It seems that the rate of societal and technological change has accelerated beyond the rate of procreation to the extent that older generations provide a less consistent ethical model for today's youth to follow. In fact, technological driven evolutionary change itself may be a better source of information on how to live ethically at a particular moment.
If we accept the idea that taking responsibility for what you know is a key component for ethical thought and action, then having a sense of the flow and accelerating trends in societal behavior may be illuminating.
This is not to say that wisdom accumulated through years of experience will not always be valuable but the time where technology, communication and basic rules of behavior remained relatively constant throughout a generation are past.
The experiences from thirty years ago may not be nearly as relevant today as the experiences sixty years ago were to those who lived thirty years ago!
This may seem to indicate a dismissal of history and the philosophy of history but quite to the contrary, it seems to point to an urgent need to understand flows of history. Perhaps if we better understood how change manifested itself over the past 100 years, we would then understand how that same amount of change would happen over the next 30.
Just a thought.
Friday, January 12, 2007
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