Dealing with millennial angst may require more than moral sound bites.
The Heart of
Millennial Dread
By N. Ann Davis
Many people view the new millennium through a glass darkly. It is not just unknown, but also menacing, dark with portents of disorder and destruction.
But if we focus on the Y2K problem--as the media might have us do--we are not likely to grasp the edge of our edginess or capture the apocalyptic tenor of our anxiety. Stories about snafus in the software have become comfortable cultural touchstones, and technical and managerial failures are--alas--routine facts of life, not phantoms of the future. It is less the fear that things will go wrong and more the spectre of humans doing wrong that haunts us.
The received view is that technologies are neither good nor bad in themselves, but morally neutral, and that it is thus how humans choose to use technologies that should be the focus of concern. But the received view does little to assuage millennial anxiety. Barring a vast change in human circumstances or human nature, it is reasonable to expect future people to have the same sort of motives people currently do: good, bad, and mixed. We should thus anticipate that technologies of the future will be used to serve ends that are prurient and cruel, as well as ones that are noble.
This is neither a novel observation nor an especially cynical one. The threat of increased terrorism has been widely discussed in popular and academic contexts. We have been well supplied with frightening footage; we have experienced both terrifying special effects on the screen, and the hypnotic world of virtual reality. We can thus give vivid content to dark conjectures about what could happen if powerful technologies fell into the wrong hands.
Though at times hyperbolic, the warnings surely are not idle. There is no shortage of disaffected souls among us, or of individuals with the skills, knowledge and opportunity to wreak havoc if they so choose. And it is reasonable to suppose that at least some of those who attribute special religious, political, or mystical significance to the end of the millennium will view it as a call to arms.
One of the roots of our dread of the future thus stands at least partially exposed: it is an expression of our feelings of increased vulnerability. But if we continue to deal with these fears by focusing on the impending rise of terrorism and concerning ourselves primarily with the deeds of others, we are not likely either to appreciate the depth of these fears or address them constructively.
We routinely condemn "terrorists" for committing "acts of senseless violence."But this characterization is misleading and dismissive: it encourages us to view violent acts as phenomena we may hope to avoid, but not to understand. And it impedes our recognition that violence is something we tolerate, and even revere: the culture is saturated with violence and the language of violence. Our history and folklore have long lauded violence as the currency of courage, as a noble form of self-expression. We should thus recognize that "senseless violence" is something we provoke, both tacitly and overtly.
We bombard ourselves with an incessant blast of input, thereby undermining our ability to distinguish between the signal and the noise.
And we have become less interested in conversation, less engaged with the written word, and generally less responsive to non-invasive demonstrations of discontent. It is thus not surprising that there are individuals among us who think we will not hear their message unless it hits us between the eyes.
But if we do not acknowledge others' dissatisfactions unless they are violently thrust upon us, then it is far from clear that those who commit "acts of senseless violence" are behaving in a way that is senseless. Nor can we plausibly maintain that we are innocent victims of their wrath.
Popular response to the recent spate of violence in schools can serve as an illustration. We have been quick to assume that the individuals who committed such heinous acts are nothing like us, eager to believe that they must somehow have been identifiable as morally beyond the pale before the fact. But beneath our demonstrations of outrage at the flouting of unquestioned axioms of human moral interaction, there lurks a great deal of confusion and denial. The idea that those violent individuals are not Other in this sense--with its plain implication that we ourselves, or our children, might be capable of such acts--is one we find unthinkable.
But it is has become clear that we have neither a firm grasp of what it is for things to be thinkable or unthinkable, nor a viable understanding of how things can and do go so badly wrong. Rather than trying to topple firearms from the pedestal they have been allowed to occupy or to confront the question of why our society is so fascinated with violence, we have repeatedly chosen symbol over substance. We have raised our voices in condemnation, demonizing the perpetrators of violence and demanding that legislators legitimize our anger by passing measures that enable us to try violent children as adults. And we have also indulged ourselves by supporting bills that are vacuous or irrelevant, employing models of human behavior and schemes of moral education that are painfully simplistic. We have supported social policies that are punitive and misdirected, and endorsed plans of action that pointedly ignore questions regarding the larger society's involvement in, and complicity with, our children's moral failures. And we have chosen leaders who are so sure they know just where humans' moral fault lines lie that they see no need to endorse (or fund) continued investigation.
Consider the suggestion that we respond to the latest wave of violence by placing copies of the Ten Commandments in public schools. Does anyone truly believe that children who were so angry and disaffected that they could murder their classmates would have been dissuaded by having had to pass the words "Thou shalt not kill" every day on their way to lunch? That individuals who amassed a vast arsenal of weapons to use against their schoolmates had simply forgotten that killing is wrong?
Some of the darkness of our millennial angst may stem from the dawning recognition that we have chosen to leave ourselves morally in the dark.
We have not grappled with issues which, if left unresolved, may hold the seeds of our undoing. We have not thought hard about what makes human acts and choices right and wrong, nor have we taken on the challenge of trying to explain our moral convictions to others, or even to ourselves. We have thus not been able to offer much guidance or insight to our children.
Here, too, it has been easy to resort to formulas and homilies, intellectual sound bites: "Think about what you are doing, and about its larger consequences." "Imagine how you would feel if someone else did that to you." But we know that we live in a world in which the pace of life continues to accelerate, one in which we leave ourselves less and less time to think. Can we be confident that we will be patient enough to learn (and teach) the skills of critical self-reflection? That we will search for more effective ways for our children to think--and talk--about their moral confusions, uncertainties, and mistakes? Can we trust ourselves to reject the high speed, total immersion, techno-culture of the late 20th century, and resist doing what we are constantly being pressured to do: fling moral sound bites at each other with the expectation that--somehow--those "morsels of undigested beef" will spark and sustain sound moral growth?
Are we willing to question the content of received moral views, to demand that the sound bites be fleshed out? As I see it, this is one of the more serious challenges facing us in the next millennium, one we cannot sidestep if we care about our survival. We cannot hope to understand the meaning or the content of our moral views unless we regard them as essentially open to critical scrutiny. We cannot teach our children the difference between right and wrong, or explain what it means to see ourselves as beings who care about acting on principle simply by sticking moral verdicts up on Post-Its.
What does "Thou shalt not kill" mean in a world in which biological life may become indefinitely extendible, resources are scarce, and human life is already routinely prolonged past the point at which individuals are aware of themselves, or interested in the fate of other beings? What would it mean in a world in which humans could make perfect genetic replicas of themselves?
I do not believe such questions are unanswerable, or that our attempts to find answers can only take the shape of rationalizations. My concern is rather that, in our heady rush to keep up with the future, we will forget how malleable that future is, how much power humans have, and how much responsibility we bear for the choices that will form it: that we will be unable or unwilling to subject ourselves and our way of life to sustained moral scrutiny. If we are not willing to grapple with the sort of questions that cannot be answered on Jeopardy, how can we suppose that we will be able to find the answers we need when the screen goes dark?
N. Ann Davis, the McConnell Professor of Human Relations, specializes in moral theory and applied ethics.
--Illustration by Stephanie Dalton Cowan
