Composing a Further Life

legacy, yet there is an overlay consisting of the values or social capital we pass on.”
    Looking at the transmission of values and ideas to a wider community may become critical in later life, since the genes will have been passed on some time ago, with unpredictable results. “Actually,” I pointed out, “biologists are beginning, when they’re talking about social animals, let’s say a herd of deer, to look at the question of why some deer survive beyond their reproductive capacity. Because if the only thing that’s critical is passing on the genes, and it only takes a year for a fawn to be an adult, then why don’t the older deer just die off at that point? The older animals may have knowledge—for instance, of where to find water or grazing during a drought—that is critical to the survival of the entire herd, and of course the herd has many genes in common. The older animals contribute to what’s called the herd’s inclusive fitness, and so do birds that adopt parentless chicks. * As for humans, we transmit certain traits genetically and we transmit other traits by teaching.”
    “It’s not only teaching, but the images a parent displays to a child will influence that child forever,” Ted elaborated. “I remember my mother—what she read to me, what she said to me in terms of ambition and belief in myself. Those images are totally controlling. She kept reading
The Little Engine That Could
to me. She always said, ‘You’re a lot better than you think you are. You got a C plus? Well, you’re better than that.’ Mother would take us over to the Perkins School for the Blind, and we’d do work there. She was very strong on seeing that her children helped others. She always insisted that I have a job in the summer helping people. And Mother had a tremendous influence on me in terms of the importance of bringing something to your life other than economic success.
    “Later on, I was in the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon administration. [Donald] Rumsfeld was head of OEO but had bigger aspirations and went to work in the White House as counselor for Nixon. He then put [Dick] Cheney in charge of the OEO, and I worked with them. Few people today believe me when I say how dedicated Rumsfeld and Cheney were to the programs I was developing for inner-city economic development.”
    Ted had recently reviewed figures showing that in many black families that had made it into the middle class, children were not growing up with the values that would have carried that gain into the next generation. “Why would one group, where so many have achieved middle-class status, not be transmitting their achievements? And why is this failing to happen at a disastrous rate? I would like to know if it’s happening with Hispanics or other groups. And how about women? Does it make a difference if the parent is a college graduate, and does that accomplishment get passed on?”
    “I think we underestimate the cultural lag of any social change,” I said. “You often see parents who’ve gotten into the middle class but are still raising their children as they remember being raised themselves, so the children grow up without the middle-class values. And how much does one get from one’s peers, and who are the peers with whom these kids are associating? I think you have to ask that, too.”
    Ted asked me how I would define the difference between heritage and legacy, and I took a stab at it. “Heritage is looking back, legacy is looking forward. So you have Black History Month, and that’s about heritage. Black legacy month would be about the future.”
    “There’s wanting to pass a legacy on to your children to give them the advantages that you’ve attained,” he said. “I might make sure my kid has enough money to go to college, or to buy a house, all that kind of thing. This can be a quite selfish way of making your life more important because you’re passing on an advantage. But a legacy could be a big disadvantage, too, say in some Asian societies where the social security system is based on the children taking care of their parents. I don’t know if it’s a legal obligation in China, but it’s a very profound social obligation, isn’t it?”
    “That’s the tradition,” I said. “And that incidentally is the thing that was hardly ever mentioned in the debate about Social Security, that if Social Security deteriorates, it’s not only seniors who will suffer but the young people who are