Ultimately that’s my point here overall: not that this change is not possible, but that much of sustainability advocacy is too on the nose, too focused a specific range of policies and practices that seem to connote sustainability, and too focused on the achievement of a political subjectivity that is also overly specified. The job ahead is both bigger and vaguer.

Unless I am misreading you (always a possibility) this seems in conflict with some of your recent writings on education – about having to be open to multiple possibilities some of which we cannot even imagine in the present.

That said, I think the argument that sustainability will take very different perceptions of personhood is a good one. Just that imagining the future as it will be (or even a specific version of the future) is unnecessary.

I don’t think present-day Swarthmore would be unrecognizable.

Here’s a quote I liked:

“If each subscriber for the past year would duplicate his or her subscription for the present year, payable between now and the first of the year 1865, or failing in this, would procure another subscriber for a like amount, we might look with confidence toward the erection of Swarthmore College during the year following; and with the Divine blessing upon our efforts, might anticipate for thousands of children yet unborn the advantages of a sound and liberal education within its walls, under circumstances favorable to their imbibing the principles and testimonies of Friends. ”

As for the larger idea that expanding our sense of moral obligation toward future humans would be a giant leap — I think the idea of a peoples looking towards the future of its own children is fairly common (“for ourselves and our posterity,” etc), but I agree that giving moral weight to the unborn of other countries is a big change. A lot of people don’t give moral weight to the living of other countries. Peter Singer’s written a lot about the idea of “expanding circles of concern” , moving from a tribal understanding towards one encompassing more and more of humanity and then beyond, into moral concern for the animal kingdom leading to vegetarianism and animal rights.

You write: “most existing attempts to move towards sustainability radically underestimate just how unprecedented that move will be for human subjectivity and personhood if we manage to achieve it.” Doesn’t this assume a) that you already know what real “sustainability” involves (and it’s not what others think); and b) that “we” will know when we have “achieved” it? Neither of these assumptions seems at all warranted to me.

When I try to make sense of your claim, it comes down to the statement that “individuals [=human personhood] have a hard time imagining [=radically underestimate] sustainability over the long term [=unprecedented move]. This is no doubt true; but then, “sustainability” is a social or systemic property, not an individual one. Societies accomplish things that are unimaginable for individuals.

You invoke the analogy of “life after death,” which strikes me as right. It’s an aspiration, a guiding moral idea that we use to imagine limits to our behavior, without knowing (or being able to verify) whether or not we’ve succeeded. You can think of “sustainability” as a rhetorical trope that asks “would we (I, you) be able to live with ourselves if we could foresee these consequences….”

Play out the scenario of finding yourself in a room full of secular people. Granted, you might think to yourself: “What’s my reward for foregoing something now in order to benefit people who are not even born yet, people I will never know? Why shouldn’t I live for my own satisfactions right now?” But unless all the secular people you know are hard-core libertarian nihilists, I’ll bet it’s unlikely that you’d actually say this aloud. And if other people believed you actually would act that way, they’d start to distance themselves pretty quickly. If you value their company at all, you’ll either become a hypocrite (pretending to believe as they do) or feel guilty (for being unable to live up to ideals). From this perspective, the bottom line of sustainability is the possibility–always uncertain–of cooperation rather than the war of all against all.

Historically, the idea of sustainability is an effort to develop an alternative to catastrophist thinking, the visions of eco-apocalypse. With climate change upon us, we’re likely to be facing an escalating number of disasters: hurricanes, droughts, snow storms. Maybe they’ll add up to a global catastrophe, maybe not. But deciding that we humans are too short-sighted to be worth sustaining is a self-fulfilling prophecy of despair.

First, that the endowment we have today was not part of the institution at the beginning, e.g., a large investment fund that provides operating revenue for the institution. Until quite recently, endowments were mostly funds kept as a barrier against emergency or adversity, more like insurance. (Insurance is itself arguably a form of thinking about the long term, but wait for the next installment and I’ll try to get to that.)

Second, what I mean in this paragraph is simply that the Hicksite Quakers who founded Swarthmore did not have in mind the type of people who presently staff and attend the college as the beneficiaries of the institution they were creating, let alone the present circumstances of higher education. They were making an institution whose first purpose was the continuation and enrichment of their own ethical and religious practices within their own communities of immediate residence. They certainly hoped it would continue to do so for a long time to come, and were willing to give up something of what they had in their own lives for that to happen, but they were not giving to an unimaginable future of strangers–the abstraction required to imagine “future Quakers in 19th Century America” is not terribly dramatic and still retains some sense of “this is for us, the living (and our immediate descendants)”. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just that it’s only the barest beginnings of what we will need to imagine now to sacrifice for a very abstractly different set of future people.

There’s a complicated third thing in here perhaps about the nature of philanthropy itself–that it mostly involves giving what you can spare without missing it rather than giving what you need or wish for yourself. I need to think that through a bit more.

“You could argue that the Quakers who founded Swarthmore College were looking out for me. Only they weren’t: the college they founded absolutely did not have me or its current students or its current society meaningfully in mind. The only thing they gave us was an institutional framework that could be redesigned and repurposed going forward. There is no reason in that sense when you build something for yourself, with your own resources, to be deliberately spiteful and make it fall apart or break the moment you’re done with it, to “take it with you”. But that’s a far cry from consciously giving up something you have or could have in favor of people who don’t even exist.”

Doesn’t an endowment involve consciously giving up something you have in favor of people who don’t even exist?

There is a bit of an irony that some of the strongest proponents of divestment on campus right now argue that favoring the future in the endowment is an impoverishment of the needs of the present…I think that shows in part how hard it is to argue for having a mentality that gives preference to what very far future people will feel and want.