The notion that we shouldn’t cry over spilled milk — more broadly, that we should not lament what we cannot change — is the claim I set out to challenge in this TED talk. Granted, one purpose of the spilled-milk saying is to remind us not to sweat the small stuff, a sentiment I wholly support. But that saying is also part of a larger set of cultural admonitions against experiencing regret: “What’s done is done,” “Let bygones be bygones,” “Let the dead bury the dead.” We have this idea — especially here in America, a relentlessly forward-facing nation — that looking backward, particularly toward times of difficulty and pain, is both a failure of will and a waste of time. Ideally, it seems, we should look back just once, at the end of our days, in order to survey the past and triumphantly announce, like Edith Piaf, “Je ne regrette rien.“
I has also encounter this lack of regret in our technoscientific establishment. Because technoscientists & progress engineers are only concentrated on the myth of infinite benefit, they need never look behind and fully take on what techno-economic progress has wrought. Can it actually be the case that one of the last of the philosophic thinkers in the sciences to feel any public regret was Oppenheimer? Are there others?
Why do we not want to see our politicians, business leaders, and technoscientists exhibit public regret? We almost demand it from athletes & actors… the very people we should not be turning to as examples for how to live. [Not to sound too intellectually snobbish, but face it folks: celebrities are the entertainment.]
The real leaders–and by virtue of their power, the real examples for being “good Americans”–are the folks with authority… powers-that-be who go through the world, as my Puerto Rican seminary colleagues would say, SIN VERGUENZA (without shame).