What is an inheritance?
inheritance (noun)
/ɪnˈhɛrɪt(ə)n(t)s/
Inheritance refers to the reception of assets, traits, or characteristics from a predecessor. Depending on the context, it generally falls into one of three distinct categories: legal and financial estates, biological genetics, or computer programming.
Around 1390, a word entered the English language: inheritance. The English borrowed this word from the French enheritance, who in turn borrowed it from their Latin cousins, hereditare. The Latin developed this word from its root, heres—H-E-R-E-S. It sounds pretty similar to “heir,” the one to whom everything is left behind, but “heir” is far from its ancestor, heres. Because heres was not about the person who receives, but the act of leaving behind.
The journey of this word is a pretty appropriate metaphor for its meaning.
If the first thing that comes to your mind when you read or hear this word is a house or money or property, I wouldn’t blame you. Legal systems and television have used this word in its most tangible avatar. But there is another meaning to inheritance—one that is invisible, pervasive, and profound, living through our every thought, action, and in our very skin.
In my house live three generations: my grandmother, born in 1940; my parents, born in 1967 and 1970; and my sister and I. When each of them thinks of inheritance, both received and given, they think of very different things.
My father, for example, received only a hand-knit sweater, a few handwritten letters, and an old sari from his mother. But he will leave behind a piece of land with two flats. If you were to ask him what he truly inherited, though, he would say love, impeccable character, an appreciation for honesty and integrity, and a deep understanding of financial distress and dignity in the face of absolute poverty.
When I think about what I will inherit, yes, it will be 50% of said plot and one flat. But what I will remember long after the land has been sold off and the flat rented out is an appreciation for books, an unwavering obligation to be kind to other people—which I’m only now starting to do—a frustration with my parents’ generosity, and a lifetime of memories.
If this journey through linguistic and personal history has not made it clear, let me spell it out.
Inheritance is the reception of qualities, possessions, conditions, values, and traits from previous generations. It is the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we have heard, and the stories we leave behind. Stories of land, property, culture, heritage, religion, power, and gender. None of them are mutually exclusive. All of them are woven into the seamless fabric of our lives.
Inheritance is not merely any one of these things. It is a system made up of all of them and much more, wrapped around our lives like the atmosphere itself. But inheritance is also, in many ways, a deeply human fiction.
There is no biological imperative for a lioness to leave behind a cave or a carcass for her children before she dies. There is no imperative for a deer to fence off a patch of grass for its young. Almost every species on this planet nurtures its young only until survival is possible, and then leaves them to fend for themselves. Humans, however, interfere in the lives of their children long after survival is guaranteed, often in ways neither generation fully understands. Not even death stops us from leaving behind resources, tangible and intangible, documented and legalized, for future generations. Sometimes I wonder if we have children because we cannot find meaning in ourselves, and so we make them the centre of our universe in order to find something to live for but I digress.
What is even more fascinating is that inheritance does not come only from previous generations. Or rather, individual inheritances may come from specific ancestors, but our nature as social animals complicates inheritance significantly. Our personal inheritances constantly interact with the inheritances of our environment. Political choices made by the grandparents of a stranger living thousands of miles away inform our present political realities. Neither my father nor his mother consciously chose to converse in English, yet the behaviours and incentives of their and another alien society created a world where I inherited English as my “second” first language.
Think about that for a minute: a 27-year-old non-British person living on a completely different continent is writing in a language tied to a country she has never even visited. That is the true, and mostly ignored, nature of inheritance.
Inheritance expands from an intergenerational gift into an international, interreligious, intercontinental web of conflicting realities surrounding us every single moment. We inherit from peers, competitors, nations, and civilizations just as much as we do from our great-great-great-grandparents. It may not always be visible in our features or our bank balances, but it is unmistakable in our behaviour and in our lives.
If you zoom out from the individual, it becomes evident that countries inherit financial systems, languages, culture, music, products, and values from each other all the time.
At this very moment, we are living through inherited economic pain that many of us had no say in, because a political decision made on the other side of the world reshaped global realities overnight. If anything should make the nature of inheritance clear, it is this: the most dangerous thing about inheritance is that we rarely get a say in what we receive. We may reject it once we have it, but we inherit it all the same.
When we begin to recognize inheritance as a system, we unlock something incredibly powerful: a way of understanding ourselves and the world that is not rooted in somebody else’s wisdom or a self-help book, but in our own histories and our own unique systems of thought.
With that, ladies and gentlemen, and anyone else who’s interested, welcome to the Inheritance Project. This is my attempt to understand myself, and perhaps help you understand yourself in the process.
Over the next few weeks—hopefully years—I will continue to write about the things we inherit, the worlds we build from them, and hopefully, the kinder worlds we leave behind.