The Posterity Pact

Consider a virtue that could alter how we think, speak, and act.

Source: DZ Guevara

The dead made promises on our behalf. We pay their debts, inherit their quarrels, and walk roads they laid and ruins they left. This is the ordinary condition of being alive. We arrive in a world built by the hands of the dead, which, for better or worse, is our inheritance.

Some accept this fact without much thought. What we accept less readily is its mirroring—that we, too, will shape the world for others to inherit. Just as the dying left us an inheritance of gifts and debts, we will leave one, too.

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
—Wallace Stevens

Most ethics asks how the living should treat the living. A less trodden tradition asks how the living should treat those who will come later. Such questions are harder because their subjects cannot speak, bargain, or withhold their consent. They have only the standing we grant them. Those who grant them none will spend their inheritance and leave only detritus. Those who grant them too much will starve the present for a future that may never come.

The Posterity Pact is a middle way between avarice and asceticism.

It is not a rule but a practice, a virtue in the sense of an active and conscientious habit of mind. One keeps the Pact in the following way:

In my thoughts, words, and deeds, I will consider whether my actions improve the lot of any future person, especially those born soon after I die. At the least, my actions should leave no future person worse off than they would have been had I not acted.

The Posterity Pact asks little—only that those who follow us be considered—yet few act in such a way.

The Pact does not require us to sacrifice the present. It does not ask one to forgo our flourishing or the Tiers of Joy among the living. It asks only that future generations be welcomed into our daily deliberations. Those who come after cannot speak for themselves, so let us speak on their behalf.

There is consolation in this.

The fear of death loosens its grip a little when one knows he’ll leave some trace of himself for posterity. To plant, to build, to teach, to improve our institutions, to bear and raise children well, to leave a community more habitable than one found it—these are not merely good works. They are the means by which one is not soon forgotten. One who keeps the Posterity Pact has already begun to die well, because they have chosen to live as one who knows that what they leave matters as much as what they consume.

The Posterity Pact has implications that one should not hesitate to name. A generation that funds its comfort by binding its grandchildren to debt has broken the Pact. A generation that hollows out the institutions it inherited, squandering the trust its forebears placed in them and spending nothing on repair, has broken the Pact, too.

Yet our primary work is not indictment. It is practice. The Posterity Pact is kept first for the small things—in the choice to mend rather than discard, to transmit wisdom rather than withhold it, to plant a tree whose shade will cool others’ brows and whose fruits will sweeten other tongues.

Our temple spires will climb in others’ skies.

Memory is the language through which the dead converse with those yet unborn. Each day asks whether we will be the broken link in the chain. Every living person stands between an inheritance and a bequest, and in that circumstance has an opportunity to bequeath something—not perfect, but better.