When I was around 11 years old, my mother arranged piano lessons after school for me. I hadn’t asked for them, and I was not a good student. I would walk slowly up the road, arrive 10 minutes late to an elderly teacher who had a habit of shutting her eyes during my lessons – more in disgust than reverie, I think, though possibly just old age. After some months, I told my mother that I wanted to give up the lessons. You’ll regret it when you are older and you’ll wish you could play, she warned me; and I was sensible enough not to disagree. Yes, I expect I shall I said, but I won’t next week after school on Wednesday. The lessons ended, and of course my mother was right; I have regretted that choice for decades.
I expect many of us have been through similar experiences, on both sides. They may even be a daily staple: Fancy another drink, knowing you’ll regret it tomorrow? Just another episode on Netflix? Neglect that run, again, to lie in bed another hour? We’ve all done it.
According to some views, this is an irrational failure. We should take into account how we will feel about things in the future. This is expressed most clearly in the ‘I don’t want to look back with regrets’ approach to life, which suggests it’s a failure not to consider the so-called ‘future self’ – the self that will look back and wish we had made different choices. Philosopher Derek Parfitt puts it like this [if] we.. neglect our future selves [it’s] because of some failure of belief or imagination. And that might sound right – after all, our future self is just us, in a few hours or years, so it makes no sense to shortchange the person who we will shortly be. But it turns out, perhaps, to be more a problem of empathy than belief or imagination. Neurological studies seem to indicate, bizarrely, that we do not think of our future selves in the same way as we think of ourselves. In fact, when we think of our future selves we literally use the same parts of our brain as when we think of strangers!
The implications of this are stark. As a parent and a teacher, it might mean that my appeals to my children and students about the future are unlikely to be effective (the 11-year-old-me certainly did not care about the future-me’s regrets, even though I was only briefly 11 and have decades of regrets). And if we see our future selves as somehow ‘other’ then no wonder we don’t take them into consideration; it’s like saying ‘do this now so that some future stranger can benefit in years to come’ – hardly compelling! And it completely explains why it’s not an effective strategy kids to ask kids to study for distant career rewards or to avoid smoking because of health risks decades in the future. We need to find alternative ways to appeal to the present.
This problem is really one of attention. From friends and family to teachers in class, to social media giants, to emails, to advertisers, to hobbies, there are many calls for our attention; often right in our faces, insistent, and hard to ignore. But they are, as we know, often distractions and film-maker Wim Wenders wrote about the monopoly of the visible which wrongly dominates our attention. It’s interesting to see that the existential threat of our time – climate change – has largely arisen because it is so hard to pay attention to things that are decades away, even when they will dramatically affect our future selves. Alas the decades are passing and things are now far more urgent and dangerous than they would have been, had we paid proper attention sooner.
The job of leadership is often to direct attention to the less visible. For me, the emotive approach of attending to the type of world we would want to leave for our children turns out to also be the most rational approach. As well as pointing at the future, it is anchored in the present, because our emotions about our children are very much our present reality. For me this juxtaposition helps us to ‘see the big picture, ‘play the long game’ or ‘take the balcony view’ (as it is called in different leadership approaches) because it connects us via the present to future generations. Furthermore, this idea as a venerable history. Eighteenth century philosopher and economist Edmund Burke described society as a partnership… not only between those living but [also] between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born; US President Teddy Roosevelt spoke of the present-day minority of humanity. Environmental lawyer Edith Weiss in her book In Fairness to Future Generations recommended that the United Nations designate a High Commissioner for Future Generations. Written in modern, systems-speak language, thinking about the type of world we would want to leave for our children implies an ecosystem of care that extends not only across space to other nations, not only across differences to a wide variety of people, but also across time to our descendants.
That doesn’t mean that anything is straightforward; certainly in terms of climate change there are no easy answers. If there were, then we’d likely have found them already – now there are only hard choices ahead. I know some advocate for an approach that stresses the willpower to abstain from consumption as the solution – but my 11 year old piano-playing self was fully, if unwittingly aligned with English economist Nassau William Senior, who said to abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results, are among the most painful exertions of the human will. We should not count on it.
The way forward here has to be an approach that makes a tight link between the present and future; which is to say it’s about the mindset with which we approach these problems. It has to involve avoiding a narrow, individualist mindset that ultimately views the world as an economic resource; as a means to an end. It means we need to bring our kids, our students, to places of natural beauty and wonder, and to help them understand systems and science well enough to want to act now, not out of some sense of deferred gratification, or through gritted teeth, but out of genuine sense of connection and appreciation. It means teaching them ways to engage with people with very different ideas from them, in ways that do not push people further apart and create a polarised, fractured society. It also means developing a deep sense of empathy that goes beyond the people who are in front of us here, today, and that extend across space and time.
In practice, these forms of thinking, these habits of leisure need to form a thread across childhood – at school and at home – if they are to inform the way of being that we need for a sustainable future. It’s all our work to educate peoples nations and cultures for peace and sustainable future.
Reference
Parfitt, D. (1986) Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press.
1 Response
Thank you Mr Alchin. Very well said!