Report card on my generation
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/report-card-on-my-generation-20101231-19bxp.html
Peter Singer
January 1, 2011
As the first baby boomers turn 65, there are things to celebrate and
to regret.
This was to be the year in which I retired. When I was appointed to
my first permanent academic position, the superannuation salesmen
came around with graphs that showed how much I would have on
retirement, for each year up to 2011.
That I would retire in 2011 was taken for granted, for it was the
year in which I would turn 65, and retirement at that age was
mandatory. I was still under 30, so that was the distant future.
My assumption changed when I went to Princeton University, for the US
abolished the mandatory retirement age before Australia did. Now I
have colleagues working well into their 70s. So the 2011 date no
longer possesses the significance I once thought it would. Still,
many of my contemporaries are working less demanding schedules than
they used to, some taking extended breaks to travel, others reading
those books for which they could never find the time.
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We are also taking time to be grandparents - belatedly, most of us
think. Our children have generally taken longer than we did to find
the partner they want to stay with - I was married at 22, an age that
now seems barely out of adolescence - so they are having their
children later than we did. But becoming grandparents is worth the wait.
My generation was conceived in the release from fear and hardship
that accompanied the defeat of Nazism. We grew up in the shadow of
the mushroom cloud that had formed over Hiroshima. When I was 12, on
summer holiday at Mt Eliza, I watched Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck
filming On The Beach, a movie about the aftermath of World War III.
The action in Australia takes place at a time when everyone in the
northern hemisphere has died. Australians are alive but they are
doomed by the spreading radiation. By the movie's end, it has reached
Melbourne, and the final scenes show newspapers blowing in deserted
city streets.
A few years later we watched Dr Strangelove, in which a crazy
American general initiates a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union.
It didn't seem all that far-fetched. We worried, not only about a
deliberate attack, but about an accidental nuclear war, which the
eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell thought was highly likely. The
celebrated physicist and novelist C.P. Snow wrote: ''Within at the
most 10 years, some of these bombs are going off. I am saying this as
responsibly as I can. That is a certainty.'' Fortunately, he was wrong.
Though our lives have not been free of war, they have been far more
peaceful than we expected, or indeed had any right to expect, given
that the three decades before we were born had two world wars. If
someone had told us then that we would reach 65 without any nuclear
weapons being used we would have been immensely relieved.
The most traumatic conflict of our lives was the Vietnam War. In
terms of casualties, it dwarfs the conflicts now being fought in Iraq
and Afghanistan. For Australians, however, it resembles them in that
most of us escaped any direct involvement. Overall, 521 Australian
troops died. Yet the war itself took the lives of 58,000 Americans,
220,000 South Vietnamese and more than a million North Vietnamese and
Vietcong. Estimates of civilian dead - including those killed in
Cambodia and Laos - range from 420,000 to 2.5 million.
If we consider that the destabilisation of Cambodia made possible the
triumph of the Khmer Rouge and thus the notorious ''killing fields'',
the toll climbs to more than 6 million. And for what?
I marched against the Vietnam War, heckled Harold Holt, John Gorton
and Don Chipp - yes, even Chipp supported the war - and was, for a
time, president of a group called Melbourne University Campaign
Against Conscription. Today many people write about the 1960s as if
the radicals were all either Marxist ideologues espousing violence or
naive hippies stoned out of their minds. As a student of philosophy I
was interested in Marx - eventually I wrote a short book on him - but
I was never a Marxist. I smoked pot a few times, had one fascinating
trip on LSD and experimented with various other substances that
turned out to be largely innocuous. None of that had any impact on my
anti-war politics.
What needs to be said is that we were right to oppose the Vietnam War
and the conservatives who supported it were tragically mistaken.
America dropped millions of tonnes of bombs on Indochina because it
was fighting ''the international communist menace''. Australia's
involvement in the war was premised on the ''domino theory'' - that
if Vietnam went communist, the other dominoes, Thailand, Malaysia and
Indonesia, would follow and soon the communists would be on our
doorstep. Well, the communists won and the dominoes did not fall.
''International communism'' proved to be more divided than anyone had
imagined and eventually it began to crumble of its own accord.
I doubt that any of the legions of Australian tourists who have
visited Vietnam in recent years come home thinking that if only the
southern part of the country could have been prevented from becoming
communist, it would have been worth all that killing and devastation.
As we reach 65, it is worth asking how our generation has done as
stewards of the world we inherited. In several respects we are
leaving our children and grandchildren a significantly better world.
Progress towards equality, now symbolised by the fact that Australia
has a woman prime minister, has been significant. We are also less
credulous in our religious beliefs, more accepting of the freedom to
have no religious beliefs and less narrow in our sexual morality, as
symbolised again by the fact that our prime minister does not have to
pretend she is religious to win votes and feels free to live with a
man to whom she is not married.
For a generation that can remember when Australia's indigenous
inhabitants had no rights to their traditional lands and were not
even counted in the national census, Kevin Rudd's apology to our
indigenous inhabitants was another important symbol of progress.
Needless to say, there is still a long way to go.
The environmental movement that began with Earth Day in 1970 has had
many notable successes. In Australia, we lost Lake Pedder, and large
areas of old-growth forest that should never have been logged, but
the Franklin still runs free, Kakadu has been protected, along with
much of our alpine region and many other once-threatened areas of
wilderness. Surprisingly, despite the increase in size of our cities,
the air is cleaner than when we were young and our wonderful beaches
are still a joy to visit.
A new concern for animals shows signs of reversing the habits of past
generations that saw them as mere means for our use.
We can also feel some satisfaction in the knowledge that the
proportion of the world's people who live in extreme poverty is lower
now than it was when we came of age. Far more children go to school -
and girls are less likely to stay at home while their brothers go to
school. The difference is shown most dramatically in the figures the
United Nations Children's Fund provides on the number of children
under five dying from poverty-related causes. In 1960 that number was
estimated at 20 million. By 2007 it had fallen below 10 million. In
the 2010 report, it is down to 8.1 million. That is a remarkable
achievement, especially considering that in 1960 the world's
population was only 2.5 billion and it is now approaching 7 billion.
We must not forget that this still means that 22,000 children die
every day and almost all these deaths are preventable. We can and
should do much better. Yet if we think about the progress made, we
can be encouraged.
So we are passing on to the next generation a world in which the risk
of nuclear annihilation has receded, sexism, racism and even
speciesism are on the retreat, important areas of wilderness are
protected, more children than ever before go to school, and extreme
poverty and infant mortality are falling.
We would be entitled to feel that we had not done too badly, were it
not for the fact that we are also leaving our children and
grandchildren with an economy based on energy from fossil fuels and
an atmosphere that has already absorbed so much carbon dioxide that
we are on the brink of calamitous climate change. This is likely to
mean unpredictable rainfall fluctuations, more intense storms,
fiercer heat waves, rising sea levels and, by the end of the century,
perhaps hundreds of millions or even billions of climate refugees.
We have known about the problem at least since 1992, when at the Rio
de Janeiro Earth Summit the leaders of every other major nation
signed a declaration pledging to keep our emissions below the point
at which they would lead to ''dangerous anthropogenic climate
change''. We have selfishly failed to keep that promise. For that
future generations will curse us and rightly so.
--
Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and
laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public
Ethics at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is The
Life You Can Save.
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