The notion of an afterlife seems to lie at the root of morality and wisdom. Not afterlife as in another world to which your soul goes but rather this world in which future generations live. The notion that our lives have consequences beyond our own life - and that future lives matter just as much as our own - can provoke something better in us.
Pericles was born about 500 BC and presided over the Athens that included Socrates and Plato. (And Plato who had been taught by Socrates went on to teach Aristotle who went on to teach Alexander the Great - speaking of afterlives and consequences.) Pericles helped to define democracy, something the Athenians were among the first in the world to make a reality.
Each year, a notable Athenian was to give a funeral oration to commemorate those who had died in battle. The tradition was to praise these brave people. Pericles went a step further. In this oration, he actually spoke to why their sacrifice mattered, spoke to what they died for.
He mentioned two reasons these warriors' sacrifice might matter.
One was, "If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences." It is what we now call justice for all.
Another was, "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality..." Pericles brought in the best minds from around Greece. (The Greeks did not think of themselves as one people at this time. Spartans and Athenians, for instance, were enemies and definitely saw each other as foreigners. Xenophobia is a Greek word. Pericles was different for so many reasons; one is simply that he was not xenophobic.) Those great minds from elsewhere helped fuel math and philosophy and helped to design and build the Parthenon. By the standards of the day, Athens was cosmopolitan and it flourished because it was a magnet for the world's best and brightest.
Pericles looked beyond the lives of the recently dead (and was himself to die of a plague just two years later) to why their deaths - or perhaps anything at all - mattered. What he articulated in his funeral oration was the fact that the afterlife matters because future lives matter. And of course, here we are, convinced that our lives matter even more than the lives of those ancient Greeks. And in another 2,500 years there will be another generation convinced of the same. Whether the world flourishes or flounders is greatly determined by whether past generations thought - or this present generation thinks - that an afterlife deserves our investment, our thought, our consideration.
Young men are driven to pass on genes, old men to pass on memes. We have a biological imperative to create a future that is partly us and mostly someone new; I believe we have a social imperative to do the same with the values and ideals we try to articulate, share and live. That has to at least partly be animated by a love for the possible, for what isn't born yet.
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