#350: My Least Popular Opinion
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I just read Sigal Samuel's latest Future Perfect email newsletter, and it got me thinking--as it often does.
Samuel's point, this time, involves the question: How can we be good ancestors. Her answer is that we should be focused not only on the present, but on the distant future as well: "Don’t get trapped in the now. You can help future generations survive risks like climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence."
A good point. In the course of her thoughtful article we're introduced to:
* Japan's Future Design movement. At community meetings, organizers designate some participants to represent future generations.
* Minimizing Natural Blinders. Thought Experiment: someone is drowning and you can easily save them, so of course you will. But what about someone the next state over, or on the other side of the world? Or someone many years in the future? Easily saving them isn't the natural, knee-jerk reaction that saving a family member would be.
* Nations that've created a Minister of the Future, or Risk Advisor to make seeing the distant future easier.
* Strong Longtermism. The idea that the long-term future is even more important than the present. If we humans do indeed have a distant future, then there are likely more of them than there are of us, so some might say they're more important.
* Lock-In Mechanisms. Looking toward the future, find a career path that's sure to lock-in human progress (fight Climate Change, help develop vaccines, preserve ever-dwindling natural areas).
* Safeguarding Place. Humans, like all organisms, require a healthy place to thrive. If we're using earth's resources at an unsustainable rate, what good is adding an extra billion or two human lives if Earth and the people on it would be happier and healthier with fewer?
Essentially, Samuel is pointing towards a distant future and asking us to see the big picture; it's only natural to care about people, especially the people we know, but sometimes people and places outside our field of vision are even more deserving.
This is where my least popular opinion comes into play. Unpopular, because it doesn't place humans at the center of everything--and we're all self-interested to some extent.
Instead, I agree with Samuel that safeguarding place--to pick one of the above items--can be a higher priority than many of the present-tense needs we see around us. For example, if I'm deciding between giving $20 to the Girls Scouts (something I did many years ago) and giving $20 to a group trying to save a wild river, I'd choose the latter.
