Thinking Seven Generations Back and Forward

Some Native American nations hold dear the idea that the potential benefits or harm that would be felt by the next seven generations should be amply considered when making major decisions.* That seems to be a very significant idea—and one almost impossible to implement sufficiently.  

I asked AI to create an image that refers to taking care of
the earth for the next seven generations. This was the result.

I began thinking about seven generations while working on this blog post that originally was to be primarily about the Louisiana Purchase.

The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed 220 years ago this week, on April 30, 1803. That was of tremendous importance for the United States, which had become a nation only 27 years earlier.

That purchase was a major accomplishment of President Jefferson and one of the most significant events in the history of the young nation—and even in the history of the nation up until the present. It is widely considered to be the greatest real estate deal in history.

The U.S. purchased the Louisiana Territory from France at a price of $15 million, or approximately four cents an acre. It added to the United States an area larger than eight Great Britains, doubling the size of the United States and opening up the continent to its westward expansion.

Jefferson explained his action to Congress by saying that this fertile and extensive country would afford “an ample provision for our posterity, and a wide spread for the blessings of freedom and equal laws.”**

President Jefferson was perhaps thinking about the next seven generations in his efforts that led to the acquisition of that huge territory for the U.S.

Without question, that purchase had tremendous benefits for most White U.S. citizens—and considerable harm for Native Americans— for the next seven generations, and more.

Thinking Seven Generations Back

For individual persons, seven generations go back to their grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents. In my case, Hartwell Seat (1749~1827) was my seventh-generation grandfather whose family name I bear. George Seat (1878~1952) was my grandfather, and Hartwell's grandson Franklin (1818~1905 was George’s grandfather). 

So, seven generations before I was born in 1938, Hartwell Seat was born in Virginia just six years after Thomas Jefferson’s birth. In 1797, Hartwell and his family migrated to Tennessee, just a year after it had become the 16^th state of the USA.

The Mississippi River was the western border of the new state, and at that time it was the westernmost edge of the United States. Just seven years later, though, the vast expanse of land on the other side of the Mississippi became U.S. territory.

When working on this article, it was a bit of a shock when I realized that the Louisiana Purchase, which had always seemed like ancient history to me, was made when my seventh-generation ancestor was 54 years old and living less than 200 miles from the eastern border of that vast new territory.

Just fifteen years later, Littleton Seat, my sixth-generation grandfather, migrated with his wife Elizabeth and two young daughters (as well as two of his brothers and their families) to Missouri Territory. That was three years before Missouri became the 24^th state in 1821.

Littleton’s great-grandson George, my beloved Grandpa Seat, was born just 75 years after the Louisiana Purchase, and his death was just one year shy of being as long after his birth as the Louisiana Purchase was before his birth.

Thinking Seven Generations Forward

Now, turning from the generations of the past (and the Louisiana Purchase), what about the generations to come? With me as the first generation, my first two great-grandchildren, who were born in 2022, are the fourth generation. Their great-grandchildren will be the seventh generation.

It is hard to imagine what all will happen and how the world will change during Nina’s and Vander’s lifetime. How can we even begin to imagine what the world will be like when their great-grandchildren are born? That will be well into the 22^nd century.

But maybe the Native Americans were right: we need to consider how the decisions we make now will affect the seventh generation in the future. Of greatest need along this line is concerted thought and action regarding the current global ecological crisis.

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* In the 2022 book What We Owe the Future, author William MacAskill writes about "longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time" (p. 4). Early in "The Case for Longtermism," the first chapter, he cites a Native American who wrote, "We . . . make every decision that we make relate to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come. . . . We consider: will this be to the benefit of the seventh generation?" (p. 11).

** Jefferson’s words are cited on page 49 of William Catton’s book Overshoot, which was the main topic of my March 23 blog post, and it was related to the author’s explanation of the significance of the Louisiana Purchase in expanding the “carrying capacity” of the United States at that time. 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

As many of you know, I have seven grandchildren. The oldest celebrated her 38^th birthday in January, so I have been a grandfather for 38 years now. In 2022, two of my granddaughters became mothers, so now I also have two precious great-grandchildren, the first born a year ago last month.

I have been thinking about my grandchildren in a new way because of reading two books written to or for grandchildren. Those books are closely related to my January 28 blog post.

Larry R. Rasmussen’s book The Planet You Inherit was published last year. Its subtitle is Letters to My Grandchildren When Uncertainty’s a Sure Thing. I had the privilege of writing a review of that book for The Englewood Review of Books, and you can read that review here.

Rasmussen (b. 1939) is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, emeritus, at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Among his published books are Earth Community, Earth Ethics (1996) and Earth Honoring Faith (2013).

It is no surprise that the letters written to Eduardo and Martin Rasmussen Villegas (b. 2015 and 2018), his two grandchildren, are primarily related to his many years of ecotheological teaching and writing.

While the letters clearly express the writer’s love for his two young grandsons, it will likely be 2035 and beyond before they will be able to comprehend the meaning and significance of those letters.

Maybe, though, the writer’s intention was to say important things to us adults who read those letters now, as well as to Eduardo and Martin, who will be reading them much later.

One of Rasmussen’s most important letters is titled “Responsible by Degrees,” written in August 2020. There he broached the possibility of “widespread civilizational collapse”—and asserts that “we know we must put an end to a growing, extractive economy running on ecological deficits.”

Rasmussen, though, has hopeful views about humanity’s ability to confront the current and coming ecological crisis effectively, and those views need to be pondered thoughtfully.

Still, this challenging book written for the author’s young grandsons needs to be balanced with careful consideration of more realistic views about what is most likely to occur in Eduardo’s and Martin’s lifetime.

William Ophuls’s Apologies to the Grandchildren is a 2018 book of essays, the first one bearing the same title as the book, which does give a more realistic and less hopeful view of the current ecological crisis.

(I first learned of Ophuls, born in 1934 and with a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1973, from the video by Michael Dowd that I introduced in my January 28^th blog post linked to above).

Ophuls begins his essay with stark words: ”Civilization is, by its very nature, a long-running Ponzi scheme. It lives by robbing nature and borrowing from the future, exploiting its hinterland until there is nothing left to exploit, after which it implodes.”

He continues by saying that civilization “generates a temporary and fictitious surplus that it uses to enrich and empower the few and to dispossess and dominate the many. Industrial civilization is the apotheosis and quintessence of this fatal course.”

He goes on to write these blunt words to the grandchildren, “A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation. So we bequeath you a ruined planet that dooms you to a hardscrabble existence, or perhaps none at all” (p. 1)

What Can We Say/Do? While I would like to embrace Rasmussen’s hopeful view, I have become convinced by Ophuls and by Dowd—as well as by William Catton, whom I plan to introduce in later blog posts—that my grandchildren and their children will experience a world of increasing gloom.

Perhaps there is still time for necessary changes to be made, but that is doubtful—and there is little evidence to indicate that such changes will likely be made. Perhaps, sadly, little can realistically be done other than to offer deep apologies to the grandchildren.

Yet, surely, we can work toward pushing the impending collapse farther into the future and encourage the grandchildren to find ways to flourish now in the present, regardless of what looms in a future that, unfortunately, may not be as uncertain as Rasmussen thinks. 

Why are Teenage Girls “Not Okay”?

Soon after posting my February 16 blog article in which I referred to Diana Butler Bass, I read Bass’s latest newsletter on her Substack blog called The Cottage (which has 32,000 subscribers!) It was partly about teenage girls, which hit home with me. 

Image from Bass's newsletter

Natalie, my youngest granddaughter, turned 13 that very day. I first mentioned her in the blog post I made on February 19, 2010, three days after her birth, and I will probably refer to that article again in an upcoming blog post.

Naomi, Natalie’s sister, is celebrating her 19^th birthday today, so the youngest two of my five granddaughters are both teenagers. They have been, and are, a great delight to June and me. 

“The Girls Are Not Okay” is the title of Bass’s newsletter (click here to read it). Bass was not writing about all girls, and I am deeply grateful that she was not writing about girls such as my granddaughters, who both seem to be well-adjusted young women. But sadly, many girls are “not okay.”

Bass’s article begins by referring to the new study of USAmerica’s teens released by the Center for Disease Control’s Youth Rick Behavior Survey (YRBS), and she reports the findings were “stark and frightening.” She writes that “the crisis is particularly urgent among teenage girls.”*

The YRBS report states that according to the data, “teen girls are confronting the highest levels of sexual violence, sadness, and hopelessness they have ever reported to YRBS.” (A summary of the YRBS report can be found here.)

Interestingly, Bass seeks to link the malaise of teenage girls to an aspect of contemporary society that would not at first glance be considered a cause of that dis-ease.

“White Christian Nationalism” is part of the problem, according to Bass. She refers to “A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” a study released by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) on February 8 (see here).

That study indicates that White Christian Nationalists, by and large, “believe women must submit to men” and that “society is diminished when women have more opportunities to work outside of the home.” These ideas reflect a belief in “complementarianism,” a widely held view by evangelical Christians.

Bass (who celebrated her 64^th birthday last Sunday) states, “There is little doubt among historians that second wave feminism of the 1970s improved the lives of women and girls in terms of education, health, work, finances, and overall equality.”

She mentions the significance of the 1974 book All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation, authored by Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty. As Bass says, that book “caused a sensation in evangelical churches and theological circles.”

June and I, along with many other progressive evangelicals, read that book with much appreciation during the mid-1970s. But a decade later, conservative evangelical opposition had grown to the extent that an organization to oppose the emphasis on gender equality was formed.

That organization called The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was founded in 1987.** That group was the result of anti-equality backlash, and it forwarded the position of “complementarianism.”

While, of course, there are several other important reasons why so many teenage girls are not okay today, I think that Bass is right in declaring that “evangelical theology” with its emphasis on complementarianism for a generation now “bears a significant part of the blame.”

As Bass gladly notes, formerly prominent Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leader Russell Moore ten days ago now posted “a somewhat repentant editorial against complementarianism” (see here).

Unfortunately, though, the SBC continues to support male supremacy. Just two days ago Religious News Service reported that “Southern Baptists oust Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church for naming a female pastor.” That’s a bad sign for teenage girls in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

 
Strong egalitarian homes with nurturing parents is one of the most important keys to rearing teenage girls who are okay. I am truly grateful that my teenage granddaughters have such a home—and have also been strongly supported by their egalitarian American and Japanese grandmothers.

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* Not long after reading Bass’s newsletter, I read “American teens are unwell because American society is unwell,” a Feb. 15 opinion piece on The Washington Post website. It was directly related to the same YRBS report. And then on the morning of Feb. 17, the WaPo posted “The crisis in American girlhood,” another opinion piece regarding the same report.

** In “Fed Up With Fundamentalism’s View of Women,” the eighth chapter of my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020), I wrote about the founding and influence of this organization among “fundamentalists” (see pp. 240~2). 

A Special Grandchild

Every child and grandchild is special in his or her own way. June and I have four children and seven grandchildren, and we think that each one is special.

This article is about our special grandchild Naomi Kei Seat. Naomi is special partly because she was born in 2004, the very year we returned to the States after 38 years in Japan. And her mother is Japanese.

Our youngest son Ken and Mina Takazaki were married in 1999. After living in Japan for a couple of years they moved to the U.S. and settled in Maryland. Naomi is their first child.

Natalie, another special grandchild, was born six years later, in 2010. But Naomi was our first grandchild who is half Japanese.

Being “half,” though, is not always a positive thing—especially in Japan. In fact, sometimes children of international marriages are called Halfs there. And especially in the past, Halfs have often been discriminated against in various ways.

Partly for that reason, soon after Naomi was born I wrote her a letter, trying first to express something of my great joy on hearing about her birth. In that letter I also mentioned how she might sometimes be referred to as a Half, but I challenged her (and her parents) to think of herself not as a Half but as a Double.

And much has been done in that regard. Naomi’s parents each speak to her primarily in their native tongue, so she and her little sister are completely bilingual to this point. And speaking two languages equally well is perhaps the main thing necessary for being a Double.

Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a term that also might be used for children like Naomi, although, technically, the term has mainly been used to refer to children who accompany their parents to live in another country and/or culture.

(The term third culture kid was coined in the 1950s by American sociologist and anthropologist Ruth Hill Useem; we had the privilege of entertaining Dr. Useem as a houseguest back in the 1970s when she was doing research in Japan.)

Naomi’s father was a true TCK, and that is what led to the international marriage and Naomi’s being born as a Double, one who has grown up knowing two languages and understanding two countries/cultures.

Some of you have a grandchild like Naomi, one who is from an international or bicultural marriage. And most of you know one or more children like that.

I encourage you to see such children, and to encourage them to see themselves, as Doubles or as TCKs, and thus as people who can, more than most, be bridges for mutual understanding between nations and/or cultures.

I am writing about Naomi at this time partly because last week she flew out to Kansas City from Washington, D.C., and June and I appreciated her bravery in making such a trip all by herself. We greatly enjoyed her five-day visit with us.

Naomi is a special grandchild. So are all the others, each in their own way. You grandparents know what I am talking about. Grandchildren are truly a blessing from above!