British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Posterity: Past and present concerns with the future

What’s become of posterity? An outstanding feature of the Enlightenment agenda of progress was obeisance to posterity, in the two-fold sense of one’s immediate progeny and of the future in general. From the mid-18th century on, Western philosophers, poets, statesmen, and scientists increasingly invoked posterity as the prime inspiration of their efforts and creations—not just ‘the resource of those who felt under-appreciated by their contemporaries’, in Gillian Beer’s apt phrase, but as both the cherished heirs and ultimate arbiters of their works. Faith in progress meant forgoing immediate rewards for the benefit of future generations.

Posterity hype endures; ‘you never actually own a Patek Philippe; you merely look after it for the next generation’. But as a collective goal in political philosophy posterity has dwindled to the vanishing point. Expectations of and hopes for the future over the past half-century have become increasingly short-term, self-absorbed, and mercenary.

Declining faith in the future and reduced concern for posterity was the leitmotif of a recent British Academy discussion. Public attitude surveys show mounting pessimism in and beyond the West. Political, social and ecological anxiety gives rise to widespread cynicism and apathy in public affairs. Utopian prospects of half a century ago have turned dystopian, marked by prophecies of doom and by fears, if not hopes, of Armageddon and extinction. Apocalyptic fears led some to query the rectitude of bringing children into a doomed world. From valued family mainstays, children become costly burdens and impediments to self-gratification.

Atrophied along with concern for posterity is our Enlightenment and Victorian precursors’ sympathy with the long view, their vision enlarged by the poetic and scientific literature of the time. Moreover, within the past century the exchange of material goods became the sole measure of economic rationality, And increased productivity became the summum bonum of progress, Richard Norgaard argued, to the exclusion of social welfare, environmental health, and distributive justice to present and future generations alike.These losses, together with the failures of post-war promises to eradicate famine, pestilence, war, slavery, and racist and sexist injustice, have engendered serious attrition of trust in the institutions - political, corporate, scientific and scholarly - that govern society. Mistrust takes two related forms: on the one hand, leaders seem increasingly venal, corrupt and self-serving; on the other they seem incapable, however motivated, of coping with the dismaying problems of our times. Only where people trust their institutions, remarked Onora O’Neill, can they spare concern for social justice, including the lot of their successors.

To think ahead beyond two or three generations would not have served human survival during most of prehistory; short-termism was hardwired into the Paleolithic brain. Settled societies and civilized imperiums required more far-sighted awareness to sustain long-enduring institutions. Technological humanity’s growing impact on the earth now calls for alertness and action on a geological time-scale. The daunting task of being required to contemplate remote and perhaps non-human descendants augments the angst that makes many flinch from the future.

Yet visionary hope is not wholly lacking. To avert or mitigate potential environmental calamities—the ozone hole, global warming, biodiversity loss, asteroid and cometary collision—has reanimated future cares in the scientific community. Urgent global need could replace bellicose political rivalries with collaborative enterprise. Philosophers, environmental economists and the arts are becoming joint entrepreneurs in ideas and action that infuse present realism with transcendent vision.

Time capsules, one discussant remarked, have gone out of fashion, although we are increasingly inventive in preserving mementoes and reminders of the pasts, even of ourselves. But two new time capsules seem uniquely farsighted. One is the Svalbard seed bank in northern Norway, designed to store for countless millennia the seeds of billions of plants and the DNA of many animals, to enable survivors of some future global catastrophe to restart agriculture. The second is the lethal legacy of nuclear waste in underground repositories. That such sanctuaries need to be secure from accident and intrusion for 10,000 years is generally agreed, though no one yet knows how to warn remote descendants to whom our language, technology and mentality are likely to be incomprehensible. Moreover, a new American ruling now requires nuclear storage safety for 300,000 years, the duration of lethal risk should waste contaminate air or groundwater. Present efforts to cope with and warn of distant terrors, notably those of our own making, suggests physicist Alvin Weinberg, ‘will deserve the gratitude of future generations’. If any survive.

Gratitude aside, we owe posterity at the very least an obligation not to leave it a world irretrievably poisoned or impoverished. But we owe it to ourselves, above all, to restore our concern for posterity, and thereby outlive our selves.. The 18th-century encyclopaedist Denis Diderot was asked what would happen should it be made known the world was soon to expire. Without the hope of posterity, he replied, men would straightway rush into evil courses. P. D. James’ novel The Children of Men