Seven Generations
This is the 8th and last article in the Ethics Series. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. We reserve the option to revisit the topic from time to time…
Prologue: Buenos Aires
Boarding a flight in the early 1980s, I raised an eyebrow at the Eastern Airlines vinyl on the cabin wall. (It seems, when you acquire a plane in Argentina, you don’t strip and refit, but simply get it flying!) The cabin had the “patina of experience.” Glancing out, I noticed there were two engine pods under the wing. As we started with a roar, reality crystallized: it was a Boeing — 707. We were flying a museum piece!
Prologue: Athens
The Parthenon, built around 434 BC, was designed to be a lasting monument. During its lifetime it has been three kinds of church; exploded, plundered, and deconstructed for parts. A 19th century restoration used authentic iron support bars. Unfortunately, the original lead coating was omitted, allowing the formation of rust, which swelled, expanded and cracked the marble — creating even greater damage. The current repair uses titanium and new quarried marble along with supporting adhesives — new materials designed to fit, complement and over time to “weather in.”
“In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” — Iroquois Nation Maxim
Multi-Dimensionality
Things change when we add the additional dimension of TIME to an ethical computation. It’s one thing if it’s good for me, and another if it’s also good for my family. Throw in the community and my local business and things get interesting. In a previous Cornerstones, we also discussed the larger arenas of mega group, living things, the environment, spiritual concerns, and the Infinite with a Capital I. Makes your head swim, trying to compute “Greatest Good.”
But let’s just torture ourselves a bit more…
What about TIME? More than the next five minutes? The next five days? Months? Years? You get the idea.
When an architect designs a building, she could be thinking only of getting paid and getting off the continent. Or she could be thinking of making the first of a hundred lasting monuments to taste, impact on the profession, positive indications for how to live a better life, and setting a standard to be followed by generations to come after. Phidias, Ictinus, and Callicrates built something that has almost “outlasted time itself.” Take that Mies. Geary. Zaha. But each of them is leaving a legacy.
Talk about raising the bar…
Madison, Hancock, Franklin, Jefferson. They were thinking beyond next season.
Marshall. Eisenhower. Gandhi. Lincoln. Churchill.
Think the Space Needle. The Intercontinental Telephone Cable. The Arc de Triomphe. Subways. Notre Dame. Interchangeable Parts and Moveable Type. The Arched Bridge and Aqueducts. Insurance. Reinforced Concrete. The Code of Hammurabi. Postscript. The Great Wall. The Stock Exchange. Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge. Eiffel’s Tower. The Great Canadian Railroad. Vatican City. The Shard. The Crystal Set, the Vacuum Tube, The Transistor, Integrated Circuits, Chips. Sydney’s Opera House. Virgin Galactic. Can you speak to our omissions here?
Art: Michelangelo. Leonardo. Pablo. Calder. Motherwell. Indiana.
Poetry: Yates. Cummings. Ferlinghetti. Nash. Poe. Coleridge. Joyce. Cocteau. Neruda.
Medicine: Jonas Salk. Banting & Best. Pasteur.
Cinema: Hitchcock. Kurosawa. Welles. Ingmar Bergman. John Huston. Truffaut. Fellini.
Physics: Newton. Einstein. Stapp. Heisenberg.
Literature & Theater: Shakespeare. Moliere. Jonson. Stoppard. Dumas. Tolkien. Brothers Grimm. Twain.
Music: Strauss. The Beatles. Ravi Shankar. The Stones. Beethoven. Sinatra. Bach. Joplin. Mozart.
Religion: Jesus of Nazareth. Gautama Siddhartha. Lao Tsu. Muhammad. The Lamas.
Masterpieces… and Masters.
Were they thinking of getting home early for dinner? Cashing out? Getting the next promotion? Perhaps a portion of genius is the willingness to think about a further future, and the needs of a world beyond our immediate reach. It’s going to cost us to rebuild the bridges and the infrastructure. And that would require something generally missing in our planned obsolescence world — a lofty perspective — one that considers the next seven generations.
Boeing thought long and hard about the 707, so I could fly one with confidence nearly thirty years later. The Plane and the Parthenon both lasted of course, but more importantly served as definitive influences for generations of engineers and designers. You cannot speak to the 7th Generation, save through your art and actions.
Applications
1. Personal
If you’re going to leave behind a financial fortune, a building, a musical form, a theatrical legacy, a body of work; you’re going to have to start thinking, planning, and acting that way now. Go ahead, give yourself permission! Enjoy the moment of fear as you contemplate the challenges. But don’t forget to contemplate the incredible satisfaction of seeing your ideas take shape and find their way into the arcana of civilization.
2. At Home
Under the immediate pressures of caring for family, a lot of greatness goes unrealized. Sure, it’s great to raise wonderful children, and provide a safe haven for the family. But we’re talking about a different order of magnitude here. If you’re willing to imagine, to aspire to greatness; you’ve got to think long term; and about your great, great, great, great, great grand-children — and their peers. Perspective. Hmmm. Changes things. It’s not either/or, that’s too easy an out. Raise your sights and your family’s. Think Einstein’s Mother…
3. At Work
Is there a sliver of greatness still glowing in the heart of your organization? Can you breathe it into flame with your over-the-top passion and commitment? Can you encourage your team to start thinking of changing the industry — or the world? We’ve all lived to see some big thinkers create wonderful effects on all of our lives. And we’ve witnessed the opposite. Can we somehow, together, make life better, cleaner, more sustainable, safer, more complete, and more trouble free for those who follow after? Buy a colleague a drink and start imagining.
Seven Generations: Somewhere between 175 and 210 years. From Aerospace to Architecture, from Spiritual Counsel to Entertainment, if we all thought not only about the greatest good for all dimensions, but also about the next seven generations, what good could we do?
Perhaps it’s not only “What good shall I do today?” but also “What greatness can I send to the future?”
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