Can we have succession without place?

Considering the nature of succession in an incurably mobile society

In an essay recently published over at American Reformer, I argued that acceptance of our own mortality requires us to look beyond the life-goals of ‘success’—a degree, a nice house, upward career movement, financial security etc.—and towards succession: the aspiration that our good works might outlive us by being handed down the succeeding generations.

Out of recognition of the nature God has given us, we must reject the modern teleology of success with its forced frame of a single lifetime and its vainly constructed measures of achievement. Instead, taking as given that we are mortal creatures, thus genealogical creatures, we must live an answer to the question: what will I leave behind me, and to whom?

A good portion of the essay is devoted to arguing that succession is a work of loving persons, both those whom we succeed and those who will succeed us. But I must confess that I wrote this with the consciousness that I was ignoring an elephant. That elephant is mobility. Modern persons are not just afflicted with a lack of awareness of our impending deaths; we are also incurably mobile. We so rarely stay put in the same place from one generation to the next.

Our higher education institutions in particular have this assumption built into them: students will move across the country to study, and once they graduate it is not expected that they will remain living in their university town. If the institutions which have the formation of each new generation as their direct objective operate in this way, what can we expect of institutions which are only concerned with succession indirectly? What has the small town cricket club to do about raising up a new generation of coaches and umpires and so forth if it doesn’t know which of its young people will still be around in twenty years? What about the church that is thinking about its future Elders? And why should a couple build a house that will retain its strength and beauty for generations if their children are more likely to sell it than to live in it?

There have been many arguments made lately to actively resist the current of mobility and stay ‘rooted’ in a place, and there are as many good points to be made about why that is so incredibly difficult to do. I am not going to venture much into those discussions here. Instead, let me ask the question that comes prior: given the fact of mobility, given the assumption that people are going to be changing places, is succession possible? And if it is, what form does it take?

I have in mind a ready answer to this question: that succession under conditions of mobility is in fact more conducive to disinterested love than succession in immobile societies.

The argument would go something like this:

P1: Institutions that are invested in the formation of the next generation are concerned with succession.

P2: Even very mobile societies are full of institutions which invest in the formation of younger generations (e.g. families, schools, churches, clubs)

C1: Even very mobile societies are concerned with succession.

P3: An act done for the sake of others without expectation of personal benefit is an act from love rather than self-interest.

P4: Mobile societies are concerned with succession but do not stand to benefit from this, because the young people being formed are likely to live elsewhere.

C2: Mobile societies are concerned with succession out of love rather than self-interest.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that succession under conditions of mobility requires giving without the expectation of return. It therefore requires acts of generosity and (it might also be argued) of faith: for so long as one does still hope that one’s community will continue into the future, one must trust that this will occur by God’s mysterious providence, through means that he is working out far from our own sphere of knowledge.

I have split the argument into two parts (succession still occurs, and occurs through love) because I don’t think either conclusion can be taken for granted. But, expressed that way, they seem somewhat obvious. Our age of mobility has been going on for a while now, and civilisation continues. Something must be being passed down. We have all those succession-oriented institutions still, which only recently seem to have become threatened—presumably there are other, more important forces at work there than transient populations. And it is undeniable that we love educating people, even though the people we educate locally are not necessarily going to compose the local communities we live in. In our churches and university ministries we ‘invest’ in our young people without expectation of return, and instead ‘send’ them out to be faithful (we hope) in some other church, somewhere else. If this is succession abstracted from particular people and places, is it not succession purified from all parochialism, and therefore elevated to the highest degree?

And yet, it cannot really be abstracted from particularities, for when it comes down to it we are still talking about young Daniel and young Emma the kids of Mark and Anna at St Such-and-Such’s Church who go to their local public school and will probably move to the Capital City soon and start attending Uni Church. I guarantee it that the good people at St Such-and-Such’s love Daniel and Emma and are heartbroken that they are almost inevitably going to leave them. And they may well be starting to look around them and wonder where the next batch of teenagers are going to come from.

If the good people of St Such-and-Such’s have any hope about their own succession, it will be in this: people move. Daniel and Emma may go, but Others may come. And hopefully the Others have been raised well by their own families and churches and schools and will be strong hands into which they may place the future of St Such-and-Such’s and the work of the church in their town.

Succession can be abstracted from the local place, but only to a point: we are necessarily handing over something to someone. We cannot be forming interchangeable blanks, but must be forming citizens or church members or cricket players. The extent to which succession works under conditions of mobility is the extent to which we all move within a monoculture: in every place there is a similar church, the same kinds of jobs, and roughly the same clubs and organisations. If there is anything particular to one’s place that one wishes to pass on, people need to be remaining in place for that to happen. Or at the very least, coming and staying for just long enough to succeed into it and then hand it on. But short memories can make for strange traditions, as time-tested lore is substituted for a narrow sense of The Way Things are Done Here, most of which was probably made up by The Last Guy. Culture which moves hands too quickly can very quickly become strange.

When mobility is the accepted condition of succession, this affects not only how things are handed down but also how they are received. We can’t really be uninterested in what happens to the things we ourselves received and which we in turn pass down. To lack an interest in this is not to have a special kind of faith, but to be unfaithful servants with a habit of burying our master’s talents rather than using them. The reality is that, if we in our mobile societies are concerned with succession, we do in fact hope that the next generation will make good on our investments in and for them, and that St Such-and-Such’s will live on and prosper after we die. But if we accept that this is not going to happen through young Daniel and young Emma, but through ours and every other community participating in a concern for ‘the next generation’ in the abstract, we are now approaching succession as participation in a system of exchange. And such a system is not only detached from place, but also from time.

Why is such a system atemporal? Because it is very difficult to trace a genealogy through it. Only God could tell the story of all our many swapping and exchanges; we ourselves must necessarily lose ourselves, our sense of participation in a story, within the vast and complex System we all inhabit.

Every geographical move we make is like a small death: we leave the people we love and our works in place behind us and venture out to something new and strange. Perhaps we are learning to die to ourselves through this. I fear we are learning instead to treat life as a succession of moments, of repeated new beginnings, when it should be a continuous arc from infancy to old age. Without staying in place, it is hard to place ourselves in time. We will have only the stories of our own families to place ourselves in, until they too disband across to the four corners of the earth. And then we will have our bodies, which will faithfully testify to the passage of time despite our many attempts to start over, until the story of mortality finally closes on our last grasp at the new beginning of the retirement village and carries us away for the last time.

I think there is a way to leave a place as a practice of dying to oneself. I don’t know that I have ever succeeded in this myself, although I have known the goodbyes to feel like a foretaste of death. I do not think that love for those we leave behind us is usually the chief principle of our actions when we move, and I suspect that our faith that things will turn out is usually less like faithfulness to God than it is a misplaced trust in the great System we participate in. There will of course be saints who prove the exception to this, who know themselves so fully within God’s story that they do not lose their grip on where they are in human time. For the rest of us, I fear it will be all too easy to forget that we are genealogical creatures, and to unwittingly exchange succession for the System.