Prologue
My father was born in 1912. If on the winters day he was born someone, say his father, had written an essay contemplating what his new baby’s whole life would be like – just how accurate would that prediction have been?
Consider what goes through a father’s mind the first time he sees his new son after his birth. What sort of man will this boy become?
A new Jesus?
A new Stalin?
A new Gandhi?
A new Hitler?
How would the fathers of Joseph Smith, of George Dewey, of Prescott Bush, of Bill Gates reacted if they had seen their sons's futures on their birth days?
Many things that shaped my father’s life had been invented in 1912, but who could contemplate in 1912 things that influenced his life – things like atomic power and television and the Internet? Or bananas available year round anywhere in America or mass-produced soap, automobiles, and canned spaghetti.
In January1912, it would be easy to believe that the baby boy’s whole life would be influenced and overshadowed by the powers of the time – the imperial empires of Germany, Great Britain, Ottoman, and Russia. The Powers of Austria and of France and of America. Within a short seven years, a number of those political entities more or less disappeared into the wreckage of The Great War. A whole new set of empires went into motion.
I contemplated today the life of a little boy born on 28 April 2013.
Those now involved in human genetic engineering, cyborg technology and global health initiatives like to talk about the possibilities that the future human could possibly live routinely to 125 years, given the right conditions. If that child did indeed achieve that prediction, he would die in the year 2138. It is anybody's guess what kind of humans and human civilization will surround him then.
Will the Federal United States still be around as a superpower or even a power in the twilight of the boy’s lifetime. When this boy becomes an old man, will the political structure of the World even closely resemble the World political map today?
A week before the boy was born, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom observed her 87th birthday. Two months after the boy was born, the Queen will celebrate the 60th anniversary of her coronation. If the Queen lives to be 90 and if her son lives to be 90 and if her grandson lives to be 90, then King George VII will rule from 2016 to 2038 and King William V will rule from 2038 to 2062. In the same year that the boy was born, a new heir to the Windsor Dynasty will be born. If the United Kingdom continues to have a monarchy – a big if – and if King William lives to a ripe old age and if his first born also lives to be 90, then this new heir born in 2013 will reign from 2062 to 2103.
If the boy is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he will be baptized in 2021, ordained a deacon in 2025, serve a mission in 2031. If he gets sealed at the age of, say, 24, that will happen in 2037. All of this speculating presupposes that a boy in the Mormon church of the future will still go on missions as a youth and as a retired person, which presupposes that people will retire from careers and have time for full time proclaiming the gospel. If he and his spouse serve a mission as a mature person that could come in the year 2083.
When he is in his 20s and 30, say from 2031 to 2041, will the world be peaceful or will armies at war want to recruit him or even conscript him? Will the USA military still be volunteer or will it go back to its old ways of forcing boys to flight other people’s struggles? Will the leaders of human society finally rise to the occasion to face the decisions that need to be made – peacefully?
We humans really have too. The possibilities of 21st Century War are too hideous to contemplate, but the boy born today may in fact see one. Or them. The wars of the 19th century were significantly more deadly than the wars of the 18th century, thanks to advances or improvements (both words seem wrong) in weapons and in an increased willingness to use deadly force to force a nation’s way on others. The wars of the 20th century were infinitely worse than the wars of the 19th century. Will atomic weaponry be common in the boy’s lifetime? And automatic weaponry become common household implements? Will the boy grow up to have his own drone for protection? Or will humans finally be sensible and ban such weapons in favor of non-lethal protection?
Among The Big Questions to answer in the 21st Century that this boy may see –
Will humans evolve into creatures that can live peacefully on a warmer planet with fewer resources?
Will we humans discover major unknown life forms in the oceans in his lifetime?
Will we humans discover extraterrestrial life in his lifetime?
Will alien life visit Earth in his lifetime?
Will humans travel back into space in his lifetime?
Will humans do anything on the Moon or Mars?
Will we make enough advances technology in his lifetime to travel – Star Trek-like – faster than the speed of light?
Will humans be traveling through time when this boy becomes an old man?
In 2013, the more apocalyptic of the futurists – looking at the simmering nationality hatreds and all the atomic weapons and the issues of global climate change coupled with dwindling resources – predict the destruction of technological civilization. Will the boy live in a large technological house? Or a hut? During the majority of his lifetime, will he urinate in plumbing or pee pee in thickets? Will he get his food from a supermarket? Or a private ranch? Or garden? Or hunting-gathering?
If he goes to college and earns a Ph.D in physics or British Literature, he will be in the class of c. 2045. Will the prestigious ivy league American colleges still be prestigious and expensive? Will this child do a job or a career that we have even heard of in 2013 or will his career be in a technology uninvented as of yet. Furthermore, if humans indeed will live way into their 100s, this will have an enormous effect on work and retirement – or work, retirement, work, retirement. A boy who grows up to be a man could conceivably have a number of different careers, requiring not one university experience but two. Or three. It is quite possible that the boy’s last career will being doing something that we have never heard of today because it does not exist today.
Today in 2013, we think of American retirement in terms of Social Security. If that survives to the boy’s retirement age, that means the boy as a mature man will retire maybe at 75 years of age. If people will live healthy lives into their 110s and 120s, retirement may be later than that. For even though we humans like to talk about nothing but leisure, we by and large define ourselves by work.
Six weeks before the boy was born, the Catholic Church cardinals elected a new Pope, the first from the Americas, the first Pope named Francisco. This Pope is the last one described by Saint Malachy of Armagh, a Roman Catholic bishop who died in 1148, was said to have had a vision while on a pilgrimage to Rome wherein he learned the exact number of all the popes who would rule from his time to the Apocalypse. Francisco is “Peter the Roman” – an Argentina with Italian roots but nothing in his birth name to suggest the predicted moniker. Will Catholicism continue into the future?
Will the LDS Church also continue into the future? Currently it looks as though Elders Dallin Oaks, Jeffrey Holland, and David Bednar will be the next three church presidents. However, who knows what tomorrow brings in a leadership based on seniority. Will it always be based on absolute seniority. Will the boys wife hold the priesthood in the sense of an ordained priesthood office?
FUTURE RELATIONSHIPS
The Sunday the boy was born I walked to Church and saw two of the boys who live in the neighborhood and attend Church in my Ward. They are both 15. As they walked down the street together close, they tugged at and wrestled each other on the way. I mention this as a way of introducing the topic of boys friendships / male friendship and writing my hope that in this little boy’s relationship world the culture will allow male friends to hold hands if they want to just to express friendship and to kiss if they want to for friendship and have intense bromances if they want to. When this boy grows up, will the culture will allow him to have emotions other than lust, violence, and irony?
I hope that American culture will allow the boy born today and his friends to have more of an emotional life than boys of my generation were allowed by the adults. We boys of my generation were allowed and got violence and humor. The culture allowed us to think in terms of sexual activity, but not in terms of romance, bromance, or friendship. Hopefully the 21st century boy and man can have an emotional, spiritual side
I hope that a boy born today would finally be able to avoid the traps that his grandfathers and fathers fell into: Grueling work for survival. Corporate hookup for prestige, survival, and glamour. Being tough – violent and uncaring – for the sake of survival toughness. Defining ourselves by work. Competing constantly with men instead of enjoying friendship.
Will this boy father children of his own some day? And grandchildren? In a world that will have 7 billion people . . . 8 billion ... 9 billion. .. . 10 billion . . . 11 billion, in a world where the commandment to “multiply and replenish The Earth” has been fulfilled several billion times over and over, will the boy have a moral reason to reproduce at all?
On the day the boy is born, Americans discussed, contemplated, argued over “reforms” in marriage to allow men to marry. This proposal would affect only a certain number of 3 to 5 percent of the American population – those men who prefer men for intimate companionship. Furthermore in the year the boy is born, fewer and fewer Americans actually get married. So it is a discussion that ultimately will really affect a small number of marriages. Will marriage continue to be “The Norm?” for regular people when the newborn is an old man?
When gazing a newborn boy for the first time, it is a little hard to look into the future and contemplate, well relationships. Romance. Sex. Despite all the current talk about traditional marriage and traditional family values, traditional family values have always had any number of people attached to the family. Accountants. Lawyers. Bankers. Ministers. Counselors. The wife’s girl friends. The husband’s guy friends. Mistresses. Lovers. The children’s friends. Considering the death of spouses, divorcing spouses, "la casa grande -- la casa bonita," and outright polygamy in many modern cultures – the majority of men in the world are not monogamous either through time or in eternity. The odds are the boy will in his lifetime in this epoch of mankind have multiple relationships.
Currently the world has 7 billion people, give or take, and a number that vast makes us wonder how any of us can make a name for ourselves or leave a record of ourselves in a world when one person seems so utterly outnumbered?
Hard to know how to end an essay like this, where I am trying to gaze into a crystal darkly.
Many of this boy’s relatives and neighbors anticipate the Second Coming of Christ in his lifetime, but since we crucified him the last time he was here, I bet he is in no real hurry to come back. Most of those hopes are wish fulfillment that someone can just by supernatural force turn the World into Their Kind of Place. The problem with supernatural intervention is that we humans will have to like what we get. One way or another, The New Order will require a very huge bureaucracy – bigger and more complicated than the bureaucracies we now have on a smaller scale.
MY BIRTHDAY BLESSING
Whatever happens to the boy, whatever he becomes, I hope that the world will treat him well and that plenty of people around him with love him and nurture him and not just exploit him.
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