The Hero Generation of Our Species

We are all familiar with the narrative of a parent struggling to create the opportunity for a better life for their child. A product of the hard lives of his own parents, our hero is but one generation removed from knowing true hunger, existential fear a component of daily life. He is committed to creating a secure life, a platform from which his child can look to the future with hope and possibility. We have a natural respect for the role of this parent, and an empathy for the desire to enable the betterment of the life of one’s progeny.

By analogy, our society as a whole will (hopefully) give birth to succeeding generations and we will play the role of ‘parent’ for the generations that follow (as the generations that preceded us form our civilizational ancestry). If we zoom out from the perspective of the individual to view our species as a whole, what is the narrative of our present generation?

Over millennia we have made great progress in conquering many natural threats and improving the average quality of life of our species. And yet, our future is not secure (an unfortunate theme throughout these musings). We are, as individuals^*on the whole…, no longer awaiting death around every corner from a threatening natural environment; our lives are not lived on a razor’s edge and there is plenty of food to go around.^*if only we could help it find its way to the mouths that most need it However, there are nearly 4,000 active nuclear weapons around the world, pandemics rage (with the threat of engineered pandemics evermore real), the climate is on a collision course with an average temperature rise unsustainable for much of our species, and nearly 1 billion people still live on less than $2 per day. Existential risk for our species has likely never been higher. And yet, it seems that much of this risk is of our own making – consequences of the single-mindedness with which we’ve pulled ourselves out of the jaws of unforgiving natural selection.

The hero generation frequently does not have a specific future planned for their children (though they may stereotypically have strong feelings about the choices they make). Indeed, it is not the luxury of this generation to look deep into the future for they still must contend with survival, with basic and psychological needs less elevated than Maslow’s pinnacle.

Source: Wikipedia

Should the hero be successful, a generation with the opportunity to dream is enabled. However, a positive outcome is not guaranteed – simply the possibility granted. We all know the spoiled child who, wanting for nothing, squanders his privilege only to leave the world a worse place than he found it. We also all know the scarred adult who, though in a state of abundance, is habitually stuck in a loop of accumulation of resources and accolade out of deep sense of insecurity so that the process is never allowed to resolve into the possibility of dreaming of how one could and should live if basic security were no longer at risk, for him or his family. While he may have a narrative that he is doing work on behalf of his children, indeed his actions are not in service of others but merely feeding the beast of phobia and habit.

With so much left to do to secure our future, we might hope to consider ourselves the hero generation, working diligently to improve conditions for our progeny.

Are we the generation to be identified with the ‘hero’ parent? Are we to be identified as the spoiled generation that does too much cocaine and might wrap our car around a tree, bringing an end to the family line? Or are we stuck in a propagating, habitual loop that precludes us and our progeny from achieving self-actualization?

Perhaps we cannot know how our generation will be viewed without the benefit of hindsight. Nor, perhaps, is it our place to know what our ‘children’ will do with the opportunities granted to them. The best we can do is consider how our own behavior will influence that of the next generation. We need to be careful about the examples that we are setting. Is there not a path to follow whereby we gain practice acting in such a way that we raise beings with the potential to feel a life of purpose, that have a genuine chance of realizing self-actualization? Let’s hope that when our great-great-grandchildren look back at our generation that they have reason to forgive the actions we take out of insecurity and reason to believe that we were trying our best to make their lives not only possible, but better than our own.

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