Riffing off my review of Eberstadt’s book, Tim Burke wrote an excellent essay last week on modernity, change, and our children.

(I hope I’m not doing violence to his thought by boiling it down, but here goes.)

Burke writes that much of the despair about children’s experiences today is just really part of our own adult confusion about modernity and fear of change. Eberstadt and other conservatives are responding to our desire to hold on to the past. To make the future like the past is an impossibility, he writies. It takes “extraordinary resources and will to deliberately change the forward drift of social change.”

Most of the time, we should just accept that what we were is not what we are or will be. That humans are resilient, and children most of all. Our children will be ok in day care, or at home, just as we were ok with the range of things done for us and to us when we were children…

So much of this angst, from Eberstadt or many other commentators, is about the most confusing and difficult fact of human life: our children will not be us. Modern middle-class Americans are more confused than most about this fact. We hope our children will be better than us. We hope that they will be us. We fear that they will be worse than us. But we are not prepared to relax and deal with the truth: that most of the time they will be nothing more or less than different. That children are both alienation from as well as connection to the present, and that this is neither good nor bad. It simply is.

I’m not sure why but Burke’s essay depressed me terribly. Maybe it’s because I’m going to turn forty next year. It could be because I recently discovered that I don’t understand Sponge Bob whom my kids adore. It could be because there’s a fatalism about his post, which undermines liberals, as well as conservatives.

I agree with Burke that there is no way to turn back the clock. Conservative efforts to force women back to the home, to cut out daycare, to push abstinence-only sex education, and to stamp out rap music seem misguided to me. As Tim said, a return to the fabled days of old would cost too much to engineer and would interfere with other progress that has been made.

However, I do think that the present is far from perfect. I do think that conservative criticism of the present can be useful to liberals. They do sometimes get things right. There may be some real problems with our kid’s education and upbringing. The lack of free time exercising and the excessive use of Ritalin is not something to shrug our shoulders over.

As a liberal, I think that we can make our lives better, not by turning back the clock and not by acquiescing to the whims of fate, but by thinking up something totally different for the future.