Subtlety, Intimacy, Motivation IX

All of my good feelings aren't replenishing fish populations, but they are some sort of beginning. There's a lot of structuring to be done--this is the intellectual and human work that I find fascinating. While in some ways, it can appear as if all that needs to happen is for people to let down their barriers, it doesn't work that way and it never will. Pai-chang said very simply and clearly, "A day without work is a day without food"--realization doesn't come for free even if peace is essentially free.

Kids need to be brought up within some structure if they're to be brought up. If I expect my eggs to be there at the grocery, something has to get them there. And even if there might have been some relatively nice time in history when societies weren't so hierarchical and people didn't feel quite as distanced from one another while being crushed by the overall weight of humanity, well, we can't quite get back there without some MASSIVE drop in population. While God or evolution may help us sort that out with a global spread of avian flu or something, I'm not sure that very many people actually want it to be them dying in the epidemic. "Everybody wanna go up to heaven, none of them want to die."

As much as there needs to be a global structuring of certain institutional functions, emergent change cannot be predicted and absolutely controlled. This is also part of what I find fascinating. When dealing with adaptation and emergence, heuristics and qualities can become much more important than explicit/concrete rules and expectations. So while we may know that we'd like our kids to help take care of us in our old age, we may not know what that will entail exactly. But we can be sure that some appreciation of older generations will be part of what it takes, some appreciation for life, etc. We can know the qualities of life we want to include without knowing exactly what quantities or resources will be needed to fulfill our desires concerning genetic advancements, technological pleasantries, energy usage, etc. And we can be sure that some things concerning human nature and how we learn will not change all that drastically within the next fifty years. We can also know that, while some qualities in human interactions are good universally, we can still have differences in cultural emphases or preferences just as we can allow for individual differences and preferences within various sub-societies (from nation-groups like the EU on down to couples).

Again, this is a big part of where developmental psychology becomes important. We can recognize and support various milestones within individual development. Right now, the next most significant step and ability in development is mindfulness (by whatever names you prefer) following the idealism involved in adolescence. Essentially, when kids reach the age of young adults, they hit a growth spurt in their prefrontal cortices. This allows but does not demand an increase in abilities like planning, mindfulness, impulse inhibition, etc. Essentially, this growth allows the tempering of teenage idealism. From the inside, from the teenagers' or young adults' perspectives, we could call this an application of idealism or what ends up being the beginnings of each generation's actualization or realization of their particular mix of idealisms.

The fact that the Babyboomer generation didn't have this neurological information at their disposal is not an indictment of that generation for what it has failed to accomplish (and the failures are significant). They did a great deal to break open American and Western European society. In my generation of post-USSR Eastern European states and other aspiring potential EU members, there is a similar breakthrough from the established communist/capitalist enforcement of old-school culture. The same is just around the corner in the Middle East. Hopefully, this current generation of young adults in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and developing South Asian countries is learning from the failures and closeminded entitlements of our Babyboomers. God knows we need help with all of it because we are sometimes too close to those people, that generation, and their failures to have perspective on our situation. We need help from outside cultures to the same extent that they can learn from this culture. Young adulthood is the perfect time to start trying to figure out solid but flexible ways of dealing with emergent processes (like raising kids and figuring out ecological sustainability, how to save the Amazon rain forest and whatnot). If we know nothing else, we can be sure that our failures in this generation will be as significant as those of the previous generations. Subsequent generations will have to face those failures, and we might as well do what we can to prepare them for facing those failures rather than glorifying a past they will never be able to experience. Whatever it was like to live in a country and time where people were not so distanced from one another, I'll never know. That openness-ignorance is the space it takes to be willing to reach out to others. And we've learned a lot about oppressive exploitation of others even if we haven't put all of that knowledge into play yet. Going through the current economic changes is probably helping this generation of young Americans understand exploitation firsthand. (Of course, as always, class has a huge impact and always will.)

We can be sure that radical types of power analyses and Hugo Chavez' sort of sensationalist/oppositional rhetoric is no more helpful than unilateral military endeavors from a British Raj, an American empire, a Russian military, or the Chinese. It's no more helpful than corporate embezzlement of public spaces such as schools, oceans, airwaves, rivers, or land. Right now, we are acting more stupidly as groups than we actually are as individuals or as a whole. That's okay, but not for much longer. Along with the recognition that early adulthood brings a little more reality into idealism, comes the further recognition that wise understanding and application of group dynamics can accompany insightful power analyses. This is true within every culture as gender relations and relationships between generations and classes. If the American economic elite are irresponsible, that is no more helpful than the Saudi economic elite being irresponsible. But because we are dealing in emergent, rather than design, processes even the elite do not have ready-made answers. It's more of a question of how much they'll stick to exploitation of the status quo. Technology and money by themselves never solve social problems. What does it take then? Well, the Boomers took a solid step forward in addressing that question.