On Inheritance
This is an edited transcript of the talk given by our guest speaker, Dr Edmund Carrow, on the fifth evening of Latimer 2022.
Thank you. It’s a great pleasure to be here, and a slightly alarming one. I have been told you have spent the day arguing about Aristotle, so I shall try to keep my claims modest.
I want to talk to you about inheritance. Not money, although I suspect that’s the first thing the word brings to mind. I mean everything that was handed to you before you were old enough to choose it: your language, your songs, the shape of the towns you live in, the churches you walk past, the laws that protect you, the books on your seminar table. None of it was made by you. All of it was given.
We live in an age that is rather uncomfortable with that idea. We like to think of ourselves as self-made, as free to choose everything about who we are. There is something admirable in that. But a tree that insists it has no need of roots does not grow taller. It falls over in the first strong wind.
Burke said that society is a partnership between the living, the dead, and those who are yet to be born. I think that is one of the truest things ever written. It means that you are not only individuals. You are also trustees. You have been handed something precious, and it is not entirely yours to spend. One day you will have to hand it on.
The question I want to leave with you is a simple one. What will you hand on? Will it be what you received, cared for and perhaps a little improved? Or will it be less? Every generation has to answer that question, and I think yours will have to answer it more seriously than most.
It is easy to criticise the things we inherit, and it is often right to do so. Latimer himself spent his life calling his own church and his own country to do better. But he did it because he loved them. Criticism without love is only demolition. I hope you will learn to love what you have been given enough to argue with it, and enough to defend it.
Thank you.