AA 2022 Volume 54 Issue 1

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http://hdl.handle.net/11660/11952

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Browsing AA 2022 Volume 54 Issue 1 by Subject "Commentary"

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    A good ancestor
    (University of the Free State, 2022) Dlamini, Hector
    In The Good Ancestor, Roman Krznaric presents a compelling argument about our responsibility to future generations. He highlights that in order to be good ancestors to the future generations we need to make a shift from short-term thinking, shorttermism, to long-term thinking, long-termism. He notes that most of our decisions have been usurped by short-termism without any regard for their effect in the long term, a term whose horizon is centuries, millennia or even multiple generations in the future. There is also a six-pronged prescription of how we can overcome the grip of short-termism and begin to think long-term. These six aspects of the prescription are: deep-time humility, legacy mindset, intergenerational justice, cathedral thinking, holistic forecasting, and transcendent goal (242).
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    Interaction with The Good Ancestor
    (University of the Free State, 2022) Gess, Rob
    The Good Ancestor is a call to arms for an overthrow of an outmoded system and the rise of a radical new order. Drawing at times on metaphors of the liberation of oppressed colonised people, it draws our attention to the latent oppression of the people of the future. These, our descendants, must bear the brunt of the current culture of consumerism – that happily squanders the resources and health of the future, in pursuit of short-term profits and single use pleasures. Like No One is Too Small to make a Difference by Gretta Thunberg it is an unapologetic wake-up call.
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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.
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    Short- vs long-term vs the middle-ground in critical socioeconomic and environmental planning
    (University of the Free State, 2022) Dhansay, Taufeeq
    Roman Krznaric’s The Good Ancestor provides an account of how temporal thinking drives critical global planning. In particular, Krznaric denotes the effect of extensive short-term thinking, i.e. thinking driven by achieving goals in a present-day sense or a singular generational time frame. These goals may include garnering socio-political advocacy and those agendas driven by tangible economic and financial gains. Furthermore, Krznaric highlights how shortterm thinking and policy developed with these kinds of considerations have a negative impact on the earth’s natural environment.