I used to hurt, because I knew I wouldn’t be alive in future times. Not only was I painfully interested in the technologies and lifestyles and possibilities of the year 100-from-now, but I imagined the future without the realism with which I thought about the past. Life in the fourteenth century was tough. Life in the twenty-fourth century I believed would be easier. Perhaps that is true. Perhaps life will be easier, longer, filled with more comfort.
Yet walking home today, for the first time not only did I feel glad to be alive when I’m alive (now), but, even more so, happy that I will not be alive in the future. In one hundred years, I will be dead. And that made me smile. Assuming a worst-case scenario—a global catastrophe, an increase in poverty, irreparable environmental damage, etc.—that’s understandable. In a best-case scenario, I feel myself in the minority. How could a world of greater equality, governed by an increasingly-single (hence, increasingly peaceful in the traditional sense) government, founded on racial and ethnic harmony, dictated by science and ruled by an ever more-efficient and economic system of law be bad?
The evasive answer is: it’s not, but it’s just not for me. The truthful answer is that I’m only starting to find out. I have a gut feeling, an instinct, that something is going wrong—or, at least, that developing social, political, philosophical and legal trends are leaving me opposed and behind. At the same time, I see that, for most of the people around me, things are going right. It’s not a case of one boy crying wolf and the rest of the village going matter-of-factly about its business. It’s a case of everyone seeing the wolf but disagreeing about its fundamental nature: friend or foe, saviour or downfall?
I suppose the true issue is one of proportionality. The problem is a teeter-totter. On one side is the individual, on the other the community. On the individual’s side are rights and a rights-based interpretation of the law; on the community’s is an economic, efficiency-based view. The debate is not a new one and it will not be resolved any time soon. But I sense the balance shifting smoothly and irreparably toward the side of the community. I sense popular opinion shifting with it.
And so I smile, happy that I am alive now, still in a time of relative balance, when I don’t have to live my life continuously striding up a slope, slipping and sliding, struggling to keep from falling into what I don’t believe.
This Defeasible Life 