I went to an interesting exhibition called “Babylon” at the Louvre* over the weekend. A lot of the explanations were in French, so I am sure I missed a lot of the factual history. What was clear was the mythology surrounding the Tower of Babel that God supposedly destroyed when the civilization became too decadent. As I recall, this account heralds the beginning of disparate languages and the considerable miscommunication that has been going on between human beings every since.

We’ve been working a lot recently on the formation of the Eldering Institute, which is, among other things, focused on promoting “multigenerational collaboration” (which of course implies intergenerational communication). Our commitment to this came from my recognizing that men and women from different generations are speaking different languages. I am not speaking about ‘hip’ jargon or technical lingo. It may all sound like we’re speaking the same language (English or whatever language one might be using in conversation), but we are not. Different generations have dramatically different worldviews, and our language is what holds and gives us our worldview—what Fernando Flores calls our ‘disclosive space’. The world that is ‘disclosed’ to us, in turn, defines the boundaries of what we see is possible. As well, our actions are always correlated with our disclosive space, which is why we typically get more of what we expect and become habituated—if not addicted—to our historically determined notions of reality.

I think the gap between my worldview and my son’s is much larger than the gap between my world and my father’s. I would attribute this mostly to our technological rate of change and all the interconnectivity that goes with it. It isn’t that we can’t understand what is being said. It is that what we understand doesn’t seem to bring us closer together.

If the basic relationship between my son’s world and mine is based in translating back and forth, then we are missing a very important principle. That is that innovation happens only at the intersection of worldviews. My son and daughter’s world has the same problems as mine, but there are no solutions in either of our worldviews. We need each other if we are going to create a future that can work for everyone.

* For more information on the exhibition, check out Time’s article, Babylon: Visions of Vice.