Published September 5, 2024
Twenty years ago, The New Atlantis published a remarkable essay by Yuval Levin titled, “Imagining the Future.” (The essay was subsequently lengthened and published as a book.) It’s one of those rare essays that does more than add one or two new volumes to the library of one’s mind; it is the sort of essay that is liable to rearrange the mental furniture altogether.
On the surface, the essay is about how we ought to think about technology, particularly biotechnology, and how it shapes our future as individuals and as a people. But the framework of the essay is also very helpful for thinking through all kinds of important questions, including, as will become clear, questions facing the Church in these turbulent days.
Levin begins by describing two distinctive ways of thinking about the future. The first of these is premised upon what he calls an “anthropology of innovation,” and it is the way of imagining the future that comes most readily to the American mind. Progress – in science, in politics, in economics – is attained through innovation, that is, through constant efforts to discover new and better ways of doing things.
In theory, this process of innovation has a way of self-regulating through the principle of selective choice: “Those individuals most directly affected by some new innovation will be best able to judge its value, and if they find it is harmful or not worthwhile, they will reject it.” This sort of progress can be disruptive, even chaotic, but it is hard to argue against the fact that, at least by material standards, it has proven to be a remarkable success.
This anthropology of innovation is flawed, however, in its conception of the future. Namely, it has difficulty making sense of children. Levin explains:
[T]hose who imagine the future in terms of innovation tend to think of the future as something that will happen to us, and so as something to be judged and understood in terms of the interests of the free, rational, individual adult now living. . . .But the future is populated by other people – people not yet born, who must enter the world and be initiated into the ways of our society, so that they might someday become rational consenting adults themselves. Strangely, what is missing from the view of the future grounded in innovation is the element of time, or at least its human consequent: the passing of generations.
Which brings us to Levin’s second way of thinking about the future, one premised on what he calls an “anthropology of generations.” This anthropology doesn’t begin by imagining how the future might be made more to our liking. Rather, it begins with a concern for continuity, precisely because it understands that human beings don’t enter the world as “rational consenting adults,” but as children.
And children, Levin reminds us, “do not start where their parents left off. They start where their parents started, and where every human being has started, and society must meet them there, and rear them forward.”
We delude ourselves if we assume that the human progress of the past is secured, once and for all, by the mere fact of its once having been accomplished. Even the most authentic and humane progress – progress in medicine or in our understanding of the natural world, for example – is fragile. It must be taught, cultivated, and maintained.
For this reason, the work of educating and rearing the next generation is one of the most important things we (or any other generation) can do. “If the task of initiation and continuation fails in just one generation, then the chain is broken, the accomplishments of our past are lost and forgotten, and the potential for meaningful progress is forsaken.” Preserving the health of those institutions that are most essential to intergenerational continuity – families, churches, schools, etc. – is of the utmost importance.
There is a great deal more to Levin’s essay than I’ve been able to hint at here, but I hope you can at least see how all this might shed light on this particular moment in the life of the Church.
For example, a growing, vibrant local Church is wise to spend a great deal of its time considering how best to transmit the faith from one generation to the next. The needs of families and schools will be paramount. Such a Church is likely to imagine the future – and arrange its pastoral priorities – very differently than would a Church in an aging, secular society in which the intergenerational transmission belt broke down decades ago.
Is it surprising that the latter example is typical of those places where one is most likely to find an “anthropology of innovation” applied to the life of the Church? It’s one thing to ask, “How do I ensure that the next generation is formed in virtue and raised in the faith?” It’s another thing entirely to ask, the faith not having been handed on, “What innovations might we employ to make it more attractive to adults who have once rejected it?”
How much energy has the Church spent trying to innovate its way to an imagined future that appeals to the sensibilities of a generation that is fast disappearing and will not be replaced?
The point is not that innovation – or development of doctrine in the ecclesial context – is bad. Rather, the point is this: no worthwhile innovation, no development of doctrine, no real progress of any kind can be achieved, let alone maintained, without an appropriate concern for the kind of continuity that makes authentic and lasting progress possible in the first place.
Or to put it a slightly different way, imagining the Church as a field hospital, full of walking wounded, is a very different exercise than imagining how we might keep people out of the hospital in the first place. The Church must surely concern herself with both. But to attempt the first without the second would make it difficult (divine guarantees notwithstanding) to imagine a Church with much future at all.
Stephen P. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. White’s work focuses on the application of Catholic social teaching to a broad spectrum of contemporary political and cultural issues. He is the author of Red, White, Blue, and Catholic (Liguori Publications, 2016).
