The Good Ancestor

A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking

By: Roman Krznaric

Narrated by: Joe Jameson

A call to save ourselves and our planet by targeting the root of our inaction: extreme short-sightedness

“The most important question we must ask ourselves is: Are we being good ancestors?” So said Jonas Salk, who cured polio in 1953. Salk saved millions of lives, but he refused to patent his cure or make any money from it. His radical rethinking of what we owe future generations should be an inspiration to us all, but it has hardly taken hold: Businesses can barely see past the next quarter; politicians can’t see past the next election.

Markets spike, then they crash in speculative bubbles. We rarely stop to consider whether we’re being good ancestors...but the future depends on it.\

Here, leading public intellectual, philosopher, and best-selling author Roman Krznaric explains six practical ways we can retrain our brains to save our future - such as adopting Deep Time Humility (recognizing our lives as a cosmic eyeblink) and Cathedral Thinking (starting projects that will take more than one lifetime to complete). His aim is to inspire a “time rebellion” - to shift our allegiance from our generation only to all humanity, present and future.

©2020 Roman Krznaric (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

genial !!

lectura obligada para todas las generaciones actuales y venideras, en aulas y long term learners.

Great Book

I loved this book and it gave me great insight, but the narrator bored me. That makes a huge difference in reading audiobooks.

Essential reading for a world we'd all want to be

It will take something for us to shift our focus from "For me, today" to "For them, tomorrow". This book might just help you shift that thinking for at least yourself, and who knows what you might come up with if that were to happen. Remember your grandparents? Did they lead their lives in a way that made yours better? And your grandchildren? Let's start to think that way, it won't feel natural for most of us, but if we don't, then our grandchildren may curse us. That is not how I wish to be remembered.

Our future selves cherished in the here now

An opportunity to learn how to write your epitaph, how to ensure the actions and behaviors of your daily life are immortalized positively and constructively by all who come after you. Take this book as your call to action. Reflect on your place in building a sustainable existence for all creatures great and small. Open your mind and heart, as this book serves as an excellent reference and playbook. And once you read it, pass it on!

Excellent

The book starts a little slow, but then becomes extremely good. I thought it was thoughtful and very helpful.

Simplistic, Grandiose and a little (unintentionally) smug

Lovely thoughts to ponder for those who actually haven't pondered the need to regulate their pursuit of short term pleasure. But most of us are well acquainted with such, will find herein too many assertions of opinion as fact. And the author fails to seriously deal with the prospect of the wrong folks getting control of deep time. (Bad enough they have control now! :)

Limited

I had such hopes with his book. But I’ve found it to limited to a human-centric/ legal-policies point of view. Anthropocene at its finest.

Surprisingly weak on logic

Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I was very disappointed. The book is a collection of thoughts about how we ought to be mindful of the effects of our behavior on the future. Common sense and garden variety environmentalism get us that far, so I wanted something more from this book.

What it has isn't very valuable. First, there are some some obvious facts about the potential for people in the present to influence the future, and added observation that we often don't think much about what we do with that power. Then there is a series of banal style observations that many cultures have rituals and customs around the future (which dip a little uncomfortably into noble-savage stereotypes). This is all fine, as far as it goes, in service to mindfulness about the future, even if it does read like a bulleted list of cherry-picked ideas from human cultures presented as unique, except that prognostication and concern for the future can be found in virtually every culture ever. At least the ones that had children and parents. The point is that these traditions don't stand up to the forces that drive us to create economies of scale, and what I wanted from this book was good ideas for dealing with that.

But the reason I take such issue with this book is that we are living, as the book rightly quotes David Attenborough as saying, in the last period where we can make an real difference on the course of anthropogenic climate change. There are many great arguments for caring more about this that don't descend into the fetishization of foraging cultures, or specious arguments from people who should have taken a math class before using math in their book.

The book's most egregious issue comes near the middle. There's a ridiculously illogical -- and offensive -- comparison of the way discounting the future is like racial slavery in the United States Constitution. Setting aside the very questionable use of black slavery to try to score emotional points for the environment, the argument makes no sense.

The message of the book is stated quite clearly that future people should count just as much as present people, and have the same rights as we have. It may push the right emotional buttons, but it's a truly stupid position -- so much so that it's difficult to decide where to start. First, yes, potential people *should* count less than actual people, just as potential things, jobs, money, love, and shoes should count less than actual examples of those things. And this is for reasons that should *not* need explaining. The only question is by how much. The book's argument leave no room for that, because it slides down a slope regardless of how much you value future people, as long as it's not 100%. It goes like this: The US Constitution originally counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person for purposes of legislative representation. If you discount the interests of future people *at all* there's always some future point at which you can find that a theoretical future life has been discounted to 3/5ths, and voila, you've just enslaved them. How heartless of you! If slavery is wrong, you must agree that tidal power is better than nuclear. My response to that is: Wat?

That's a bit like reasoning that I care about myself and my family most, and my friends, then acquaintances, and that concern becomes less as we go farther away. At some point you can I prefer the interests of my family over some distant stranger such that the stranger's interests are shared with mine at a rate of 3/5ths. Therefore I am treating that person as a chattel slave with no human rights. This bizarre mix of button-pressing, loaded topics, emotional blackmail, and numerology does not deserve our attention.