#154: What We Owe the Future
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness” – Martin Luther King Jnr.
Dear friends
What we owe the future, is the title of a book. It holds the question, what do we owe the future? This holds another question, does what we do matter? I think it does.
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/ strategy – the power of plasticity
Ben Okri’s 2019 novel, The Freedom Artist, begins “It is written in the oldest legends that all are born in prison. This prison is all they know. Literature describes life in it. Religion hints at redemption from it. Having lived here all their lives, humans have ceased to see it as a prison.”
The page ends “To create a reality more perfect than the world was their idea of perfection…Their civilisations became so successful that they forgot they were in prison. They began to think that they were free”.
As I started writing about Oxford philosophy professor, William MacAskill’s recently published What We Owe the Future, Okri’s words crept from memory onto this page.
MacAskill writes about “longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time”, that the decisions that we take now have a material impact on the lives that follow ours and that we have a moral obligation to consider what world we leave them.
He introduces us to plasticity, the idea that when an idea or an institution is new, there is space to shape what it becomes, but after a period it settles, and change is much harder and more disruptive to achieve.
For example, “the US Constitution was written over just four months—a moment of great plasticity—and amended eleven times in its first six years of operation. After that, though, it became more rigid. Between 1804 and 1913, only three amendments were passed, all immediately following the Civil War: they abolished slavery, granted citizenship to African Americans and formerly enslaved people, and prohibited race from influencing the right to vote. Today, the Constitution is again very rigid: it’s only been amended once in the last fifty years, and that amendment—to prevent increases in congressional salaries from taking effect until the next term of office—was first proposed in 1789”.
Although MacAskill’s concern is the sweep of centuries, it is easy to see the application of the idea in everyday life.
You have a health scare, you’re open to reconsidering your diet. The team you lead makes an error; you revisit your operating practices.
Plasticity is there at the momentous moments of constitution writing. It is also there in everyday moments.
If we don’t act, MacAskill tells us what may follow, is a period of value lock-in. Lock-in occurs when a value system becomes entrenched for a long time.
This is critical to get our heads around because not only does that value system impact in the immediate moment, it prevents the emergence of some futures. Futures that may have been possible before the lock-in, no longer emerge, and with them the possibilities that they might have brought with them.
Let’s keep it simple. You have the health scare. There’s a period of plasticity. You hire the personal trainer; you change your diet. Life unfolds in one way. Or, you have the scare and do nothing or to make yourself feel better you prescribe three donuts a day.
You get the idea. Different value systems, creating different levels of openness and possibility – expand that to your workplace, to your community, to your country, to the world and all of their futures. Doesn’t it take your breath away?
You might be thinking that a value lock-in may not be a bad thing.
MacAskill reminds us that successive societies, throughout history, across the globe, all believed that they were morally correct in upholding systems and practices that today repulse us. It seems self-evident to us that they were wrong and yet, how often do we pause to think that we may be wrong in our moral certainties?
By pointing us to this fact of history, he invites us to consider that we too may be guilty of moral errors and so to lock in our existing value system may be disastrous.
The answer rests in defending an open society, to ensure that we are ever-open to new ideas, to the possibility of change, the only requirement being that those ideas cannot be absolutist, cannot declare themselves to be the final idea, for if they do, we have value lock-in and history has shown us time and again, that we typically don’t know what we don’t know.
Again, just to prompt you, MacAskill is writing about society but the same applies in our organisations and our lives – being open to learning, looking for moments of improvement and taking intentional action, being prepared to introspect, reflect and change – all of these help us grow, help us not be imprisoned.
MacAskill’s book left me simultaneously optimistic and terrified.
If we spot moments of plasticity and act, we can make our world a better place.
If we miss them or see them and do nothing, we may be complicit in the creation of Okri’s prison, where we think we’re free, but we know we’re trapped.
I was reminded of Martin Luther King Jnr’s injunction, “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
// self – never retire
Those who know me, know that I can’t resist a play on words. Often not even as clever as a pun, most often a random association that makes sense only to me. This may be of those moments.
Tom Brady plays American Football for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He is the oldest starting quarterback in the NFL for the seventh season in a row, a position he’s played for 23 years. He is in the oldest 1% of his profession.
In December, Francesca Paris wrote The Tom Brady of Other Jobs. She interviewed Louis Caplan, an 85-year-old neurologist, Dianne McIntyre, a 76-year-old choreographer and Jesse Izaguirre, a 70-year-old paramedic (who claims that the nurses think he is in his 50s).
She interviewed Lilian Thomas Burwell, a 95-year-old artist. In March I read Why Stop?’ Meet the 80 and 90-Somethings Who Want to Keep Working and met practicing attorney Wilmar Jensen. He too is 95.
Each of these people consider their work to be a part of their life. Their life’s work includes their work.
They reminded me that retirement age is not an immutable truth, but is an expression of a value system that emerged at a point in time. They reminded me that the idea of work as separate from life is also the expression of a value system and an economic model. In living their lives, they show us that we are surrounded by the possibilities of plasticity.
/// soul – one in two hundred million
MacAskill musings on conception made me both flinch and smile.
“Consider that a typical ejaculation contains around two hundred million sperm. If any of the other two hundred million sperm had fertilised the egg that you developed from, then you would not have been born. Instead someone else—with 75 percent of your genes— would have been born in your place. A one-in-two-hundred-million event involves extreme luck. So, as much as I’m sure you don’t want to think about such things, if your father’s ejaculation had occurred just milliseconds earlier or later, it would almost certainly have been a different sperm that fertilised your mother’s egg. And so any event that affected the schedules of your biological mother and father on the day that you were conceived, even if only by a tiny amount—such as a longer line at the supermarket or an additional car ahead of them on their way home from work—would have prevented you from being born.”
Regardless of your metaphysical view, it does mean that only you are you. You are completely unique. One might argue that you are meant to be here.
Perhaps then, what we owe the world is to be the best version of ourselves and help others be the same.
Best wishes
Karl
PS: I am taking a break next weekend, so we’ll see each other again on 16 April. I have a few places open for new clients from June. You can learn more here.