A practical guide for ancestors. A conversation with Roman Krznaric

from Ossigeno 14

Topics

Between the past and future of Responsibility,
how to think beyond the present:
a conversation with Roman Krznaric

 

«This is really the essence of the problem of Responsibility: that there’s this huge nation of future citizens who most of us are not thinking about. And that is a tragic injustice».

Roman Krznaric, social philosopher, serves up reflections that strike with the precision of aphorisms, and his discourse aims to be that gentle gesture given to instil trust and set things in motion once more. Looking around, he sees little reason for optimism, but the problem lies precisely here: the surrounding context is no longer sufficient to comprehend the present. It is necessary to look beyond, to adopt an external perspective and a temporal outlook, both towards the past and the future. In this beyond, Krznaric leads us through unprecedented or historically overlooked examples, within a reflective framework that can be encapsulated by the question: how can I be a good ancestor?

Talking about useful examples. Our conversation begins with the presentation of Ossigeno and the issue dedicated to Responsibility – a value to be rediscovered and reintroduced at the heart of the relationship between humankind and its environment, both natural and social, alongside Respect and Sharing. Krznaric expresses his enthusiasm for addressing the theme of the future through the lens of Responsibility and invites us to introduce the article informing the reader that, while the interview is taking place, the Romagna region of Italy, from which Ossigeno originates, is grappling with yet another flood in the last two years. A paradigmatic example to explain the condition we find ourselves in. To understand that, as Krznaric observes: «We’ve colonised the future. We use the future as a dumping ground where we discard or throw away, or abandon, ecological degradation and technological risks as if there were nobody there. And of course, there are people there. There are millions, billions of people who will inhabit the future, but the tragedy is that these future generations have no voice in our politics… If we’re going to decolonise the future, I think what we need to do is think about ourselves as good ancestors. Therefore, the question is: how can we be good ancestors? I believe this is the great existential question of our time».

In the case of Roman Krznaric our conversation, free of questions, has been geared towards eliciting as many insights as possible. In this narration we are going to simply highlight seven concepts, elevating them to chapters, all linked to an action, an attitude that can characterise the good ancestor and his sense of Responsibility, a subject that Krznaric introduces with two questions. The first one: what are the gifts that I’m going to pass on?, because «If you think about it, looking backwards, we are inheritors of gifts from the past. The cities we live in, the medical discoveries, the sewers under our feet. The roads that we walk on, the aqueducts of the Romans and also some economic forms». The second one: «Responsibility is about duty. What do we have a duty to pass on? And consequently, what do we have a duty to leave behind? We can leave behind colonialism. We can leave behind obsessions with economic growth, which is destroying the planet».

Ethnosphere

The first important sticking point lies in the cultural dynamics, which must share everyone’s needs and influence behaviour. This is true in general, but it is even more fundamental for the youngest, the privileged recipients of Krznaric’s reflections. They will be the ones who will inhabit the world, and they do have that virginity of thought which is essential to bring about change.

«The biosphere provides the air that we breathe, and the ethnosphere provides the cultural air that we breathe. It’s in the ideas, the assumptions, the worldviews. And what I try to do in my books is to introduce concepts that I hope can shape the way we think, for many years to come. They don’t have to be attached to my name, but I think that the idea of being a good ancestor, for example, is a metaphor or a concept that might help us to shape our actions in the future, so that we don’t just automatically click the buy now button, but we might instead look ourselves in the mirror every morning and ask: what can I do today to be a good ancestor? I think that’s the existential challenge: to make that a habit, and the good thing about humans is that we’re good at habits. We can get used to everything, the worst and the best».

School

«The world we live in is one of beauty and horror, but also of opportunity. The opportunity to rethink our institutions. I can hear my children coming home from school now. They go to the local school, up the street. Everything is organised around the idea of individualism and competition. It’s a nice school, but it’s part of our culture where when they do exams, it’s not like they come together as a group to solve a problem. We don’t even think about that: why is that? We’re organising our education in a way that’s probably not the one we need, to solve the kind of problems that our species is facing. It’s mad».

Alternative view

It is difficult to ask for change, when the first thing that comes to mind is sacrifice – such as not being able to drive a car, or using a company’s profits to offset its environmental impact. It is difficult to start in this way, but much more motivating is to find alternatives to our habits.

«I think it’s a really important topic. I think people are afraid to talk about sacrifice. There’s a kind of ideology in the modern world, totally based on a sort of win-win model. We should be able to make money and save the planet at the same time. Well, actually, no! Maybe you’ll have to make a little less money, if you want to save the planet. Of course, many religions, Catholicism for example, have a kind of a history of the idea of sacrifice. And I think that this is one of the uses of religion today. But, in a practical sense, I think that there are certain ways of framing a sacrifice. So, just for example, if cities like Paris or Amsterdam were to say, “Ok, by 2030 you are not allowed to drive a fossil fuel car into this city”, people would think: “Oh no, I don’t want my freedom to be taken away! This is too much of a sacrifice!”. What governments need to do is to put something better in its place. So: “Ok, maybe you can’t drive your car in, but we’re going to improve public transport, we’re going to give you a free tram, or a free bus”, or something like that».

«Especially with fields like transport and so on, we can still change that. But we also have to think in the long term, because the long-term reality is that these amazing cities in Italy, where it would probably be dangerous even to ride a bike, are going to be – and indeed already are – full of water. Just think of the floods that have hit Italy over the last couple of years. What kind of world do we want to live in? And I am not thinking about distant future generations, like seven generations from now. I am just thinking about our future selves next year».

Empathy

To study Roman Krznaric’s work is also to enter a museum dedicated to a type of intelligence that is rarely celebrated. Yes, because empathy is a form of intelligence that is less glorified than logical or spatial intelligence, although it is an indispensable psychic and mental capacity for those who, like human beings, are animals living in groups, in communities.

In 2015, Roman Krznaric launched the travelling project of the Empathy Museum, which «was invented to allow people to walk in other people’s shoes. And one of our main exhibits is called A mile in my shoes. It’s a giant shoe box. There are some beautiful photographs of it online. You can walk into it, and it looks like a shoebox that you can go into. It’s the world’s first empathy shoe shop, so you’re fitted with a pair of shoes belonging to a stranger. It could be a Buddhist monk, or an environmental activist, or a Syrian refugee, and you can literally walk a mile in their shoes while listening to an audio narrative of them talking about their life, in their own words. And it’s very simple, and very powerful. And we’ve been collecting shoes and stories all over the world. Wherever we go, we collect new shoes and stories. In fact in Italy we’ve been working with a really lovely organisation in Milan, called Empathy Foundation, and we’ve been doing A mile in my shoes there. And it’s been very successful. The Empathy Museum is in Montreal at 38 the moment, and also in Belgium. We always have it in several places. So I think that’s one kind of route, but if we’re going to do deep re-education, I really think one of the things that can help us is babies».

«We were just talking about Canada, and it just came to my mind that in Canada there’s this amazing empathy teaching programme – it’s called The Roots of Empathy, like the roots of a tree – and over a million children have gone through this programme. And what they do is bringing a baby into a classroom to be with children about five to ten years old, and they all sit around the baby. And they start talking about the baby: “Why is he crying?”; “Why is she laughing?”; “Why is she suddenly looking up at mum or dad?”. They’re trying to put themselves into the baby’s shoes. It’s all about empathy. The baby comes several times throughout the year, and they use the baby’s visits to start discussions about what it’s like to be a child: who gets beaten up in the playground, or what it’s like to be a family living in the streets of Calcutta. But they also look to the future. What will this baby need in thirty years? What will his or her life be like? How can we help them today, in order to support their future? So, this is about deep education in Responsibility. Responsibility in space, for other people alive today on the other side of the world, but also Responsibility in time. Space and time. It’s very profound. It’s very effective. It’s just one way, I think, of trying to reshape our moral landscape, because I go and talk to politicians, sometimes».

«I went and spoke to the Dutch Senate, not long ago, to discuss it with both parties on the left and on the right, with all of them. And I gave a talk about why they need to be good ancestors, why they should have citizens’ assemblies instead of the Senate. They didn’t like the idea that much [Roman Krznaric is laughing as he says this, Editors’ Note]. I suggested shutting down at least one house, to replace it with direct citizens – or, as I said, at least 50% – and it’s not totally mad. In East Belgium they now have a permanent citizens’ assembly, and Brussels too has a permanent citizens’ assembly on climate change. The point I wanted to make is that it’s very hard to change the minds of people who are already politicians. That’s why it’s so important to work with young people and to take the long view, in order to rethink what Responsibility might look like».

«You know, there are always revolutions in Responsibility. I mean, before the Second World War, if people gave money to a charity, they wouldn’t have given it to one on the other side of the world. They might have helped someone in their community, in their local church. But after the Second World War, there was an explosion of empathy for people on the other side of the world. This is what Médecins Sans Frontières, or all these organisations, are doing. And then something very interesting has happened in the last, let’s say, ten years, which is an expansion of the idea of Responsibility for future generations».

«I mean, just thinking about Italy, it comes to my mind Laudato si’, the Pope’s encyclical talking about intergenerational solidarity. That’s a very interesting shift in Catholic thinking, right? You wouldn’t have found that fifty years ago, but also only twenty years ago. Something is shifting. It’s just words, ok, and I’m not saying it’s like a revolution. But the point of this conversation, the point of me writing a book, is that cultural shifts need many voices. Like a lot of little boats going out into the future. And we’re not all doing exactly the same thing, but we’re going in roughly the same direction».

Carpite diem

What is Latin for? To understand Horace and Robin Williams, to put carpe diem in the plural form, because hyper-agency must be collective.

«Consumer capitalism, representative democracy, are not designed to solve the problems of today’s world. They’re overly short-term paradigms, they’re too profit-driven. So, we’re in a moment of questioning everything, in many ways, and that means it’s a moment of human agency. A moment that could go in many directions, of course. Sideways. What do we know about the 1930s in Europe? The Wall Street Crash and the Depression brought some countries closer to social democracy, other countries closer to fascism, but I think what I’m gradually beginning to understand – and I can’t really say it well, because I’m only just starting to grasp it – is a sense that this kind of moment of crisis is a moment of hyper-agency. Hyper-possibility. A hyper-questioning of assumptions». «Thirty or forty years ago, the only idea of questioning economic growth… you couldn’t have done that, people would have just said you were crazy, or dangerous [Krznaric starts laughing again, Editors’ Note]. Now, it’s still difficult to question economic growth, but because of the failure of the system, we have this obsession with GDP growth, which basically delivers growing inequality in terms of climate catastrophe and technological risks. If only we all could try the Doughnut Economics, come on!, we would realise that there are over a hundred cities around the world that are putting it already into practice. This is a moment of agency, and Doughnut Economics represents just one example of that, while citizens’ assemblies is another one. But we need revolutions of Responsibility in many more areas – particularly around technology, AI, genetic engineering, biotech. I recently tried to find out how many cooperatives there are in the biotech industry. Cooperatives or steward-owned companies that aren’t just shareholder driven, or venture capital driven; I found almost nothing. I mean, it’s not that surprising, but you’d think there would have been at least one».

«I think there are two fundamental ways of thinking about agency. When we normally think about it, people often think about themselves as an individual – what can I do? – but I’m much more interested in collective agency, and my new book History for Tomorrow is all about what we have done together. The power of social movements, the campaign for independence in India, the right to vote for women in the early 20th century, or the civil rights movement in the US. You know, when we think of the individual, we think of carpe diem, seize the day, but we should think of the plural of that: carpite diem, let’s seize the day together. That’s what I’m saying about this moment of agency. It’s a moment of collective agency. Carpite diem. So, let’s take Horace and let’s bring him into the 21st century, into an age of collective change. Let’s rethink Horace. Let’s adapt his philosophy».

From marshmallow to acorn

Examples and metaphors, one of which is wonderfully effective. When we question him about it, Roman Krznaric pauses for a moment, smiles and shows us a marshmallow and an acorn, with his hands spread wide apart.

«Here is my marshmallow and an acorn. I always have them ready. I think of the brain as if it consisted of these two parts. The marshmallow brain, which is short term, driven by instant gratification, immediate rewards, named of course after the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment in the 1970s, where children were put in front of a marshmallow and if they could resist eating it, they were rewarded with two marshmallows. Most of the children couldn’t resist: they snatched the snack. But we also have this other part, the acorn brain, which is focused on long-term thinking, and planning, and strategising. And it’s a reasonably recent part of the brain. It’s only two million years old. We share it with rats. On the other side, the marshmallow brain is eighty million years old. But if you look at human history, or if you actually compare us to other animals, we’re pretty good at long-term thinking, using our acorn brain».

«Chimpanzees might plan a bit ahead: they can take a stick, take the leaves off it and use it as a tool to put in a termite hole or an anthill, but they’ll never make a dozen of those tools and put them aside for next week. That’s what human beings do. We’re pretty good at it. It’s the acorn brain that has enabled us to build the Great Wall of China, to build the aqueducts of the Roman Empire, to create the Future Library, to send a satellite to the Psyche asteroid – I’ve just read about that today. There’s this satellite that was sent up last year, it’s going towards this asteroid. It’s going to take about seven years to get there. It’s between Mars and Jupiter. We can do this, and throughout history there have always been people who have had this kind of acorn vision».

«For instance: in British history, in the 19th century, there was this guy called Sir Joseph Bazalgette, kind of obscure. He was an engineer in 1858. When raw sewage was being dumped into the Thames, tens of thousands of people were dying every year from cholera and other diseases. In 1858 there was an event, known as The Great Stink, where the smell from the river was so bad that MPs couldn’t even breathe, and they soon passed emergency legislation to build sewers under London. Joseph Bazalgette was the engineer, and he built the sewers twice as big as they needed to be for the population at the time. And that’s why those sewers are still in use today. This is the acorn brain in action. I really love these figures – people like the man who founded Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard – as acorn brain thinkers, good ancestors who sort of think: “Let’s take the long view!”. Or even Jonas Salk, the great virologist, who developed the first polio vaccine in the 1950s. He said, “I’m not going to patent my vaccine, it is a gift to future generations”. And he was the man who famously said: “Are we being good ancestors?”. I see it in the radical climate activists, whether it’s Greta Thunberg in Sweden, or Luisa Neubauer in Germany, or Anuna De Wever in Belgium. These amazing young activists, often women, are teaching us about moral Responsibility. Acting intergenerationally. Their acorn brains pulsate with energy and, in a way, with fear».

History

The discourse remains one of radical activism.

«We celebrate figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Junior, who broke the rules and the law, but we put the environmental protesters in jail for doing the same thing. I think they have a really important role to play in society, and when I stand back and look at it, I am not that optimistic about the prospects for the human species. We are heading towards ecological and technological self-destruction. But when I look at history, I think I can see hope. I can see the fact that movements, often disruptive movements, have always risen up to create change, to challenge injustice, to move societies in new directions. That gives me a real hope that, as a civilisation, we can bend rather than break. That’s what this is really about. Are we going to bend, or are we going to break? I think these movements are going to help us bend».

For Roman Krznaric, history is not so much an archive of solutions, but rather a repository of ways to confront fate, of positive examples that can also serve as a source of solace. His book History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity is a compendium of such testimonies.

«One of the things about writing this book was how surprising it was, and how shocked I was, to keep coming across examples of how human beings have managed to overcome crises and challenges and build cities and civilisations, because I think so often, when we look at history, we look at everything that’s gone wrong. You know, the history of colonialism and slavery and fascism are all phenomena we need to look at, as captured in that famous aphorism: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it».

«But I have also looked at when things have gone right. Just to give you an example, I remember there’s a chapter in the book about migration – a hot topic in Italy, in Germany, in Britain. Migration, the borders. And we live in a culture where we think that the clash of civilisations is inevitable, and living together is impossible; but actually, if you look at history, you can see amazing examples where people from different cultures have managed to live together. One great example that really surprised me and did something to my brain was the Spanish city of Cordoba in the year 1000, which was part of the Islamic kingdom of al-Andalus at the time. That period, between about the 9th and 12th centuries, is sometimes called the Convivencia, the coexistence, where Muslims, Christians and Jews managed to live together in relative harmony. Of course, it wasn’t an idyll. There were everyday tensions, there were occasional outbreaks of violence, but in general you had Muslim and Christian people playing music together. Jews and Muslims playing chess. People mixed in the marketplaces and in the public bathhouses. There’s the story of the famous Jewish poet Samuel ha-Nagid, whose skills as an Arabic scribe enabled him to become prime minister of the Muslim ruler of Grenada, and even to lead his armed forces. This is not about utopia. It is just saying that we have managed to live side by side on a large scale, and that the past is not a perfect blueprint for the present, but rather a kind of inspiration, like: “Oh my God, why didn’t I know about this?”».