38 39 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 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».
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