Richard Erlich: Why should we sacrifice for future generations?

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9:51 AM Friday, May 14, 2010

I have some questions to ask. They’re “loaded,” but not rhetorical.

Why should this generation of Americans make sacrifices for future generations? Why should older people sacrifice for the young?

Or we can make that: Should old people sacrifice for younger people, or for generations unborn and who might never be born?

Should politicians ask old, reliable voters to sacrifice for those who don’t vote? Should politicians demand such sacrifice, or force sacrifice upon us?

Our answers to those questions are important, most obviously for issues of federal financing and the environment, but also for policies on nuclear power and preparing to fight nuclear wars.

Clearly, when economies are in free fall, governments have to pump in money: A second Great Depression does no good now and would harm the future. But crises come and go, and modern Greeks are far from the only people more willing to borrow and spend than to pay taxes and keep honest books.

In large part because of federal policies, old people in America are doing pretty well. Tax money going for the military, police, prisons and old-age entitlements like Medicare are safe; but discretionary spending for schools and welfare isn’t helping many of the influential old. So it’s mostly to old folks’ advantage to keep taxes low, or no higher than they are. If the money needed for “the general welfare” (etc.) is made up by borrowing, that’s fine; we, if we’re rich or our pension funds are doing OK, can buy into the federal debt. With borrowing, we get not a loss to taxes but an investment; and when the debt comes due, it can be rolled over until we roll over dead and the debt is someone else’s to pay.

Similarly, we can use up oil and coal, potable water, soil and other resources — and pollute; and if we die soon enough, it is, again, someone else’s problem.

We can build nuclear power plants and produce more radioactive waste, suitable for theft for radiological weapons. Even if none goes into weapons, radioactive waste will be a problem for millennia, but yet again, not our problem; there’s not enough to be a pressing hazard — not yet.

And we, as a generation, can keep thousands of nuclear warheads around; and we can laugh at suggestions that maybe NASA — when not going again to the moon — might work on asteroid defense. Nuclear warheads in their current superfluity threaten nuclear winter and an end to the human species; ditto for a hit by a significant asteroid. But the odds are heavily against any such disaster in our lifetimes.

“Posterity don’t vote,” as the cynical old saying has it, and neither do children or most young adults.

If old, reliably voting voters feel little responsibility to the future, it makes political sense for politicians to cater to them and figuratively, though vigorously, screw posterity and the young.

I was brought up in a liberal tradition of responsibility across the board, and I have adopted the part of the conservative tradition — conservative as in Edmund Burke, not Glenn Beck — that stresses our responsibility to the past, and to the future. I accept the view in Scripture that the Earth is ours, but ours to till and care for (Genesis 2:15).

There are other traditions, and philosophies that deny tradition, and there is the attitude, “I got mine; screw you!” There is the theory that God gave humans dominion over everything (Genesis 1:28-30, 9:1-3), and that the physical world has never been very important to start with and, in any event, will soon be gone at the End of Days (Revelation 21:1-4); in the meantime, Earth, in such theories, is ours to use and use up.

We need to make those theories explicit and argue them out. The time is past when we can half-asleep mess over the future. If we’re to screw nonvoting posterity, let’s at least be honest enough to do so consciously; when we mess over the young, let’s admit to ourselves and them why we feel we have the right.

Richard D. Erlich is an emeritus professor from Miami University in Oxford. He is retired and lives in Ventura County, Calif.

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