Roman Krznaric
Becoming a Better Ancestor
Recorded on Oct 28, 02020
Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. The need to draw on our capacity to think long-term has never been more urgent, whether in areas such as public health care, to deal with technological risks, or to confront the threats of an ecological crisis.
What can we do to overcome the tyranny of the now? The drivers of short-termism threaten to drag us over the edge of civilizational breakdown, while ways to think long-term are drawing us towards a culture of longer time horizons and responsibility for the future of humankind.
Creating a cognitive toolkit for challenging our obsession with the here and now offers conceptual scaffolding for answering one of the most important questions of our time: How can we be good ancestors?
---Roman Krznaric
Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His newest book on the history and future of long-term thinking is The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking. Other books include Empathy, The Wonderbox and Carpe Diem Regained, which have been published in more than 20 languages.
Krznaric founded the traveling Empathy Museum and is especially interested in the challenges of how we extend empathy to future generations. Roman Krznaric is also a Long Now Research Fellow.
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bio
Roman Krznaric is a philosopher of time whose internationally bestselling books, including History for Tomorrow, Empathy and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 25 languages. His book, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World, has been described by U2's The Edge as 'the book our children's children will thank us for reading'. He is Senior Research Fellow at Oxford Univesity's Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing and founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum.
After growing up in Sydney and Hong Kong, Roman studied at the universities of Oxford, London and Essex, where he gained his PhD in political science. His writings on themes ranging from long-term thinking to the power of empathy have been widely influential amongst political and ecological campaigners, education reformers, social entrepreneurs and designers. An acclaimed public speaker, his talks and workshops have taken him from a London prison to the TED global stage.
Roman is a member of the Club of Rome and previously worked as an academic, a gardener, a conversation activist and on human rights issues in Guatemala
He is proud to be Long Now member number 8615.
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