The Future Kicks Ass

Last Sunday, nine members of my extended family sat awaiting brunch at a local restaurant, drawing upon all our reserves of conversational ingenuity and dollar-bill origami to keep the younger members of the party from tearing the place apart. Suddenly my nine-year-old son popped the question: “Who do you think would win, the future or the past?”

We took this in the spirit Simon intended: as another in that eternal series of power comparisons with which all parents of boys over the age of three have grappled at some point. “Who’s stronger, Superman or Mr. Incredible?” “If the Ninja Turtles and Spider-man worked together, do you think they could defeat the X-Men?” “Can the Phillies pull another one out of the hat?” (I guess not.)

At first glance, it’s a no-brainer: the future is this wide-open universe where anything can happen, right? And if we’re talking sheer weaponry (which we were), the new has always pretty much wiped the floor with the old. Flint arrowheads don’t stand a chance against assault rifles, any more than a trebuchet could bring down the Enola Gay. I don’t know what crazy killing machines are in military pipelines around the world, but I’d be willing to bet they’d make mincemeat out of any fighting force the human race has been able to muster up, to date.

But even though our family brunch conversation hovered at this level for the most part -- musket balls v. Kevlar vests, F-16s v. photon torpedoes, and so on -- part of me had begun to contemplate the deeper ramifications of Simon’s question, and to arrive at a somewhat different conclusion. Technology aside, you see, the past holds all the cards in this game -- it has the power to hobble the future, to gag & blindfold it, to send it to the bottom of the East River in a pair of concrete shoes.

The past -- the source of what’s known as “the facts on the ground” -- shapes future possibilities in so many arenas, from Middle East politics to job interviews to public school assignment plans. Last month the president of the Maldives held an underwater cabinet meeting to highlight the threat climate change poses to his country, most of which lies less than 5 feet above sea level. You could argue that the Maldives’ future started shriveling the day the first Model T rolled off the assembly line.

There’s a scene in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain where a group of Confederate deserters has been caught by the Home Guard and chained together in handcuffs; they’re being marched back to face court martial and likely execution. I can’t remember how exactly, but they end up getting shot -- all except one. And this lone survivor finds himself miraculously still breathing... but chained to a pile of dead men.

This scene made an impression on me in the book. But it wasn’t until I saw Jude Law up on the big screen, desperately trying to get free, or at least get moving, his face straining with the effort of dragging these dead bodies with him along the road, that the full impact of the metaphor hit me. We are still chained to those dead bodies. Seven hundred thousand Civil War casualties, countless millions who died in slavery -- all of us are dragging those bloody corpses with us every day, everywhere we go.

Can’t we just cut through the chains, walk away from the bodies, and start building our future from this moment on? I’ve sometimes wondered what might be possible if the Israelis and Palestinians (for example) could find a way to do this. But it’s such a fine line between consciously letting go of a brutal past in order to start fresh, and walking away from it whistling casually with our hands in our pockets, pretending it never happened at all -- or at least, that we had nothing to do with it. And if we fail to understand the difference, if we don’t find a way to give those metaphorical dead bodies a proper burial in a well-marked tomb -- well, that’s when you find a Harvard professor and a Cambridge police officer having it out in the middle of the street on a hot summer night.

Besides, I’m enough of a historian to know that without the past, the future is just as feeble & hamstrung as it is with a flawed one. (Or worse -- think of the nightmare that unfurled when Pol Pot tried to start Cambodia’s history over at Year Zero.) The connection to the world that came before us nourishes & sustains us -- as a species, as societies, and as individuals. Our ancestors’ stories provide us with heroes, teachings, warnings -- and hopefully the wisdom to move forward. By standing on the shoulders of the past, we reach places we could never even glimpse if we had to start from scratch.

And frankly, I worry about starting from scratch -- too many nights reading post-apocalypse novels, I guess. I mean, if the future we’re looking at is anything like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or even James Kunstler’s kinder, gentler World Made By Hand, then I want out. I just don’t have it in me to navigate a world where might makes right, where the Good Guys distinguish themselves by not eating their children, where all your doomsday preparations mean nothing if somebody with a gun happens along and demands your beet crop or your Starbucks stash. If that’s where we’re headed -- and it seems like a real possibility sometimes -- then the past wins, hands down.

But I’m not sure I have it in me to look my kid in the eye and tell him that, either.

So what do we do, then? We can’t change the past, of course. But every day we are creating the next layer of it, consciously or not -- assembling the facts on the ground that will shape our response to the scary shit the future is getting ready to hurl at us.

Clearly individual lifestyle choices are part of this (though I have to admit I’m losing my grip on the delusion that somehow changing my light bulbs and biking to work will prevent the polar ice caps from melting). And we need to develop resilient social structures in our local communities -- through potlucks & food banks, wikis & happy hours, parades & clothing exchanges -- all the serious and frivolous activity that builds the kind of relationships that make us a little less likely to shoot each other over the last of the coffee.

But the simple, feel-good stuff is not enough. Not anymore. If we really want to avoid the desperate, violent, chaotic disruptions that loom on the horizon, we are going to have to engineer some planned, cooperative, orderly disruptions of our own.

I don't know what that will look like; the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen seems like a crucial step. It's going to take hard work and sacrifice to address the enormous global inequities we have created on our way to this moment. It's going to take imagination and resourcefulness to envision & enact the new economic and social systems our planet can sustain. We're going to need to call on every ounce of wisdom the past has to offer, and every wisp of possibility we can squeeze out of the future.

But don't we owe it to Simon (and the rest of the children on the planet) to live out a present that lays down a past that aims at a future that kicks ass?