Imagining the Future

The Catholic Thing

By Stephen P. White
But first a note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, September 5th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Papal Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Father Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss the ongoing Asian journey of Pope Francis, as well as other developments in Rome and the American Church. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.
Now for today's column...
Twenty years ago, The New Atlantis published a remarkable essay by Yuval Levin titled, "Imagining the Future." (The essay was subsequently lengthened and published as a book.) It's one of those rare essays that does more than add one or two new volumes to the library of one's mind; it is the sort of essay that is liable to rearrange the mental furniture altogether.
On the surface, the essay is about how we ought to think about technology, particularly biotechnology, and how it shapes our future as individuals and as a people. But the framework of the essay is also very helpful for thinking through all kinds of important questions, including, as will become clear, questions facing the Church in these turbulent days.
Levin begins by describing two distinctive ways of thinking about the future. The first of these is premised upon what he calls an "anthropology of innovation," and it is the way of imagining the future that comes most readily to the American mind. Progress - in science, in politics, in economics - is attained through innovation, that is, through constant efforts to discover new and better ways of doing things.
In theory, this process of innovation has a way of self-regulating through the principle of selective choice: "Those individuals most directly affected by some new innovation will be best able to judge its value, and if they find it is harmful or not worthwhile, they will reject it." This sort of progress can be disruptive, even chaotic, but it is hard to argue that, at least by material standards, it has proven to be a remarkable success.
This anthropology of innovation is flawed, however, in its conception of the future. Namely, it has difficulty making sense of children. Levin explains:
Those who imagine the future in terms of innovation tend to think of the future as something that will happen to us, and so as something to be judged and understood in terms of the interests of the free, rational, individual adult now living. . . . But the future is populated by other people - people not yet born, who must enter the world and be initiated into the ways of our society, so that they might someday become rational consenting adults themselves. Strangely, what is missing from the view of the future grounded in innovation is the element of time, or at least its human consequent: the passing of generations.
Which brings us to Levin's second way of thinking about the future, one premised on what he calls an "anthropology of generations." This anthropology doesn't begin by imagining how the future might be made more to our liking. Rather, it begins with a concern for continuity, precisely because it understands that human beings don't enter the world as "rational consenting adults," but as children.
And children, Levin reminds us, "do not start where their parents left off. They start where their parents started, and where every human being has started, and society must meet them there, and rear them forward."
We delude ourselves if we assume that the human progress of the past is secured, once and for all, by the mere fact of its once having been accomplished. Even the most authentic and humane progress - progress in medicine or in our understanding of the natural world, for example - is fragile. It must be taught, cultivated, and maintained.
For this reason, the work of educating and rearing the next generation is one of the most important things we (or any oth...