What We Owe Today and Tomorrow
Reflections on Rosh Hashana and Long-Termism
I make this covenant not with you alone but both with those who are standing here with us this day before our God, and with those who are not with us here this day. (Deuteronomy 29:14)
“Long-termism” has been trending of late. Long-termism is the idea, popularized by Will MacAskill in What We Owe the Future, that the future can be much better than the present and that we should try to make it so. Said more strongly, future lives are worth as much as present lives, and we should care just as much about people living far away in time as in space.
While I’m not as confidant as the longtermists that we can meaningfully know, relate to, or impact the future beyond a certain point (the distant future and the distant past being as enigmatic as the face of God), I appreciate the optimistic impulse beneath it. People who can’t imagine a long term future despair, but those who can, build. It is in this context that I find God’s (or Moses’s) claim that the covenant is with “those who are not with us here this day” to be quite revolutionary—they imagine the covenant as something that affects a long-term future, one in which I am here and you are here, discussing it.
The first suggestion of long-termism in the Torah that I can find is Jacob’s purchasing of the birthright from Esau. Although it is considered to be a story of trickery and deception, another rosier way to frame it is that it is a fair trade between someone who values intergenerational value and someone who values impulsivity, a caricature of two different orientations to time.
For most of human history, society was pre-industrial. It was with the Industrial Revolution that we got the capacity to see tremendous impact from our action, with the help of technology. That resulted, according to Tyler Cowen, in the discovery of utilitarianism as an ethical theory. When you can see outsized returns with little effort that leads you away from deontology (rule based ethics) and virtue (character based ethics) towards ethics focused on impact.
The Torah contains the seeds of all three ethical theories. We should be generous because it’s good for us to be generous, we should give because it’s the right thing to do, and we should give because we can make a difference on the recipient. The covenant likewise exists to help us achieve personally at the level of the soul, it helps structure society according to shared “universal” norms, and it also—and here is the point emphasized in our parasha—prepares the world for others to inhabit it. A covenant is made, in short, not just between us and God, but between us and the future. That is the meaning of covenant, and that is why Nietzsche refers to the human being as a promising animal. The more we can consider the long-term future impact of our lives, the more we transcend the divide between self and other, and perhaps the more we can console ourselves against the fear of death and the inevitability of loss.
One of the features of the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur liturgy is the request that God pardon and forgive us on account of the merits of our ancestors, Z’chut avot. But another aspect, less emphasized, is the idea that God should pardon us for the sake of our descendants, the ones to come. God should find our z’chut, our merit, and highlight it, so that it can count towards the future in which we, too, will be remembered.
To uphold the covenant is to uphold the future. Of course, we fail, err, make mistakes. But if we consider the covenant as made not just with us than it does not fall entirely upon us to carry it on; as long as we do our part in transmitting it to the future and giving the future the best chance of passing it on, etc., we can be said to have succeeded. There is tremendous comfort in this macro-point even as we have much to work on.
One thing the utilitarians get right is that if the future is significantly worse then all our kind and good efforts now will ultimately have been no different than chair arrangements on the Titanic. On the other hand, the covenant is made Hayom. All covenants are made in the present. And we cannot only live for the future, procrastinating by telling ourselves that tomorrow we will take the covenant seriously.
those who are standing here with us this day before our God, AND with those who are not with us here this day
On The Days of Awe we celebrate that we have agency now, just as our ancestors did once upon a time, and our descendants will tomorrow. We owe the Future a lot, but we are also owed a future by a loving and forgiving God.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh