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 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

An ideal curriculum for cultivating a consciousness of posterity as energetic as our constricted moment demands—in other words, a civic education robust enough to help us think like stewards of the future—would have many parts, and a very significant one would be eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, and history.

to the discourse of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America.

The uses of “posterity” are especially interesting in the eighteenth century because the word was shifting in meaning. Until about 1700, the dominant meaning of the word was one’s personal descendants, so that to speak of your posterity would mean your children and grandchildren. This meaning persists—it is still what the authors of the United States Constitution probably meant by their determination to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”—but the word was also coming more and more to mean succeeding generations generally, all those future people one will never know. The older and newer meanings compete in George Washington’s 1789 letter to the Pennsylvania legislature urging that “every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn.” James Madison clearly had more than “immediate” posterity in mind when he urged that the history of the American Revolution be properly recorded because it holds “lessons of which posterity ought not be deprived.”

Their times were so extraordinary that the Founders’ rhetoric does not seem hyperbolic. In less dramatic circumstances invocations of posterity may easily sound grandiloquent. Earlier in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift parodied his own desire to be remembered by posterity by having the zany narrator of A Tale of a Tub simply dedicate the book outright to “Prince Posterity,” in the terms one might use to flatter a rich patron. A later Swiftian maxim on the subject runs, “It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. FUTURE AGES SHALL TALK OF THIS; THIS SHALL BE FAMOUS TO ALL POSTERITY. Whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.”

Samuel Johnson, too, could cast an ironic eye on appeals to posterity, calling the approval of future generations one of those “consolatory expedients” with which neglected authors comfort themselves. But he also makes such appeals seriously. In an essay promoting academic scholarship, Johnson challenges the elite of his day to offer education some of the support that they shower upon military and economic activity: “while we are so anxiously diligent to secure property, and to deliver down our liberties and our privileges to posterity…we may likewise extend our care to more valuable advantages, and hand to them the lamp of science unextinguished.”

Denis Diderot, general editor of the ground-breaking French Encyclopedia and Johnson’s contemporary across the channel, took the extreme secular position of declaring that for writers the hope of posterity’s regard is the equivalent of aspiring to heavenly salvation. In Diderot’s phrase, for the artist or intellectual “le jugement anticipé de la postérité est le seul encouragement” (the anticipated judgment of posterity is the sole encouragement). But Johnson, Diderot, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and scores of other intellectuals and poets shared the Enlightenment idea of posterity as a source of obligation (we owe something to future generations) and a possible judge (we will be vindicated or found wanting by them). Burke writes of the responsibility of high officeholders to both the “existing world” and “posterity, which men of their eminence cannot avoid for glory or for shame.” Posterity is a “tribunal, at which, not only Ministers, but Kings and Parliaments, but even Nations themselves, must one day answer.”

Shortly before his 1729-31 sojourn in Rhode Island (three miles from the Redwood Library and Athenæum), the philosopher and later bishop George Berkeley linked America and posterity in the poem “On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America.” Berkeley anticipates the judgment of posterity by envisioning a new “golden age” in the new country, one that “By future poets shall be sung.” The poem’s most famous line is “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” and the association of America with the future strengthened during the Revolution. Founding Father Benjamin Rush defines American patriotism in proudly expansive terms: “It comprehends not only the love of our neighbors but of millions of our fellow creatures, not only of the present but of future generations.”

If the love of millions who exist, though unseen, is a heady ideal, the love of generations who do not yet exist requires an even stronger act of imagination. Near the end of An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope had imagined something like the former, as the virtuous person’s love ripples out spatially into ever-widening circles: “Friend, parent, neighbor, first it will embrace, / His country next, and next all human race.” But expanding through time requires even greater energy. So great that a hard-headed Swift or Johnson or John Adams might think the possibility of such love unlikely. But if not love, perhaps the thought of future generations comes more naturally to us than we say.

So at least argues contemporary philosopher Samuel Scheffler. His book Death and the Afterlife (2013) turns on a striking thought experiment: suppose you were given certain knowledge that 30 days after you died, the rest of humanity would also die. According to Scheffler, such knowledge regarding the earthly “afterlife” of our fellow humans would be demoralizing, regardless of family concerns or religious beliefs. It would be wholly disorienting because the assumption that humanity will outlast us as individuals is tied up unconsciously with how we assign value to many—possibly most— activities and customs. “To an extent that we rarely acknowledge,”

Some Large Additions to Common Sense (1776) Redwood Library & Athenæum Special Collections.

he concludes, “our conviction that things matter is sustained by our confidence that life will go on after we ourselves are gone.”

If we still share the idea that keeping posterity in mind is essential to who we are, what do we not share with eighteenthcentury European and American thinkers? Mainly their confidence, I believe, or, perhaps more accurately, their lack of anxiety. This is not to suggest that all eighteenth-century writers or ordinary people regarded all “progress” as positive. The word “innovation,” which we now have trouble using without cheerleading, often meant something negative, as when in the late seventeenth century John Dryden wrote that “all other errors but disturb a state, / But Innovation is the blow of Fate,” or when Burke observed a century later of the French revolutionaries that “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views.” But generally, and especially in America, the eighteenth-century view of the future is more promising than ominous.

Some would argue that our modern sense of futurity began to grow anxious after Word War II. Robert Heilbroner contended that in the later twentieth century, an “apprehensive” view emerged as it became harder to separate technology’s promises from its threats. He saw this change as due largely to the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and the “environmental overload of global warming”—this in 1995. Whether one agrees with this interpretation, it is worth noting that the shift occurs during the period that environmental historians have come to call The Great Acceleration (and sometimes the Anthropocene Era), the period from about 1950 to the present, in which global population more than tripled, real global domestic product grew about ten-fold, and human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide increased more than seven-fold.

If a vision of posterity is good for us personally (as Scheffler argued) and, by extension, good for our civic life, can we find things in the past that might help restore an enabling tie to posterity, one not so haunted by apprehension? Burke would encourage us, as a general principle, to begin with historical reflection: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” Retrospection and reflection are always healthy, but are there more particular eighteenth-century lessons? Does a period so relatively “innocent” of technology as the eighteenth century afford us anything to learn from its easier imaginative access to a vision of the future?

A basic truth to keep in mind is that while our ancestors did not have our anxieties, they also did not have our gifts. They had nothing approaching our access to information, energy, and toolusing capacity. And there are no inevitable reasons why those gifts cannot be used with more wisdom and care, including care for those to come. A second lesson is that there is much to learn from their lack of blind faith in “progress” (undefined), “growth” (undefined), or a world without limits. While it is still true that many politicians and some economists remain allergic to any mention of limits, more circumspect heads may be starting to prevail. The eighteenth century can be instructive in this respect because it is not the nineteenth century: it precedes nineteenth-century European and American “Cornucopianism,” the view in which the horn of plenty always has more, and Romantic “Prometheanism,” in which human energy and technology can do anything, including somehow making more nature. We tend to take the Cornucopian and Promethean assumptions as traditional and natural. (Julian Simon, still revered by some as a “conservative” economist, declared that “natural resources are not finite.”) But there’s an older tradition to recover, one with a measured view of posterity, offering guidance for a deeper development of our collective imagination.

Contemporary political philosopher, Daniel Innerarity describes, in The Future and its Enemies (2012), our natural personal capacity for “futurizing” in terms similar to Samuel Scheffler’s; we are creatures who cannot help but anticipate and plan. Innerarity turns the discussion in a more collective direction to argue that our futurizing ability, like any natural capacity, needs to be cultivated to develop fully. Otherwise, it only endangers civic health: “If it is not trained, this anticipation works destructively: it atrophies, turns us into fanatics, into people who are unnecessarily fearful or excessively credulous.” An ideal curriculum for cultivating a consciousness of posterity as energetic as our constricted moment demands— in other words, a civic education robust enough to help us think like stewards of the future—would have many parts, and a very significant one would be eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, and history.

What’s posterity ever done for us? The question is no longer rhetorical. The more we think about the cultural costs of an absent or enfeebled sense of the future, the more clearly an answer arrives: Just about everything.

John Sitter, Ph.D. is the Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature, Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English, Emeritus at Emory University.