What do we owe future generations?
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. When a child is born, what is it given? First, a name. A name is an identity, the first words on the first page of the book of life. Not just an identity, but also a family, a community. A name is an embrace: You are my child. This is your family. This is your culture, your society, your nation. This is your story.
When, as a society, we wish to take away someone’s humanity, what do we do? We take away their name. We substitute the part for the whole—blacks, Jews, immigrants, terrorists, welfare queens, those people. Or we substitute it for a number, whether sewn on prison blues or tattooed on forearms. We try to control someone else’s story, and, in doing so, we forget our own. The perfect totalitarian society is one without a past or a future, but an eternal present, stripped of culture, art, stories, life.
Science and rationalism are religions that refuse to acknowledge their identities, their stories. They attempt to transcend their humanity by rejecting it. Culture is to be scrubbed clean of every last myth. The church of the rational and the scientific is built on its own myths. Namely, that the soul is quantifiable. That the self can be removed from the body, or be proved to not exist. That the Earth will forever consent to being stripped bare of its resources. That people can be contained, monitored, packaged, placated, and are reducible to the sum of their labors. Our community and culture give us stories, give us meaning, give us a narrative thread to hold onto. They give us life.
What do we owe future generations? A story worth reading, a song worth singing, a world worth sharing.
Before we can answer the question of what we owe future generations, I think we first must ask whether or not we have this ability.
The luxury of being able to give the generation after you something is not in fact afforded to everyone.
I am currently taking a class on the Sudan and as I read more and more about the country—political conflicts, religious conflicts, linguistic conflicts, economic conflicts, colonial conflicts, racial conflicts… all resulting in the loss of human life—it becomes clear that for these individuals life is about making it to the next meal. The future for them is literally the next day… not the next generation. For these people they are just trying to survive—not change the world.
Juxtaposing this lifestyle with that of the west—we who have the ability to not only promote change now but in the future, I wonder if we in fact have a moral obligation to ensure a better tomorrow for future generations. Some people don’t even have the ability to owe future generations anything/change the course of history… so if we do, wouldn’t it be incredibly selfish of us not to take advantage of such a privilege?
As students attending an elite university do we owe future generations more then an underprivileged single mother living in poverty? I believe that it is hard to say what each person owes the future. We can pass our beliefs and values down to our children, but should we also be improving the greater society? I think it is hard to realize what we owe the future because we our just ourselves, we have yet to produce any generations after us. Once someone has children they can see that there are lots of generations that will come after them and we must work to better things for the future.
I believe that one of the few things we can actually ensure to our future generations is an opportunity to make their own way. With change being so random and many of our actions as a whole having a whole assortment of long term effects known by no one, we can only do so much to prevent what looms. We can however do the best we can to prevent these problems, and I believe that if we collectively come together with the betterment of the world in mind, our future generations will have that opportunity to truly make the world better for generations yet to come.
Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
Elie Wiesel
