Wad-if-I-don-wanna? Sometimes, when he wants to push on his parents a bit, my eight-year-old son asks that question, in a whiny, smirky sort of way. I can react with frustration. I can try to assert my sense of power, and take away some of his. Or, I can smile back at him, and play along: OK, so you tell me. What happens now?

In his New York Times column today, David Brooks considers what would happen, on a grand scale, if one of our greatest intrinsic motivators was gone. “The value of the thought experiment,” says Brooks, “is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives.”

He writes:

Anything worth doing is the work of generations — ending racism, promoting freedom or building a nation.

 

Without posterity, there are no grand designs…no high ambitions…no sense of peoplehood, none of the untaught affections of those who are part of an organic social unit that shares the same destiny.

 

Instead, we are blessed with the disciplining power of our posterity. We rely on this strong, invisible and unacknowledged force — these millions of unborn people we will never meet but who give us the gift of our way of life.

Here we find the better story, one that goes to the heart of Communities of Health. Change, if there is to be any, relies on people’s innate sense of contribution — our “untaught affections” for each other.

We invite people to consider for themselves what matters most, and to begin to see and act more consciously toward the future they wish for. We have no prescription. No power to assert. We ask a simple question: Does the health of the community matter?

The “disciplining power of posterity” may not get my son to clean up his Legos. But what we find together in the conversation might be more important.