I once read that the most perfectly safe airliner could indeed be built. The aircraft would cost near a billion dollars in today’s money and carry about two people. This little anecdote has been on my mind a lot since the NSA revelations, and had always held a place in my psyche since 9/11. We Americans, prosperous as the result of our unique ability to take risks, have grown timid in the midst, and perhaps as a result, of our very prosperity.
Knowledge is a wonderful thing. It has enabled us to live longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives. It has also opened our minds to an endless universe which, through technology, we will come to know ever more intimately. The things we learn and the speed with which we learn them will transform the world we know today into something even our grandchildren can only dream of. They will live still longer and healthier lives in a world that will likely see replacement organs grown from our own stem cells, and profound reductions in heart disease and cancer as the result of improved genetic testing and engineering. Let us leave to the imagination how they will move about and communicate.
Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will also meet new and complicated paradoxes. More and more religious dogma will be rendered irrelevant at best, and silly at worst, as science and knowledge take their proper place. Some members of subsequent generations will, in their search for meaning, continue try and fit the square peg of an involved deity into the round hole of modernity. Others will pursue art, humanism and other avenues to make sense of it all. It will be, however, be as it always has been: the more we learn, the more questions that are raised, the answers, if knowable, will be all the more complicated and confounding.
No matter how much we learn; No matter how long we live; No matter how wonderful may be the experiences of the fortunate; we will all certainly die, and more than likely suffer the ignominious insult of never having known that we lived at all. Children will still die from the guns of insane people; the best airliners will fall from the sky. Mothers and fathers will abandon their children, and there will always be disease as long as there is life.
Somehow, though, in the arrogance and vanity of the largess which is our modern world, we act as if we should live forever. In that mindset we have held hostage the very lives we seek to lengthen. No one shakes hands anymore, lest they get a cold. We set play dates to insure our children won’t get hurt or bullied. Everyone gets a medal at sports even if they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Doctors do scores of unneeded tests to protect themselves from our sense of entitlement of immortality. Since 9/11, traveling is a nightmare and we have surrendered our freedoms in the expectation that we should be protected from a terrorist threat that kills less people than bicycle riding.
Enough!
There are no easy answers, and there never will be. Whomever or whatever sent us into this world has given us the incomprehensible knowledge of our own morality combined with the ability to lengthen our lives. It is maddening. But what is worse is living life timidly, avoiding risk to the point where life loses its vitality and, yes, its meaning.
