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| Daniel Innerarity's is worth reading. |
Kids love socializing, getting into groups and sometimes even
gangs, and making up the rules as they go along, as they play.
Maturity brings marked changes in that their innocence vanishes
and much of their sociability to become frequently dogmatic, insular, individualistic,
hubristic and seemingly unable to take the advice of another.
The outcome for you and me, Australia and the world
generally is toxic.
Now adults, our decision makers understand the concept of
winning and losing, they are richer, more powerful and influential with
measureable behaviour and yet, fundamentally, they still play games and make up
the rules as they go.
Spend a week critically observing the news and in watching the
behaviour of those at the top of the human food chain, it becomes obvious, even
though we have been told, repeatedly, that the “adults are now on charge”, that
we continually resort to rules that are politically convenient, ignore
externalities such as the environment and rule to benefit a minority. Decency
is dead.
Maturity is more than chronological status.
The accumulation of years does not magically open the door
to wisdom for it is a status only arrived at, or achieved through earnest and
endless endeavour to grasp and understand the human experience and the culture from
which that experience arises.
Kids find the lure of the present irresistible and for many,
age brings few changes and it was Daniel Innerarity writing in “The Future and
its Enemies” who said people often repress their awareness of the future.
“Thinking about it (the future) distorts the comfort of the
now, which tends to be more powerful than the future because it is present and
because it is certain”, he wrote.
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| Prof Kate Auty. |
Considering how the past and the present will congeal to
become the future demands more than simple adulthood, rather it insists on a
wisdom that understands that life is not linear – what was is not necessarily
what will be.
Today we make the error of colonizing the future; a
colonization that Innerarity says consists of us living at its expense in an
imperialism of the present that absorbs the future and feeds off it
parasitically.
Many are entranced by what was and long for those comforting
times, but we can’t go back, rather we have to negotiate with tomorrow and in
being somewhat like a kid, make up the rules as we go and avoid acting like an
adult where we persist with ideas and beliefs that are dogmatic and remote from
wisdom.
Warnings from Victoria’s Sustainability Commissioner, Prof
Kate Auty, of endemic social wrongs fail to stir the adults and so maybe we
need the kids to make up a few rules as they go – our future depends upon it.
