How to Be a Good Ancestor w/ Roman Krznaric

Upstream

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.9 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2024

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's been said that “the shortest path to the future is always one through the deepening of the past.” But how do we balance the past, present, and future, when all three weigh so heavily on our consciousness and our social existence?

Perhaps one way to find a balance—or at least to distill these various webbed threads of temporality—might be to pose them as questions: what can we learn from the past to help us in the present? And how can I be a good ancestor for the people of tomorrow? These are the questions that inform and guide the recent work of our guest on today's episode.

Roman Krznaric is a social philosopher, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, and the author of several books including most recently, History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity and The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World.

In this episode, we explore lessons from the past and what it means to be a good ancestor today. We look at how our conceptions of time can expand or limit the way that we answer these questions. We explore what it means to be on the radical fringes of a society, how to build and strengthen solidarity, and how to find meaning and community in a world that has grown increasingly isolating and alienating.

This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse-responsive co-learning network that hosts free online Weekly EcoGatherings that foster conversation and build community around heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. In this collaboration, EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some Upstream episodes to life—this is one of those episodes. We hope you can join the gathering on TK to discuss the topics covered in this episode. Find out more at www.ecogather.ing.

Further Resources

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Cover art: Nina Montenegro
Intermission music: “Seed of a Seed” by Haley Heynderickx

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse-responsive co-learning
0:06.0	network that hosts free, online, weekly eco-gatherings that foster conversation and build
0:12.4	community around heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world.
0:19.7	In this collaboration,
0:25.6	EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some upstream episodes to life.
0:28.0	This is one of those episodes.
0:34.1	Find out more, including the date and time for this eco-gathering, in the show notes,
0:38.3	or by going to www.orgcogather. I.NGETHER dot I NG.
0:40.3	Oh, Our obsession with the present moment has been developing for more than 500 years in the Western world.
1:08.8	You know, it goes back to the invention of the mechanical clock in the 1415th century.
1:13.6	When time started being sliced up into hours, then by 1700 most clocks had minute hands, by 1800 they had second hands.
1:20.6	You know, the clock became the key machine of the Industrial Revolution, speeding everything up, diminishing the future,
1:26.6	forcing people into the
1:28.2	present moment. And not in a sort of expansive Buddhist sense of interbeing or anything like that,
1:34.7	but a sense of like, right here, right now, I'm going to, you're going to work faster, I'm going to
1:39.9	sell you more, you have to consume, you know, we have to produce all of that kind of obsessiveness
1:46.4	with the seconds, with the non-no-second speed algorithms of the share markets as well.
1:52.2	You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and
1:59.1	conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.
2:04.7	I'm Robert Raymond.
2:05.9	And I'm Della Duncan.
2:07.6	It's been said that the shortest path to the future is always one through the deepening of the past.
	...

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