[Serious] Is the Past Real?

[Belacqua]

Does a promise made yesterday become no longer a promise because yesterday is in the past and therefore doesn't exist anymore?

Let's go with 'be a decent human'.

But what does that mean? To whom are you being decent when the person either no longer exists or does not and may never come to exist?

Roger Scruton has written well about responsibilities we have to people who don't currently exist. He sees this as a fundamental part of conservatism. (There are still sane and persuasive conservatives in Britain; not like US Republicans at all.)

I won't be able to summarize his arguments well, but it's something along these lines:

Good people are likely to feel some responsibility to people who aren't born yet. We know it would be bad for us to wreck the environment to produce our short term luxuries. And whatever is good about our culture, if anything, we ought to preserve as well as we can so that later generations can benefit from it as well. Probably most people feel this, even if they don't have grandkids of their own. 

It's less intuitive to see a similar responsibility to people from the past. But when those people worked hard to produce works and institutions which make our society better, we should respect their ideas and wishes and be very careful about destroying or changing those creations. It's likely that people from the past thought differently than we do, which means it requires an effort to understand what they were up to sometimes. Still, it doesn't mean they were stupid, and we are doing good people a disservice if we simply write off what's old-fashioned as garbage. 

(I was surprised once at the reaction I got when I said that we can learn from tradition -- that sometimes traditions are there for good reasons. It makes some people upset to hear this. And of course we frequently see the scientism people here dismiss pre-scientific thinkers as worthless, which I believe is a mistake.)

Naturally some things must change and old institutions can be improved. But taking great care to preserve what is really good, and not just follow fashion, can be framed as a responsibility we have to those good people who made the effort to create those things in the first place. 

A simple example that comes to mind: the early curators who put together the collections in an art museum might have had different enthusiasms than we do right now. But it would be a mistake to sell off all the baroque sculpture in order to buy this year's popular artists, even if baroque sculpture doesn't draw the tourists the way it used to. Those curators knew something, and maybe knew better than those who focus on what's trendy today.