The Unremarked Days

You have been doing more than receiving.

Across the years in which the three channels were laying down their deposits in you, something else was happening alongside them. You were not only absorbing. You were, in small ways at first and then in larger ways as you grew, contributing. Every conversation in which you said what you actually thought, rather than what was expected of you, was a contribution; every time you used humour or staked your comfort to expose a difficult truth; every time you drew a small line that had not yet been drawn, or did not draw it. Every choice of friend, or choice of career; every new taste you tried that did not match the tastes of the household you grew up in; every silence, when speaking would have been easier and lying would have been easier still. You have been adding to what was given to you and giving back to society something with your signature on it the whole time, often without thinking about it as adding or changing.

This is the structural condition of being human that the first three chapters did not name directly. You are not merely an empty vessel into which a pre-formed inheritance is poured. You are a part of the chain, and the part you play has direction. What reaches the next link from you is not the same as what reached you from the link before, even when you have not consciously tried to change anything. Some of the difference is involuntary — you are not your parents, you are not your siblings, you are not the community you identify with most strongly, and the version of what those around you handed you that you reproduce is bent by everything else you are. You may be the one who keeps the line when others around you have not kept it, even when the keeping costs you something the breaking would have spared you. You may be the one who breaks the line when others around you keep it, taking the small advantages the breaking confers and paying the small costs the breaking imposes on those who keep what you have broken. The bend in you that reshapes the substrate - whether you have chosen it or not - goes forward from you to whoever comes next.

Some of the difference is voluntary. You have been making choices, large and small, that have altered what gets carried forward, and the choices accumulate in directions you cannot always keep track of. The work you refused to do because the work would have required something you could not bring yourself to do. The conviction you arrived at on your own, against the inertia of where you grew up. The influence you had on people, the silence you broke and the jokes you did not laugh at. These have been your additions to what reached you, and the additions are real, and they have been going forward through you to those who come after you whether you have been keeping track of the going-forward or not.

I want to say something about why this matters, because the picture the first three chapters have been drawing could be read in a discouraging way, and the discouraging reading would be wrong. If everything in you came from somewhere else, if the deepest channel cannot be inspected by you and if you are a node in a chain whose origins you cannot see — then it can begin to feel as though there is no you doing the carrying, only the chain using you to extend itself. This is only half of the truth, and like all half-truths it does more damage than a clean falsehood, because the half it gets right gives it the authority to mislead you about the half it gets wrong.

The half it gets right is that you did not begin from nothing. The half it gets wrong is that you are only what you have been given. You are not. Something arrives in the world with each new person that was not in the world before, and the new arrival is not the same kind of thing as what it joins. The new person carries an excess — a surplus of life over what would be needed merely to continue what is already there — and the surplus is the seedbed of everything that has ever changed in any people. The proof that the surplus is real is that things have changed, and continue to change. The world has not gone on identically reproducing itself across the generations. It never will, and the reason is the surplus each individual produces.

This does not mean that human society is so fluid as to be volatile. Change in human society and civilization happens through processes and interactions that we can observe, isolate and understand more than we may be inclined to assume. I don’t want to make it seem overly simplistic, because it is not, and we should be very careful about any claims to the contrary. However, I will help you see for yourself some of the dynamics of human social evolution that you can recognise and test, and once you see them, you will always be able to see and recognise their working patterns everywhere.

It starts with young human beings who see, in a particular way, what the old have stopped seeing. This is not because the young are wiser than the old; mostly they are not. It is because the young have come into the existing arrangements from outside, and the existing arrangements still look strange to them, in the way things look strange to anyone for whom they are not yet automatic. The old have been inside the arrangements long enough that the arrangements have become invisible to them; they have stopped seeing the things they once saw because the things have stopped registering. Why do men wear neckties that seem to have no explicit use or purpose? Why do we need money to survive when we have arguably survived for longer as a species without money and plants and animals are able to survive without money? The young who are in the early stage of acclimatisation to our civilisational reality are curious to know why adults do certain things that make no immediate sense outside of the specific civilisational context they have been accustomed to accept without question over time. They will, themselves, eventually stop noticing some of what they see — but while they are not in that stage, they will question and challenge even as they continue to pick up actions and belief systems that the long-time inhabitants just habitually perform and reproduce without question. What is invisible to a household in this way, is often visible to a child. What is invisible to a country is often visible to a young person not yet absorbed into its working assumptions. The visibility is short — it has a few years' span before formation closes over it — and during those few years, the young are able to do reconnaissance work that the old can no longer do.

I am not making a romantic claim about youth. The young are often wrong. Their seeing is partial — they see what is strange but not necessarily what is important about the strangeness, and they do not yet have the experience to tell the two apart. They mistake the froth of their own first encounters with the world for the depth of mature judgement, and the mistake produces some of the most embarrassing convictions of youth, the ones the older self of the same person will be glad to have left behind. What the young have is not better judgement; it is fresher seeing. The two are not the same, and a culture that cannot differentiate between them can seriously damage itself.

What is needed is for the fresher seeing of the young to meet the mature judgement of those who have grown wise rather than merely accustomed. The two together can do what neither can do alone. The young see what the old have stopped seeing; the old can tell, of what the young have seen, what is worth keeping and what was only the froth of first encounter. The seeing without the sifting is restless and often destructive. Every new generation who believes that what its elders accept must be wrong simply because the elders accept it will never mature beyond adolescence. Similarly, the sifting without the seeing leads to inertia and suffocation. Older generations tend to persuade themselves that what worked once will work again, and what was settled is settled, and that the world will forever work the same way it has always worked. A society that has given into such thinking or considers it wisdom not dying, but for most purposes is already dead. However, the pairing of the old and new, in a working configuration, is the way people advance through time without either drowning itself in custom or losing itself in novelty.

This is one of the reasons why a culture that cannot mediate a constructive dialogue between the generations will get caught in a gridlock that is very difficult to break away from. Disagreement between the generations is not a fault to be eliminated. It is a working condition. In a healthy society, it is conducted with affection and with the assumption that each side has something the other needs. When the disagreement curdles into contempt where the old treats the young as fundamentally unserious and the young treats the old as fundamentally unsalvageable, the work the pair was supposed to do does not get done. The young's seeing is dismissed before it can be sifted, and the old's judgement is dismissed before it can be applied. The culture falls back on whichever generation has the loudest voice and most leverage at the moment and whichever it is, the work the other was supposed to do will not get done.

Some of this you may have watched in your own life. There is, in many of the places you have been, a sense that the conversation between the older and the younger is not being conducted well. The older feel patronised by the younger, or not listened to, or written off as having nothing to offer. The younger feel patronised by the older, or not taken seriously, or told that their experience is invalid because they have not yet earned the right to speak. Both sides are partially correct in their grievance, and both sides, in being partially correct, miss the larger truth. The conversation is supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be uncomfortable. The two sides have different vantage points on the world and the unease of bringing them into contact is not a sign that something is going wrong; it is the sign that the work is going on. What goes wrong is when the unease becomes contempt and the contempt cuts off the constant dialogue that is supposed to be taking place.

I want to draw your attention, now, to something you may not have given yourself credit for. You have already been adding to the conversation. Every choice you made about obeying the rules or to disobey them; to conform to the group or challenge the status quo; the way you drive; the career you chose - if you did - despite the small disappointment of the elder who had hoped for something else; that too would have been an addition. The conviction you arrived at on your own, against the inertia of where you grew up — that was an addition. The small kindness you extended to someone whose kind your formation had not predisposed you to extend kindness to — that would have been an addition. These are not small. They are the actual operation of the surplus I have been describing. They are what change is made of.

You may also have failed to add, at moments when adding was open to you. You may have laughed at someone who should not have been laughed at, because the room was laughing and the cost of not laughing felt larger in the moment than the cost of laughing. You may have stayed silent when speaking was warranted, because the speaking would have been awkward and the silence was easier. You may have chosen, in some small and unremarked way, to reproduce something that was given to you that you knew, even as you were reproducing it, that it would have been better not to reproduce. These too are part of your record. They are not unforgivable. In fact, they are extremely common; almost everyone has them in considerable quantities. But they are real, and the work of becoming honest includes acknowledging that the moments of failure to add are also moments of formation — they form the version of you that will be on hand the next time the same kind of moment arrives.

This brings me to something I am going to say more about in the next chapter, but I want to introduce it here. Within any generation, in any people, there are a few people who carry a particular charge. They are the ones who, when the moment arrives, do not laugh at the victim. They are the ones who say in the meeting what no one else will say. They are the ones who refuse the work that should not be done. They are the ones whose small additions accumulate into something the rest of the generation can recognise, after a while, as a way of being that was not there before. These are not the geniuses of their generation, necessarily, or the loudest, or the most prominent. Most of them are obscure. What sets them apart is that they have, somehow, been so formed that they cannot pretend not to have seen what they have seen, and that the cost of pretending is, for them, larger than the cost of acting on what they have seen.

I do not yet know — neither of us does — whether you or I are that type of person. The question cannot be answered by us in advance. It will be answered, when the moment comes, by who you and I have been becoming across the unremarked days. What I want you to take from this chapter is the simpler recognition that you have been part of the work the whole time. You have been adding, even when you did not know you were adding, and your additions, however small, are part of how what was given to you will reach the people who come after you. The chain does not pass through you neutrally. It passes through you bent into the shape that you are.

The next chapter is about the few who carry the charge — what they look like, how they are made, why they are needed, what it costs them, and the question of whether you might be one of them. We will not answer the question because you will not know the answer until the moment that asks it of you arrives. But we will look at what makes the answer go one way rather than the other, and at the modest, unspectacular work by which a person, across the years that no one in particular is watching, becomes the kind of person who answers it well.