Better ancestors

LISTEN. We turn to Aristotle today in CoPhi, I'm also thinking a lot this morning about my upcoming MALA classes on educating good citizens. The Stagirite has things to say about that. He 

disparages oligarchs, who suppose that justice requires preferential claims for the rich, but also democrats, who contend that the state must boost liberty across all citizens irrespective of merit. The best polis has neither function: its goal is to enhance human flourishing, an end to which liberty is at best instrumental, and not something to be pursued for its own sake. (SEP)

My MALA focus will be first on John Dewey, whose commitment to democracy also sought an equilibrium between personal liberty and communal well-being. Like Aristotle, Dewey also thought we are political animals. We are social beings with an inherent civic duty to respect and collaborate effectively with our peers in addressing matters of common concern.  

And like Aristotle, Dewey placed great emphasis on human flourishing as something far more profound and lasting than fleeting pleasures, more than a feeling. It's a state of being, the ongoing project of a lifetime coordinate with the lives of our fellow citizens, an effort to live virtuously in a community dedicated to virtue. Being a good citizen, in these terms, involves the pursuit of personal liberty and well-being no more or less urgently than that of the entire polis.

Being a good citizen also, maybe especially, involves being a good ancestor. "The most important question we must ask ourselves is, 'Are we being good ancestors?'" So said the great humanist and medical researcher Jonas Salk, without whose vaccine countless lives would have been lost and countless others would never have begun. 

In our time, life is threatened by disease, ignorance, dishonesty, and consumerist disregard for the long-term environmental consequences of our "lifestyles." It's threatened, at bottom, by a failure to see ourselves as individuals inseparable from not only our immediate community but from the larger historical human community. 

“In an incredibly short period of time we have endangered a world that took billions of years to evolve. We are just a tiny link in the great chain of living organisms, so who are we to put it all in jeopardy with our ecological blindness and deadly technologies? Don’t we have an obligation, a responsibility, to our planetary future and the generations of humans and other species to come?” ― Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World

Dewey put it this way: 

“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” A Common Faith

That notion of community as continuous, prior and larger and posterior to our personal selves, is crucial to good ancestry. Our "heritage of values" is a sacred trust, and potentially our greatest gift to the next generations. If we neglect it, the next generations will curse our dereliction as bad citizens and bad ancestors. If we neglect it too long and too selfishly, the long-term flourishing--if not the very existence--of the next generations will be imperiled. If we treasure it, our lives and theirs may flourish. 

Aristotle had the germ of that notion of community, but it took his followers millennia finally to appreciate our Deweyan responsibility to expand it to include all citizens and all persons. So to be good and virtuous citizens, concerned not only to flourish in our own right but to ensure all others the same opportunity, it's not enough to be good ancestors. We have to be better ones.