I was fortunate to grow up as the son of a man of great curiosity, an encyclopedic mind, and perhaps most of all, a very sincere engagement with the problem of living a moral life in a fallen world filled, without exception, with congenitally fallen people.
At our dinner table and on long car rides he would riff on questions spurred by his readings of, say, St. Paul, Teilhard de Chardin, or John Rawls, and ask us to respond to his interpretation of their ideas.
By inviting us to become participants in an intellectual process that by today’s assume-children-are-fragile-and-ignorant developmental standards we were unprepared to take part in, he was sending us an important message: it’s never too early to start thinking about the type of person you want to be in the course of this gift called life.
He was, I think, also trying to impress upon us that all journeys of discovery begin with wonder and the torrent of unanswered questions that inevitably follow in its wake, and that many, if not most of the answers to this endless fusillade of queries could be found in the past.
Put more succinctly, they constantly endeavored to locate their life trajectories in space and time.
Locating the self in space and time.
Could there be anything more basic to the human condition? We are descended from hunters and farmers. And if you’ve ever spent time with either, or simply listened to either type of person talking about the pursuit of their craft in any detail, you realize they are constantly checking and rechecking where they are in the flow of time (dawn, midday, dusk, fall, spring, summer, winter, etc.) and taking very careful notes on the always changing nature of the physical spaces that surround them. Clearly, a farmer or hunter incapable of being constantly alert to these things would cut a ridiculous and, no doubt, unsuccessful, figure.
And yet as we look around, we increasingly see people, especially those born after the mid-nineties, who have almost wholly outsourced these millenarian skills to the device they carry in their hands, often relying on it rather than their own senses to provide them with an understanding of the physical world that surrounds them.
Some might say, “But we’re no longer farmers and hunter-gatherers. So why shouldn’t we use the technological tools at our disposal to make sense of the world?”
And, of course they are right, at least in part.
Talk about engaging in unilateral disarmament before a potentially fearsome enemy!
This contemporary practice of effectively inviting powerful others to build Potemkin Villages for us in the visual-spatial realm is also found in the temporal realm as well.
For centuries, individuals have implicitly understood that they are a small link in an infinite chain of familial and/or tribal existence, and that while each person in their age cohort is unique, their ways of being and their identities are heavily conditioned by the genetic, behavioral, and spiritual inheritances bequeathed to them by their forebears. They also knew, thanks to the elaborate rituals all pre-contemporary developed societies had around death—designed precisely to introduce those further from the finish line to its powerful ubiquity—that decrepitude and death will greet us all, and that, therefore the key to living well lay not in trying to wish death away, but to try, though careful gleaning of the examples of those who came before us, to find something approximating meaning and fulfillment within our finite time on the planet.
But then came modernity, and within the last 60 years or so, its botox-bloated child, consumerism. The first ethos suggested that mankind, if it used the rational side of its mind to catalog the testimonies of the past and the present, might, over a very long stretch of time, perhaps unravel the many mysteries of the world.
However, its offspring consumerism decided to jettison seeking wisdom in the past part altogether.
Having people think too much about their present actions in the light of time-worn moral examples, while good for impulse control, was bad for sales. It was far more profitable to use the media to obliterate the past as a palpable factor in the lives of most people while using the same media to pound home the message that grabbing all the material things you could grab today and tomorrow is basically all that matters. And sad to say, many people have rapidly learned to comply with these implied edicts.
But, of course, no one asked the kids about any of this.
As Robert Coles has persuasively shown, small children emerge into consciousness, not as is often suggested, as behavioral blank slates, but rather as ardent seekers of both justice and moral guidance. They yearn to understand why they are among us, even more acutely, who will help them navigate through the often threatening and confusing messes of the world. They are—at least until the commercial media latches on to their attention and sends them repeated messages about the uncoolness of doing so—naturally fascinated by the stories told by the elders in their midst.
Why wouldn’t they be? The young have listened to elders around campfires for millennia, which is to say, for hundreds of thousands of years more than they have been asked to sit in classrooms and/or before screens to listen to a relative stranger emit generally humorless recitations of something they market as knowledge.
At first, of course, these campfire cum dinner table “dialogues” are pretty one-sided affairs. In time, however, the child begins to talk back, another way of saying that he begins to offer his own gloss on the ideas espoused by his elders.
This is the true beginning of the process of individual identity formation, a fundamental part of which, of course, is the establishment of the younger person’s internal codes of morals and ethics. The often feared and lamented adolescent rebellion is, at its core, just an especially intense version of the dialogic process.
But what if, as a result of not wanting to appear authoritarian, or more pathetically, of not having taken the time to establish an argument-worthy set of moral convictions in our own lives, we elders fail to hold up our end of this essential process?
This is what we do every time we allow children to eat alone in their rooms in front of their computers, or allow them to stare into their phones rather than into our faces at the dinner table. We are, in effect, announcing to them that we ourselves have not engaged in a vigorous dialogue with the world around us, or lived examined lives, and thus that we really don’t have much to offer them in the way of charting a path that will allow them to live in consonance with their God-given gifts, or to pursue their own version of the good life.
Worst of all, we are admitting to them that we don’t have the will to be attentive to the miracle that they are, and would just as soon have them get their lessons on life from faceless corporate ghouls producing internet trash whose only concern is to fatten their own bottom lines.
The acting of becoming a mindful and hopefully ethical being has, for millennia, centered on a very simple dialogical process: one in which the child learns to view the momentary and often disorienting barrage of sensorial inputs that the world transmits to his inexperienced mind in light of the acquired wisdom of those who preceded him in the journey of life.
Yes, some elders will forcefully and crassly seek to impose their vision of life upon the young. And many of the young will reflexively reject anything their elders seek to tell them, as is their right. That things often break down along these lines shouldn’t surprise us, as even the most time-worn social processes never function perfectly. How often this happens, we cannot be sure.
What we do know, however, is that if the adult in this equation never shows up, the process will never get out of the starting gate, and the justice-seeking child will be left, as is the case of so many today, to rely on amoral corporate and government organizations speaking to them through their telephone to piece together some sense of what it means to live a reflective and moral life.
Do we really think we can create a better world in the future when so many of us continue to feed our children to the machine in this way?
