Maybe it is the kids we need in charge, rather than the adults

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.

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.

The fragile candle of the future flickers in Shepparton

The fragile candle of our future flickers in Shepparton on Thursday night.

The passionate and articulate,
 Arundhati Roy.

A trio of speakers, marshalled on the night by Professor Kate Auty, will talk about opportunities arising from our changing climate, but deep within that conversation will be an urgency on which our understandable future hinges.

Thursday night’s “Slap Tomorrow – A Wake-Up Call” is about our communities understanding, accessing and utilizing opportunities that surface as we adapt to our changing climate.

Beyond that, Thursday night, in an almost unrecognized sense, is about this community re-imagining how it lives; it’s about our institutions; it’s about our governance; it’s about how we treat each other; it’s about regaining a sense of who we are, understanding why we are here and what is our purpose; it’s about an appreciation of our intergenerational responsibilities; and it’s about, importantly, securing the resources on which humanity is dependent –clean air, drinking water, food production, stable climate and a rich biodiversity for natural ecosystem function and the benefits of nature in providing human psychological health and the sustenance of countless other species critical to our lives.

It is not a debate about whether or not climate change is happening for the evidence is conclusive; humans have interfered with earth’s atmosphere to the extent that the Holocene, an epoch in the world’s history that has allowed humans to thrive, is collapsing.

Our voracious capitalist and market driven world has polluted not only most everything in the biosphere, but it has also invaded our minds leaving many of us intellectually crippled and so unable to understand and comprehend the threats to our future.

Helping us break out of that status quo-induced mental prison will be the co-founder of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Anna Rose; a Sydney based professor recognised through the world for her innovative ideas about the re-use of materials, Prof Veena Sahajwalla; and environmental communications consultant, Rob Gell.

Thursday night’s conversation is about recognizing and adapting to opportunities emerging from our changing climate, but deeply implicated within those discussions are questions about what happens next?

Writing in her 2009 book “Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy”, Arundhati Roy, asked what happens now that democracy and the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?”

She argues that what we need now for the survival of this planet, or at least conditions in which humans can thrive, is long-term vision.

Thursday night’s conversations are about that urgently need long-term vision; they will be about our intergenerational responsibilities; and they will be about escaping from what Roy describes escaping from our “greatest folly”, our near-sightedness.

Roy wrote: “Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival.
“We plunder the earth hoping that accumulated material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable things we have lost,” she said.

Thursday night begins a journey, though rather late, when we can ponder the questions Roy asks.