Grumpy social critics have long decried a perceived erosion of the famed “Protestant
ethic” of old time and its replacement by a culture – or cult – of mindless wallowing
in instant gratification. It turns out they needn’t have worried – or, more
likely, they have deceptively fretted over an ideologically expedient myth
evoked to justify outdated forms of social oppression or regulation. This is
the somewhat counterintuitive diagnosis offered by humanities professors Patricia
Vieira and Michael Marder in an opinion piece posted on the philosophical blog
of the NYT. In its title, they ask the fraught existential and practical
question: “What Do We Owe the Future.” Their response, apparently, is that we
obsess way too much over such counterproductive concerns.
Vieira and Marder issue a stern warning that by looking up to a
non-existent, “otherworldly ideal,” we tend to “debase the world here below” –
with even less justification than the metaphysical traditions which have
committed a similar sin since time immemorial. Why is our current debasement of
the world we are lucky to inhabit so much less warranted than previous faux idealistic
visions? Because “the emerging metaphysical paradigm differs from its
predecessors in that its fate is tied to historical becoming, rather than to
the eternal principles of being. This temporal characteristic is illusory,
since the future is postponed indefinitely. It always remains beyond the
present, immune to contestation, much like the chimeras of old metaphysics.”
Most of Vieira’s
and Marder’s essay is couched in this abstract phraseology, which seems
willfully emptied of the weakest existential echo. Its apotheosis is perhaps even
more strikingly unevocative: “A healthy dose of Epicureanism will go a long way
toward curing the discursive inflation of the future. … The one defensible
relation to this temporal modality would be to leave the greatest number of
options available for generations to come… This minimalist approach would be
sensitive to the future’s open-endedness and acknowledge our inability to do
justice to its sheer otherness."
