It's been dawning on me, about the luxuries we now have as a consequence of a longer life. It wasn't too long ago that the life expectancy was sixty and if you made it that far, you were considered blessed. As a consequence of shorter life spans, people advanced in stages quicker. By that I mean that people would get married younger, they found a job, and sought to establish themselves sooner rather than later on in their life. By the age of 30, many were married, found a job, and were at the peaks of their careers. I'll often look back at a scholar or writer of sort and see that they've published these great works in their early twenties. In comparison, I've achieved little by my early twenties let alone where I'm at now.
Perhaps this is the consequence of living longer. There's a sense of ease by which we live our lives. We don't need to rush into anything anymore. That urgency in the race with life and death is no longer. The life expectancy is now set at an average of eighty-something. I remember my father telling me one day that because humans live longer now, he didn't feel like he had to enforce his wisdom about a certain path. But that we could now experiment and find what we wanted to do. Turns out, my interest went from neuroscience to the study of religion. Like, whoa.
The extended period of life we now have certainly allows more time to cultivate our craft and get distracted in the many other interests we have altogether. It would seem that we now must practice more and more in perfecting or achieving that state in which we would like to see ourselves. Polishing, in a word.
I've been looking into the theories of moral development recently. Just for fun in a way. Something that I hope to study more intensively at one point or another. Beginning with Piaget and then Kohlberg, and then Gilligan's criticism of Kohlberg for being androcentric, which created a debate about an ethics of Justice vs. an ethics of Care (the former being Kohlberg and the latter Gilligan) and then Turiel and in the contemporary sphere with Haidt and a few others (Stich, Prinz, Knobe, Gallagher, Mallon, etc.) who have been bringing more and more awareness to the place of emotions in morality. But with the earier theorists like Piaget, Kohlberg, and Gilligan (in other areas there is Erikson and Maslow) there was a trend of doing stage theory. Putting ages and developmental stages of cognition or moral reasoning together and saying that at this age period this happens and so forth. While my own research in the past has confirmed studies of the language miracle at 2 years of age, theory of mind capabilities at 4, and other benchmarks for development, I wonder if some of these stage theories extend their suggestions too rigidly. In other words, if they had a stage regarding adulthood would this mean that those of the past who had a lower life expectancy never reached such a point in moral reasoning? And conversely, does this mean that today we reach those stages much later on in life? I would certainly be interested in seeing a contemporary model of this kind of stage theory, which would also incorporate cross-cultural variance and consider the differences as well as the similarities. But then again, stage theory may no longer be useful to capture the evidence that is presented; a different model may be required.
One thing that I do find quite promising for the future is the malleability and adaptability of human nature. That if we shape the right cultural conditions - social, political, environmental, economic, and so on - human nature will adapt and be shaped by them as well. That is, human nature allows for the reproduction and perpetuation of culture. In this sense, the argument of human nature is good or bad is an antiquated and an irrelevant debate. If the conditions that shape human nature are "good" then so will be the outcome and vice versa with "bad". However, this does not mean that the discussion about human nature is no longer relevant, I think it is, but rather that we have to reconsider and reshape the way in which we talk about human nature. Some forms of discourse views human nature as if it is some kind of fixed thing. Far from it, our biology allows change. Identical twins who come into this world with an identical set of genes, turn out to be distinctively different by the time they reach 50. Their genes have changed as well (epigenetics has yet to take hold in the discussion on human nature). We still talk about Hobbes and aggression as if we are inherently evil. If culture shapes persons, and persons shape culture, then this means there is an active component by which we participate in and are shaped by society, whether it is active, passive, passionate, or apathetic. To paraphrase Howard Zinn, you can't be neutral on a moving train. In one way or another we are participating and perpetuating culture. And with longer and longer life spans, we have longer to do it albeit it may be at a slower rate.
It seems that timing is an important element. A premature move can break an attempted shift. A quickly cooked stew will not taste as good as one that has been given the time to release its flavor and draw out in conjunction with other ingredients. There is an art to timing.
대기만성(大器晩成)
big. bowl. late. creation: It takes time to make a big bowl.
No comments:
Post a Comment