THREE FACES OF THE FUTURE.

• Author: Goodwin, Jean

Why should I take the future into account? I mean not my future (to paraphrase the holiday ghost) but the "long future" (Benford, 1999, p. 27): put concretely, the future after I'm dead. I have interests right now and in my future that I want to see to, I have cares to attend to, obligations to meet. When I deliberate about what to do, I ought as a matter of course to consider all these things. They are all, we might say, visible from where I stand. But there are horizons to my vision, including a temporal horizon; things beyond it are beyond my ken. So why should I take the long future into account?

This question currently vexes two groups in particular: the philosophers and the advocates. On the philosophical side, the works of John Rawls (1971) and Derek Parfit (1984) have opened a debate about how to justify an obligation to future generations. The problem becomes most apparent when we consider the puzzles that arise as different theories about how we ought to deliberate try to deal with the long future. Utilitarianism, for example, says we ought to prefer a plan that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Does that number include future people? If so, we ought to bring about a densely populated world, where the sheer quantity of people would still lead to a greater sum of well-being, though the quality of individual lives was quite marginal; but that is counterintuitive (Parfit, chap. 17; see also Rawls, pp. 286-7). An alternate, more Kantian, theory tells us that we should adopt such principles of justice as impartial negotiators would contract for--those in the "original position," stripped of knowledge of their particular place in society. Do these negotiators include future people? It seems absurd to say so. But if different generations are not represented in the imagined contracting, what is to prevent negotiators of a single generation from deciding to use up all resources for themselves? (Rawls, pp. 139, 292). Again, counterintuitive. And finally, how can we conceive of entering into ethically significant relations with people who don't even exist? These people may not even ever come to be, depending on what choices we make now (a point emphatically made by Parfit, chap. 16). So as Rawls remarked, "the question of justice between generations.... subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests" (p. 284). Philosophers are still looking for Parfit's missing "Theory X": a philosophically defensible justification for taking the long future into account.

The question of the long future has arisen also for advocates, because we, more than any other generation, have the capacity to affect it. Undoubtedly everything that anyone has done has changed the environmental, cultural and social future. But the changes we are making now would seem to be more manifest, more predictable, and simply bigger than those made by former ages. In part this is because there are so many of us; practices like slash and burn agriculture that were consonant with preserving forests when pursued on a small scale, pursued on a large scale threaten to eliminate the resources they depend upon. In part it is because new technologies have expanded our power intentionally or as a foreseeable "side effect" to alter significantly and suddenly such things as the Earth's atmosphere, the number of fish in the sea or (soon) the human genome. When continuing these practices or using these powers, why should we consider our effects on the long future?-this is the practical question advocates arguing for restraint must answer. Our use of these powers and practices presumably satisfies us, the living; otherwise we wouldn't be adopting them. It is only when we take the long future into account that we can consider trends like global warming to be problems at all.

I do not propose to say why we should take the long future into account, to answer the question as posed either to the philosophers or the advocates. I will not try to argue that you should think what you are doing when you drive to work, nor try to justify any particular view of our obligation (if it is an obligation) to future generations. What I undertake instead is to survey the ways we speak about the long future when we in fact deliberate about it: three of the faces the future shows us when we reason together about civic issues.

The liminal space between high theory and ground-level practice is the traditional province of the art of rhetoric, after all-- indeed, as Robert Craig (1996) says, of the communication arts generally. Rhetoric, permanently at the margins of these more recognizable enterprises, may seem at once impractical and unphilosophic. Yet it can encourage advocates to more thorough self-reflection and point philosophers to something more in heaven and earth than they have, perhaps, yet thought of. My aim, to put this another way, is to scout out new territory in what Michael Leff has reminded us to call "middle-level theory" (1978, p. 90). These are theories of rhetoric, grounded in the details of practice, which don't attempt to account for everything rhetorical--we might say theories within rhetoric, not theory of what rhetoric is, from the foundation up. I would hope this work can make a modest addition to the growing literature examining particular rhetorical arguments and figures, classical and contemporary: Cox ( 1982) on the locus of the irreparable, Black (1992) on idioms of social identity, Booth (1974) on irony, Innocenti (1994) on vivid description, Walton (1998) on adhominem appeals--to name only a representative few.

In the following sections, therefore, I isolate and analyze three ways of talking about the long future manifest in civic deliberations. I close with some brief remarks suggesting what use the philosophers and the advocates might make of the ways thus isolated.

1. CHILDREN

   Let us begin with the familiar, or even the banal. I take the speeches at the 1996 Republican and Democratic National Conventions as representative of our ordinary public discourse. [1] What induces these speakers to take the long future into account? Their children:

   When my husband, Bill, and I had Susan Ruby three months ago, we began to understand those dreams. You begin to think less about how the world is ... and more about what kind of world you'll leave behind (Molinari).

   In the face of a child the parent sees the future present before her; she can project her care for her life and environment forward into the life and environment of her child. The parent can use "as [a] guiding star" in deliberations aimed "to make America better," a conception of "our childrens' future" (Kasich).

   Parents have of course an obligation to care for their offspring. But the appeal to children seems to draw not on a sense of duty but a feeling of love. Parents see the future as promising or threatening those they love; checking on their children asleep, they find "all [their] hopes and fears for tomorrow lie quietly before [them]" (Bayh; see also H. Clinton). In most cases, the speaker's "fear" seems to dominate her "hope." "Parents looked in on their sleeping children," for example, "and, in the quiet of the night, worried that no matter how hard they worked, those they most loved might inherit a lesser life in a lesser land" (Dodd). Or again, parents

   are worried. They worry about their jobs-and whether they will still have them tomorrow. They wonder whether they can provide security for their parents as they grow old-and opportunity for their children as they grow up. They worry about drugs-and violence, and every morning at the kindergarten door, they hesitate-if only for a moment-to let go of that small hand clinging so tightly to theirs. (Molinari)

   This anxiety about the children's future may be an adaptation to the election season, for an out-of-office party must find something wrong in the present day. Alternately, it may be characteristic of deliberative discourse more generally. The hopeful person is unlikely to think she needs to plan; the fearful, as Aristotle points out, is driven to deliberate (Rhetoric, 2.5.14, 1383a).

   An orientation to their children's future demands the parents act to secure for them a good life; specifically, a life as good as or better than the parents' ("better life," Bayh; "as good a life," Dashle; not a "lesser life" Dodd; "more," Kasich; "a better life," Molinari). This ideal of living well and then living better the speakers call the "American dream" (Bayh, Gore, Kasich, McCain, Molinari, Powell) or "promise" (Bayh, McCain). The good life is in part conceived in material terms. The dream here is to "find a job, marry your sweetheart, have children, buy a home, maybe start a business. And in the process, always provide a better life for your children" (Molinari). To accomplish this requires constant improvement in the surroundings for life-a "more prosperous, more peaceful, more beautiful America" (Kasich; see also Molinari, Powell). The good life is also conceived in moral terms. The dream here is to live properly and to pass on what the speakers tend to call "values" to the next generation: ideal s like never giving up (Kemp), "passion for hard work" (Molinari), patriotism (Molinari), "a clear understanding of the difference between right and wrong" (Powell; also R. Dole, T. Gore) and religious views (Powell). The dream thus "is not just a more prosperous America but a better America," one "that honors-in all its institutions-the values that mothers and fathers want to pass on to her [sic] children" (Kemp).

   One of the values to be passed on, it should be noted, is the value of caring for one's children: a "faith in family" (Molinari), a "faith and responsibility and love-the cords that tie one generation to the next" (Bayh). In this way, a concern for the future-as-children can reproduce itself through the generations.

   Those who look to the future in the faces of their children see their parents when they...