TEMPORAL PROVINCIALISM (via Matt Crawford):

Imagining the Future (Yuval Levin, Winter 2004, The New Atlantis)

Put simply, those who imagine the future in terms of innovation tend to think of the future as something that will happen to us, and so as something to be judged and understood in terms of the interests of the free, rational, individual adult now living. That person is the basic unit of measurement in all of the theories of social life that inform the anthropology of innovation: the freely choosing individual of classic liberal democratic theory; the rational actor of free market capitalism; the consenting adult of libertarian cultural theories. All of these models and theories serve us well because enough of us do more or less answer that description much of the time.

But the future is populated by other people—people not yet born, who must enter the world and be initiated into the ways of our society, so that they might someday become rational consenting adults themselves. Strangely, what is missing from the view of the future grounded in innovation is the element of time, or at least its human consequent: the passing of generations. What is missing is the child—the actual bearer of the future of humanity—and the peculiar demands, conditions, and possibilities that the presence of children introduces into the life of our society and its future.

In part, children are absent from this vision of the future because the vocabulary of classical liberal and libertarian thinking leaves little room for them. The thought-experiment that is liberalism’s creation myth—that famous state of nature from which free and equal men enter together into society and government for the protection of their rights—holds out a timeless ideal. Government is legitimate because free individuals created it by choice and live under its rules in accordance with a kind of contract. But only the founding generation of any society can claim to have done that. The generations that follow did not freely create their regime. They were born into it, literally kicking and screaming. They enter a world formed by laws, arrangements, and institutions that were established by others, but which they have no real choice but to accept. They are also incapable, for about the first two decades of their lives, of fully exercising the rights of citizens. And yet every decision made by their society will directly affect them and those who will follow them. So by the logic of the theory, how can we take into account the needs and rights of future citizens who are not there to consent? How can we keep from treating them unjustly?

Liberal theorists have not been blind to this difficulty of course; and more importantly, like many things that occupy political philosophers, these concerns are really far more of a problem in theory than in practice. The theorists come up with complicated notions of implicit consent and implied participation, while in actual societies liberalism is suspended in the family, and parents are trusted to look out for the interests of their children.

Nonetheless, it matters that the theory of liberal society and the anthropology of innovation have serious trouble with children and with future generations. Our theories do shape our ideals and our actions, and affect our sense of what is legitimate and what is desirable.

The most common answer to the liberal difficulty with the child is to treat children as the charge and almost as the property of parents, and so to apply the language of rights to them second hand. This often makes good sense, but it also has the effect of subsuming the interests of the child within those of the parents, so that in principle our picture of the world can still consist purely of rational adults and their needs and wants. That way, we can continue to imagine the future without considering the distinctive challenges (and the peculiar promise and hope) that result from the presence of children in society.

But the absence of children in this vision of the future results from more than a gap in a theory. Even more important is the very practical way in which children pose a hindrance to any vision of progress. Regardless of how much intellectual and material progress any society may make, every new child entering that society will still enter with essentially the same native intellectual and material equipment as any other child born in any other place at any other time in the history of the human race. Raising such children to the level of their society is, to put it mildly, a distraction from the forward path. And a failure to initiate the next generation of children into the ways of civilization would not only delay or derail innovation, it would put into question the very continuity of that civilization.

The constant intrusion of children into our world reminds us that even as we blaze a trail into the new and unknown we are always at risk of reverting very far back into humanity’s barbarous origins, because we are always confronted with new human beings who have just come from there. We are, in a limited sense, always starting from scratch, and this means that we need more than innovation to secure and to better our future.

The anthropology of innovation would like to avoid or avert this complicated reality. It does so mostly by ignoring it, but at the edges of the party of innovation, we see genuine efforts to ward off the challenge of the child. In the “transhumanist” desire for eternal life is a desire to think of the future as belonging to us, and not to future generations. It is a desire to start not from scratch, but from individual, rational, freely choosing adults, and to progress only from there.

Indeed, it may be that in its fullness, this innovation-driven vision of the future almost has to exclude children. William Godwin, the eighteenth-century futurist and prophet of innovations of the human intellect, offers a sense of why that should be. In his future, free of “disease, anguish, melancholy [and] resentment,” when people might live nearly forever, progress would almost depend on the absence of children. “The whole will be a people of men, and not of children,” Godwin writes of his utopian ideal, “generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years.”

This may be the only way in which the anthropology of innovation could be sufficient in itself as a vision of the future. But the fact that truth has, “in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years,” or in other words that children enter the world knowing nothing of it, is a defining feature of the life of every human society. Children do not start where their parents left off. They start where their parents started, and where every human being has started, and society must meet them there, and rear them forward. That we are all born this way has everything to do with how the future happens.

Hannah Arendt, borrowing a term from the demographers, labeled this inescapable fact of life human “natality,” the counterpart of human mortality. A vision of the future that takes note of our natality will go about imagining in a profoundly different way.

The Anthropology of Generations

To imagine the future in terms of generations means, most fundamentally, to be concerned for continuity. The means of human biological continuity do not offer guarantees of human cultural continuity, because (at least for the time being) the intellectual and cultural progress we might make leaves no real mark on the biology of our descendents. They enter the world as we did, and as all human beings have before us: small, wrinkled, wet, screaming, helpless, and ignorant of just about everything. At this very moment, dozens of people are entering the world in just that condition—about 15,000 worldwide make their entrance every hour—and the future of the human race depends upon them. Contending with this constant onslaught and initiating these newcomers into the ways of our world is the never-ending and momentous challenge that always confronts every society.

At stake are both the achievements of the past and—most especially—the possibilities of the future. If the task of initiation and continuation fails in just one generation, then the chain is broken, the accomplishments of our past are lost and forgotten, and the potential for meaningful progress is forsaken. The barbarism of savage human nature, more than the prospect of a final human victory over natural limitations, is in this sense always just around the corner.

Indeed, what stands out about the anthropology of generations is not so much a desire to protect children from the dangers of the world—a desire shared by nearly everyone—but rather the related determination to protect the world from the dangerous consequences of failing to instruct the up-and-coming generation.

It's interesting that the Hawthorne story that Leon Kass had the Bioethics Commission read was The Birthmark, but the problem that Mr. Levin raises is actually treated in another of his stories, Earth's Holocaust.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 20, 2004 12:31 PM