Why secular hope struggles to promote taking responsibility for the long-term future, and how Christian faith can help

Image: Midjourney

by Peter Wygnański, edited by Vesa Hautala

In this post, we are sharing a talk given by Peter Wygnański at the EA for Christians Academic Workshop that we have abbreviated for the blog (the editor takes responsibility of any shortcomings that may have resulted from this). A recording of the talk is available here.

Those living in London rarely worry about sanitation because they enjoy the benefits of over 1000 miles of underground drainage designed and built in the second half of the 19th century. However, this rather future-proof sewer system, which was also arguably the most disruptive civil engineering project in London’s history, was not simply a fruit of generosity. We have to recall the great stink of 1858.^[1] Waste was dumped into the Thames by the London population that had recently reached 2.5 million, but because the Thames is tidal, the waste was not efficiently carried away from the city.

It is hard to imagine what it must have been like, especially on hot summer days. The Houses of Parliament by the river were directly affected, and fear of disease forced parliamentarians to act in their own self-interest.  It motivated a course of action that had a secondary effect of benefits for future generations. Effective reasons to motivate actions that are to benefit humanity’s future, especially the long-term future, are those that impact the experience of today.

The Steps to Acting for Future Generations

If I am to make some sacrifice for the sake of a temporally distant good, I must 

1. acknowledge some moral standard that requires I do so

2. perceive an opportunity to act meaningfully

3. experience motivation to uphold that principle.

Parliamentarians in the 1850s recognised the value of a clean river, were in just the right place to make a difference, and they had plenty of motivation to do so. Action was taken. 

More generally however, these steps are vulnerable to disruption, especially when applied to the future.^[2] Pressure from immediate concerns can cause me to overlook the pertinence of moral values or to exclude future others from my circle of moral care. Feelings of helplessness threaten perceiving an opportunity to act meaningfully. If the first steps are taken, a moral judgement has been made, but this can only indicate an action, not demand it.^[3] The third step requires motivation, and future-oriented motivation is more demanding because we’re at a distance from future benefits.

Secular Hope and its Challenges

I hope to argue that secular hope, based on present-day moral thinking, fails to offer firm grounds for motivating the required sacrifices by which we live out a moral relationship with future generations. This is not a controversial claim. Some of the best-known thinkers who promote increased concern for humanity’s future recognise something is missing. Just two examples: The director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity institute, Nick Bostrom, recognises that applications of strict utilitarianism indicate unacceptable implications, concluding that solutions will require ‘mixed ethical theories that include non-consequentialist side constraints.’^[4] Annette Baier, in her landmark defence of the rights of future people concludes that she is unaware of any moral theory that effectively captures the right reasons for the right attitudes to past and future persons.^[5]

First the term "secular hope" must be explained. The hopeful gaze toward the future that is commonly found among longtermists did not spring up out of a philosophical vacuum. The monotheistic revolution of the ancient world broke out of a cyclical conception of time towards an idea that history is pointed to an end – a view which Christians still hold. Later a secular dream of progress replaced faith in providence. 

More recently, though, the inevitability of progress has been called into question. With God and the inevitability of progress removed, optimistic nihilism is the remaining option: Human experience is just cosmic coincidence, so our experience is all that matters; if the universe has no purpose, then we get to dictate what its purpose is; if the universe has no principles, the only principles relevant are the ones we decide on. There is no reason not to have fun, do what makes us feel good, and there are bonus points if you make the lives of other people better, more bonus points if you help build towards a utopia of a galaxy teeming with blissful human beings.

However, ‘bonus points’ are an ineffective motivator for making sacrifices for the sake of future generations, and the prioritisation of individual freedom undermines connections between future benefits and present day experience that effective motivation requires.

The Limits of Secular Ethical Approaches

There are challenges for optimistic nihilists, as there are for all secular ethical approaches, in even justifying, in principle, care for humanity’s future: Utilitarians are paralysed by humanity’s potentially vast future; Promoters of duties wrestle to account for corresponding rights amongst people who do not yet exist; Contractualists struggle to strike up hypothetical agreements with future generations.

Good longtermist writing recognises this and seeks creative ways around it. Baier appeals for promoting a sense of a trans-generational community, but admits she relies rather dogmatically on old intuitions that she believes are generally shared. William MacAskill hopes to invoke egoism by suggesting imagining future people looking back in history.^[6] Toby Ord guides his readers to experience the present incapacity of imagining the goods the future might hold.^[7] Whatever people value, they are likely to be positively disposed towards working towards a future which can contain more of that good than they first realised, and to avoid the loss of that potential.

These sorts of efforts point us in the right direction but feel like they are straining against self-imposed limits of method. A second challenge is that relativism accompanies optimistic nihilism. This makes it difficult to determine what a good future would look like, and it is difficult to work towards a flourishing human future without some sense of what that means. There is in fact a great danger: that we abandon our values, fail to pass on the treasures we have received, and the collective wisdom about human flourishing, form an ideological aversion to limiting the self-determination of future people.

Here I can begin to outline how a Christian worldview can help. A belief in objective good suggests that hope for the future is bound to a commitment that what one values, what makes life worth living, should endure. The right question is not which needs future human beings will have, but which needs they should have. It is for us to advocate the apparent regress from modern secular interpretations of history to their ancient religious pattern. This is justified by the realisation that we find ourselves more or less at the end of the modern rope which has worn too thin to give hopeful support.

Anyone concerned with the unity of universal history and with its progress toward an ultimate goal or at least toward a "better world" is still in the line of prophetic and messianic monotheism, however little they may think of themselves in those terms.^[8] As Christians we recognise in the desire to safeguard the future a manifestation of that part of human nature that needs a future. We are made in such a way that we cannot live without a future.^[9] What, then, happens when we draw fully on the grounds of our future hope, on our faith, when we approach the question of motivating care for the future?

Christianity’s Vision of Humanity's Future

Christianity, especially in more traditional denominations, has a well-developed lens by which to attribute meaning to the past, turning that lens towards the future expresses how the Christian faith offers long-standing foundations on which a meaningful relationship with future generations can be found. God is future orientated, he gives very little that is present; all the important things are given in the category of promise of what is to come. This means faithful people have to live outward, beyond the present moment, and live in a state of reaching out towards something else, something greater, and this has both heavenly and earthly dimensions.^[10]

As a Christian, I flourish in a community that transcends my own lifetime. My faith refutes the false god of a freedom unencumbered by the freedom of others. Through the Trinity, we come to know that freedom flourishes when it is closely knit in a union with other persons. Being a Christian, being like the Son, means not standing on my own, but living completely towards, being for, others.^[11] A Christian recognises that they do not belong to themselves, fullness of life comes to itself by moving away from itself and finding its way back as relationship. The lines between egoism, altruism, and collectivism are blurred by faith in what Jesus Christ reveals to us about the human person in light of what it is to be Divine.

God ‘guides the course of all history’ and so there is an inherent future aspect of our faith, in which the present is made relative to a wider horizon that runs far beyond the moment, indeed beyond the whole world.^[12] Comparable to the compass which gives us orientation in space, the eschatological compass gives orientation in time by pointing to the Kingdom of God as the ultimate end and purpose. Sailors of the ancient world needed the rising sun to orient their maps. A river needs a hill to flow. Morality needs a framework that transcends it, to carry connections across generations, across time, to allow meaning to flow; to point us outwards, beyond our immediate relationships; to draw us forward, towards humanity’s future. When such bonds between generations are undermined, the casting off the apparent chains of past generations, there is little left to mediate meaning to us from humanity’s future, so that we can feel it today.

But with that orientation, I see how my blessedness today depends on passing on my faith, and the conditions of living that faith out, to others; in acting in charity to the most vulnerable, those who God now knows before forming them, who have no voice with which to defend themselves today. The fulness of life that Jesus came to give me rests on becoming like him, which points me outside of myself, with a hopeful gaze towards the future, which involves a deep love for all my brothers and sisters. We seek to become one another’s hope and to set upon the future the seal of Christ’s features, the features of the coming city that will be completely human because it belongs completely to God.¹³ In short, the nature of our Christianity is such that it involves us deeply with humanity’s future.

More practically: The Christian faith has a firm set of values to inform a widely shared vision of humanity’s future, evading the paralysis of uncertainty, and avoiding the tragedies that could arise in building a future for humanity without a sense of the human person. The Christian faith has sources of moral growth, building up people of faith as a living stone in the brotherhood of the Church, a fraternity which draws me close to the suffering or flourishing of the future Christian family. The Christian Faith dares to speak to secular power in a way that is increasingly scarce and so could play a unique role in promoting civilisational virtues, and a moral conversion towards greater care of future generations. The Christian Faith rejects the priority of freedom and self-determination that gives rise to temporal parochialism, restoring connections with future generations as it treasures its past. The core of the Gospel message is to love all of humanity as one would the closest family. Why could this not include future generations? The situation is new, but the potential is significant; the unique contribution an authentic Christian imagination offers for motivating care for humanity’s future, that is lacking in alternative accounts.

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Footnotes

1. Ashton, One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858, 2017. ↩

2. Batson, What’s Wrong With Morality?, 2015. ↩

3. Birnbacher, “What Motivates Us to Care for the (Distant) Future,” in Intergenerational Justice, 2012. ↩

4. Bostrom, “Infinite Ethics,” Analysis and Metaphysics 10 (2011). ↩

5. Baier, The Rights of Past and Future Persons, 2010. ↩

6. What We Owe the Future, A Million-Year View, 2022. ↩

7. Ord, The Precipice, 2020. ↩

8. Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, 1957. ↩

9. Ratzinger, Faith and the Future, 2019. ↩

10. Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, 2004. ↩

11. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2004. ↩

12. Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, 2004. ↩

13. Ratzinger, Faith and the Future, 2019. ↩