The Good Ancestor

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The Good Ancestor

Highlights

Remoteness in time has, in itself, no more significance than remoteness in space. Suppose that I shoot some arrow into a distant wood, where it wounds some person. If I should have known that there might be someone in this wood, I am guilty of gross negligence. Because this person is far away, I cannot identify the person whom I harm. But this is no excuse. Nor is it any excuse that this person is far away. We should make the same claims about effects on people who are temporally remote.

On another level it raises a challenging political question: is effective long-term planning most likely to thrive under an authoritarian regime?

Japan’s long-term planning was a result of being controlled by an authoritarian family dynasty that was bent on preserving its own power through the generations.

History has few, if any, examples of dictators who remain benign and enlightened for very long – witness, for example, China’s record on human rights.

Steward Brand points out that the most long lasting buildings are those that can “learn” by adapting to new contexts over time […]. He draws an analogy with biology: “the more adapted an organism to present conditions, the less adaptable it can be to unknown future conditions.”

This may be the ultimate historical lesson of the Great Stink: that radical long-term planning can be kickstarted by a crisis.

As Milton Friedman put it, while a crisis provides the opportunity for change, “when that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

When ruling elites are able to insulate themselves from the problems they create, those problems multiply and eventually catch up with them, whether in the form of economic collapse or destabilising social unrest.

The Reform path is one where keeping below 2°C of planetary heating is seen as a worthy achievement, even though studies show that living in a world that is 2°C hotter rather than 1.5°C hotter would result in an extra 150 million human deaths from air pollution alone. As David Wallace-Wells notes, “numbers that large can be hard to grasp, but 150 million is the equivalent of twenty-five Holocausts.”

A good ancestor recognises a dying system when they see one, and rather than trying to pass on their own dysfunctional civilisation to the next generation, they take part in the historic act of seeding a new civilisation that can grow in its place and maintain the conditions conducive to life into the long future.

Viktor Frankl, Auschwitz survivor and founder of existential psychotherapy, believed that we find meaning by dedicating ourselves to what he called a “concrete assignment”, a future project or ideal that transcends the self.

A more serious challenge is that the goal of techno-escape may create serious collateral damage: the more we set our hopes on escaping to other worlds, the less likely we are to make the effort required to preserve our existing planetary home.

What we really need, argues ecologist William Rees, is to create self-sustaining “bioregional city-states” that are integrated into their local ecosystems rather than parasitic upon them.

The idea that collapse is inevitable is not only empirically unproven but also promotes a fatalistic inertia and apathy. “By turning people’s attention toward preparing for doom, rather than focusing on structural political and economic change,” argues cultural thinker Jeremy Lent, “Deep Adaptation threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, increasing the risk of collapse by diluting efforts toward societal transformation.”

Framing collapse as “inevitable” creates feedback loops of passive despair rather than of radical hope that inspires action.

In the natural world the definition of success is the continuity of Life. You keep yourself alive and you keep your offspring alive. That’s success. But it’s not the offspring in this generation. Success is keeping your offspring alive for then thousand generations and more. That presents a conundrum because you’re not going to be there to take care of your offspring ten thousand generations from now. So what organisms have learned to do is to take care of the place that’s going to take care of their offspring. Life has learned to create conditions conducive to life.

It is this underlying faith on growth that poses the greatest challenge to securing a long future for humandkind. As the economist Kenneth Boulding put it in the early 1970s, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

As David Wallace-Wells argues, “the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics”.