Back to the Future

I suppose as we age time becomes a very different thing from what it was in our younger days. Then we could hardly wait for the hours and days to pass until we reached some imagined goal on our journey. It did little good for older and wiser folks to tell us to slow down and enjoy the passage; we wanted change and we wanted it now. Eventually, however, the time arrives when we begin to cast a backward glance and take stock not only of where we are and where we're going, but of where we've been. This much is common to nearly all of humanity. While the human scale is somewhat limited, a span of seventy years, give or take a decade or so, it is sufficient to note significant changes in the world around us. And although some older folks will continue to embrace change and look to the future, many will turn more and more to memories of what often seem to be better times in years gone by.

Thoughts like this have come to me more frequently lately, perhaps the product of my own aging, perhaps encouraged by the time of the world. We seem to be going through some sort of collective longing for better times. And many appear to think we've never been more divided in our imaginings of what those times might consist of. A greater historical perspective would be helpful, but historical data, the very concept of factual knowledge, has also become a vexed topic. Many of those I know and consort with, admittedly a fairly select minority of very educated people, mostly professors and academics in a variety of fields, are at a loss to understand how this has come about. When did we as a culture and society lose our faith in science and history and what is sometimes called expertise? I'm not so sure this really is a new thing, but a ubiquitous Internet has made us more aware of it. There has been a good deal of hand wringing about the spread of "fake news" and the erosion of confidence in the "mainstream media." But that explanation, while it may point to something that contributes to the phenomenon, is not the entire story.

The more troubling way of asking this question is, perhaps, why have we slipped backwards after an apparent period of progress? But longing for a return to some imagined golden age is as old as humankind. Nearly every period of human history has its myths and legends of a golden age, a better time, a lost paradise or Eden. The fact that these stories have little basis in fact does not make them any less appealing or poignant. And while there may be countervailing ideas and notions of progress, some hoped for promised land in the heavens with the gods, or in the future here on earth, or somewhere in outer space among the stars, often those dreams too are associated with longing for better days more reflective of the past than the future.

The sad truth is the clock never runs backward, except in science fiction. The way is always forward, and the future is always an unknown country inhabited by strangers. When we get there it's never quite what we expected. And all of our best efforts to predict the future or program it seem to come up short. And yet, as I've written before, change gonna come. And in that spirit I have come to a few conclusions: First, the world as we have known it will soon cease to exist. That sounds dramatic until we recognize that this has always been the case. Nothing lasts; everything passes. Second, those who inherit the future will accept it as their present and will one day look back on it as their fondly remembered past. As one of my oldest friends once so wisely observed, everyone draws the line at himself. And, finally, while it should be axiomatic that what we do in the present will inevitably alter the future, we cannot really know how these alterations will play out. There are too many variables, too many unknowns. Perhaps global warming will prevent another ice age; perhaps it will also flood much of the populated parts of the Earth and bring massive dislocation. In any case it will simply be what it is, the new normal.

One way to react to all of this would be to say que sera, sera, and let it go at that. But humans are natural planners, and we cannot help making plans and taking actions we think will bring about desired future outcomes. Some of us are better at this than others, but nearly everyone plays the game to some extent, calculating best future outcomes for ourselves and our families and friends. If harm must come to others so that we may prosper, well then so be it. Sometimes we also make calculated sacrifices in the present in order to accomplish some future good, but this is a slightly rarer quality, not a universal one, or so I have observed. And while most of us can imagine ourselves existing in the future (indeed some of us cannot imagine a future without our existence), precisely how far our imaginations stretch separates the true planners from those who can deal only with the most obvious day to day contingencies. Finally, of course, there are those who are future challenged and fail to make even the most basic preparations. They are either the saddest or the wisest among us, I'm not sure which.

Actually, I think the saddest among us are those who believe they can or should impose their own visions of the future on the rest of us. It seems to me that most of the world's ills result from just that motive, folks thinking everyone else should be just like them. I have never really understood this. Protect us from those who have found the truth! Maybe someday someone will explain it to me. But that is probably a topic for another blog post.