{"id":22932,"date":"2012-09-22T20:54:35","date_gmt":"2012-09-22T20:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/it-is-always-a-little-hard-to-find-a-convincing\/"},"modified":"2012-09-22T20:54:35","modified_gmt":"2012-09-22T20:54:35","slug":"it-is-always-a-little-hard-to-find-a-convincing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/it-is-always-a-little-hard-to-find-a-convincing\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

It is always a little hard to find a convincing answer to the man who says, \u201cWhat has posterity ever done for me?\u201d and the conservationist has always had to fall back on rather vague ethical principles postulating identity of the individual with some human community or society which extends not only back into the past but forward into the future. Unless the individual identifies with some community of this kind, conservation is obviously \u201cirrational.\u201d Why should we not maximize the welfare of this generation at the cost of posterity? \u201cApr\u00e8s nous, le d\u00e9luge\u201d has been the motto of not insignificant numbers of human societies. The only answer to this, as far as I can see, is to point out that the welfare of the individual depends on the extent to which he can identify himself with others, and that the most satisfactory individual identity is that which identifies not only with a community in space but also with a community extending over time from the past into the future. If this kind of identity is recognized as desirable, then posterity has a voice, even if it does not have a vote; and in a sense, if its voice can influence votes, it has votes too. This whole problem is linked tip with the much larger one of the determinants of the morale, legitimacy, and \u201cnerve\u201d of a society, and there is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

– Kenneth Boulding,\u00a0The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966<\/strong><\/p>\n

Boulding teaches us that referring to posterity instead of the future leads to a dramatic change in perspective. \u2018Posterity\u2019 implies continuity of society and the obligations of those living now to future inheritors, a living commitment, while \u2018the future\u2019 is a distant land peopled by strangers to whom we have no ties.<\/p>\n

Boulding is very much a modern man, a product of the first half of the 20th century, when concern for posterity was a duty of the elite. In the postmodern, posterity was mined, exploited for all it held, and all that was left was \u2018the future\u2019. And now, in the post-normal, \u2018the future\u2019 is just a pile of slag left behind by people we don\u2019t remember, just a pile of sci fi stills and economist\u2019s powerpoints with the lines all trending in the wrong direction.<\/p>\n

We have reached the point that Boulding wrote about: our leaders \u2014 our culture \u2014 provide us no images of the future other than dystopia and decline. We need to colonize the future ourselves, we must make our own maps of that territory, maps that show us as inhabitants and inheritors, making new economics, breaking with the deals and disasters of the past, and committing again to each other: to be a community and not consumers, to be partners and not competitors, to be from the future and beyond the past.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(via stoweboyd<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is always a little hard to find a convincing answer to the man who says, \u201cWhat has posterity ever done for me?\u201d and the conservationist has always had to fall back on rather vague ethical principles postulating identity of the individual with some human community or society which extends not only back into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-5XS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}