A British philosopher believes that we must change economic thinking from the short to the long term, but avoid using the same technological utopias that brought us the climate crisis
By: Rupert Reid, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of East Anglia
As a philosopher thinking about climate change, a central concern driving my work in recent years is an anxiety that the human race and our political-economic systems are thinking dangerously short-term. Indeed, my soon-to-be-published book deals with exactly this: in the book "Why Climate Collapse Matters", I present the urgent need for humanity to start being more "long-termist".
By that I simply mean things like: we should care what the world will be like in a thousand years, after most of the world's ice has melted (according to our current climate trajectory). We need real long-term thinking, and we need it fast.
But the reason I felt the need to use quotation marks first is that the term "thinking about the long term" is actually taken by a specific interpretation that ironically does not take climate change seriously.
I am thinking of the situation described by the writer and philosopher Phil Torres in a recent article. He convincingly argues that what is now called long-term thinking is a "dangerous secular belief."
What is this belief? It is the idea that what really matters is humanity's apparent potential in the very long term. This future is after humanity, or will involve the establishment of colonies in the solar system, the galaxy and the universe. Once you start thinking that way, almost any sacrifice or even crime can be justified in order for the human race to survive. More precisely: to maintain the survival of that part of the human race that bets exclusively on Big Tech, space travel, freezing, and more.
Image: Long-term thinkers are often big supporters of space travel.
Torres's article reveals how justified concern about the existential dangers - dangers to our very existence - that humanity is creating for itself more and more, changes form into a way of perpetuating the very system that created these dangers. A complex system of Big Tech/Industry/Academia has been created that siphons money and attention that could be directed to thinking about how we can really think long-term, and instead it focuses that attention on the idea that the way to prevent us from destroying ourselves is to have much more technology, much more surveillance (ostensibly to guard against existential threats to humanity coming from non-state terrorists) and much more economic growth.
If you think Torres and I are exaggerating, here's an example. Oxford academic and leading "long-term thinker" Nick Bostrom suggests that everyone permanently wear a device with the Orwellian name "Freedom Badge" that monitors everything they do 24/7 for the rest of their lives to guard against the tiny possibility that they are part of a conspiracy to destroy humanity.
It may sound like satire. When I first read Bostrom's article, I assumed he was proposing the idea of a "badge of liberty" just for rhetorical effect, or something. But no - he is completely serious.
And here's the real problem: these long-term thinkers, in their total support of the idea of a big tech and industrial future, seem to be asking for much more of the same things that brought us to this desperate ecological state.
For an article in The Conversation
More of the topic in Hayadan:
