"Future generations are disenfranchised in the same way that slaves and women were in the past": Roman Krznaraic on his new book, The Good Ancestor

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We covered Roman Krznaric’s ideas about our “responsibility to future generations” here about 18 months ago - and it’s a delight to see that it’s finally resolved into his new book, The Good Ancestor: how to think long-term in a short-term world.

Below is the opening section to an interview Roman gave to the excellent Five Books blog - which speaks to writers about their vital five book recommendations. Here, Perspectiva’s Caspar Henderson does an opening interview on the content of his new book - and at the end, we’ll list Roman’s book choices:

CH: Tell me about long-term thinking and why you decided to write a book about it.

RK: Firstly, I saw a conceptual emergency. There are lots of people talking about excessive focus on short-term thinking, and the need for longer-term thinking to solve problems such as the climate crisis, the threats from artificial intelligence, pandemics and wealth inequality.

But very few people are really exploring long-term thinking systematically and asking the important questions. What are its components? How long is long-term? How do you get better at it? How do we embed it in our minds and in social institutions? I realised that I wanted to try and answer some of these questions.

The second thing had to do with my interest in empathy. I’ve been writing about empathy for over a decade, and I also founded an arts organisation called the Empathy Museum. My focus has been on how do we step into the shoes of people who are alive today but who may be living on the margins, whether in developing countries or in our own societies?

Yet I’ve always struggled with the question of how you empathise with people through time: people who you cannot talk to, whose lives you can barely imagine. And so this book is partly an effort to explore that. How do we step into the shoes of future generations and make a moral and even a personal connection with them?

The third reason I wrote the book came to me in a moment of recognition. I realised that humankind has colonised the future. We treat it like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk and nuclear waste.

In the decade I spent as a political scientist researching and teaching democratic governance, it simply never occurred to me that future generations are disenfranchised in the same way that slaves and women were in the past.

Yet that is the reality. I realised we need to embark on an anti-colonial, intergenerational liberation struggle to give those future generations a voice, rights, and a place in our public discourse.

On that last point, I guess you know The Future Eaters by Tim Flannery?

Yes, it’s a really important book, partly because it articulates the metaphor that we have colonised the future by consuming the natural wealth of future generations. Flannery, like me, is Australian, and the language of colonisation is very much in our upbringing.

When the British colonised Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries they drew on a legal doctrine now known as terra nullius—the idea that the continent was ‘nobody’s land’ and that therefore they could take it despite the claims of indigenous people.

We are now in an era not of terra nullius but of tempus nullius—nobody’s time. We treat the future as an uninhabited territory that we can pillage as we please.

You headline the third part of The Good Ancestor ‘Bring on the Time Rebellion.’ One hears it argued that authoritarian regimes are better than democracies at planning for the long term. Is there any truth to this idea?

The idea that we need benign dictators or enlightened despots to save us – especially from long-term ecological threats – is widely held.

The belief is that democratic structures are irredeemably short-termist because of a design problem: electoral cycles. Politicians focus their attention on the next election, and can often barely see beyond the next opinion poll or tweet.

At the same time politics is vulnerable to capture by corporations and other groups who are concerned with their near-term interests. So the assumption is that authoritarian regimes must be more effective. Look at China, look at Singapore!

One of the things I tried to do is examine the evidence for this. The book presents something called the Intergenerational Solidarity Index, a quantitative measure of long-term government performance that has been created by the interdisciplinary scientist Jamie McQuilkin.

How do various countries perform on environmental measures, and in terms of investment in long-term health care and education that benefits future generations? And what you see is that democracies actually outperform authoritarian regimes by a very significant margin.

There are exceptions—like China, like Singapore—but then think of all those authoritarian regimes that are poor performers on long-term public policy, whether it’s Saudi Arabia, Russia, or many others.

Although democracies tend to score higher on the index than autocracies, a key point is that all those democracies could still perform more effectively. On the Intergenerational Solidarity Index a country like the UK comes 45th out of 122 countries.

The US is even further down the list, and even high-performing countries like France could do a lot better in terms of extending the time horizons of government policy.

You write about what you call ‘design principles for deep democracy.’ Tell us something about these as you see them.

We need to inject long-term thinking into the DNA of democracy itself. A first step is to have ‘guardians of the future.’ These can be political appointees with a focus on long-term public policy. In Wales, for example, there is a Future Generations Commissioner whose job is to monitor legislation for its impact on people thirty years from now.

This is a good start, but as Sophie Howe, the current Commissioner acknowledges, the position lacks power. So I think we need to go further.

One approach is to have Citizens’ Assemblies that focus on long-term issues, such as the management of nuclear waste, embedded into our democratic processes. Because all the evidence shows that Citizens’ Assemblies taken from random selections of a diverse range of people are much better at long-term policy focus than our current myopic politicians.

“We treat the future as an uninhabited territory that we can pillage as we please”

In Japan, there’s a wonderful citizen-based initiative called the Future Design Movement which is all about long-term city planning. They split up people into two groups to make plans for their towns and cities.

The first group are told they are residents from the present day, and they make plans about health care and education and so on. The second group are given ceremonial kimonos to wear and told to imagine themselves as residents from the year 2060, thinking ahead to the perspectives of people four decades from now.

This second group tend to come up with much more radical proposals in areas such as the environment, employment, healthcare and education.

So, these are the kinds of democratic design changes we need today, especially because representative democracy is dying. We’ve got the rise of far-right populism, the decline of political trust and of traditional parties.

We urgently need to do something to revamp the democratic model. These kinds of changes are amongst the most effective ways to do it, and they have long-term benefits.

More here. Caspar then asks Roman about his five favourite books on long-term thinking - click here to read his full answers, but the titles are:

FUTURES, EQUIP FOR THE FUTURE, SHAPE THE SYSTEM, BIG PICTUREpat kanehistory, generationsComment