What Will the Future Think of Us

One of the most potent forms of the Big Other is “the opinion of future generations.” I was reminded of this by @ilzolende ‘s discussions.

The “future” is an understandable God to worry about for a number of reasons:

• It’s objective. We’re so caught up in a current struggles, we like to think about someone who isn’t self interested in any of our fights, judging from the Veil of Ignorance, who’s gotten information about how it all works out.
• We judge the heck out of the past. We worry about people thinking the same thing about us we think about the Confederacy.
• Whig history, and general idealization of the future as better and a source of progress.
• We all are searching for a Big Other to comfort us that our decisions were moral and just, and posterity sounds a lot less bankrupt at this point than God or those high school cliques.
• We’re afraid that if the future thinks badly of us, we won’t be around to defend ourselves.

I certainly grew up as a good liberal believing the future would judge me well for fighting for gay rights, just like I judged the civil rights activists of the sixties as the good guys. (In fact I was amazed anyone could not be on the obvious winning side.)

And yet… there is no God to guarantee meaning, not even the future. They are not actually a morally superior arbiter of our present day actions, because they are just a bunch of normal humans.

• Maybe white nationalists will win and the future will be racist and fascist.
• Maybe no records of you will really stand out and while the future may have broad opinions about goods guys and bad guys in the twenty-teens, they won’t know anything about you specifically (and your special snowflake philosophy that didn’t fit neatly into the black and white ideologies isn’t remembered at all.)
• Maybe the future will be wholly caught up in completely different moral divides, and our big arguments will look as senseless to them as the Dreyfus affair or the Butter Battles. 
• Maybe history is written by the victors and you might lose a war, the wrong guys might win, and they make up a bunch of shit about you.
• Maybe people in the future will be as divided as we are now, and by and large too busy to think about us.
• Maybe a big rock will destroy the world and no one will exist to judge us.

They’re just… more humans, with no guarantee of moral accuracy that we don’t have.

Which means you have to decide your ethical bedrock now, and stick to it no matter what some other people think of you. Even your descendants. If you believe that all races are equal, you’d fight for it even if your brother disagreed. Well, same for your great granddaughter.

What’s right just has to be right. No one can vouchsafe it for you.