Looking back six decades, what I've seen.
The often sporadic and shaky transition of a society as perhaps most societies must change during an individual's lifetime.
I was born into cultural conformity, matured into social upheaval, and lived mainly in a world of backsliding content and indifference.
Last night I watched a John F. Kennedy speech in which he announced America's intention to land a man on the moon before the end of decade.
Kennedy justified the entire Apollo venture in a line often forgotten about how it was important, in the development of mankind, that free men fully participate in any advances. He was trying to say that, once we fell technologically behind, we risked our very freedom.
But can we retain that edge, upon which our very freedom relies, with an unaware, apathetic society?
To me, it's a "net sum" game. We become ever more physically capable and sophisticated at every conceivable level of human communication - but at the price of being ever less perceptive, unchallenged, untested and, ultimately, smaller human beings.
I guess that explains why I'm at times so pessimistic about the future. The challenges today are looming larger than ever in centuries, possibly millenia, and yet they're arriving at a time when we've allowed ourselves to become "smaller", less adaptable, less self-reliant, less courageous than we've been and had to be in earlier generations.
From global warming and associated climate change to nuclear proliferation and global insecurity to resource exhaustion, species extinction and overpopulation, we'll soon be confronted by the full effects of our excess and apathy. Will the "free men" of Kennedy's vision be up to the challenge? Do we still have what it takes to preserve our freedom in this changing world or have we simply grown too small?
MoS, nice to see you back. I was a little concerned, as you have not posted for a while.
ReplyDeleteDo not be so pessimistic. Things do change. Humans will, hopefully, continue to find ways to survive.
Hopefully there will be fewer Bushes and Cheneys in this world we seemed to be bent upon destroying this world.
Hey LD, just a little R&R up in the mountains. I hope you're right and I'm flat out wrong. I think we'll know within a decade, two at the most. The upside is that, if we are to meet these challenges, we'll have to give up what we've become since the 70's. That would be its own reward.
ReplyDeleteMoS: Great, insightful post.
ReplyDeleteAt the risk of sounding like a broken record (or cd) - it's all about intellectual sloth, which drives incompetence (as human beings and citizens) and which, in turn, keeps spreading further the cancer on the body democratic ...
Thanks for your kind words, Pierre. I suppose what troubles me is our social atrophy in the West. Call it small or weak or narrow, blind even, but we've undergone a progressive narrowing of our focus and abilities offset by a steadily increasing reliance on technological advance. Even though our misuse of technology often lies at the core of the threats we face, we still gamble on new technologies to set everything right. Note that I'm not blaming technology and science, merely the way in which we've failed to use them wisely and our use of them for our immediate gain without regard for the consequences we may bequeath to those who will follow.
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