexual Revolution within and the Soviet Union--a mightier challenger than any today--without? Is our day the worst that has ever dawned? Think of the 1950's, revered as a golden age. Did anyone then predict--could anyone then have forecast, much less clearly explained the minutiae of life in the 21st century?
I doubt it.
The difficulty lies in imagining what shape new mores and new community might take. The Internet is not community, and yet because of it I can (and regularly do) speak face-to-face with my father on the far side of the world. Some imagination is required to glimpse the world in which our children may live, and imagination is in short supply among the scoffers.
It is not that forecasting the future is impossible, nor that the old improperly perceive the faults of the young, but it is interesting to note the reasons why men tend to gloom--for us to take a man seriously when predicting good things, we would require rising stocks or a crystal ball.
I doubt it.
The difficulty lies in imagining what shape new mores and new community might take. The Internet is not community, and yet because of it I can (and regularly do) speak face-to-face with my father on the far side of the world. Some imagination is required to glimpse the world in which our children may live, and imagination is in short supply among the scoffers.
It is not that forecasting the future is impossible, nor that the old improperly perceive the faults of the young, but it is interesting to note the reasons why men tend to gloom--for us to take a man seriously when predicting good things, we would require rising stocks or a crystal ball.
Jody,
ReplyDeleteI agree with most of your propositions and am in entire agreement with your consideration of this. I did want to post several things for you to consider.
The first regards your examples. (I know examples are limited and you may have counter-examples to my counter-examples, but perhaps they will help along some more actual thoughts). You ask if today is worse than the sexual revolution within and the Soviets without. Well, I admit that we have no enemy without that even aspires to be the Soviet Union. My counter to your example is that the sexual revolution never dreamed that things would be as revolutionized as they are today. The sexual revolution proclaimed free love and wanted everyone to have sex, but they really wanted all consenting adults to have free sex with people that they could agree to have sex with. Today you pay the government to hand out free condoms to twelve year olds and the Congress of the United States of America must listen to a graduate student whine about how her contraceptives are expensive and how you should pay for her to have as much sex as she wants. Our problems within are much worse (at least as far as I understand them) than they were fifty years ago.
The second is more general. Physically, the world is getting worse (if you don't agree, take a physics course and maybe one on genetics and get back to me). It may be getting spiritually worse as well. The pronouncements of Jesus about the end times (in which we are living) do not seem to indicate a steady future or one that gets better. I guess I'm just saying that while you are right to question our instinct to think "durn whippersnappers can't do anything right" there also seems to me to be no reason to believe the future will be anything better or even as good as what we have now.
I think it probably takes more than imagination to explore the contours of the future, which might be why a wise man once said "do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."
Well, Nathaniel is more thoughtful, as usual, but I just wanted to say I found your thought that we can't see the future so we are likely to fear it quite the flash of inspiration. But I think it can work the other way, too--we can't see the future, so we expect it will be better than today (e.g. Progressivism, which I know you know well enough about).
ReplyDeleteJody, I too wonder why so many people [in my circles] think that the world is getting worse. Like your friend commented above, there is better reason to think so than you let on in your post. The trouble is, I'm young and have not yet been exposed to the foulness of our age, not to mention I don't have any experience of the past to say that it used to be better. Shortly, I'm young. :) However, I still tend to, like you, question why people seem so gloom and doom. I don't believe much about the future, to be honest. I don't know, and I don't even have much of a guess. Maybe I should work on one. But I do tend to scoff at the scoffers because I DO have imagination, so I scoff at how sure they are of their futile predictions.
ReplyDeleteI believe that many people I know think the future is dark because they don't know the past. It's ironic, because these same people tend to romanticize the past. They know the past, but not well enough to see how SIMILAR the past is with the present. It's easy to see how two things are different (in my opinion) but difficult to identify a common essence which runs through them, despite time changing some of the details. To use Nathaniel's example, maybe the demands of the 60's were wrong, and maybe the demands have become even more blatantly wrong today, but at least people today (proclaim that they) believe that sex trafficking is wrong. That said, I am not one to say that the future is bright and blossom-y. But like I said, I think people bewail the future because they don't understand how truly similar the past is to the present--for example, people will always be lustful beasts who want more sex. That is, until the new heavens and the new earth come to be.