Pride and Precedent

“Having little or no sense of the human experience through the ages, of what has been tried, of what has succeeded and what has failed, of what is the price of cherishing some values as opposed to others, or of how values relate to one another, they leap from acting as though anything is possible, without cost, to despairing that nothing is possible.”

Before this summer, my outlook on enacting social change constantly flip-flopped between sides of the exact dichotomy Kagan here presents: extreme optimism or pessimistic fatalism. Both attitudes are remarkably unproductive–risk oversimplification or disappointment on the one hand, and complete inactivity on the other. So assuming our damnation to one of these two attitudes, thanks to our complete ignorance of what our esteemed predecessors have already determined by way of the almighty scientific method, how is our generation supposed to accomplish anything?

Excuse my snark. I agree, my generation is prone to falling into one of the ruts Kagan accuses us of, but his explanation for the phenomenon is absolutely suspect. I’d blame a thousand other things on my generation’s flightiness before I’d pin it down to “having little or no sense of the human experience.” And what generation before us, universally versed in the classics or not, hasn’t had the same initial disillusionment in the face of injustice?

The issues we face today may not all be new, but relying on the successes and failures of past endeavors to determine the worth of an idea seems horribly limiting. The more a person knows about precedented approaches to a problem, the more likely they are to stay within the previously drawn lines past attempts have sketched out. Innovation does require some optimism, and perhaps even some ignorance, to yield truly “new" ideas.

After all, since when has doing something strictly “by the books” ever led to progression in society? I’d hate to think of the kind of America I’d live in today if some ordinary citizens hadn’t challenged “what has been tried.” I wouldn’t expect to be able to vote, see some of my closest friends get married, or even be welcome at the liberal arts school I attend. And frankly, life would be kind of boring if we didn’t color outside the lines a little bit.