Alone and With Others
Individual choice in Space, cooperative choice in Time.
We live in time as well as space. We travel through both. There is, though, an important difference. Traveling on a boat down a river is traveling in space and we can exit at many points. We don’t have to continue. We can stop. We can pull to the shore and walk in a different direction.
Traveling in time is different. We are tied to the boat. It is drifting with the current.. The waterfall is, or may be, ahead.
You might say that we can pause what we are doing. But that does not stop our steady passage into the future. We are carried along into, or with, a constantly changing world. We can’t stop that movement. Returning to the river analogy we are bound to the flow of the waters. We are carried along. If disaster is ahead, our only hope is to change the course of the river.
Thus, if we are to have some agency over the course of our lives, we faced with two opportunities. We can make individual choices. We can change our place in space. Move to a new country or a new job. That is why we rightly celebrate individual freedom. In this sense we are libertarians, guided essentially by moral judgment. We value free choice and we choose, to the lopextent that we have a choice, to live where that freedom is broader than elsewhere. In the flow of time, that is, we can still chose to occupy different spaces.
But we can’t leave time. Our other task, if we accept it, is much harder. We can, if we choose, try to alter the future. Bend, King said, the arc of history. Act with others to give our human community a better chance. That task is social, not individual. In this we are “socialists” not “libertarians.” We can ignore it. Though, others will not and the choices they make may not lead us in the direction of our genuine interests.
Why then ignore this second opportunity? It is harder and requires more energy and intelligence and knowledge. But for some of us this is not an acceptable excuse.
The task, though, is not ours alone. As well, or even more urgently, it is the responsibility we leave our children. And, if this is true, it is our responsibility to prepare the next generation to accept and succeed at this task.
Time is a map of change, of changes. They must learn that map. They must know where they are in the flow of many changes and where these changes are taking them. They, as well as we, need to understand where we have been at different times in the past and from that knowledge judge the direction we are headed. We all need to study history.
Not the history of famous battles or great men. Not event history, the still snapshots of the past. We need to feel and know the passage of time in our communities, for our nations and our world. Without intervention we may be rushing toward many disasters. New technologies have their own momentum. The natural world is evolving. Under the sea techtonic plates are shifting and in the heavens suns are dying. Perhaps out of our reach, at present, and with consequences beyond our imagined span of human life. But here and now, the next war is in the making, a cure for one of many cancers is one laboratory’s insight away, and climatic shifts are creating new weather patterns. And it is here and now we can act to “turn the river.”
“Teach the children how to see.” In the abundance of their space to make good individual choices in their “pursuit of happiness, and in the waves of time, to close ranks with others to make a better world.