🔭 The Long View — Civilisation & the Future

What we bequeath to the future is, ultimately, a reflection of what we are. Never has the relationship between the present generation and those who will follow been more consequential — or more morally urgent.

Having acquired an unprecedented capacity to alter the fundamental systems of the biosphere, we have simultaneously acquired an unprecedented moral responsibility that most of our political and economic institutions are ill-equipped to discharge.

Compelling though the case for short-term self-interest may be — and notwithstanding the very real and legitimate pressures that billions of people face in meeting immediate needs — the evidence of long-term risk is no longer seriously in doubt. Much as we may resist the idea that we bear moral responsibility for people who do not yet exist, the logic of intergenerational ethics is difficult, on reflection, to escape.

Were we to take seriously the interests of all future people — to genuinely expand our moral circle across time as well as space — the way we organised our economies, our energy systems, and our political institutions would look radically different from today.

Had we understood this clearly fifty years ago, we would not be facing the specific convergence of crises that now confronts us. Whether that understanding, now more widely shared than at any previous moment, will translate into action in time — that, arguably, is the defining question of our era.

Whatever choices remain available to us — and there are still significant ones — the question is whether we will make them. Admittedly difficult. Arguably the most important set of decisions humanity has collectively faced. And still, somehow, open.