Catch-up week: Optimistic futures
“…The very notion of a “historic” future is one which most Americans are apt to find uncomfortable. We are naturally sympathetic to ideas which stress the plasticity and promise, the openness of the future, and impatient with views which emphasize the “fated” aspect of human affairs. We strive to see in the challenges which beset us not obstacles but opportunities. In a word, we are an optimistic people.”
Oddly enough, this passage coincides neatly with my recent reading of “the Blank Slate” essay by Steven Pinker. One thing that struck me while reading it, was the almost out-of-hand dismissal by the public, of genetics as having any role whatsoever in a person’s individuality and life simply because to them, genetics seemed too fated. The preferred view, that similarly stresses the “plasticity and promise” of the future, would of course, be the ever-popular “Blank Slate” theory which regards children as empty minds waiting to be filled. (Note to world: referring to the theory by its latin name doesn’t give it any more merit than it deserves. Also: more in depth on Pinker later.)
This optimistic attitude about the future also seems oddly topical with Obama on the eve of his appointment to office. Already there is beginning to be a curious rewriting of history, as a narrative placing Bush and his failures in office as paving the road for hope and change in 2009, and similarly painting Obama as the natural cumulation of the decades of the civil rights movement. (While I can sympathize with all the optimism- for goodness sake’s, the guy’s just getting his new office tomorrow. It will be some time before we see how it all turns out.)
“When this [optimism] is called to our attention, we tend to conceive of our traditional optimism as a personal philosophy- as a character trait which sets our aspirations above the horizons of private circumstance. Thus we overlook something which is much more fundamental. […] Optimism is grounded in the faith that the historic environment, as it comes into being, will prove to be benign and congenial- or at least neutral to our private efforts. This is so unpresuming an assumption that it comes as something of a shock to recognize that over most of human history it has been untenable.”
“…over by far, the greater part of man’s existence the importance of the future assumed a much smaller proportion than it does in our day. Indeed, until a few centuries ago in the West, and until relatively recent times in the East, it was the past and not the future which was the dominant orientation to historic times. Modern man, who typically sets his life goals in what is to come [emphasis mine], displays an attitudes quite the converse of earlier days. Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the vast Asiatic civilizations, even the Renaissance, did not look ahead for the ideals and inspirations of their existence, but sought them in their origins, in their ancient glories, their fabled heroes, their pristine virtues real or fancied. Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
