The democracy of the dead

What are our obligations to the past?

Ancestor worship is, along with our understandable fascination with the Sun, one of the oldest forms of human faith and – descending from that – of political theory.

Most nations have ‘founding fathers’ who are remembered in school textbooks and with statues in public squares. We recall these men – and, less commonly, women – not just for their existence and deeds but for their thought as well, often in the form of written constitutions and other declarations of principle.

These people fixed rules for the management of public life that we still obey, though they themselves are usually long in the grave. Institutions like parliaments and their traditions, ‘supreme’ courts and so on, were created to defend their view of the common good and to preserve it intact over time.

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