The Future is Barren

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Australia - Nobody's land.?

Would you think for a moment to call that great nation "Nobody's Land"?

Not likely.?

However, when Britain colonized that wondrous place, that is exactly the legal justification it gave itself to do so.

Consider that is exactly how we treat the future generations.? "Tempus nullius" - the future is nobody's.? No one lives there, and we are free to inflict environmental, societal, cultural, and economic damage to those yet unborn.?

Such is part of the thinking that writer and philosopher Roman Krznaric shares with us in The Good Ancestor - A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking; a deep and sometimes preachy book I found while bumbling around the bookstore looking for jdeas to be inspired by.

Starting us off on a bright note, Roman writes:

The moment has come, especially for those living in wealthy nations, to recognize a disturbing truth: that we have colonized the future.? We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, and nuclear waste, and which we can plunder as we please.?

At the heart of this premise is "tempus nullius", and our short term viewpoint of the impacts of our actions.? Many things we do blatantly disregard future generations and the trillions of future lives, and are born out of increasingly shorter term ways of dealing with things.? Most of us can barely think a few months out - the public stock market depends on 3 month news cycles, our political system is based on a short four year elections (or three, if you consider the election year as they typically just focus on being re-elected), the daily news brief, shocking us with noise so that they get their advertising revenue, and the now prevalence of the "buy now" button, shipping things to us within 1 day or two.

We need to be adventurous with our temporal imaginations.? At the very least, when you aim to think "long-term", take a deep breath and think a hundred years and more.

What if we started thinking a little further out?? If public markets reported not so regularly on their finances?? If our elections were not for four years life long career self-interested politicians? And instant gratification "buy now" buttons disappeared, bringing us back to a time when we would have to carefully think about the money we have??

Imagine

if

life

slowed

down.

Roman breaks the book out into sections that present these short term drivers, and tools/mental models that could help us think longer-term:

Deep-Time Humility:? Understanding that the Earth's history spans billions of years, while human history constitutes only a tiny fraction of that time.? Our generation today is an even smaller, almost the smallest, fraction of that total history.? Thinking forward, there are trillions of yet to be born lives.? Who re we to jeopardize their lives?

Legacy Mindset: The importance of cultivating a mindset where individuals consider the legacy they want to leave for future generations. This involves thinking about how one's actions and decisions will be remembered and what kind of impact they will have on the world.

Intergenerational Justice: The fairness in the distribution of resources and opportunities across different generations. Krznaric argues for policies and practices that ensure future generations have access to the same or better opportunities and resources than the current generation.

Cathedral Thinking: This concept is inspired by the medieval cathedral builders who initiated projects that would only be completed centuries later. It represents the mindset of long-term planning and working on projects that are designed to last and benefit future generations; not necessarily benefiting those that initiate the projects.

Holistic Forecasting:? The gist here refers to the practice of anticipating future challenges and opportunities by considering a wide range of factors—environmental, technological, social, and ethical—to make decisions that are sustainable and beneficial for future generations.? Think strategic planning, but even longer-term and wider in scope.

Transcendent Goal: This final tool is about setting ambitious targets that transcend current limitations and challenges, inspiring collective action towards long-term sustainability and well-being.? It's setting visionary, far-reaching objectives that will benefit people far down the line.

If you stop reading here, you pretty much have got the idea of the book.? The rest here just complements the above tools, but has some stuff I found poignant.

This graphic really hit it home for me (and is further expanded on in this overwhelming and inspiring Kurzgesagt video. Only watch if you’re ready to feel tiny):

Can we as a species think long term?? Of course we can; countless past endeavours exemplify this behaviour, and we today are results of these:

https://longnow.org/ideas/how-humans-grew-acorn-brains/

The grandmother effect and social cooperation pieces resonate strongly - of course we developed the ability to future think if we were concerned about the impacts of our choices on antecedent generations, and on how to get along with others in our current communities.? We realized that treating others poorly would have direct, long term impacts on our lives.? It just makes perfect sense that our empathy for others would grow out of the very actions that necessitated them.

This is where Roman touches on the "four motives for intergenerational justice".? In short, additional mental models on how to think about the future and the rights of future generations:

One of the most beautiful and impactful points I found were the references to long term thinking from a religious reference:

In a story from the Jewish Talmud, a man is asked why he is planting a carob tree that will not produce fruit within his lifetime and replies, "just as my ancestors planted for me, I too am planting for my descendants.

And Oren Lyons, a Chief of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, part of the Iroquois Confederacy writes

We are looking ahead, as is one of the first mandates given to us as chiefs, to make sure every decision that we make relates to the welfare and well-being of the Seventh Generation to come, and that is the basis by which we make decisions in council. we consider: will this be to the benefit of the seventh generation??

This idea of the seventh generation - that decisions we make today should result in sustainable world seven generations - in the future is something we could all consider. Think about it - if you were worried about the environmental impact of that pesticide on your grandchildren, or that garbage being tossed into the woods and how it could affect where your future family lives, would you use that pesticide, or toss that trash?

Because what will happen if we don't think about our future generations?? This is where the book presents another rosy outlook:

Energy expert Ugo Bardi has found inspiration in the Roman philosopher seneca's observation that "growth is slow, but ruin is rapid,” to coin the concept of “the Seneca cliff” on: large structures, such as Financial systems or animal populations, tend to follow a skewed S-curve in their development, reaching a peak and then suddenly collapsing.

Climate philosopher Roy Scranton gets right to the point on this one

“we're fucked. the only questions are how soon and how badly.”

Flipping this nihilistic viewpoint on its head, Rupert Read makes a deeply relevant point

"if we assume we are doomed, then we will definitely be doomed… we need to feel a confidence:? that a change of course remains eminently possible.”?

Some final complementary ideas are presented -? design principles of deep democracy - democracy not just for those around us today, but for those unborn, and for more relevant ways of governing that keep the governing bodies in touch with their peoples.

And that's where we, dear readers, need to think about others.? Not just the neighbors, but those a few hundred, or thousand, years away.

Really, it can all be summarized in one word: empathy.? Have empathy for those we will never know.? Give their lives the same starting points we had.? Or challenge yourself to do one better - set future generations up to be just a little bit better than we had it.

There are at least two core skills they should be learning that will stand the test of time. firstly, relationship skills like empathy, where humans have a big advantage over the AI machines that threaten to take their jobs.? Secondly, the skill of long-term thinking itself. This is something we will always need in a world undergoing rapid transformation and facing long-term threats. we need education systems that forge in bond with the future Generations who will inherit the consequences of our actions.

You can pick this book up on Amazon and preferably at your local bookstores. It is worth the read. Actually, I picked it up for my dad - I hope you like it dad-io.

Thanks so very much for reading this book review. I know this was a bit different, I’m not sure it worked, but then again it is more practice and did get some ideas across. If you loved this, please share it with your friends, family, enemies and strangers. Click the Like button on this post so that other people can discover it on Linkedin. Read the other things I wrote. Oh and I should be asking you again to subscribe at webuildist.substack.com if you haven’t. Please do these things, they all mean a lot.

- Jean-Michel