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?

The Ultimate Challenge to a Father’s Love

Many of us will do “the right thing” when it is easy or pleasurable for us. The real test is when the right thing challenges us or may hurt us. The “hurt” might be the loss of a relationship, the loss of a job, the loss of money. And therein lay the ethical dilemmas that face us on a regular basis. If ethical behavior was easy, we would have a very different world. If ethical behavior was easy, we wouldn’t need newsletters and blogs and trainings and continuing education requirements related to ethics. And if our country’s leaders thought that ethical behavior was easy, they wouldn’t have passed Sarbanes-Oxley and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines in their attempts to motivate companies to behave ethically. They wouldn’t be fining financial institutions whose ethical behavior had challenged the very economic security of our country.

But few of us will encounter the ethical challenge faced by Alhaji Umaru Mutallab. Alhaji is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father. Umar is the son who boarded the Northwest airliner on Christmas Day with bombs strapped to his body. And as Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times commented, behind all of the fracas of questioning how Umar was able to get through security to board the plane, behind the questioning of our security systems, behind trying to figure out who to blame for the security failure, is a powerful story of fatherly sacrifice, of a father who made a very hard decision.

When Alhaji became worried about the potential danger of his son’s fervent, radical version of Islam, about his son’s newfound fundamentalist commitments, Alhaji went to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria to warn the authorities. Can you imagine doing that? Turning in your own child? This father recognized and confessed a breakdown; his confession was in the service of a greater good. In his case, the breakdown might have been in the family or the community or the religious institution in which the son was raised. In other situations, breakdowns may occur in our assumptions, our schools, our companies or organizations. But the key is that we don’t always get it right. Even if we are trying to do it right, we may blow it. We are not perfect creatures – never will be. And some of us aren’t even trying.

But someone needs to keep in mind “the greater good,” the larger community that may be negatively affected by our imperfections or poor choices or outright evil. Someone needs to step up to the plate, take responsibility, and commit to making it right. Is it easy? No. Do we need to do it? Yes. If we don’t, people get hurt, our environment gets hurt, future generations get hurt. We can say all we like, “But everyone does it.” Or “I’m just one person – what I do doesn’t count.” Or “What one person does won’t make that much difference.” Or “I did the best I could.”

Even if these statements are true, even if our souls or hearts have become so calloused that we really believe the excuses, the reality is that if one person’s bad behavior touches three others, then that can multiply and escalate exponentially in a very short time. In particular, the message gets passed along that “This is the way we operate in our society,” and others believe it and emulate it.

Fortunately, the opposite is also true. The Pay It Forward foundation has a wonderful video clip on their website that shows the exponential impact of spreading good deeds or behaving with good character (payitforward.com). What would happen if we each decided to do what the young boy does in the movie? What would happen if we did a good deed for three people each day, and asked them to do the same? What if we resisted all temptations to do the wrong thing, knowing that its impact would spread just as exponentially. Does the picture of exponential spreading of harm or good motivate you in any way? It does me. Suddenly, I am not “an island” anymore. Suddenly, I am connected in meaningful ways to everything and everyone around me. And, suddenly, I have the great responsibility of paying close attention to even the smallest of my deeds, of not brushing anything off by considering it unimportant, of aiming for what’s optimal. Umar’s father made a sacrifice that is probably larger than any of us will ever have to make. Surely we can get on board to make the small ones.

The Power of Posterity (August 2009)

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?