The Past Meets the Future

[coberst]

The Past Meets the Future

 

Recently David Brooks wrote for the New York Times an article labeled “The Past Meets the Future”.

 

This was an imaginary conversation between Mr. Past and Mr. Future.

 

Mr. Past focused upon our failure to understand the past and in so doing we make egregious errors such as the Iraq War. He admonishes us not to take insane attempts to solve historical problems when such matters must heal themselves slowly in the course of time. He admonishes us to seek the happy mean, as Aristotle would say. He suggests that we just try to get by today and maintain some decent order that one thing will lead to another and we will all get by.

 

Mr. Future reminds of the Exodus story and how this story indicates what a people can accomplish if they never give up. Generational journeys are possible and they can account for revolutionary changes. The ‘Exodus frame of mind’ gives us the power to ‘move mountains’. Examples are M.L. King, Gandhi, and Moses in the Promised Land.

 

“Tocqueville gets at this when he writes that freedom "is ordinarily born in the midst of storms, it is established painfully among civil discords, and only when it is old can one know the benefits." The adolescence of freedom is painful, but what is the alternative?”

 

I think that we are in a period that might be called a “fork in the road”. If we do not find a better path into the future there very well may not be a future for humanity.

 

I think we have the capacity, i.e. brain power, but we lack the character and will to do the things that will lead to a revolutionary adjustment. This is, I think, a time when young people either get off their ‘intellectual couch’ ditch their intellectual ‘Twinkies and chips’ and get an intellectual life or their children my not have an opportunity.

 

I say that an ‘intellectual life’ is necessary but not sufficient for their future. I say that the day when the ‘happy mean’ is sufficient is dead and gone.

 

Hey, wake up, do you agree?

[HydrogenBond]

Mr future keeps in mind the long term goal, which would be all nations progressing in a way where there is little internal or external conflict, beyond human debate about the direction to the future.

 

Mr Past realizes that much of leadership is self serving instead of collective serving, creating states of division that slows the progress to steady state. Human nature is hard to change, this is reality.

 

What I think should happen is that the most socially progressive cultures should take over the fourth and third world cultures. Progress them until they are able get a glimpse of the long term goal, and then release them to their own self determination. It is like making these child cultures go to school so they can learn. When they graduate, they become part of the world adult community, with their own self determination.