I left this comment on this NY Times article called “No One Knows What’s Going to Happen,” and I think what I wrote is something that others need to hear so that’s why I’m sharing it here.
Mr. Lilla is right when he says, “The pandemic has brought home just how great a responsibility we bear toward the future, and also how inadequate our knowledge is for making wise decisions and anticipating consequences.”
But he is wrong when he says, “Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.”
This statement denies heroic efforts made during the Enlightenment and subsequent generations to improve the human condition through advancing knowledge and morality. How else can you describe the change from the Dark Ages of superstition to the James Webb Space Telescope? Or the change in the most powerful nation on Earth from once selling humans as property to that same people electing a Black president in a landslide?
If you think these changes just “happened” and are random events not steered by visionary men and women, you are severely deluded in your thinking. Now — this moment — is an unprecedented opportunity to *shape* the course of the future for humanity in a positive direction.
Everything has slowed. We have time to reflect. Let’s go forward with the intention to make positive changes to the planet. Let’s consciously chart a course for humanity’s future, so it might be bright for everyone. In Mr. Lilla’s metaphor, let’s blow away that fog and start planting a garden.
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