The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World

Having a picture of the potential long-range pathways in our minds is essential mental scaffolding for negotiating our collective and personal journeys into the future.

the ‘we’ that appears in this book usually refers to the economically secure inhabitants of Western industrialised nations, sometimes known as the Global North.

As the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano remarked, ‘Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.’

A final political challenge lies not with democratic government directly but with the larger body in which it exists: the nation state. When nation states first emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and replaced the old order of empires and principalities, they were not an especially dangerous source of short-termism. Italy and France,

Rather than thinking on a scale of seconds, days and months, we should extend our time horizons to encompass decades, centuries and millennia. Only then would we be able to truly respect and honour the generations to come.

how do we empathise not just across space but across time?

The musician and cultural thinker Brian Eno had already recognised the importance of this issue back in the 1970s when he coined the concept of the ‘long now’. Eno had begun to notice just how many people were immersed in a ‘short now’ mentality, where ‘now’ meant seconds, minutes or maybe a few days. A result of this high-velocity, short-term cult

At this moment in history the dominant force is clear: we live in an age of pathological short-termism.

Moreover, the studies show that thinking about death and how we want to be remembered when we are gone can have enormous social benefits by helping to forge a sense of intergenerational care and responsibility. This is very much counter to the culture of death denial that pervades Western society. We expend enormous energy shielding ourselves from