Alternative Editorial: Future Sensibility
How often do we hear that ‘young people are the future’, often accompanied by some commitment to ‘hearing more from Gen Y or Z?’ Yet how often do we see any real evidence of young people leading the way. And should we?
Greta Thunberg has shown us in no uncertain terms that her generation can make demands on the powers that be. Greta demonstrates this in her extraordinary capacity for speaking unflinchingly to power - predominantly about the state of our climate, but also increasingly about the brokenness of the systems of power that promise everything but deliver nothing game-changing..
Similarly, the movement she inspired, Fridays for Future, has become instrumental in holding governments worldwide to account, in ways our representative democracy has failed to do. Greta is no longer the only young face making the weather on environmental news.
However, these young leaders are in agreement: as much as they can object to the current regime and its poor record, they cannot take the reins on system change themselves. They have neither the expertise nor clout to make change happen: this is the job of their parents (and grandparents). Greta’s scorn on this front – the absurdity that politicians point back to the children for solutions - is even stronger than her initial cry for help.
So, does that just throw the ball back to the current establishment—to wake up or else? Or might Greta and her cohort be missing a trick? Maybe there is more to her role as a young person than is obvious. Her recent publication ‘The Climate Book’ is an exhaustive overview of all that is current in the science of environmental activism, bringing in issues of justice, gender and governance that also shape outcomes. Young people are mostly portrayed as those bringing the urgency, because it is their future - not that of those in power - that is most affected.
Yet Thunberg makes nothing of her own generations capacity to grasp the issues and read the runes of the future, in ways that her elders have not been able to do. Some - including Greta herself - have suggested that this might be to do with her autism. She seeks direct access to ‘truth’ about the world around her; and she is less edited by social norms, graces or even empathy for other’s trauma induced passivity.
But if that were simply so, she would find it difficult to communicate with her own generation too. Yet they recognise easily what she is saying. They have a shared sensibility, born of a different relationship to the wider world. This is not singularly to do with climate, but a different way of being in the information space more broadly - public and private - creating different expectations of life.
If you are over 30, you will have been told, when listening to youth, that “you just don’t get it, do you?” So, what is the ‘it’ we might not get and does it have important generative qualities too?
Beyond seeing clearly into our failings, does it also suggest new capacities for not only seeing what could be done, but also how it could be achieved, drawing on sensibilities that are relatively new? In ways that explain why, until now, we have been stuck?
Vegans are the future…
Here are two examples we have run into in the normal course of life. It’s a well-known fact that animal farming is a major cause of climate change but, even with all the added incentives of moving towards ethical production of food, only small numbers are switching to vegan diets. We give ourselves innumerable self-justifications, but in the simple equation of choose meat or choose life, meat consumption is still winning. In that wider failure to make a better choice, young people are overwhelmingly more capable compared to those older. Even where the switch has not occurred due to lack of convenience, the possibility of switching is solidly there for the next generation; less the current one.
Looking below the surface, this has many components. Firstly, there seems to be less attachment to the physical experience of eating meat - a common reason for carnivores to find it hard to give up. This is more so in affluent and otherwise privileged environments: meat is deeply (though questionably) associated with strength, security and status. Even manliness. Young people often reject their parents’ preferences and, still young, may not have become ‘addicted’ to the lifestyle promise that meat brings - especially as it is amplified by advertising.
But from another direction altogether, animals are much more present in social media than in the years preceding the internet. Their appealing vulnerability and emotional openness is something older people will never have experienced growing up. Animals used to be either pets (taboo in this discourse) or game of one sort or another. No longer.
They are now appreciated as wondrous, sentient beings sharing the planet with us: why would you want to eat them? Psychologically our kids are differently wired from us, ready to do things differently. Not because their parents told them, but because neither teachers nor parents constitute the font of wisdom anymore. Their education comes from a much wider source of information - the world wide web, which carries an infinite amount of emotional data.
Whereas, in the past, parents kept that part of themselves private, emotions have become the accessible (and easily manipulable) currency of our public space. Not only triggering deeply buried experiences, but also enlivening our every waking moment. While the elders were only ever on the receiving end of such media - propaganda, advertising, news headlines - young people have become capable in this field. They generate their own affects (who could have predicted Tik Tok ten years ago?) but also observe the impact of others on their own lives. They are natural emotional agents, intent on shaping the public sphere.
…And social justice brings it nearer
Another example would be around social justice. The path to genuine inclusion has been slow across the broader society all across the globe. Even the word “inclusion” is indicative of an in-group, stretching to allow more into its hallowed boundaries. While we are amid a World Cup being held in Qatar it is easy to celebrate our (UK, Europe, US) relative tolerance to gender diversity compared to the inhumane laws of some Arab countries. Yet we forget homosexuality only became legal in the UK in 1967 and same sex marriage only permissible in 2004 - less than two decades ago.
Older people marvel at this and celebrate our progress, but young people in those countries where the shift occurred are more likely to marvel at the immorality of their elders. How could this situation have pertained for so long? Their own ease with multiple genders, trans or post-binary status and all colours, while novel and virtuous to the generations above, is unremarkable to them. Digital natives grew up cosmolocally - able to play games or be in conversation with peers from all around the world. They are not wired for tribalism in the same way that their parents were.
If anything, those under 30 have less resilience to discrimination and find it hard to live with. What is termed “woke” - awake to the injustices of the past - is also experienced as being vulnerable. Unable to tolerate even casual offensive behaviour from others, they call out every incursion. Hence the term snowflake, describing mostly young people who melt under the pressure of the kind of aggression their parents learnt to take in their stride. While this leaves them often unable to stand up to injustice confidently, their traumatised responses cause others to rise to their protection - a sort of inverted causality, which nevertheless causes change in behaviour and legislation around them.
There is another, perhaps stranger aspect - by no means universal but nevertheless a phenomenon. It’s their hyper-sensitivity to the full diversity of expression available through exposure to the world wide web, which leads to a significantly expanded resource of creativity.
One sign of this is the often uncanny ability of young people to sing in a very adult way - with the full range of emotional intelligence that used, once, to be available to maturity only. We noticed it early on with Joss Stone who, at the age of 21 could reach the same depths of emotional resonance as Aretha Franklin after a life of struggle to find that voice.
But listen to this 9-year-old singer and this 4-year-old piano player. Some might say this is a wild claim - anyone can impersonate. But it might well be more than the simple ability to copy and caricature, and more to do with affordances. After Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, hundreds followed: not because they all became suddenly faster, but because the story of what is possible was changed. These young people have direct and constant access to what is emotionally possible from birth.
Over the past 30 years of networked society, being able to hear about every small kind of breakthrough, in the many areas of life that need improvement, has changed the story of what cam emerge. And as such previously intransigent problems have begun to be overcome - from same-sex marriage to artificial intelligence. But imagine being born into immense possibility at every level - not only scientific and material, but psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. Not just unleashing our imagination, but our super-enhanced agency too.
Re-imagining AI
Of course, the evidence is that young people are not yet overly excited about this potential. Maybe the stark contrast of what they imagine - and sense - is possible, is too confounded by what actually arises from our socio-political space.
The rules have to be changed
They are told in no uncertain terms by the mainstream media that they are powerless and deluded. It is this contrast that caused Greta to withdraw from school, and before that even from her family, becoming deeply depressed. Might it also be a prime cause of mental ill-health in young people today – their acute sense of a loss of integrity, at the very heart of society? Showing them immense power on social media, but denying them any exercise of that in real life?
On the other hand, where young people are encouraged and given resources, this new sensibility can be very generative. It questions everything about the way we live, our values, our unwillingness to integrate our collective intelligence. This sensibility reimagines homes, work, education, even politics. And while it has always been the case that young people have new ideas, ready to feed into the old structures, there is some evidence that a genuinely RegenA powered future would lead to whole system change.
So what do their elders do - just get out the way and leave them to it? As Fridays for the Future would say: no, you don’t get off so lightly. It’s our job to make space for their voice and imagination. but also to bring our resources to their enterprise. Not simply funding - though that would be welcome. But more plausibly, we should bring the fruits of our work over the past decades, and place them in service to their new capacities. This can save them from reinventing the wheel, as well as giving them greater control over the tools we designed, deploying them better for faster and fairer results.
These spaces of collaboration between the ages are not easy to curate. Older people tend to romanticise the young - hanging on their every word and taking every fancy literally. Some might even say we are doing that here. Yet our sense is that, when facing the future, we should utilise the tools of the future, not those of the past. In the same way that parents hope their children will outperform them (so they can boast to their peers), so we should invest in all the signs that our next generation are the people we are waiting for.
