Reflections on The Good Ancestor
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Date
2022
Authors
Van Marle, Karin
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Free State
Abstract
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.
Description
Keywords
Commentary, The Good Ancestor, Roman Krznaric
Citation
Van Marle, K. (2022). Reflections on The Good Ancestor. Acta Academica, 54(1), 138-143. http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/24150479/aa54i1/8