AA 2022 Volume 54 Issue 1

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Reflections on The Good Ancestor
(University of the Free State, 2022) Van Marle, Karin
Roman Krznaric’s The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World (2020) is about developing an argument for long-term thinking. In Part 1 he takes up a question posed by Jonas Salk, who was part of the team who developed the first safe polio vaccine, namely ‘Are we being good ancestors?’ (v, 3) in a more active form, ‘How can we be good ancestors?’ (4). He observes that the future has been ‘colonised’ (4) by short-term thinking and calls for it to be ‘decolonised’ (241). Albeit in the background, his argument rests on the rise of Western modernity as the coloniser of how we engage with time, the future and generations to come. Krznaric is convinced that there has been an ‘unprecedented’ ‘growing public belief’ (8) in long-term thinking over the past 25 years in terms of a number of concrete projects, but that there is an ‘intellectual vacuum’, even a ‘conceptual emergency’ in as far as the conceptual development of the term goes.