(Pandemic Diary - day 246)

From my journal: 30 October 2020 (Friday)

They have the courts, but we have the youth. Enlightenment can’t be stuffed back into a bottle (but is that what people like me thought in the late 60s, too?) and the arc of it rises into the future.

The last paragraph was a quick note to capture a fleeting thought I had as I read an essay in the newest National Geographic [“Are we ‘Generation Screwed’? Not necessarily” by Jordan Salama]. It was written by a 23-year-old who’s talking about her sub-generation of people, currently age 18-25 (which of course includes Lucas), as feeling like something between Millennials and Gen Z, not fitting with either of them (I can see that).

Her observations about how they have reacted to the displacement of the pandemic by participating in protests and so on, and their growing acceptance of the notion that silence is not acceptable, are what led me to that optimistic statement.

I believe it and I’m encouraged by it. I’ve thought for a long time that this period we’re in now is just a blip, a last gasp of fanatical resistance from an ideology or a mindset whose reign is rapidly and inevitably fading away. I’m surprised and disgusted by the power of this gasp, but I don’t think the fundamental nature of its transience has changed at all. It won’t disappear, not now or in the near future or perhaps ever. But its time of power certainly will.

I said earlier that you can’t put enlightenment back in the bottle, but that term “enlightenment” is probably not quite right. I’m drawing a blank right now on a better term, and enlightenment is certainly part of it, but there’s more.

Or maybe I just need to expand on that term. Maybe there are different sorts of enlightenment, and they’re all at play here, in different ways and to different and changing extents. There is educational enlightenment, emotional and empathic enlightenment, artistic enlightenment, scientific enlightenment…

Maybe enlightenment really is a good catch-all term for all of this, as long as I think of it that way, as a catch-all. The problem is I don’t think people generally think of it that way, and so if I were to use it publicly in a statement like the one I started with, it would be understood differently than I intend. It would sound arrogant and elitist (the way it must sound when I describe places like State College and Boulder and Ithaca as “little islands of enlightenment” — and rightly so).

Anyway, it’s hard to imagine that these kids are suddenly (or even gradually) and en masse going to start believing in racial superiority, or that it’s alright for an individual or group to impose particular religious values on others, or to voluntarily give back civil rights that they have come to accept (and in some cases have helped fight to gain).

What possible conversation can you imagine between a zealot of the Old Way and a Zoomer, where that kid becomes convinced they should start caring one way or the other about another person’s sexual orientation, or the color of their skin?

It’s natural for those frightened and ignorant supplicants to the old way to fight against this, and for a while they’ll have some successes, as our system has some anachronistic features that allow a minority to effectively hold the country hostage, to elect presidents who lost the popular vote, to pack the Supreme Court with judges the majority doesn’t support, and so on.

In some ways this is even a feature of our system rather than a bug. It makes us inherently small-c conservative, makes it hard to change things quickly, requires change to be more deliberate, perhaps even saves us from some mistakes. But it only slows things down — there’s no mechanism for it to prevent that change.

Especially when the desire for change flows from enlightenment.