The way humans treat the future as a dumping ground for today’s problems is not how Roman Krznaric wants to be remembered as an ancestor.
Krznaric, a philosopher, has written The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World - a book exploring how humans need to stop our short term thinking about what we’re doing to the planet and instead consider the legacy we’re leaving for the future.
He argues that humans live in the age of the tyranny of the now, driven by 24/7 news, the latest tweet, and the buy-now button.
Roman Krznaric Photo: Kate Raworth
To combat that short-sightedness, Krznaric reveals six ways in which we can learn to think long, exploring uniquely human talents like ‘cathedral thinking’ that expand our time horizons and sharpen our foresight.
He told Jesse Mulligan the thought of being a bad ancestor keeps him up at night.
“I’ve got 12-year-old twins and I know they are going to live way towards the end of this century, they might even be alive at the beginning of the 22nd century so, that long term future isn’t science fiction or just in a film like Blade Runner 2049, it’s an intimate family fact.
“That’s for instance why my wife and I during the last UK General Election we decided to give our votes in the election to our twins… we all sat around the kitchen table and debated the party manifestos and then they told us where to put the x on the ballot sheet. In case you are wondering they didn’t exactly follow their parents’ political opinions, but it was all about realising that we’ve got this huge responsibility – what legacy are we going to leave to all those future generations to come.”
While not everyone may have a deep feeling of guilt deep inside their subconscious like Krznaric, he says there are those who think long-term like he does but are driven more by ego than desire for genuine change.
He references Russian oligarchs who build and name football stadiums and art galleries after themselves as examples of this paradox.
“When we’re thinking about our legacies we need to be asking ourselves, ‘what legacy do I want to leave for my family, for my community, for the living world’, and we need to think about our legacies as something bigger than just having the wing of that art gallery named after ourselves and I think something bigger than just leaving stuff for our own kids.
“I know the motivational drive for that, I want to leave stuff for my kids, whether it’s a home or pass on language and culture, but also I realise I’ve got to think a bit bigger than that because when I think about my daughter when she’s 90 years old in the year 2100, she’s not alone in the world, she’s surrounded by a web of family and community and friends and the web of the living world itself – the air she breathes, the water she drinks – so if I care about her life, I need to care about all life, everything that will support her and the world around her. So, I think we’ve got to make a leap from the short-term and individual to the long-term and something a bit more collective.”
And that’s not where the paradoxes end – the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed people from thinking about something immediate like a disease to other causes of human destruction such as artificial intelligence and climate change, he says.
“There’s this incredible urgency and need to think long-term because never before have our actions had so much impact on future generations.”
There are signs that urgency is being actioned, he says.
For example, in Wales they now have a Future Generations Commissioner, in the Arctic there is a seed storage facility for the world’s plant species capable of holding them for 1000 years, and even the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, has spent $US42 million on a 10,000-year time clock in a hollowed-out mountain in Texas to help humanity think about the long-term future of the planet.
Krznaric says ideas such as these are a good starting point, but more conversations need to be had about the direction humans are going.
“We need a public conversation about long-term thinking, about regenerative economies, about getting off economic growth, and I used to work for this organisation called the Oxford Muse and what we did is we created conversations between strangers, so we’d get 100 CEOs and 100 people living on the streets and different places, get them together, give them menus of conversation… to discuss questions about life like ‘what have your learned about the different varieties of love in your life’ or ‘what ways would you like to be more courageous’ and I think we need those kinds of conversation about thinking about future generations, like that one about ‘what legacy do you want to leave’… or ‘what do you think [is] the ultimate goal for the human species’… let’s talk to family members, strangers, get older people talking to school kids and the other way around – that is how we start changing the world one conversation at a time.”
