Reflections on Thanksgiving 2024 about understanding and preserving the legacy we have received from our ancestors so we can pass it on.
Thanksgiving 2024: Understanding and Preserving a Legacy
This Thanksgiving 2024 was a more intimate one for us: our two boys joined us for an early afternoon dinner that stretched into an early evening supper and dessert. We watched some episodes of the second season of Arcane and played several rounds of the Dominion card game. It’s been part of a week-long set of festivities that involved a trip to see Elf in the movie theatre with our teenage grandchildren, a wine party at the neighbors, a Black Friday shopping expedition, and a rich variety of Hallmark movies. These experiences have put me in a reflective mood about the legacies our ancestors have left us and what we leave for our descendants.
“Society is a shared inheritance for the sake of which we learn to circumscribe our demands, to see our own place in things as part of a continuous chain of giving and receiving, and to recognize that the good things we inherit are not ours to spoil. There is a line of obligation that connects us to those who gave us what we have; and our concern for the future is an extension of that line. We take the future of our community into account not by fictitious cost-benefit calculations, but more concretely, by seeing ourselves as inheriting benefits and passing them on.”
Roger Scruton in “How to be a Conservative“
Our parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles do the best they can to prepare us for the world as they understand it, and we do the same for our children, grandchildren, friends, and neighbors. At least that’s my plan, to leave things better than I found them to the extent I can glimpse better and have the ability to be a positive influence.
“History is an endless maze of unrelated happenings, until we divide it up into brief portions in which we discern a certain unity of purpose.”
Samuel McChord Crothers in “On the Evening of the New Day,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1919
We have a limited perspective on history since we grow up embedded in a particular cultural context and customs and practices specific to our family. But what I see makes sense: it’s a natural human perspective to accept what we are born into as normal. And to take it for granted, even when it’s rare and precious. It can be hard to appreciate living in the calm luxury of Silicon Valley and how many have sacrificed and continue to sacrifice to make this all possible. But it is worth the effort to give thanks and to pass along their legacy as best we can.
Conservation is about beauty; but it is also, for the very same reason, about history and its meaning. Some have a static conception of history, seeing it as the remains of past time, which we conserve as a book in which to read about things that have vanished. The test of the book is its accuracy, and once deemed to be part of our history, objects, landscapes and houses must be conserved as they were, with their authentic surroundings and details, as lessons for the restless visitor. This is the concept of history that you find in the American ‘heritage’ trails and historic landmarks: meticulously preserved ephemera of brick and timber, standing on concrete between hostile towers of glass.
My father favored rather a dynamic conception, according to which history is an aspect of the present, a living thing, influencing our projects and also changing under their influence. The past for him was not a book to be read, but a book to be written in. We learn from it, he believed, but only by discovering how to accommodate our actions and lifestyles to its pages. It is valuable to us because it contains people, without whose striving and suffering we ourselves would not exist. These people produced the physical contours of our country; but they also produced its institutions and its laws, and fought to preserve them. On any understanding of the web of social obligation, we owe them a duty of remembrance. We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.
Other Thanksgiving Posts
- 2023: Thanksgiving 2023: Absent Friends
- 2022 Thanksgiving 2022: Reconnecting With Friends and Family
- 2021 Thanksgiving 2021: The Road Goes On
- 2019 Thanksgiving 2019
- 2018 Thanksgiving 2018: a Look Back at Founders Who Persevered
- 2017 Thanksgiving 2017: Counting My Blessings, Bootstrapper Potluck, Finest Hour
- 2016 Thanksgiving 2016: Bootstrappers Potluck and Reflections on the Mayflower Compact
- 2015 Thanksgiving 2015: Bootstrappers Potluck and Rainbow Shiny
- 2014 Thanksgiving 2014
- 2013 Thanksgiving 2013
- 2012 Thanksgiving 2012
- 2011 Thanksgiving 2011
- 2010 Some Things Change, Others Remain Constant
- 2009 Thanksgiving 2009
- 2008 Thanksgiving 2008
- 2007 Giving Thanks & Success For a Bootstrapper
- 2006 Quotes for Thanksgiving
Image Credit: “Candle Light” by Riyaad Minty (used with attribution under creative commons). I thought this captured the sense of carrying illumination forward.