Try not to be so jaded.
Each fall, Beloit College in Wisconsin releases a “Mindset List” that attempts to convey the worldview of the class currently entering college. For my class, the Class of 2009, the Mindset List includes observations such as “heart-lung transplants have always been available,” “Wayne Gretzky never played for Edmonton,” and “the federal budget has always been more than a trillion dollars.” Every Penn undergrad was born during the Reagan administration, though fortunately was too young to remember any of it.
But aside from these relatively random facts, the List doesn’t really get at what I feel is the most magical truth about our generation: We know more now than has ever been known.
The world is older now than it has ever been. This week, my history professor, Alan Charles Kors, described the philosopher Francis Bacon’s argument that this essentially means that we should not be deceived by the authority of “the ancients,” since in terms of the age of the earth, they were the youth of mankind. We are the experienced ones! We’ve seen it all.
So what do college students today see from where they stand? Question 4B on the Penn application for the class of 2009 asked, “In your opinion, what was the most important moment in history, and why?” It was a short answer, about thirty words. Since admissions information is confidential, I set out to hear what people said (or would have said) to answer the question.
Many sophomores didn’t remember ever even answering the question. With several trillion years of history to choose from, some students I asked couldn’t summon up a single important moment, while others were torn between many. The most popular answer was the birth of Christ. Some people referenced moments in the physical history of the world, such as the Big Bang, or advancements in science and technology, like fire, the wheel and modeling the structure of DNA.
Wharton sophomore Travis Schlegel cited the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, which effectively began World War I. On my application, I said that it was when Cain asked God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” One of my friends asserted that it was the invention of caffeinated beverages. The question has since been replaced with the more brown-nosing “Name a Penn professor with whom you would like to study or conduct research and explain why.”
In keeping with the Mindset List, I also asked students what they thought had been the most important moment since they had been alive. Although I’ve heard that September 11th will be my generation’s “where were you” moment, akin to the assassination JFK, surprisingly few students actually brought up September 11 as the most important moment they had lived through. The most frequent response by far was the birth of the internet. Following that was the fall of the Berlin Wall.
So, sure, I never saw the Great One play for Edmonton. But we each have a rink-side seat from which to view all that has come before us, and that’s a lot of greatness to learn from.
We are products of our history, but we can also decide what comes next.
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