I became a grandfather for the first time in the early hours of May 20.  I have transitioned to grandparenthood.  The little girl is the first grandchild on both sides of her family.  I was in that position myself many moons ago.  I think it was easier for my grandparents.  They did not transition in any way that I ever noticed.  They were grandparents for as long as I knew them and they stayed that way.

The old people that I knew when I was young don’t seem so old anymore.  The oldest of my grandparents, my father’s father, was born in 1885.  With a little luck, my granddaughter will be complaining about her lumbago as her grandchildren ring in the start of the twenty-second century.

Seeing a new generation begin is a reminder that we are all bridges from the past to the future.  Most of the traffic that passes over those bridges carries selective nostalgia in the form of detailed accounts of walking to school through the snow and a general head-shaking attitude toward the deterioration of modern life.  It is too easy to remember a past that is better than today, better than the past as it was.

Like most of their generation, people like my grandparents devoted their energy to solving the problems they faced and had little time for introspection, or any interest in it.  They were intelligent and engaged but their focus was outward not directed at themselves.  We are more likely than they were to see racism, injustice, and prejudice, although they experienced it more directly and more frequently than we do.  We worry about micro-aggressions.  Hitler and Stalin dismembering Poland, that was aggression, nothing micro about it.  The threat we face from Islamic fundamentalism has ideological pretensions on a par with national socialism and its international cousin, but nothing like their firepower.  If they weren’t blowing something up every six months, we’d forget they were there.

I was born in the year that Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color barrier in major league baseball.  My granddaughter is born in the eighth year of the presidency of a man whose father was born and lived most of his life in Kenya.  I remember people speculating in the 1950s and 1960s about the possibility of an African American president sometime in the future.  The consensus was always somewhere between “never” and “not in my lifetime”.  But it happened.  A nation that had permitted racial segregation within living memory elected an African American as its political leader.  The argument over the merits of the individual who filled that role is beside the point.

The past is not all it’s cracked up to be.  The overwhelming likelihood is that little Quinn and her cohort will lead lives of even greater personal fulfillment, ease, and enjoyment than have their ancestors.  All of us have been lucky to live in a prosperous commercial republic founded – and at times conducted — on the principle that the prime purpose of government is to protect the rights of its citizens.  The “prosperous commercial” part will mean that the already impressive advances in medicine, genetics, materials, information technology, systems management, and other practical arts will increase both in rate and in quantity for the generation now being born and for their descendants.  They will enjoy a better material existence and will have the opportunity for a richer intellectual and emotional existence than their ancestors, although we have had it pretty good, compared to our own predecessors.  It would take active stupidity to get in the way of that process, although there is an abundant supply on offer, its owners lining up for the chance to make policy for the rest of us.

I worry about the “protect the rights of its citizens” part.  We have gotten a taste in recent years of what it’s like when the organs of state power are put to work to advance ideological interests.  The political power of courts, prosecutors, presidents, and administrative agencies is growing in tandem with the increased reluctance by legislators and news organizations to act as a brake on the unwarranted exercise of executive, administrative, and judicial power.

It is not foreordained that this process will continue.  It can be reversed.  But if it does continue, one generation is plenty of time to produce a nation populated by regimented minds living in a mental desert while surrounded by material prosperity.  To quote William S. Burroughs, “A functioning police state needs no police.”  The distance from Marilyn Mosby or Eric Schneiderman to Andrey Vyshinsky is not so great.  You start where we are today and push a little more every year.  There is no flashing red light to warn of danger ahead.  You arrive at your desert destination without noticing the subtle changes in the landscape along the way.

Advances in technology and progress in material well-being do not guarantee that the people enjoying their fruits will lead meaningful lives.  After all, the first satellite was put into orbit by the Soviets.  A slave society produced a major technological breakthrough (with a lot of help from captured German scientists).  Personal freedom is essential to our full development as humans, but it’s an impediment to the full development of governmental power.  Governments will try to increase their power the same way the Yankees will try to win another pennant.

It isn’t only governments that threaten liberty.  Real danger springs from the way so many minds are being closed, willingly, to challenging opinions and unwelcome information.  The modern trend to suppress dissenting opinions courts greater danger than would their unfettered expression.  If, for example, the “warmists” are correct, they can afford to allow the “deniers” the right to express dissent.  The correct view will be supported by sufficient evidence and logic to win the policy debate.  Of course, it may be that the reason to suppress dissent is to ensure victory in the policy debate, no matter how the evidence plays out.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Galileo ran into an opposition that was highly attuned to its own catalog of micro-agressions.

Little Quinn is born at a time of unlimited possibilities.  She and her cohort will have great scope to apply their talents and their gifts to the development of their potential and the improvement of the lives of others.  That’s a process that has been going on for a long time, but it increases with each generation as technological progress opens up vistas and uncovers niches that we could not see until they were presented to us.  Undoubtedly, earlier centuries produced their share of genius computer programmers and geneticists.  They arrived too early.  The fields in which they might have exercised those talents were invisible, enclosed behind a high wall.  The babies now being born will have fewer of those walls in their way than anyone in human history, other than the ones who come after them.  My hope is that Quinn and her cohort will achieve the great things ahead of them as free people.  That will be up to them, but it is also up to us who are preparing the way.

In the meantime, the important thing is to take the best possible care of this new child without overindulging her.  I can tell already that this will be a challenge for my wife, who has taken to being a grandmother with the energy and enthusiasm that she brings to everything she does.  I feel I should warn her to resist the urge to spoil the child.  The infant is so good-natured and so strikingly beautiful, I may find the urge hard to resist myself.