Who Will Save the Children?

Cry for all the innocent
ones, born into a world
that's lost its heart...
 Randy Stonehill

One characteristic of our contemporary world is that whilst we fanfare that our children are our future we blithely ignore them in the present. Oh, I don't mean that we don't feed them or clothe them or give them things if we have the resources and the means; I mean that we fail to give them ethical and moral direction; we fail to cultivate wisdom.

   

One of our contemporary ironies is that we trumpet living in an 'Information Age' but fail to recognise that knowledge is a tool: it's not the having it that is so important, but rather what we do with it. 

Knowledge can, of course, be useful: knowing what a toaster is should effectively discourage us from using one as a hairdryer; but we can disregard knowledge. We could, for example, (some people in fact do) use a spade to murder a rival but that would be a misuse of the tool, using it for a wrong, immoral, purpose.

In the late 1980s a high-powered delegation of African-Americans arrived in South Africa on a fact-finding mission. They wanted to know something of what was happening in the new apartheid-dismantled nation. As soon as they got off the plane, they were met by a group of ANC officials; one of the group offered his hand to shake and said, "Hey, what's up, my niggas?" The delegates were horrified. They said, "We've fought for decades to get rid of the 'n' word! Is this all that we've exported?" During the rest of their trip, they visited areas like the Cape Flats and were equally horrified by what they discovered had been imported.

In his seminal book, It's bigger Than Hip Hop: the Rise Of The Post-Hip-Hop Generation, M K Asante points out that the three pillars of traditional African-American society, the ones that raised the delegates who were shocked by their visit to South Africa, have now largely gone. Instead of church, family, and community, young blacks are now raised on a heady brew of mostly MTV, news from the streets, and what they listen to. Today's role models aren't Jesus or Martin Luther King, nor even Miles Davis; their role models are Rick Ross, Lil' Wayne, Niki Minaj and Lil' Kim.

A thirteen-year-old girl recently asked me, "Sir, why are all the films today full of sex and violence?" I replied, "So are the newspapers. So are the news reports on TV. The world system feeds on the twin emotions of lust and anger."

I was reminded of 1 John 2:25, 26:

[Letters to Street Christians translation]

Who will save our children? It's a valid and urgent question.

Our youth, like Adam and Eve, have discovered the world and lost their innocence.

[Gospel of Thomas 56]

How can wisdom be cultivated and transmitted to our youth?

The answer, you've guessed I hope, is that saving our children is our responsibility; it's down to us. As Randy Stonehill's song puts it, we are the hands, we are the voices that must act to save our children.

Lost In Our Distractions

we love to be couch potatoes

Orwell's nightmare vision of our collective future, 1984, fortunately didn't come to pass; in part, because we were so scared it might. Yes, there are still dictatorships around the world, and some dictators have tried to make their control total (consider Pol Pot, for example), but there was a collective sigh of relief when we actually arrived in the year 1984.

However, the more accurate vision of our future appeared ten years or so before Orwell's book: Huxley's Brave New World.
Huxley argued that, rather than being controlled by our fears, we are controlled by our pleasures. The human species, he said, 'has an infinite capacity for distraction'.

Rather than get some work done, or achieve our goals, or practice self-discipline, we'd much rather be couch potatoes, be idle, and feed our pleasures.

With the rise of the Internet and mobile devices, we can now spend the whole day instagramming, facebooking, and whatsapping. Or we can spend the day wargaming, netflixing, or simply surfing.

Life is easy, life is fun, but we can oh so easily get bored. Work to do? That's boring. Goals to achieve? That's boring. Be self-disciplined? That's the most boring thing I've ever heard.

We live in an age of information and excitement at our finger tips; and we don't want to switch off. But we are already paying the price of information overload. Do you remember... 'Oh, what was his name?', 'Oh, I saw an article once...', 'There used to be a shop...'. Our devices have taught us to use our brains differently. We have already been rewired. We no longer memorise things; what we do now is remember where to find the things that we used to remember. That location is usually the Internet. But if the power goes off, what will we do?

Already, there are times when our shops or institutions can't function because they're momentarily 'offline'.

If we're not careful, humans themselves will become offline and more. That is in fact the prediction of some of our brightest thinkers: that an age of intelligent machines is coming, and once those machines become self-replicating, there will be no need for us; humans, it is suggested, will become redundant. Indeed, in an Age of Intelligent Machines, why would people be necessary or even useful? That has been a recurring idea of Science Fiction for a long time now; Asimov, for one, took the notion seriously in his fiction. Maybe it will soon progress beyond an idea.