The Power of Posterity

David Brooks, of the New York Times, offered an inspiring proposal in “The Power of Posterity,” a proposal that fits with what I have been advocating in my ethics and character work. He basically indicated that much of what we do, we do for the unborn children.

Now, some of you may be saying, “What?” in great surprise at this proposal, particularly those of you without children. But think about it. In his scenario (which came from the Marginal Revolution blog) the question is asked, what would happen if there was a “freak solar event that sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun?” This obviously implies that the culture on that half of the earth would essentially come to an end when the children and adults on that half of the earth died. People from the other half of the earth might immigrate, but they would import their culture. After all, since the sterilized folks would soon be dying out, immigrants would have little incentive to adopt the dying culture as their own. The sterilization question triggers us to ask what difference it would make to our lives if we knew that our culture would end in 50 to 100 years.

I often propose that our motivation for ethically transforming our schools, organizations, businesses, and communities is that we want to turn over a world worth having to our children and our grandchildren. When we speak of preserving the environment, or stopping global warming, or not polluting, or saving the Earth, we are aiming for the selflessness of not taking more than our share, of saving something for those who come after us. Not only can we not disconnect ourselves from people who are currently living – because what we do ripples out to affect people and systems beyond us – but it seems that we can’t disconnect ourselves from the generations that come after us either.

In fact, Brooks goes further to suggest that much of what we do, we do for its lasting value. “Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high ambitions. Politics become insignificant. Even words like justice lose meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the here and now.” The great art and music and architecture and companies and business products and government activities are done, not only with the thought of enjoyment and a personal sense of purpose and benefit, but in order to create a lasting contribution to society. In some cases, people engage in these activities for the possibility of lasting fame. Brooks suggests that if there is no future to our culture, if there are no unborn children to inherit what we do, we will reduce our focus to the here and now, and focus only on ourselves as individuals, on what is good for us. As he says, “People would themselves become children, basing their lives on pleasure and ease instead of meanings to be fulfilled.”

Is that where we want to be? Is that what we want our values and our way of living to reflect? I would suggest that we are bigger than that, that, even if we don’t have children ourselves, we realize that our future society and culture lies with our children. There is a reason that we advocate for children, for their education, for their health, for their wellbeing, a reason that extends beyond their vulnerability and inability to advocate for themselves. They are our future. And we have to decide what our future will look like. We sometimes have to decide to sacrifice the now on behalf of that future. We have to look beyond our own pleasure to some greater virtues. The question is, what will those virtues be? What do you want to stand for? What kind of a world do you want to create and pass down to future generations?