Dismiss the Past, Dismiss the Future
At church today the sermon was about how we link to the past, in particular our own ancestors. Our minister was eloquent in describing how she reconnected with the story of her grandmother. But we Americans are not especially ancestor-oriented, to put it mildly. Our history and our self-understanding tell us that we are new, that we are not constrained by the past, by what our great-grandparents did. We don’t care if they were poor nobodies. We don’t venerate the ancestral village. We make no offerings to the ancestral gods. Any reasonably self-aware American who spends time abroad—in Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, almost anywhere else—quickly realizes that for most peoples, the past, in the form of family and culture, is powerful and alive in a way that it just isn’t for most Americans.
This can be a real source of strength. We absorb immigrants and newcomers readily; we re-invent ourselves and start anew; we are not imprisoned by old customs and fears and prejudices.
But there are some huge dangers as well. A people that doesn’t care to be molded by the past may end up ignorant of it, and molded without knowing. Today’s debates about race, for instance, suffer from a terrible ignorance and selective forgetting. “Why dredge all that stuff up?” is a common complaint, at least from those who would be made uncomfortable by remembering.
To care about your ancestors and the story of your family, your community, your country, is to make them no longer past but part of the present. It is to see yourself as part of something greater than the individual you, something that shaped you and that you have a responsibility to pass on. If this sense of connection is weak, it’s easy to believe that everything you are is your own doing. And it is hard to sustain a sense of responsibility for the people who will come after you.
A prickly individualism that denies the shaping power of outside forces easily denies the duty to give back. Debates today about taxes and public spending often pit those who see all such demands as suspect, as taking from successful people to give to the less deserving, against those who stress that no one is successful alone and we all depend on public institutions that work for the common good. When President Obama said “if you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that,” his point was not to denigrate individual effort but to remind entrepreneurs that they are embedded in a country and society that helped them succeed.
Maybe more importantly, this mindset makes it hard to feel responsible for the future. We pay lip service to thinking about our children and grandchildren. But public policy to meet longterm challenges, like climate change and failing infrastructure and marginalized minorities, suffers when we are not habituated to think of ourselves as part of this greater multi-generational enterprise. Our decisions have consequences beyond the next election cycle, the next up and down of the markets. The rational-choice framework that undergirds our individualism has a hard time offering good reasons why we should care about generations yet to come.
Tocqueville ends Democracy in America by telling us “I go back from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no parallel to what is occurring before my eyes; as the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man now wanders in obscurity.” This is exhilarating but also frightening. Two hundred years later, it is essential for us to connect more naturally and normally to the past.
Caring too much about the past can be dysfunctional. But an appropriate and measured regard for our past may be the only way that we humans can connect ourselves to the future. And that is not dysfunctional, it is vital and necessary.