Carrying The Future

Did you ever get a "talking to" from your father? One of my friends recently noted in his Facebook status that he had received "a talking to" from his father for supporting the Women2Drive movement in Saudi Arabia. He clearly has no intention of backing down from his position that Saudi women should have many rights, including the right to drive a car enjoyed by Muslim women in every other country of the world, including 46 other Muslim countries.

Many of the comments to this Facebook status were positive, but a number backed up his father in trying to persuade my friend to back down. I got to thinking about this in the context of the development of the human species, who we are and where we're going.

Recently we were watching "On Becoming Human," a NOVA series on our PBS station. They were talking about "Turkana Boy", who was an 8 year old Homo Erectus boy when he died next to a muddy spring about 2 million years ago. None of us are descended from him. His body was quickly entombed in mud, allowing his remains to be preserved until discovered in 1984 near Lake Turkana in Kenya. His bones taught scientists important facts about our origins in "The Great Rift Valley" of East Africa.

Part of the story was about these early ancestors developing fire followed by society and culture by crowding around the campfire to cook their food. It struck me that we are all descended from survivors (as are all living beings great and small) from long before that time. Part of that survival was learning what makes us survive from our elders. Hence, we can consider the argument for the validity of a father's advice to his son two million years later.

BUT, we have dramatically changed our perceptions of ourselves, our societies, and humanity, particularly from the last half of the 20th Century until now. Our communications means allow information that took millennia to transmit across the world to now cut across societies in seconds. The question becomes, "What can and should we do with this overwhelming volume of information, much of which may conflict with and contradict our societies as we have known them?"

Over millions of years, it was the duty of our elders to pass their information through to the next generation, thereby giving them the necessary tools for survival. We are the living evidence of their success. Their advice has always been conservative, tried and true. Giving up a tool of any kind means giving up its power over you, and people in power rarely give it up easily, so changes of the rules have always been hard to achieve. Whether it is a prohibition of women driving or a prohibition of using your cell phone at the age of 13, the parent's role was always pointing toward a conservative strategy for survival.

But now we get entirely unfiltered information in seconds rather than centuries or millennia. It comes directly from our television or our computer, instead of our father or mother. This fundamental shift in how we learn survival skills will inevitably continue to create huge disruptions in our societies for centuries to come. But the meaning comes in what we do with the information.

It is important to respect our parents for doing what they and all of our ancestors have done for millions of years. Our parents taught us to be survivors. It is important to learn from others and see where we can do better making those improvements, regardless of what the traditions say.

The coming change will be more disharmonious than any shift in human behavior since the dawn of humanity, but it is essential if our children will develop the wisdom to live in peace. They can expect civil upheaval from shortages of water, food, electricity and petroleum, not to mention the disruptions caused by racial bigotry, religious intolerance and many others.

To our young people I say, "Be a little understanding of your parents, and their role in teaching you the skills to survive and thrive." To our parents I say, "Be a little more understanding of the world as it is and will be, rather than as it was. Your children and their children will need the education and experience to live in a world that is much different from your world, and they will carry the future with them."