43. Tenderness toward remote future generations
Posted by TT and PR in April 2021.
The Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk [tɔˈkart͡ʂuk], was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, and she delivered her Nobel Lecture [1], entitled The Tender Narrator, on the 7th December 2019. Inspired by the essence of the lecture, The Polish Academy of Sciences assigned an issue of its quarterly magazine, Academia, to this topic, and gave the subtitle Tenderness to the issue [2]. It includes essays written by contributors from many different fields such as philosophy, psychology, biology, ecology, theology, art, and engineering sciences.
Some zoologists wrote that savage wolfs care for their pups affectionately. A botanist wrote a piece about plants, which, surprisingly, are showing and accepting tenderness although they have no feelings or a soul. A designer talked about an empathic design, not only for humans but also for other living objects. A theologian warned that the world is becoming insensitive to human tragedies, and indifferent to those who suffer. A philosopher warned that when we direct our attention to screens and pixels, the attention itself becomes flattened.
As Tokarczuk mentioned in her Nobel Lecture, and also mentioned by contributors to the Tenderness issue, to be a tender narrator who sees a wider view, encompassing the whole world but ignoring time, will be possible. If that is true, it would mean that we can be tender narrators of remote future generations that are thousands or millions of years ahead. Such future generations will surely exist unless humans become extinct sooner. Their physical nature will be almost common with ours. Their soul will also be common. Their environment could be almost common if we tenderly preserve them, unless we are insensitive and indifferent.
Our present world is facing the very great danger of the greatest mass extinction in the whole history of life. However, the crisis is an event in the time scale of millions of years, so that it may be out of sight if our attention becomes flattened into a very thin layer of time. More than that, our interests are always limited to real facts as data, but, there are no data as facts in the future. In order to show tenderness to future generations, we need to expand our field of view into what is in essence an imaginary world. Even though there are such difficulties, we can have hope in the future if we could hear the warning of Olga Tokarczuk and contributors to the Tenderness issue as the voices of prophets.
Note:
[1] Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Lecture: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/lecture/
[2] Academia 1/2020 Tenderness issue: https://journals.pan.pl/academiaPAS/136179
