Things better left unsaid

There is a great deal not to talk about.  Many of the things we say every day are probably not worth saying at all, because they are repetitive, pointless, mundane, ill-informed or needlessly offensive.  (Sure is some weather we’re having.  Oh man, I hate being audited.  My goodness, that’s a big elephant.  If the world was really round, wouldn’t all the trains be running downhill?  Dear God, your wardrobe is hurting my eyes.)  Yet we keep on talking, relentlessly, perhaps because we find the silence more terrifying than the sound of banality and ignorance.

So, yes, some forms of speech are liable to create embarrassment and bruised feelings.  Who’s responsible for that smell?  Say, you look like you might have some interesting ancestry.  What’s that charming and curious idea you’re teaching your children?  So whose religion is really the silliest?  (That one at least is more amenable—prizes all around.)  There are clearly some things we dare not speak of because they are too unforgivable or fraught with social danger.  So we leave them alone in polite company.  If you want to enjoy your party tonight, you had best steer well clear of religion or politics.  Or how other people raise their children.

But perhaps there are some things we assign too quickly to this category, things that really deserve thought and attention.  Are you sure this library book is more dangerous to your children than what you are already teaching them?  What changes are you making in your home to address the imminent consequences of climate change?  Is our democracy demanding enough of us as citizens?  Are we paying enough in taxes to support the demands we make of our governments?  Should we be thinking about bringing back the draft, or at least some mandatory form of public service?  Maybe our nation has been more at fault in recent international entanglements than we have admitted?  Some of these matters may really require our discussion, perhaps urgently.  Maybe airing them would bring needed awareness to problems that would cause us measurable harm later if we were to ignore them now, perhaps make our world better if we did not.  Perhaps some things we thought were insoluble might prove more manageable than we had supposed.  We might find answers by asking others to brainstorm ideas.  Perhaps some of the things we thought were too uncomfortable to talk about are the very things we would feel better having talked through—things that others might also like to talk about if we could find a way to begin.  So how’s your mental health been?  I must admit, I’ve been having a rough go lately.  We might not know unless we actually got in the habit of airing them a little more often.

So what are the uncomfortable things we should be talking about?  Let’s try a few.  What do we owe to the future—to our future selves decades from now, to our children when they are grown and we are gone, to generations yet unborn, to the children of others and to descendants not our own?  Are we using up resources now that will be needed by others down the road?  Is it possible that our present public efforts at managing climate change won’t be enough, that perhaps we will have to intrude a little more into other people’s private homes and lifestyles?  Perhaps we will have to place limits on their behaviors so that we will all have a better chance of surviving?  And, God forbid, on our own.  Perhaps we will have to constrain some of the freedoms of individuals if they become too costly to the rest of us.  (Say, that’s a nice off-road monstrosity you never take off road!  Bet it gets really shitty gas mileage.)

How should we be raising our children so that they can live more successfully in a diverse, urbanized, globalized world?  This world is still often unpredictable, as it has always been, though perhaps less so than our ancestors’ world was to them.  Is it possible that our children are being harmed by our efforts to protect them from harmful things?  Should we be talking to them about the things we fear instead of keeping them in ignorance?  Is exposing them to strange and foreign ways of thinking and living really the worst thing that could happen to them?  Should we be focused more on building their resilience than preserving their innocence?

What are the costs of our modern ways of living?  We have managed to increase food supply and available nutrition despite a swelling global population.  We are living much longer and healthier lives on average, though there are many more of us than ever before in the history of our species.  We are reaching old age and retirement in numbers that would have baffled our ancestors.  All good problems to have.  But not without cost.  How much food is being wasted in our present world (transportation loss, overloaded buffet tables, bulging waistlines) and at what cost to the wellbeing of our environment?  How do we pay for the inevitable medical liabilities that come with longer lifespans in which to overeat?  Oh, not to worry, I’ve always been pretty healthy.  Or, I’ll just save a bit more.  But your savings, to be useful, will have to be worth something to others in the future.  Your savings are only worth something if other people agree that they are and if they are willing to do things for you in exchange for a portion of them.  Others will have to devote their time and attention to meeting the needs of your old age.  They will have to be paid.  What if your savings are worth less than you imagined or you outlive them?  And there will be many others competing for their attention just when you need it most.  Can our future society manage to care for so many elderly folk?  Improved technology surely!  But older people are less likely to innovate and less inclined to accept such changes.  They will expect others to do the innovation for them, or at least to take care of them in the manner they have come to expect.  But why should future young people—those of working age when you retire, though fewer in relative numbers to the population at large—devote their own scarce resources to taking care of the elderly when they’ve got their own children to worry about?

And what about those children?  Childhood has become extremely safe in the modern world.  Children are surviving in unprecedented numbers to adulthood.  Another enviable problem!  Surely we can solve this?  Don’t look to nature for answers.  The natural world is a hard and cruel place, merciless with the weak and vulnerable.  Grazing animals tend to lose the overwhelming majority of their newborns to predators, though the surviving few tend to be much fitter breeding individuals.  But we want our children to survive and flourish no matter their fitness.  We treat their rare diseases and genetic shortcomings at tremendous cost.  We prescribe them glasses, not worrying at all what the accumulated generations of children with poor eyesight will mean to further generations.  We watch them get chubbier, less active, less independent.  We dare not ask whether our own children are fit to survive or breed.  Such would be a graceless question at a party.  It’s been called eugenics before, and eugenics is the awkward cousin of racism.  We don’t talk about such things.  We don’t ask whether modern life has become too soft and easy for the well-being of our children and of future generations.

We haven’t even mentioned the disabled or those with tricky mental health challenges (which may include ourselves).  We would be monsters even to raise such concerns, because sincere questions imply more than one possible answer, which means we might have to face uncomfortable facts or consider unprecedented ways of doing things.  We are aware of rising levels of anxiety in our population, sometimes debilitating to individuals—at least we’re more mindful of such things.  Is autism really becoming more prevalent?  What do we do if it is?  Our health care is being overstretched by an expanding population of elders.  How do we carve out more resources for mental health?  How do we address questions about individual purpose in a world of declining religious observance?  A robust and diverse secularism is actually the best defender of religious freedom.  But we’re finding that real freedom can be terrifying, anxiety-provoking.  What about personal purpose and ambition in an increasingly automated world?  If more jobs are automated, then what are those with newly redundant skills supposed to do?  Who will pay for them?  Who will do the work for the rising number of elderly and disabled?

Feeling uncomfortable yet?  These are things we don’t like to talk about.  But some problems remain even when we try our best to ignore them.  We are perhaps the most fortunate generation of human beings who has ever lived, with longer lifespans and more available resources than in any world our ancestors could have imagined.  But we can’t pretend that our great good fortune in being alive right now in the world as it is today comes without cost.  We will pay the costs whether we want to or not.  Better to know what the costs are likely to be.  And so we will have to know what our problems will be, now and in the future.  Without the harsh sorting regime of nature, we will have to learn new ways of coping, new forms of resilience.

I’m not asking these questions because I think I have the answers.  I’m asking because I don’t.  Useful discussions always begin from a place of uncertainty.