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- [00:04]
Roman Krznaric
No migrants More in no Europe without Christianity.
- [00:09]
Effective Altruism Advocate
An alliance also with Russia.
- [00:15]
James Kantor
Welcome to EU Scream, the podcast that guides you through stories coming from the eu. We talk about the news a bit differently and with people who really know.
- [00:23]
Interviewer
What they're talking about.
- [00:25]
James Kantor
This is episode 110. I'm James Kantor this week in Oxford with the second of two episodes on why people are talking about future generations and how a focus on future generations can help address vast global problems like the climate crisis. Those ideas are at the core of the work of social philosopher Roman Kurtzinaric. Roman's thinking and writing have become a reference for the push to get governments and leaders to make better choices by planning much further into the future. Authorities in Wales, Malta, Lithuania and Ireland have been among the first movers. And now Future Generations appears to be catching on. In Brussels, ahead of her next five year term, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has outlined a portfolio for intergenerational fairness. And in New York, at a summit later this month, the UN Secretary General may appoint a special envoy for future generations. But there are thorny questions. For example, how many generations of our descendants should we plan for? And over what time spans? And can the focus on future generations be kept separate from controversial ideas like long termism and effective altruism that are beloved by tech Bros. Roman explains where those ideas may have some validity and where his approach to future generations is markedly different.
- [02:05]
Roman Krznaric
My name is Roman Krasnarik. I'm a social philosopher and I'm a senior research fellow at Oxford University's center for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing.
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Interviewer
It's not a word that we come across every day, eudaimonia. And I wondered if you could define it.
- [02:21]
Roman Krznaric
Well, there's lots of different ways of translating these ancient Greek terms and defining them, but when I think about eudaimonia, I contrast it with hedonia. Hedonia is the idea of the seeking of pleasure. And eudaimonia, I think, is more about seeking for a life of meaning or flourishing in some way. So something that involves what is my purpose, but also what is our purpose as a society, not just about me, me, me, but about us.
- [02:51]
Interviewer
And it's eu d a I m o n I a for those who need to delve a little bit further into the meaning of the word. And that's at Lineker College.
- [03:03]
Roman Krznaric
It's at Lineker College, part of Oxford University. But it's actually based around the idea of the study of the human mind and the human brain, and they bring in Philosophers, psychologists, artists, photographers, others to try and help raise questions about how we understand ourselves.
- [03:20]
Interviewer
And thanks very much for opening up your study. We're here in Oxford and it's just a beautiful study with books everywhere. We had a cat in here for a while. But let me delve into one of the many books that you've written. This is one of the more recent ones. It's called the Good Ancestor. Where I wanted to start was with the idea that we humans have evolved to think long term, unlike other species. But most of our prospecting, most of our forward looking, focuses on the very near future, future to our peril. Could I have you read here one of the paragraphs in the book? It, it, it starts here.
- [04:03]
Roman Krznaric
If alien scientists wanted to destroy our species, they wouldn't send down little green men to blast us into oblivion. That would quickly trigger our well honed defense mechanisms. Instead they would invent something like global warming, which would slip under the radar of the human brain because we simply aren't very good at acting on long term threats.
- [04:23]
Interviewer
Your point here is that our thinking about the future is so easily overwhelmed by our short term thinking.
- [04:31]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah, that is my point. But it's also balanced by the fact that we do have a capacity to think beyond the here and now. So yes, if I was an alien, I would probably slip in something like global warming that we aren't very good at responding to those kinds of long term threats. If someone threw a baseball at your head, you would duck. But if the threat is coming in five years, 10 years, 100 years, well, as a species, as societies, we don't respond nearly so effectively. And this ultimately grows to a distinction I draw in that book. The Good Ancestor between what I think was the marshmallow brain and the acorn brain and the marshmallow brain. Is that part of our neuro capacities which is all about fight and flight, immediate responses. And it's named after the famous psychology marshmallow test from the 1960s where children had a marshmallow placed in front of them. If they could resist eating it for 15 minutes, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. And most kids famously couldn't resist the snack.
- [05:45]
Psychologist/Researcher
The relationship between knowledge and action is very complicated. In one study, for example, we asked if you can have a little chocolate now or a bigger one later, what would an intelligent child do? And the child says, intelligent child would wait. And then you ask the child, and what would you do? Do you want this one? I'll take it now. So the point I'm making is that the relations, relationship between understanding and knowledge and action is far from close.
- [06:21]
Roman Krznaric
Now that's part of our natures, which is about wanting instant rewards, immediate gratification. And that's an old part of the human brain that does that kind of marshmallow brain thinking. But over the last couple of million years, we have a newer part of the brain that's developed, which I think it was the acorn brain.
- [06:42]
Interviewer
And these terms marshmallow and acorn, they're your terms.
- [06:45]
Roman Krznaric
They're my terms. They're my terms for to try and sort of summarize positions which you can find in the neuroscience literature. So the idea of the acorn brain corresponds to what's parts of the brain like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is all about long term thinking and planning and strategizing. And so I like that metaphor, that idea that we're constantly in a struggle between the marshmallow and the acorn. Do I party today or save for my pension for tomorrow? Do I get the latest iPhone or put money away for a rainy day? And those struggles within us are very real. But I think what's really extraordinary is we do have a capacity to do acorn brain thinking, to think beyond the here and now. If you think, compare human beings to other species, take a chimpanzee for example. A chimpanzee might plan ahead a little bit. They might get a stick, strip off the leaves and turn it into a tool to put into a termite hole. But they won't get a dozen of those tools, make a dozen of them and put them aside for next week. But that's exactly what human beings do. It's our capacity to think and plan long term. And that's how we built the Great Wall of China and voyaged into space. So although it's a comparatively new part of the human brain, that acorn brain, it's not that well developed compared to the marshmallow brain. It's certainly there.
- [08:10]
Interviewer
What weighs heaviest in explaining our propensity for short termism, for the marshmallow rather than the acorn? Is it that we rarely think beyond the threshold of our own lifetimes and that acts as a kind of almost natural delimitation that, that we can't think beyond to our a delimitation to our imaginations? Or is it something like consumer capitalism that so effectively distracts us to buy now, to get ahead, to look better, that entertaining more cosmological considerations is just too difficult? We don't have time for it.
- [08:48]
Roman Krznaric
I think the background to respond to that question is to recognize that we live in an age of the tyranny of the now, where our politicians can barely see beyond the next election or the latest tweet that businesses can't see beyond the quarterly report. And we're looking at our phones and clicking the Buy now button. And that raises the question, well, where does this come from, this short term drive come from?
- [09:09]
Interviewer
Right, because humans were not always like this, you would argue.
- [09:13]
Roman Krznaric
Well, I'd say we've always been a mixture of things. But although we have this cognitive makeup which drives us towards short termism, culturally, we've developed institutions and practices which amplify the short termism. So the obvious place people might often think of, well, look at our phones. You know, we're clicking on our phones, getting the dopamine rush. And that's exactly what the social media companies want us to do. But that's too much of a simple explanation to think it's just our brains and social media. In fact, you can go back, for example, to the invention of the mechanical clock in medieval Europe in the 14th, 15th century to find other origins, deeper origins for our short termism. Because the mechanical clock started slicing up time. So the earliest mechanical clocks used to chime every hour, every 15 minutes. But by 1700, most clocks and watches had minute hands. By 1800 they had second hands. And in that act of slicing up time, we start creating a short term culture. We are diminishing the future. It's coming towards us faster and faster. The factory clock was one of the key machines in a way of the industrial revolution, speeding up the assembly lines. And we've inherited that culture today in its extreme forms of nanosecond speed share trading. So we've got factors like that. We've got consumer capitalism itself which has us buying now, tempting us now. You know, markets aren't designed to plan for the long term or to consider the long term. We've got the political presentism built into our political institutions. The way that representative democracy is structured to respond to short term incentives. That next election, for example, that next opinion poll, it's not structured for a longer view. So because of all of these factors which create our short term focus, we've got to do a lot of work, I think economically, politically, culturally, to enable the ACORN brain to break free and flourish. That's about reinventing our economic, political, social institutions.
- [11:28]
Interviewer
When it comes to government and policy planning. You say the public future, quote goes dark, unquote, after about three decades, that it's difficult to find any governments, corporations, International organizations that are making substantive plans beyond 2050, thereabouts. Is that, do you think, really starting to change in a, in a meaningful and impactful way? When authorities, or let's say the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, proposes a Commissioner for intergenerational fairness, do we see the horizon going beyond the three decades that public policy cannot see beyond?
- [12:13]
Roman Krznaric
I think it's worth getting a bit of a historical view on this to answer that question properly, because you can go back to the 19th century and find governments which really took a long view with respect to, for example, public works. Go back to the great stink of 1858 in London when raw sewage was being dumped in the Thames of thousands of people were dying of cholera each year. And during the hot summer of 1858, when even members of Parliament couldn't breathe in the palace of Westminster, that's when they passed the emergency legislation to build the sewers.
- [12:45]
Interviewer
The palace of Westminster being Parliament, Parliament.
- [12:48]
Roman Krznaric
The par right there on the River Thames, the British Parliament, the mother of Parliaments. So they like to think they passed this legislation to build the sewers. And it took about 20 years, over 22,000 laborers. But the sewers were built twice as big as they needed to be for the population at the time with very expensive bricks and cement. And those sewers are still in use today. There's a history of this in governments at certain moments, taking the long view, I mean, think of the establishment of the European Union itself or the Bretton woods institutions after the Second World War. Often after moments of crises, you get these shifts. So if you look at today, what's going on, for example, you know, discussions about, right, should Europe have a future generations commissioner of some kind, an executive vice president for the future. It partly harks back to some of those older practices, but in fact it's grown more recently out of particularly the climate emergency. A recognition that here we are with an existential threat to our societies and civilizations. And in order to tackle the climate crisis, we need to recognize that its impacts are not just today, but they are tomorrow and next decade and are getting worse and worse. It has a slow violence behind it. And once the IPCC started publishing reports.
- [14:08]
Interviewer
With that is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a UN body, more or less, right?
- [14:14]
Roman Krznaric
And so for many years now, they've been publishing reports which are giving projections about what our sea level rises going to be, you know, in 50 years from now, 100 years from now. And, you know, once this starts seeping into consciousness, not Just sea levels, but temperatures and all sorts of issues. Water stress, water scarcity. It starts kickstarting political discussion. So in a practical sense, I think a lot of the modern interest in institutions for future generations, in politics and in government, comes out of the climate crisis and it comes out of places like Wales. So Wales in 2015 passed a well Being of Future Generations act and as part of that act they established a non party position called the Future Generations Commissioner, who admittedly doesn't have a lot of power. It's a seven year position, but the Commission Commissioner's job is to look at the impact of public policy across all areas, employment, transport, education, environment, and look at its impact at least up to 30 years from today. And that particular Future Generations Commissioner has had quite strong impact, positive impact, in terms of switching funding away from money on motorways and roads and into green transport, for example. And it's become a model that's being discussed a lot. I was recently giving a talk in the Dutch Parliament and the Welsh Future Generations Commissioner, Derek Walker, the current one, was there and this was all part of the discussion. How can the Netherlands maybe develop a similar institution? Or maybe it needs to be tweaked in some ways. Now, my view is that it would be good if there was that kind of Future Generations Commissioner at the European level, but was also informed by and held to account by a Citizens assembly or citizens panelists in some way to give it more legitimacy. That's, in a nutshell, a reason why it's good to introduce a participatory bit of direct democracy, some kind of randomly selected citizens. You know, this is becoming very popular.
- [16:23]
Interviewer
So this is very interesting. I mean, step one really is the creation of these positions that might bear the job title, you know, Commissioner for Intergenerational Equity or Minister for the Future or what have you. But actually it's part of a larger reimagining of our politics and there is no way that Ursula von der Leyen is, to take one example, ready for that. But this is a step in that direction, perhaps.
- [16:52]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah. And I think, you know, every country or every region is going to probably travel a slightly different path for this kind of thing. So, for example, Wales has gone for the Future Generation Commissioner model. I've been part of a group in the UK saying that the whole UK should have not a Commissioner for Future Generations, but a commission. So maybe an expert group of, let's say eight people, one for each of the four nations of the uk, along with a young person being representative as well, and that that commission should be informed by citizens Assembly. One might imagine other mechanisms as well. So in some countries, for example, in Canada, they have written intergenerational fairness into the way that they do their budgeting. So the federal budget has to report not just on the gender distribution of the funds, but also its intergener distribution. How much is going to young people, how much is the budget benefiting older people. And again, I think different countries in different places will probably emphasize different mechanisms. Right.
- [17:53]
Interviewer
So there'll be local specificities when it comes to these issues, which ultimately kind of come down to budget and politics.
- [18:01]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah, but I think the idea of a commissioner of some kind, particularly at the EU level, given that it already has a structure of commissioners of very kind, is probably a really good idea, a strong idea, partly because it is building a bridge to some of these other changes that one might have. You know, there's already a big conversation Europe around the role of citizens assemblies. Well, let's bring these two things together because what we know, and there's growing evidence of this, is that citizens assemblies, when you randomly select citizens to discuss an issue, whether it's climate change or the risk from artificial intelligence or an aging population, they tend to have longer term view than your regular politicians. And that's why they come up with often much more transformative policy. So let's tap into some of that as well, because there's a. If we're, you know, for me this is about intergenerational justice. You know, the problem our political institutions face is that we're in a culture where the way I think about it is that we've colonized the future. We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost where we can freely dump ecological degradation and technological risk as if there was nobody there. Yet there are the millions, the billions of citizens of the future, and they don't have a voice in the existing political system. So the question is, how do you give them a voice? How do you bring them into the room, given that our actions impact them? In fact, probably never before in history have our actions had such impact on future generations, such damaging impact.
- [19:28]
Interviewer
Let's talk about time spans. And you propose 100 years as a minimum threshold for long term thinking. That's a minimum threshold. Right.
- [19:39]
Roman Krznaric
So when I wrote my book the Good Ancestor, I thought to myself, how long is long Term now? There are organizations like the Long now foundation in California, which has a project called the 10,000 Year Clock. They're building a clock which will last for ten millennia or so. They.
- [19:59]
Psychologist/Researcher
Once you are holding these longer time Frames in mind that start to raise the question of what do you do on Monday? Does your behavior start to reflect this larger frame?
- [20:23]
Roman Krznaric
For them, the long view is 10,000 years. You know, for, for a business, maybe long term thinking is 10 or 20 years. Now, I write in my book about 100 years as a kind of rule of thumb threshold, because that's the extent of a human lifespan. But I think when I'm thinking more pragmatically, if I'm talking to politicians, you know, policymakers, I think at least think 30 years beyond the here and now. At least think basically beyond your own career span or to the very edge of your own career span to try and get people to go beyond where they might receive individual rewards and status for what they do, where they have to be thinking of others. And I think that's not unfeasible given the fact that in the 19th century, sewers were built that were designed to last, you know, 100 years, or the civil engineers build bridges that are designed to last a long time, or the channel tunnel for 200 years. So, you know, I'd say at least 30 years. 100 would be nice. But, you know, we need to also bring people on the journey of long term thinking.
- [21:32]
Interviewer
You also ask us to consider, and this is kind of where we're going here when it comes to time spans, you ask us to consider much longer ones and how over the last couple of decades there's been a more widespread adoption of what's called seventh generation thinking. Can you just explain a little bit about that?
- [21:52]
Roman Krznaric
So in many indigenous cultures around the world, for example, in North American indigenous communities, there's this idea of making decisions based on the impact on the seventh generation. So seventh generation thinking, it differs in different places. For some cultures, it's about looking seven generations ahead. Some it's three generations back and three generations forward. And our current generation is one of those seven generations. But all of this tends to be about, you know, multi decade thinking. It's about long term, particularly ecological stewardship. And I think we've started then getting organizations, movements, projects inspired by that seventh generation idea. So, for example, in Japan, there is a local government decision making program or movement called Future Design. And it's directly inspired by the Native American idea of seventh generation decision making. And what they do is they invite local people to discuss and draw up plans for the town or the city where they live or the region where they live. And they typically divide them into two groups. Half are told their residents from the present day, and the other half are given these almost ceremonial robes or kimonos to wear and to imagine themselves as residents from, say, 2060. And it turns out the residents imagining themselves being from 2060 come up with much more transformative plans for their towns and cities.
- [23:14]
Interviewer
You also write that, and this is a quote from the book, it's not good enough to simply state that the needs of future generations matter as much as the needs of those living in the present, unquote. And it's here that you seem to be saying that we need to make a positive case for equality between the generations. The billions of human beings who will be born in the centuries ahead and who will far outnumber everyone alive today will far outnumber everyone alive today. The billions of unborn citizens of tomorrow who are not here today to make a case for themselves.
- [23:50]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah, I mean, Groucho Marx famously said this was something he allegedly said. He said, why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me? And I think that's a fair question. Why should we care about future generations? There is the simple fact that there are going to be many more of them than there are of us. So just weighing up of the scales, that seems a good reason to care about them and the fact that our actions will be impacting them. I think there's another kind of way of thinking about this, which is that if you think about what we've inherited from past generations, or shouldn't we be leaving the world, at least better than the world that we found it? It's like a kind of intergenerational golden rule. Not do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, but do unto future generations how you would wish past generations had done unto us. So I think there's kind of core reasons why we should care about future generations or even, you know, in a philosophical sense. Look, if you planted a bomb in a train and it killed, you know, 10 children, we would think that was wrong. You shouldn't do that. Now, if you planted a bomb and it was time to go off in 10 minutes, we think you shouldn't do that. It's time to go off in 10 hours or 10 days or 10 years. Surely they're all kind of morally equivalent if you know what the impacts are going to be. And I think with so many of our actions, we do know what the impacts are going to be. Not exactly, but, you know, through the climate science, through all sorts of analysis of future scenarios like rising sea levels, we know we are condemning future generations to things like mass migration because their Cities will be underwater. Just look at the map of the Netherlands in, you know, 2100 and what it might look like under various scenarios. I mean, this is going to impact people. So I think we've got a moral obligation there. And then that raises the complex question of, well, how do we balance today's needs against the needs of future people?
- [25:45]
Interviewer
For me, one of the most interesting examples of this that I ever came across was on a reporting trip to Ankalo, which is where nuclear waste is being buried in Finland. And I got into various conversations with people who were looking into the geology of the place and looking into to just how long the tubes of radioactive waste would be there and when they would disintegrate after how many thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of years and how far it would leach into the soils. And probably the most interesting conversation I had with somebody was about marking the surface so that any alien life forms that would come to Ankalo in, in the future would know that there was bad, dangerous stuff underneath this place.
- [26:35]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah, and I guess that's one of those great questions. If you wrote it in English or Finnish, maybe those languages wouldn't be understood even by human beings in 10,000 years from now. So I've heard people say of that kind of example where you should actually just leave no marking, because if you leave a marking, human curiosity will get the better of future generations. They'll go and have a look down there and be affected by radioactivity. So it's a tricky one. But these are the kinds of questions which I think we need to be bringing into public discussion. And that's. You know, I used to be a political scientist and it never once occurred to me that we fail to give. This is when I was a political scientist in the 1990s and teaching Democratic theory and history and all this kind of stuff, comparative politics. It never once occurred to me that we failed to give a voice to future generations in our political systems, that they have a right or they have rights that we're maybe violating. It took me years to recognize that. And that kind of blindness, I think, is built into our institutions today, or most of them. And I think we're in a period of enormous and quite exciting transition. I mean, I think the idea of future generations, commissioners and citizens assemblies, which take a longer view, is one of the most exciting shifts in democracy since the enfranchisement of women in the early 20th century in Europe.
- [28:01]
Interviewer
You translate our treatment of these billions of unborn in mathematical terms into what are known as discount Rates, that's to say the amount we value lives today compared to the amount we value lies in the future. Let me have a go, a first go at explaining. The higher a government raises a discount rate, the more discounted lives become in the future. Future lives are valued less. As a practical matter, a higher discount rate means a government's more likely to decide it's just too expensive to fund, let's say a clean energy title system because it may take too many decades for it to yield its full benefits. So my question, if we are creating equality with the billions not yet born, with the billions of unborn, for example, what does that mean for discount rates? How big a sacrifice to welfare, health, education, investment today do we need to make for future generations tomorrow? How do we begin to quantify this?
- [29:07]
Roman Krznaric
Discounting is one of those economic practices which is really imposition of today on the interest of people tomorrow. And the way I sometimes think about is if you look at a painting with perspective, the further and further someone is away or buildings away, the smaller that they are. And I think that's how discounting works, that the further away people are in the future, the less we value their lives or their well being. And hence, you know, many governments will make major policy decisions like, you know, the investment in title scheme or in a hospital, looking at what will the benefits be to future people and they will diminish them or discount them compared to the benefits today. And when it comes to long term, particularly like around climate projects which might have very long time horizons of benefits, say 120 years if the discount rates are high, basically any benefits that come after, say 30 years or so are basically close to zero and they're not included in the calculus.
- [30:06]
Interviewer
So and there we are in our three decades that we can't look beyond.
- [30:10]
Roman Krznaric
So what do we do about that? And it's a really difficult question. I mean, I sometimes ask this, I've asked this to Future Generation Commission of Wales, for example. You know, how do you weigh up the interest of today's population with future people who surely have as much right to a clean climate or a healthy atmosphere or decent lives as people today. And I think one way of going at it is to say right, at least in public policy terms, is can we find an intersection between things that benefit people today and things that benefit people tomorrow? Right. In a sense that's kind of low hanging fruit. But say again, the Future Generation Commission waves will probably say something like, well, investment in clean transport, good for people today, good for people tomorrow. And it's Something that sort of transcends time. So certain kinds of investment, it's not about a big sacrifice today for the people of tomorrow, but then there's difficult choices that have to be made. I mean, I remember when I was writing this book and I gave a draft of it to a friend of mine who at the time was the CEO of the NGO Save the Children. And he said to me, he said, look, I don't really like your book because you're telling me that we should be caring much more about future generations, but there are 130 million children dying of malnutrition in Sub Saharan Africa right now. And we had a big discussion about this. And a few months later, Save the Children came out with a report saying that we really need to be good ancestors and that if we want to think about the welfare of the kinds of populations that we're working with, we need to do long term investment in things like education and healthcare. We need to think beyond the here and now.
- [31:53]
Interviewer
What was the flip?
- [31:53]
Roman Krznaric
I think that idea is probably always, always there. But I think the framing, the concept of being a good ancestor probably made them sit back and think, okay, are we just responding to immediate emergencies? If we want to think about the welfare of those who we are serving as an organization, what are the deeper, longer term policies that we can put into place? And I found it really interesting how many public policy officials and politicians have picked up on it. Franz Timmerman, for example, started talking about being a good ancestor in many of his speeches when he was talking about how to deliver the Green Deal.
- [32:32]
Interviewer
Timmermans being the former Vice president of the European Commission, who's a Dutchman, who's a socialist, and he ran as the socialist candidate to be the next Prime Minister of the Netherlands after he left Brussels. And he didn't succeed. But he indeed was the champion of the Green deal while he was at the European Commission.
- [32:55]
Roman Krznaric
The thing about some of these long term thinking is that it's something that can work across the political spectrum as well to be a good ancestor. You know, I've given talks to politicians from many different kinds of political parties. And very often when I'm speaking to them, I'll get them all to do the same short, imaginative exercise. I get them to close their eyes and imagine a young person in their life who they really care about, son, daughter, nephew, niece. Then I ask them to imagine that young person in 30 years from today. What do they look like? What are the struggles in their life? What joys have they got in their life? And Then I ask them to imagine that young person on their 90th birthday and they're surrounded by friends and family and loved ones when they're 90 years old. And I asked the audience, I say, well, go and have a look out the window. What kind of world do you see out there? And then I say, now come back in. Imagine that 90 year old stands up and sees a photograph of you, their dead, departed ancestor, over on the table, and they decide to give a speech to their surrounding family and friends about what you did to be a good ancestor, a positive legacy that you left for their world. And when you do that kind of exercise, no matter where you are on the political spectrum or your age or background, people tend to understand that or be very moved by it. And I think again, when I've done this with audiences, you know, particularly politicians, policymakers, it's a really good way to then start a discussion about more technical issues like what should the discount rate be? Or should we have a future generations commissioner of citizens assemblies?
- [34:24]
Interviewer
Were any politicians that you spoke to completely unreceptive to the idea?
- [34:29]
Roman Krznaric
I mean, always, you know, there are people that this kind of thing just doesn't work for. All change has inertia. You know, there's always people who, who don't want to change and you work with that. But in fact, in order to create changes, you don't need everybody on board or even a majority, but you do need to have the new ideas in the room that can be picked up at moments of crisis.
- [34:52]
Interviewer
So I get that standard discounting may not be appropriate to use when assessing environmental projects with very long term time horizons. But of course you go much further and you say we currently give future generations a status equivalent to that of slaves under current discounting thought. And you make a direct parallel with slavery and coloniality and Nazism, that future generations are disenfranchised in the same way that slaves were in the past. There's an analogy that you make with how an African American slave in the 18th century had 3/5 of the value of a free white person when it came to calculating their political weight, which is certainly part of Reconstruction America. My question is spending on future generations more important than say, paying reparations to people alive now to try to remedy the intergenerational poverty and trauma of slavery and coloniality. Can we afford to do that and to be a good ancestor?
- [35:59]
Roman Krznaric
That's a great question. I've never thought about that question. I definitely don't think it's one or the other because I think Long term thinking has to go in both directions. We need to be thinking long into the future, but also long into the past. And I think colonialism is exactly one of those areas where thinking about what has happened in the past and repairing that, the most effective ways possible is really very important. Because if you think of something like racial injustice, it's an inherently long term problem. It gets passed on from generation to generation because it's built into political institutions, police forces, education associations, which is what.
- [36:39]
Interviewer
We'Re realizing in the United States.
- [36:40]
Roman Krznaric
Exactly so. And I think that the discussions around reparations are part of the historical rebalancing because it will then partly redress the traumas of the past, but it's also about an investment in the future generations of people from those communities. So I don't definitely don't think it's one or the other, you know, one direction, other. But I do think what it does remind us of is the fact that we need to be thinking long in both directions, past and future.
- [37:11]
Interviewer
You also, when describing our choices about whether to be a good ancestor, you write, are we really prepared to condemn future generations to a world based on a technological version of the Nazi ideology of the Untermensch, which unquote. Which again for me sort of needs some probing because you are equating the Holocaust, you know, actual mass murder of the living with a theoretical future scenario. And the parallel sits a little bit uneasily with me.
- [37:43]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah, it's. Those kind of parallels are really difficult to work with. And I thought a lot about that parallel and also the one of the idea of colonizing the future. And just to say something about that one first, which is, you know, I'm from Australia, you know, a country that was subject to a British invasion in the 18th century. Now when I grew up, it was called colonialism. Today it's more framed as an invasion. Right. That's an interesting shift in language itself. But the idea when Britain colonized Australia in the 18th, 19th century was that it was a terra nullius. It was, it was an empty land. There was nobody there. Of course there were people there. They were an indigenous population. And I think the way we treat the future is a bit as, not as a terra nullius, not an empty land, but a tempus nullius. The sort of the future is an empty kind of time. There's nobody there.
- [38:35]
Interviewer
Tempus nullius.
- [38:36]
Roman Krznaric
Yes, yes. But I think that, you know, when I, when I came up with that kind of idea, I did talk to people from different indigenous cultures saying, well, what do you think of this? Am I appropriating the language of colonialism, you know, inappropriately and nobody had a problem with it. But what people did point out, of course, which was absolutely right, is that our impacts on future generations disproportionately will hit those living in the global south, those living in marginalized communities. There's a colonialism built into the way that we treat the future. And so I think it's even makes it even more appropriate when it comes to the Holocaust. In what I was thinking of more, there was, you know, the way that the Nuremberg Laws and other sort of institutions or apparatus of the state, you know, systematically and legally diminish the value of some people relative to other people. I mean, I wasn't trying to make a point about how the Holocaust played out in terms of the number of deaths or the nature of genocide. It was more that idea of classifying some people as less valuable than other.
- [39:45]
Interviewer
People, which is what discount rates do.
- [39:48]
Roman Krznaric
Which is what discount rates do. So it's more that more generalizing principle which can be found of course in the whole history of colonialism in terms of who gets to vote and who doesn't, who gets housing, who doesn't, who can travel on public transport, who can't. And you can find this in countries all around the world.
- [40:04]
James Kantor
But to that point, do discount rates.
- [40:06]
Interviewer
In your view go to zero?
- [40:09]
Roman Krznaric
I think there's always going to be arguments and good arguments for having discount rates sometimes not necessarily going to zero, but in terms of how we make decisions about whether we should invest in a public hospital. But I think there are contexts where we either have to diminish them down to zero or pretty close to zero, particularly when they're issues where the impacts are not going to be ameliorated by economic growth or technology coming to people's save, save them in the future. Because the idea of discounting economists sometimes say, well, it's okay to discount the, the well being of future generations because they're going to have all these technologies and economic growth that will buy them out of the problems that they've got. But are we going to be able to reverse the melting of the Greenland ice sheet? Are we going to be able to reverse with money in our pockets, biodiversity loss? I don't think so. I'm certainly the evidence doesn't look like that. So that gives us a special kind of obligation to future generations and a special reason to not be having these high discount rates. But I think it's the underlying principle which is more important which is, you know, whether a discount rate is 0 or 0.3% or 1.2%. The point for me in a democratic society is have a discussion, a public discussion that brings into the room the interests of those future generations as well as, say, European citizens today, as well as those outside the borders of Europe who might want to come into it. Let them all be part of a public sphere, a public conversation.
- [41:46]
Interviewer
I mean, there's always going to be a ferocious debate about needs in the present. It is hard, I think, to be an advocate for future generations as well as be as full throated as some would want about helping our contemporaries in need now. Job insecurity felt today, hunger felt today, the threat of violence helped today, the more than 200 million around the world who are currently displaced or are migrants and refugees being helped today. And you can't always find crossover issues that are going to benefit future generations as well as those in need today.
- [42:27]
Roman Krznaric
And these are just, this is what politics is. It's about moral dilemmas. It's about making decisions which can be very difficult. The problem is when you're not even talking about the impacts on future generations. I'm not saying we shouldn't be trying to reduce the length of the food bank queues in European nations when people can't afford enough to eat. I'm not saying that we shouldn't be helping people who are traveling on boats across the Mediterranean. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that in a democratic society, let's have a conversation that brings them in and brings in all these different perspectives and let's not be blind to them, you know, let's not push them out of our minds just because they are not here. And this is a problem with the nature of democracy itself. The demos, the people are considered to be those who are alive here and now. Yet we know even in our personal lives that we make sacrifices all the time for our children, for our grandchildren. That's how we should be working with our politics too. And sometimes there does need to be a sacrifice in the present for the future. I mean, one of the big issues I think, which Europe will be facing and other countries will be facing will be rationing over the next 10, 20, 30 years, rationing of carbon, rationing of red meat. At the moment, the politicians don't want to talk about that issue. It was starting to be talked about in the early 2000s in some countries. Now you've got figures like the French economist Thomas Piketty saying that, well, we ought to have Personal carbon allowances. This is going to be a key instrument of how we fairly distribute a resource that needs to be treated as scarce, such as carbon. And that is about making some kind of sacrifice now for people in the future so that they can enjoy what we enjoy, which is clean air, livable futures.
- [44:24]
Interviewer
We might be entering into an era of rationing just to have enough food in the present if food crises come our way.
- [44:31]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah, I mean, there already is rationing as well of water in Barcelona. I mean, there's rationing of parking permits outside the street where we're talking now. You know, you can't park your car anywhere. There's a rationing system where each household gets a couple of spots at most and gets them for guests.
- [44:48]
Interviewer
Libertarians, they would say, oh, yeah, but don't tread on my freedom. And they seem to be impervious to the idea that we already have regulation in so many aspects of our lives that also benefit, you know, the kind of businesses that many libertarians are associated with.
- [45:05]
Roman Krznaric
Absolutely.
- [45:05]
Interviewer
In technology.
- [45:06]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah. I mean, we've always put limits on freedom. You know, in the 18th century, many countries in 19th century, a freedom was taken away from some people in wealthy countries, which was the freedom to own another human being and get them to serve your food for you. Right. Yet there are still many realms of freedom left in which we could operate in the early 1970s. Seat belts. Oh my God, you can't tell me what to wear a seatbelt. Well, now we accept these kinds of limits and the freedoms that we should be allowed to have. If you think of, if you wave your arm around, you might kind of knock a glass off the table. Well, because of our high carbon, high ecologically intensive societies, we're knocking more and more sort of glasses off the table or our reach is extending further and further. So we need to be able to limit that those public discussions are coming and they intimately involve impacts on future generations.
- [46:03]
Interviewer
Now, it feels like it's no coincidence that we're having this conversation in Oxford, because after all, Oxford is one of the homes of long termism quotes. Long termism, which has been a very influential ideology, already has been talked about as becoming hegemonic or even a dominant doctrine, though it's still mostly talked about in Silicon Valley and at top universities like Oxford. And longtermism seems to me to be a lot like what we've been talking about, that positively influencing the long term future is a key moral priority of our time, and that future people matter morally just as much as people alive today. But how do you how do we respond to those who say long termism has time horizons that are just too long with very uncertain benefits, and that it deprioritizes more immediate issues and that long termism kind of has this taint of cold utilitarianism?
- [47:05]
Roman Krznaric
So I am a strong opponent of the idea of longtermism, which is based on a philosophy sometimes called effective altruism.
- [47:16]
Effective Altruism Advocate
Today, the effective altruism movement is huge, with tens of organizations and hundreds of members controlling millions of dollars.
- [47:25]
Effective Altruism Narrator
The research program of effective altruism still in its infancy.
- [47:30]
Roman Krznaric
But we can see that by thinking.
- [47:31]
Effective Altruism Narrator
Carefully and by focusing on those problems that are big, solvable and neglected, we can make a truly tremendous difference to the world for thousands of years to come.
- [47:41]
Effective Altruism Advocate
Suppose a homeless person asks you for money and you've got £3 in your pocket, but you're a dedicated, effective altruist, so you say no.
- [47:51]
Effective Altruism Narrator
When it comes to doing good, we're more likely to volunteer our time at a place that happens to be easy to get to or perhaps give money to whichever charity happens to knock on our door or focus on a problem just because it grabbed our attention when we were young and impressionable. To people in the effective activism community, that kind of thing seems like a pretty significant mistake. So there is no real flaw to how bad an opportunity to help other people can be because you don't know.
- [48:15]
Effective Altruism Advocate
What they're going to spend that money on. You don't know the consequences of that action. Instead, you put that money towards buying malaria nets for somebody 3,000 miles away. A critic might say that you've missed the point of morality. You could have given them that money even if it wouldn't have the optimum consequences. Isn't morality about human beings.
- [48:41]
Roman Krznaric
What I share with those who hold that long termism, effective altruism view is a concern about future generations and that we probably focus too much on the now. They've raised some important technological issues, like particularly biosecurity risk, bringing that issue, you know, at the UN level and other levels. But the long termism movement or the effective altruism movement is one that has been tainted, I think particularly over the last year or two by firstly a financial scandal which is their funding from Sam Bankman Fried, who's been jailed for his cryptocurrency dealings.
- [49:20]
Interviewer
Let me, let me just explain. Sam Bankman Fried, freed, he's the American entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in November. So just a few months ago, after the collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange and he was sentenced in March to 25 years in prison. And Bankman Fried justified his cryptocurrency gambits by saying that he was using his money to make the world a better place, saving the future of humanity and so on with his donations to the effective altruism movement, including long termism.
- [49:52]
Roman Krznaric
That's right. So that's one kind of scandal is the financial scandal there. But the other big critique which has come at the long termist or effective altruists has to do with the biases of their views. They frame themselves as highly kind of rational utilitarians. But I think that there are increasing recognition of certain kinds of biases. So for example, a lot of the people who call themselves long termists or effective altruists, they say, yes, we must care about future generations. There's going to be billions of people. Now I hear myself saying things like that too. But they go at it from a particular perspective. So for example, they tend to say the biggest risks facing us or facing future generations are technological risks like artificial intelligence, bioweapons and things like that. And they tend to systematically de emphasize the impacts of ecological risks. So, for example, one of the key long term effective altruist thinkers is a guy called Will MacAskill, a professor of philosophy at Oxford. And if you look at his book what We Owe the Future, on page 136, he says that, well, climate change is a problem, but you know, even with say, 7 degrees of heating, some places might be worse off, but some places might be better off because of they might be able to grow more crops that they couldn't otherwise grow. Now I know no serious climate scientist who'd ever think that 7 degrees of heating is something we should feel okay about. And equally, there's another book by another Oxford philosopher called Toby Ord called the Precipice.
- [51:23]
Interviewer
He gets a shout out, actually in.
- [51:25]
Roman Krznaric
The Good Ancestor he does, and he's a really serious thinker and I admire him in many ways, but.
- [51:31]
Interviewer
And one of the founders of longtermism, giving what you can was his charity that was funded to some degree by Sam Bankman Fried.
- [51:40]
Roman Krznaric
And if you look on page 167 of his book, he's got a little table saying what are the big risks to humanity over the next thousand years? And he says, well, there's about a 1 in 1,000 chance that climate change will be an existential risk to humanity, but only a 1, but a 1 in 10 chance that AI will be the great risk and wipe us out. So again, that gives you a sense of where the priorities are. They're very much focused on the technological risks and I think systematically under emphasizing the ecological risks facing societies.
- [52:12]
Interviewer
Roman, why are they doing that?
- [52:14]
Roman Krznaric
I think that's an anthropological question. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of them have backgrounds in maths and science. They don't come out of the climate movement. They like the numbers games which you I think are associated with the technological world. But the other bias they have, I think which is very striking, which is they tend to think that future generations will benefit from continuous economic growth and technological benefits which will solve our problems for us. It's very rare to find in the main effective altruist or long termist writers and thinkers systematic critiques, for example of neoliberal capitalism, a need to restructure the system to move towards say post growth economies, or discussions of say, models like donor economics or modern monetary theory or some of these other things.
- [53:03]
Interviewer
Donut economics, a concept that happens to to be pioneered by your partner Kate Roworth, who wrote a book called Donut.
- [53:11]
Roman Krznaric
But it's not only me that supports her work. Also the Pope and David Attenborough have also been great advocates of it.
- [53:17]
Interviewer
As now many in the EU in Brussels are very familiar with Kate rowartsworth.
- [53:22]
Roman Krznaric
Absolutely. So I think what's really important when you look at the effect of altruists in the long term is you don't see critiques of the economic system and also you see very few critiques of the political system, the need to change democracy at all or to bring in more direct participation. So all of these things I think are highly ideological. So I think that effective altruism is quite ineffective. It's got these biases built in like all political ideologies do. And I think one of the results of this is that it's not really clear when you look from their perspective about why we should care that perhaps 50 million people in Bangladesh might die due to the impacts of climate change over the next few decades. Because they would say, well, the much bigger risk is that rogue AI could come our way in a couple of hundred years. So we need to put all our funding into that. And I don't believe we should be doing that. I think we should be taking seriously the impacts today, tomorrow, a few decades from now, also thinking 100 years from now as much as we can. But it shouldn't all be so focused in one particular direction.
- [54:32]
Interviewer
I mean, I think we could also say that there's an element within tech that wants to Say well look over there at the AI catastrophe and meanwhile I'll sell my other AI products to this bank and this insurance company and this transport system and whatever and AI kind of becomes part of our world anyway. And they are just saying go. You know, they're asking us to imagine the apocalypse while they go on selling products that kind of start to infiltrate our economies anyway.
- [55:08]
Roman Krznaric
I think that's absolutely right. I think the whole discussion about AI apocalypse is a kind of a ghost story that functions to distract us from the very real impacts of everyday AI today. The fact that our data is being scraped and taken and used to sell products we don't need at us. But even the larger question of who owns the AI industry, what's its underlying structure. I think they're trying to distract us from questions about monopolies, about potentially very strong regulations of their industries, about where the resources come from, the energy comes from. And I think the AI apocalypse story is rather convenient for that.
- [55:48]
Interviewer
Elon Musk is also a fan of long termism and he's endorsed Toby Ord's charity Giving what We Can. And Musk believes that colonizing Mars is the next great step for humanity. He's all about escaping to other worlds rather than dealing with the only planet that we currently have, which is Earth. Can thinking long term not only be rescued from Sam Bankman Fried and and the collapse of ftx, but can it be rescued from the Elon Muskosphere? If you like.
- [56:24]
Roman Krznaric
I love that Elon Muskosphere phrase. That's brilliant. Yeah, I think there's certainly amongst the Silicon Valley tech bro elite, there's this idea that yeah, we've got to think long term and let's all escape to Mars though Elon Musk wants to say, I think I want to die on Mars but not on impact.
- [56:43]
Interviewer
Great, good luck to him.
- [56:44]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah, good luck to him. I think the problem here is that the way I think about this is with a kind of mountain climbing analogy. If you want to climb a risky peak, you make sure your base camp is in order before you go up. And as I see it, we haven't even learned to live within the limits of base camp Earth. Once we've learned to do that, to live within the planetary boundaries of carbon emissions and biodiversity loss and ocean acidification, we've come back in within the biosphere, then yeah, let's go off to Mars and go there as much as you want, as much as you want to. But until that date, the idea that we're going to save our species by going off to Mars is highly problematic because it makes us focus less on doing what we can to preserve the one planet we know that sustains life.
- [57:33]
Interviewer
It also is a message directly to our governments to say, don't spend on schools and hospitals, spend on rockets and space technology.
- [57:42]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah, and it's very high risk, low probability of success. I mean, it'd take decades to get to Mars. Decades, decades longer to establish any kinds of colonies. And who knows whether we'd even be able to survive there.
- [58:01]
Interviewer
Roman, what do we know about the most effective political systems for the kind of long term planning that can benefit future generations? Is good planning for future generations most likely to thrive under an authoritarian regime, a kind of, you know, a command economy where a very strong leader can say, okay, you know, here's how we're going to organize stuff, or alongside something like representative democracy.
- [58:31]
Roman Krznaric
So I think it's a very enticing idea to think that wouldn't it be nice if an enlightened despot, a benevolent dictator came along and sorted out all our problems for us, if only we were a little bit more likely Singapore, you know, with its long term investment in health and education, public housing, or more like China, look at all those solar panels that they're producing. And I got really intrigued by this question because I was hearing this from so many people, including my own father, and I thought to myself, well, is it actually true that authoritarian regimes have more effective long term public policy than democracies? And I like that question because 20, 30 years ago I used to be a political scientist and I used to study the quality of democracy. So I got a bit geeky about this question. I worked with a really brilliant statistician called Jamie McQuilkin, who developed something called the Intergenerational Solidarity Index, which is a kind of measure of good long term public policy in environmental areas around issues such as investment in housing and education and inequality. So economic, social and environmental indicators. And what we did is we plotted the scores of 122 countries on the Intergenerational Solidarity Index against how democratic they were on a measure called the V Dem Liberal Democracy Scale from the University of Gothenburg. What did we find? We found that of the 25 highest scoring countries, in other words, good long term public policy, 21 of them were democracies. And of the 25 lowest scoring countries, 21 of those were authoritarian regimes. They might be monarchies or military dictatorships. And I think that makes very clear that although there might be some outliers like Singapore or China in general, authoritarian regimes are Not a magic solution to being a good ancestor and treating future generations well. We need to work with democracy, but of course we need to improve it and deepen its capacity to respond to the long term, whether it's through future generations commissioners at the EU level or whether it's through, through citizens assembly at national, regional and global levels.
- [60:37]
Interviewer
Can we talk about future generations as a way to help heal a political divide, as a way to perhaps address some of the polarization that we've been seeing largely between people with progressive centrist views and ultra conservatives, and especially pro life, anti abortion Christians who are often focused on the unborn. And is there a way to reach across the polarization gap and start talking to people who are both progressives and ultra conservatives and say, okay, this is about the unborn, this is about children? Or am I reaching a little bit too far here and reading too much into what you were writing?
- [61:21]
Roman Krznaric
I think you're reaching too far. And the issue of the sort of conservative Christian idea of, you know, the right to life, I think is a different issue. What they're really interested in is when does a life begin, at what moment that happens. I don't think they're particularly interested in issues of intergenerational justice. But what I would say is that thinking about, say, religion, say a religion like Christianity in all its various forms, which has got its conservatives and its radicals in it, I think something that can unite them on the agenda of the interest of future generations is, you know, the texts that they draw on and the institutions they're part of. If you think, for example, Pope Francis in his papal encyclical called Laudato Si, Praise be, he talked about the importance of intergenerational solidarity.
- [62:18]
Pope Francis Narrator
Welcome back to understanding Laudato Si. So what Pope Francis says is that we need to learn, we need to train ourselves, we need to think more broadly than we are encouraged to think today. And this should extend not just to those we know in this world at present, or even those in our immediate future. So young people may be thinking one generation ahead about their children, or maybe even two generations ahead about their grandchildren and the like. And Pope Francis says we need to think even more long term than that. We must take into consideration those who haven't yet an opportunity to exist in this world, all those people who are yet to be born, those who have yet to enter this world, all those who are going to come after us. What kind of world are they going to enter into? What sort of resources in the natural environment will remain? What sort of pollution is going to exist. What lack of diversity in wildlife and plant life. This is what he means by intergenerational solidarity. And it has its footing, it has its rooting in one of the greatest of Christian doctrines. And this is, of course, the communion of saints.
- [63:33]
Roman Krznaric
In other words, he was sending a message to the Catholic world that we shouldn't just be thinking about the suffering of people today, but also the suffering of people tomorrow.
- [63:47]
Interviewer
And the Pope is going to be among the first to say there's going to be no techno fix for tomorrow.
- [63:52]
Roman Krznaric
Yeah, absolutely. He's quite anti tech, he's quite anti consumerist as well, and he's very pro future generations. He's tried to reframe the Catholic tradition in terms of kind of intergenerational fairness or intergenerational justice. And I think that's really important in Europe, for example, you know, in highly Catholic countries like Poland, for example, where I remember once being on a panel, a discussion with religious leaders from around Europe and around environmental issues, and they were saying, well, it's really hard to sell green policy action in somewhere like Poland because it's associated with the left and associated with a kind of an anti Catholic kind of feeling. But when the Pope comes along and says we should be caring about future generations and the planet so on, it helps change the conversation. So I think there's something to work with in that area.
- [64:52]
Interviewer
You start your new book, your latest book, History for Tomorrow, on lessons from history, partly on the importance of social innovations in the making of history as opposed to technological innovations, the importance of ideas that come from the grassroots and are not necessarily from the top down. And in the book you talk about radical flank theory, and I wonder if you could explain that and maybe talk me through whether there needs to be a sort of vanguard rebel movement for future generations. And if so, what does it look like? And is violence going to be an expected part of that, a necessary part of that, something that we can avoid?
- [65:41]
Roman Krznaric
So I became very interested in under what conditions do governments actually take kind of radical, transformative action outside periods like wars? And what I found through looking at the last few hundred years of history is a pattern, a very clear pattern, which is that disruptive social movements play a major role in accelerating change. What they do is they take a crisis and they amplify it. This is what happened when there was an uprising of enslaved people on plantations in Jamaica in 1831, and that hugely accelerated the shift towards the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1833.
- [66:20]
Interviewer
Uprisings that were not without violence, uprising not without violence.
- [66:23]
Roman Krznaric
Sometimes they've historically been violent and sometimes they haven't. So for example, In Finland in 1906, women were given the right to vote. How did that happen? The women's movement within the Social Democrat movement went onto the streets. They protested, they were loud, they were strong, like they were in Britain, chaining themselves to the fences and breaking windows. And that accelerated the shift. And this is a pattern throughout history. Sometimes these radical flank movements, you've got a more radical movement which makes the mainstream movement look more acceptable. So in the United states in the 1960s, you had the mainstream civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. And the national association for Advancement of Colored People and other organizations. And then you had the radicals on the side, the black power movement. And they made Martin Luther King Jr. And those people in that part of the movement look more palatable and that helps push forward the civil rights legislation. And I think that's where we need to be today. That's why I'm a supporter of direct action, non violent direct action movements like extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Ender Galende, German direct action movement, a bit like extinction rebellion. So I found myself lying on the street with my 15 year old daughter as part of an extinction rebellion protest. Stopping the traffic, disrupting commuters. And I know that can be annoying, but it's more annoying what we're going to be doing to future generations. And I've got to that conclusion through an analysis of history that we need these disruptive movements to create change. But I think it's really important to draw a distinction between violence against people and violence against property or damaging property. So I'm absolutely not in favor of anything which hurts human beings. But I'm, I think it's okay probably to pour a bit of red paint on the steps of an investment bank that's bankrolling the fossil fuel industry. Some people might define that as violence, I wouldn't. I call it, you know, damaging of property. But again, historically this has always happened. There have always been people who've broken the rules. If you go to my kids school just up the street here, it celebrates some of these law breakers and rule breakers. Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette leader In Britain, early 1900s, Martin Luther King Jr. Mahatma Gandhi, they were all breakers of laws and they are celebrated on the walls of the schoolroom. Yet today the very equivalent people who are in the non violent direct action climate movement are being put in prison in many countries like Britain, where I live. And I think that is a kind of historical tragedy.
- [68:52]
Interviewer
Not only people involved in the environmental movement or the movement for the well being of future generations, shall we say, but also people who are helping migrants. They are also being jailed. And what you're saying is that in fact, if you are participating in some of these radical flank movements, you are making life easier for a more mainstream version of that same movement to be accepted.
- [69:17]
Roman Krznaric
You're right to point out the fact that there are these movements in multiple fields as well as climate, future generations, migration, anti poverty movements. You know, the health of a democracy partly emerges from the challenging of its rules. You know, it's too late to leave the problems of our time to simmer on the low flame of gradualism. You know, when there are windows for change, particularly I'm thinking here of around environmental issues, when the windows are quite small or short, you know, we may soon cross and maybe you've already crossed critical tipping points in many areas that you need the disruptive movements to accelerate things. That is in a way, the hope we can find in history that that kind of disruption can be very effective.
- [70:12]
Interviewer
So that's it for this episode.
- [70:14]
James Kantor
And I just wanted to say a word to all our new and returned listeners. We love having you here and we hope you love our blend of news and views from people who are really in the know. But I'm not gonna lie. Journalism of all kinds is experiencing an epic financial crisis. What that means for you is that over time, you're getting a narrowing range of opinions.
- [70:37]
Interviewer
Now there are those of us fighting back, but we too are at risk.
- [70:41]
James Kantor
Of going away unless people pay for it. So if you're an EU Scream regular, and many of you are, it's time to make a pledge. Even just a small one. It only takes a few clicks at Patreon or at the donate button on our website. From just €1amonth to something more, it's all vital. Vital to pay for what it takes to make good, enriching listening. EU Screams. Nonprofit journalism is made possible by your donations, partnerships and by advertising. And we're grateful to the Laura Kinsella foundation for an annual grant. For more details and for more EU scream, visit euscream.com I'm James Kantor. Thanks for listening.