Are We Blind to the Future?

One of the most serious drawbacks of the neoliberal era has been the rise of technocrats in place of what we used to know as leaders.  Today they're short-termers with rarely any vision of the future. And that may be our fatal flaw.

...millions of people alive today will be there as 2100 arrives, inheriting the century my generation will leave behind. All the decisions we make, for better and worse, will be theirs to live with. And these descendants will have their own families: hundreds of millions of people not yet born, most of whom you or I will never meet. 

For many of us currently in adulthood, how often can we truly say we are thinking about the well-being of these future generations? How often do we contemplate the impact of our decisions as they ripple into the decades and centuries ahead? 

Part of the problem is that the ‘now’ commands so much more attention. We are saturated with knowledge and standards of living have mostly never been higher – but today it is difficult to look beyond the next news cycle. If time can be sliced, it is only getting finer, with ever-shorter periods now shaping our world. To paraphrase the investor Esther Dyson: in politics the dominant time frame is a term of office, in fashion and culture it’s a season, for corporations it's a quarter, on the internet it's minutes, and on the financial markets mere milliseconds.

Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future,” she wrote in 1978. We can only guess her reaction to the relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now. 

That's why researchers, artists, technologists and philosophers are converging on the idea that short-termism may be the greatest threat our species is facing this century. 

...What these thinkers from myriad fields share is a simple idea: that the longevity of civilisation depends on us extending our frame of reference in time – considering the world and our descendants through a much longer lens. What if we could be altruistic enough to care about people we might never live to see? And if so, what will it take to break out of our short-termist ways? 

Are we 'colonizing' the future?

According to the social philosopher Roman Krznaric, failing to value the lives of all these descendants is akin to ‘colonising’ the future – essentially deciding that future generations have no ownership rights there, or any say over how it evolves. “We treat the future as a distant colonial outpost where we dump ecological degradation, nuclear waste, public debt and technological risk,” he told attendees at a recent event in London organised by The Long Time Inquiry, an initiative to encourage long-term thinking in the cultural sector.

...A few governments are, reassuringly, trying to change their ways. For example, Finland and Sweden have parliamentary advisory groups to foster longer-term planning, and Hungary has an ombudsman for future generations. There are also various organisations now lobbying politicians to consider future generations from a human rights perspective, particularly in relation to climate change.

 Can you imagine any Canadian government, Liberal or Conservative, doing this?

Wales appointed Sophie Howe in 2016 – a former senior leader in the police – to be a “future generations commissioner”, charged with ensuring Welsh public bodies think about the long-term in their decisions. “This isn’t just through some aspirational policy document, it’s actually written into law through the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act,” Howe explained recently on BBC Radio 4. “All decisions taken by the public sector in Wales, including our government, must demonstrate how they are meeting today’s needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own.”

Our petro-economy is a profoundly stupid attempt at meeting today's needs to the impairment of future generations of Canadians to meet their own.  The environmental havoc our bitumen production creates today won't be our problem but theirs and they will pay dearly for our indifference to the future. We know our descendants will not enjoy the ease and comfort we have known. We are not leaving Canada a better place than we found it.

The wisdom of the Iroquois guides some futurists:

...a principle called ‘Seventh Generation’ stewardship, defined by the leaders of the Native American Iroquois Confederacy many centuries ago. “Every decision they took had to keep in mind seven generations hence.”

...They propose that the prevalence of short-termism is entwined with our attitude to death. “We’ve got a hunch that our inability to deal with the future of the world beyond our lifespan is wrapped up with our inability to deal with the fact that our lives will end,” they write. “Our denial of our own mortality prevents us from engaging with the long-term future.”

I've been writing about posterity on this blog for more than a decade. Posterity once held a role in political planning and policy but fell into desuetude with the advent of the neoliberal order.  I argued for the recognition of a doctrine of "fair share" in modern governance.

Posterity doesn't fit into our economic model of production and consumption because it creates a fetter on both. We have lost our understanding of the importance of posterity to our society, to our country. We no longer plan today for generations to come far in the future. We no longer look much beyond the next electoral cycle. 

Protecting posterity is an act of collective consciousness and will. It is acknowledging that we're entitled to our fair share and no more. We can't have it all without depriving future generations of their fair share. 

To understand the idea of "fair share" imagine if our great, great, great grandparents had followed our path. 

Imagine if our ancestors had two things - the ability to consume everything they could get their hands on and a blind indifference to the day when it was our turn to populate this country. Imagine if two or three generations had gone on a rapacious binge gobbling up the world's resources; going into serious deficit on renewables (emptying the oceans, logging off the forests, transforming farmland into desert) and fouling the environment. Then consider how their depredations might impact on your life today. I think that's beyond the imagination of all but the best science fiction writers but that's of no real matter. It's enough in any event to make the case for posterity and the concept of "fair share."

In arguing for the restoration of posterity politics I have been inspired by Edmund Burke, Theodore Roosevelt, Bill Moyers and several others.

Burke, the 18th century political philosopher, wrote of posterity as the glue that connects future generations to the past but also the present:
All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust. 

...one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers."

In Burke's view, each generation has a life estate in our land but no more and that life estate, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, is in the nature of a trust. We are trustees of the land for the generations that will follow us. I would like to think he had the current neoliberal contagion or something like it in mind when he writes of "floating fancies or fashions" that undermine the continuity of the commonwealth and prevent one generation from linking with the other. 

Roosevelt wrote of "skinning the land." 

"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation." 

I'm sure he was speaking plainly and pointedly when he spoke of one generation robbing future generations, skinning the land and leaving it worthless to those who will follow. I wonder how he might have phrased that in this, the age of climate change and the threat of mass extinction?

Justin Trudeau is blind to the future. He cares little about skinning the land or the damaged Canada his policies will bequeath to the future. He does not hold Canada in trust for those who will follow us. Scheer is worse but at least he's a little less hypocritical than the Liberal offering.