On Being the Eighteenth Century’s Posterity by John Sitter, Ph.D. The New Yorker ran a cartoon fifteen years ago in which a man at a cocktail party says to another, “Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?” It was a surprisingly unoriginal caption. I had long heard the remark attributed to Groucho Marx. But eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison beat Marx by a couple of centuries. In the issue of the early newspaper The Spectator landing in coffeehouses on Friday, August 20, 1714, Addison writes that when it comes to thinking about future generations’ welfare, “Most People are of the Humour of an old Fellow of a College, who, when he was pressed by the Society to come into something that might redound to the good of their Successors, grew very peevish, We are always doing, says he, doing something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us.” Addison’s anecdote arises in a discussion of estate management that urges landowners to plant more trees on their properties. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ attention to woodland depletion is arguably the origin of what we now regard as
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Sustainabilty Studies, a subject I’ve taught for over a decade along with eighteenth-century literature. Addison was popularizing a concern that “the Increase of Forest-Trees does by no Means bear Proportion to the Destruction of them,” which had been sounded in England a half century earlier by John Evelyn. Best remembered today as a diarist, Evelyn was also the author of Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-trees, and the Propagation of Timber (1664). No small part of the concern for forest management was due to England’s naval ambitions. By the early 1700s, the construction of a large war ship could require 2,000 to 3,000 oak trees. Thus Addison’s worry “that in a few Ages the Nation may be at a Loss to supply itself with Timber sufficient for the Fleets.” Good husbandry should “therefore be inculcated…from the Love which we ought to have for our Country, and the Regard which we ought to bear to our Posterity.” Despite Addison’s quip that most people don’t want to think about posterity, he and his enlightened contemporaries seem to be thinking about it all the time, and not just in relation to trees, or only in England and Europe. Appeals to posterity are essential
Fig. 1. Galileo Galilei, etchings of the Moon, from Sidereus Nuncius, 1610
