What does it mean to be good ancestor?

IUMH Reflection at the service on April 14th, 2024, on the presentation by the GA Keynote Speaker, Roman Krznaric

‘What does it mean to be good ancestor?’ This is the question posed by the keynote speaker, Roman Krznaric, at the GA Conference last week. A question he adopts and adapts from the medical researcher who developed the first effective and safe polio vaccine in 1955, Jonas Salk. When Salk thought about the global threats of the 1950s (nuclear war, or destruction of natural environments), he argued that we would successfully confront and overcome these threats only by engaging in long-term thinking: that is, by looking at the potential consequences of our actions not just on the immediate future, but on future centuries. Salk framed it as the question: ‘Are We Being Good Ancestors?’ whereas Krznaric adapts the question to ask ‘How Can We Be Good Ancestors?,’ or, how can we combat what he calls ‘the tyranny of the now’ perpetuated by pervasive short-term thinking. And Krznaric underscores that being a good ancestor has to entail a focus on ‘we,’ on a collective pronoun. To translate long-term thinking into meaningful practice, the priority must be on what we can do together, on how our individual practices contribute to a collective goal, and on identifying long-term goals that transcend the self.

As Krznaric shows, it’s not difficult to see the harmful consequences of short-term thinking at a societal level. Think about the impact of politicians’ myopic focus on policies designed for electoral gains. Such political presentism, or short-term thinking, is at work when governments opt for the quick fix of locking up lawbreakers rather than dedicating time and resources to address deeper social and economic causes of crime.

Krznaric uses powerful metaphors and analogies that underscore the irresponsibility and selfishness of short-term thinking. He states that we’re effectively ‘colonizing the future’ if we continue to live without adequate attention to the centuries ahead. A colonialist pillaging of the future by future-dumping the fallout from our policies and practices (be it higher rates of incarceration, ecosystem collapse, technological risk and nuclear waste). And we’re doing this AS IF nobody will be living in these future centuries. Here, his analogy of ‘colonizing time’ draws on the legal doctrine of terra nullius (nobody’s land), the doctrine that British colonizers of Australia invoked, ignoring the indigenous populations living there. Now, K. argues, too often societies function as if the future is tempus nullius (nobody’s time).

However, Krznaric’s talk was not one of doom and gloom. Rather, as implied by his question ‘How can we be good ancestors?,’ he is full of hope, fired by a deep and active commitment to finding outcomes we value, identifying strategies that work. He proposes 6 ways of exercising our ‘acorn brains’ to engage in long-term thinking that will enable us to be ‘good ancestors’ and provides examples from both the past and the present. I’m not going to look at all six, but instead, introduce ways that his strategies may be relevant to our collective life together, locally, nationally and globally, as Unitarians:

1. Cathedral Thinking:

Krznaric uses the shorthand of ‘cathedral thinking’ to evoke the long-term vision present in sacred architecture in the Middle Ages. He uses it as a metaphor, or analogy, for the type of long-term planning extending beyond our lifetimes, but certainly not limited to construction: cathedral thinking can undergird public policy, science and culture, and can guide grassroots social movements just as much as it generates the blueprints for top-down planning. Kzrnaric sees striking examples of ‘cathedral thinking’ at work in many enduring and transformative projects undertaken in the past and present: be it social movements, urban design, or scientific endeavors. In science, he points to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, opened in 2008, with over 1 million seeds representing 6,000 species housed in an indestructible rock bunker designed to survive at least 1000 years. Moving back in history, K. cites the building of the 82 miles of modern sewer system in London in the 1850s, still in use today, and that put an end to what was popularly known as ‘The Great Stink’ of 1858. In the early 19th century, decades of depositing of sewage into the Thames reached a crisis after multiple cholera outbreaks. A subsequent absence of rain led to sewage deposits six feet deep on the slopes of the Thames. This, in turn, precipitated a massive public health emergency. Thanks to the long-term thinking on the part of the engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, who predicted population growth, the system was built twice as large as needed at the time to handle this, and used the newly invented Portland cement that was 50% more expensive, yet much more durable since it strengthens on contact with water.

While we may not be directly engaging in ‘cathedral thinking’ at such scale, K’s writings do prompt some questions for us.

What are the types of ‘cathedral thinking’ that we, as Unitarians, want to participate in locally, nationally or globally? When we think that in 19th century London, it took an acute and catastrophic public health crisis to activate ‘cathedral thinking,’ we need to ask what most effectively catalyzes such long-term planning? Is the generating of a sense of impending crisis the most effective way to argue for long-term system change? Or, does positive and optimistic messaging about a better future more effectively rouse people to action? How do these questions relate to Unitarianism in the UK today?

2. Development of a ‘Legacy Mindset’:

On your Order of Service, we’ve put the Maori proverb, ‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes firmly fixed on the past.’ These words express the Maori sense of a powerful living chain of intergenerational linkage that travels forwards as well as backwards. The Maori world view, together with many indigenous worldviews, requires respect for the traditions and beliefs of previous generations while also being mindful of those who are yet to come. Being mindful entails asking how our everyday practices today can benefit, or harm, future generations. Through such mindfulness in the ‘now,’ Krznaric argues, we cultivate a legacy mindset central to being a ‘good ancestor.’ And K. emphasizes that by a ‘legacy mindset,’ he’s referring not to something we leave (as in a will), and not a family affair, but to something we grow through a daily practice in our lives and a legacy that benefits those outside our kin.

And here, he gives the example of The Green Belt Movement in Kenya launched by Nobel Laureate, Wangari Maathai in 1977 for women’s empowerment and conservation. To date, over 51 million trees have been planted. At her death in 2011, 25, 000 women had been trained in forestry skills, and today 4, 000 community groups work to promote sustainable living. In our own lives, many of us already engage in mindful practices that grow our own legacy mindset, be it in the way we shop, the way we vote, in rewilding projects, in the charities we choose to donate to: all of these mindful actions and practices, Krznaric argues, can help us become good ancestors and to ask ourselves about the legacies we want to grow for future generations.

3. Intergenerational Justice:

Here, Krznaric draws on the Native American concept of ‘seventh-generation thinking.’ According to Oren Lyons, chief of the Onondaga Nation, all decisions in their council ask, ‘Will this be to the benefit of the seventh generation?’ This practice focuses primarily on ensuring a healthy environment for their descendants and the limiting of exploitation of natural resources. And this practice of ‘seventh-generation thinking’ and deep stewardship is one that Krznaric contrasts with the economic and policy-making principle known as ‘discounting’ where future benefits are given less value compared to current benefits. Yet is it realistic to take an indigenous concept like ‘seventh generation thinking’ and give it meaning and traction in our high-velocity consumer-driven societies today?

K. argues ‘Yes, absolutely!’ He gives the persuasive Japanese example of Future Design, a political movement that is directly inspired by ‘seventh generation thinking.’ Future Design has been pioneering citizen assemblies in municipalities across Japan. It functions through asking one group of each assembly to imagine they are residents in 2060, and to discuss the implications of a potential policy from that perspective. Results of this experiment show that those thinking as imagined ‘future residents’ develop far more progressive and radical policy plans for their cities than those thinking from the present. And particularly in the areas of environmental and health care policy. Future Design aims to establish Departments of the Future in all local governments, and the central government.

Another example is the Future Generations Commissioner in Wales, a role established in 2015 under the Well-Being for Future Generations Act. Sophie Rowe, the current holder, reviews policy in areas ranging from housing and education to transport and health, to ensure that policies meet the needs of the present without compromising the abilities of future generations to meet their needs. She opposed the £1.6 billion extension of the M4, arguing that it was a ‘twentieth-century solution’ failing to promote a low carbon solution. And her opposition was instrumental in scrapping the project. She has been a vocal proponent of preventative care, arguing that without this, the NHS is really a ‘national illness service.’ And she has inspired others to follow her lead, most notably the British anti-poverty activist and founder of the Big Issue, John Bird. Driven by a conviction that climate change is hitting the poor the hardest, he has made a case for establishing a Future Generations Commissioner for the UK.

Both Bird and Krznaric emphasize that ‘seventh generation thinking’ would ensure that younger people have a greater say themselves in changing the future: K. would like to see citizens aged 12 and older randomly selected to participate in ‘good ancestor’ assemblies, or inter-generational juries, modelled on the Japanese Future Design Project. Such ‘good ancestor’ assemblies would have the authority to delay or veto policies that impacted negatively on the basic rights of future people. And he has also proposed replacing our Upper House of Lords with, instead, a Good Ancestor Assembly. And finally, the ‘seventh generation thinking’ is active in the giving of rights to nature, as in the case of New Zealand where the Whanganui River has been given the same legal status as a person to protect it from future ecological violation.

In this rapid overview of some of the ways Krznaric proposes that we commit to being ‘good ancestors,’ they may seem utopian or unrealizable. And yet perhaps in concluding, we might think about the words of Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano on utopian thinking: ‘Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia. It is to cause us to advance.’

Written and delivered at the Ipswich Unitarian Annual Meeting, 4 – 6 April, 2024 by Liz Constable

Address by Andrew Benedict

In “Cathedral”, a short story by the American novelist Raymond Carver, the main character tries to describe a cathedral to man who is blind. “They’re really big,” he explains. “Massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, and lots of polished wood. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, [people] wanted to be close to God. “Draw it,” the blind man asked, “Draw it on my hands.” With his finger the narrator sketches out the plan of a cathedral on the palms of the man’s hands. The blind man then says to him, “I think I can see it now but there is something missing.”

For many people, cathedrals, churches and chapels, mosques, gurdwaras, temples and shrines are sacred space - holy ground. Even those who don’t think of themselves as being particularly religious often expect to feel something other or different when they visit a place of worship, particularly, if it has some history attached to it. For people of faith this sense can be amplified still further, irrespective of the creed or particular religion they follow - whether they be papists or pagans!

I have a friend who is a Jain and in May this year we visited his community’s Temple at Potter’s Bar. Constructed out of pink sandstone and set in 80 acres of parkland, and within a formal garden, the temple is a wonder to behold. Even more so when you discover that this incredibly intricate and ornate building was hand carved in India by over 200 traditional stone masons and then shipped to the UK to be assembled on site like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. As is the Jain custom before entering the Temple we removed our shoes as a reminder, that like Moses on Mount Horeb, we were about to step onto holy ground. If I were to describe the interior of the Derasar with its sanctuary and shrine, or even show you a picture, there would be something missing from the experience of being there which, like Raymond Carver’s cathedral, defies description.

“There is something missing”, said the blind man. Then, he has a moment of inspiration. “Put some people in there now,” he shouts. “What’s a cathedral without people?” Equally, one could ask what is this Meeting House without us, whom St Peter refers to as: “The living stones, which are being built into a spiritual house.” 1 Peter 2:5

A year ago, at the rededication of Newcastle Cathedral, following its extensive restoration, the Dean wrote: “Today we are both grateful, proud hosts and at the same time guests, for in what we offer and what we receive, we participate in the radical hospitality of God.” In other words, places of worship come alive when people inhabit them. Only then do their stones resonate and their rafters sing praise. Only then do they buzz and hum with sounds of life and only then can their walls absorb and echo our laughter and our tears, our anxieties and our hopes, our past and our present, our hopes and our dreams.

As luck or providence would have it, Kamal and I arrived at the Potters Bar Temple just as a wedding ceremony was finishing, and as a joyful and colourful throng of family and friends emerged, led by a smiling bride and groom. Once the wedding party had departed and all was silent it felt as if the Temple still resonated with their love and joy.

Even this wealth of human experience only takes us part of the way to understanding what makes a place numinous and sacred. All religions have places of pilgrimage and retreat which were considered holy ground long before there were temples, churches and mosques built on them. As a student I worked as a guide on the Island of Iona which George Macleod, the founder of the Iona Community, described as a: “Thin place, where only tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual.” Holy or thin places do not originate with the building of great edifices but in encounters with the living God. The composer Anton Bruckner’s motet Locus Iste, which is often sung at church dedication festivals, translates: “This place was made by God, as a sacrament beyond price; it is without reproach.”

A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of The Divine Presence, pointing us towards the God who meets us in myriads of unexpected ways and places. The Book of Genesis speaks of this, not only in the case of Moses and the burning bush, but also in the story of the fugitive Jacob falling asleep and having a dream. Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder suspended between heaven and earth was such an awesome experience that, despite his predicament, gave him courage to carry on. “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it.” Jacob declared: “How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Genesis 28:16-17.

This provides us with an insight into why certain places feel so spiritually alive. They are sacred because people have prayed there, there found comfort, discovered hope, been inspired and experienced joy. They provide us with the space for our human struggle to meet divine grace. And that holy ground can be a temple or a cathedral, it can be a great shrine or where lay lines meet such as at Avebury and Stonehenge. And it can, equally, be somewhere very personal and individual – perhaps known to us alone.

I have been fortunate to go on a number of pilgrimages to holy places: to the Holy Land, to Rome and Assisi and to some lesser-known shrines too. I have even been to Nettuno where the statue of Our Lady of Ipswich ended up – having been smuggled out of the country by Italian sailors during the Reformation! Pilgrimages to Holy Places, like that currently being experienced by Muslims taking part in the Hajj, are not ends in themselves - rather, their lasting spiritual value lies in what happens next, when the pilgrim returns home: That having had a heightened awareness of God’s Presence in a particular place they/we might be more sensitive to that same Divine Presence anywhere, indeed everywhere. If you can touch holiness in a religious building or on a sacred site – you are just as able to experience holiness at other times and in other places too. “Tread softly!” urges Christina Rossetti, “All the earth is holy ground.”

I wonder where is holy ground for you? As I have said, it doesn’t have to be somewhere conventionally religious: a place of worship or a shrine. It could be a somewhere associated with certain memories and experiences. It could be a landscape, the view from a mountain, down a valley, by a river, or out to sea. Covehithe Beach does it for me! It could be anywhere. If, that is, we are open and sensitive enough, if we are spiritually aware and prepared to live for the moment.

To sum up, I want to read to you The Bright Field by the priest and poet, R.S. Thomas, in which he speaks of his own experience of Holy Ground:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Fragments of the Mind of God: Atoms in Search of a Meaning

When you read Ezekiel’s visionary experience of the “four living creatures” appearing out of the tumultuous, flashing sky and the “wheels within wheels” that rise and move with them (chapter 1, vv. 4-21), you could be forgiven for wondering what he had been smoking because that vision bears the hallmarks of an hallucinogenic experience. But some have seen it differently. They have seen in these “wheels within wheels”, with eyes in their rims, evidence of alien spacecraft – flying saucers – visiting the earth in remote antiquity. I’m not saying that I agree with this! Maybe Ezekiel was on some hallucinogenic substance, maybe he just had a very vivid imagination, or maybe he really did have a vision! Who knows? But the ‘flying saucer’ theory raises an issue that has long fascinated many people, namely, are we alone in the universe? In all its infinity of space and time, in all the countless billions of planets, stars and galaxies, is our tiny “blue dot” the only place where life has appeared, the only place where life has evolved to the point where sentient, self-conscious beings like us look up at the night sky and ask if they are alone?

When we do this it can lead to a sense of cosmic loneliness or to a longing to pass beyond Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “green borders of the peopled earth” and “launch into the trackless deeps of space”, there to search among the planets and stars of the “final frontier” and maybe encounter evidence of beings with whom we can communicate, with whom we can find fellowship and kinship, with whom we can compare our ideas of what it all means. As Anna Laetitia Barbauld asks, “is there not / A tongue in every star that talks with man, / And wooes him to be wise?”

And meaning is perhaps the object of this quest, the Holy Grail for which we search like latter-day Knights of the Round Table, itself a symbol of infinity and of our equality before it. To contemplate the unimaginable vastness of space, to realise how utterly insignificant we seem in relation to it, to be aware of how microscopically small we are in the midst of it, how brief and transitory are not only our own lives but also those of our civilization, our species, even our planet - to contemplate these things can be crushing. How can the momentary blips that are human lives mean anything in this universe of infinities upon infinities?

But maybe this is the wrong way to look at things. However insignificant our lives may seem we cannot deny the remarkable fact that they exist, that something quite extraordinary has happened on this planet, something that makes it more special than we can imagine. Not only did life appear – we don’t know how – which is remarkable and near-miraculous in itself, but life evolved into a variety of beings that even now we cannot number or understand – even as, in our folly, we seem intent on exterminating them.

And among all the species that evolved there was at least one which looked up at the night sky and wondered what it was all about. Of course, we can’t say that our species is the only one that has ever done this. There have, for example, been other human species on this planet that are now gone, leaving only their bones and a few artefacts to show that they ever existed. Did they look up at the night sky and wonder what it all meant? Probably they did. And are there other species on other worlds who look up at their night skies and wonder what it all means? Personally, I think there probably are.

However vast the odds against it may seem, there are so many billions of worlds out there that there must be some where something akin to what happened here has happened too. Of course, we may be so distant from even the nearest – in time as well as space – that they might as well not exist, but they are probably there all the same and their inhabitants may ask much the same questions as we do about existence and its meaning. Like us they may live on island-worlds amidst the apparently lifeless wastes, worlds that are blue-green oases among the sterile rocks and gaseous giants that most planets probably are, too hot or too cold for the miracle of life to happen.

But does any of this mean anything? Traditional religion found meaning, but it did so largely on the basis of outmoded and hopelessly inadequate understandings of the universe. To read theology is so often to read the thoughts of people who couldn’t see beyond this planet, whose concepts of God were as limited as their knowledge of the cosmos; who thought it credible that the fate of the universe hinged on a few events that took place on this tiny planet a few short centuries ago. The arguments and obsessions of so many theologians – past and present – pale into utter irrelevance when seen in the context of worlds and galaxies without number spread across fourteen billion years of space- time.

But does that make us all mere meaningless fragments? No, it doesn’t, because we know that our lives have meaning – meaning for us. And as mystics and poets have always known, meaning doesn’t depend on size. The universe is infinitely small as well as infinitely vast. As Mother Julian of Norwich wrote in her ‘Revelations of Divine Love’:

“And he showed me…a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it…and wondered, ‘What is this?’ And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.”

And similarly, William Blake wrote:

                   “To see a World in a Grain of Sand

                     And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

                     Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

                    And Eternity in an hour”

(from ‘Auguries of Innocence’) 

The scale of the universe isn’t what matters. What matters is how we treat each other in whatever time we’ve got. It matters that we are mostly caring and that we aspire to be kind. It matters that we can experience beauty, treasure it and appreciate it. It matters that we value truth and knowledge. It matters, as we are now realising, that we undo the harm we have done – and are still doing – to our environment, and so save it and ourselves from our own folly. All these things mean something here and now, and so give meaning to our existence. And they matter regardless of the second law of thermodynamics and the ultimate fate of the universe.

And when we look up at the night sky and see those countless stars, so distant in space and time, that means something too. By the very contemplation of infinity, or of the bizarre insights of quantum physics, we not so much see meaning as give meaning. We are the givers of meaning, the makers of meaning. Without us – and those beings like us who probably exist somewhere out there – there is no meaning, only a whole lot of rocks and gas, black holes and dark matter, without a thought, idea or feeling between them. Some would have said – maybe still say – that God gives the universe meaning but that can’t be understood as it was by the theologians of the past. Rather we may say that God is the cosmic process itself, the creative force that has driven everything since the beginning, since the Big Bang. But if we do say that, then how can this universal process perceive meaning or give meaning? It can do so because we, and creatures like us, who are part of it and products of it, can perceive meaning, create meaning and give meaning. We are the universe awake and conscious of itself. We are not only the hands of God and the eyes of God, we are each of us fragments of the mind of God.

We are the potential inherent in the universe made manifest, we are incarnations of the power – the spirit – that has been there all the time, awaiting the opportunity to become flesh, to become the meaning of everything else. And that is so even if it has happened only rarely in this unimaginable universe, even if it has happened only once. When we look out into the vastnesses of space and wonder what it all means, we should remember that we who look out are what it means, that our looking out is what it means. It is what happens in our inner space that gives meaning to all that outer space.

We are not meaningless accumulations of atoms. We are accumulations of atoms which have woken up to live lives rich in meaning; lives that can embody love and compassion and all that we know as vital, good and noble - all that we call divine. And in waking up we have awakened the universe of which we are part, and that means something.