First, Buy Time

© Laurence B. Winn

Jan 1, 1999

I choose the beginning of a new year to restate the point of frontier theory, which is that the absence of physical frontiers is hurtful and eventually fatal for human beings. You can use the theory to your advantage in the short term by exercising its predictive potential. You can use the theory to save the world in the longer term. You can ignore it. Your choice.

Let others spell out how to lose weight, eat healthy and develop muscle tone. I choose this time to suggest what parents, children, churches, private enterprise and government can contribute to their own survival. Because that, ultimately, is what is at stake.

I can't tell you how to be happy when every day is a struggle to stay alive, or make ends meet, or keep your job, or get good grades or make the team. I can tell you that the year ahead will shine brighter if you have choices. The way to get those choices without taking them from others is to contribute to the building of a frontier in space.

How?

First, buy time. Realize that enclosure, which is the absence of frontiers, kills by striking at the reproductive unit we know as the family. It does this by devaluing life. Burdened with the realities of environmental damage, terrorism, epidemic disease and the rest of the evening news, children are growing up fast and mean, if they grow up at all. That the suicide rate among children and young adults tripled between 1960 and 1990 is often attributed to stress created by competition for grades, for adult attention, for peer recognition and worry about what, if anything, the future holds. There is a body of research indicating that such sustained and repeated stress not only leads to depression, but can alter the brain chemistry of genetically vulnerable children in a way that predisposes them to violence. Such children kill their own children. It's John Calhoun's rats (see Universe 25) with human complications.

Previous episodes of local enclosure, of which Britain's is one of the most recent, ended with emigration or genocide. Now enclosure is global. That is new. It means there is no place on this planet which satisfies the definition of a frontier: resources without proprietors. What comes next cannot be pleasant.

Symptomatic treatment of enclosure is not enough. But, keeping in mind that enclosure will kill us anyway if this is all we do, I offer the following suggestions to buy time.

Parents need to play the leading role, and it's going to be tough. For fathers, it means getting married and staying that way. For mothers, it means dropping out of the work force. If the kids are in public school, pull them out and teach them at home. No care providers. No second jobs. Take the reduced standard of living. (Of course, to be fair about this, the roles of mother and father could be reversed.)

Private enterprise can mitigate some of the nastiness of the foregoing draconian options by offering solutions like flex time, job sharing and telecommuting.

Churches can do what churches have always done: pick up the pieces and take up the slack. Not every child will have two parents. Not every family will be able to make it financially. Some marriages will require a lot of support to stay whole. Churches can provide community, comfort and guidance.

I'm tempted to say that government's role should be to butt out. Government has done a lot of damage. It has all but destroyed the family by giving it permission to break up and offering financial support to the fragments. Public education has undermined parental authority by excluding parents from the classroom, ignoring their values and acting as a screen behind which adolescents can do as they please.

But I think government can be part of the solution. It can encourage the use of communications instead of transportation, enabling people to work from home. It can encourage home education by offering curricular support and use of facilities to home educators. And it must, without fail and with the appropriate use of the free enterprise system, create a spacefaring civilization. The effort alone will make a difference in juvenile behavior and outlook because it signals that there is going to be a future, and that children can become, not cogs in a "sustainable development" machine, but men and women of destiny.