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What We Owe the Future is a fantastic introduction into the philosophical concept of longtermism, the idea that we should invest more time and energy into the long-term future of humanity, and what we can do to ensure that the future is as positive as we can make it.

The issues facing the future are legion, some listed in the book include disasters such as new global pandemics or nuclear war, climate change (duh), or the most disconcerting concept in the book for me, authoritarians using carefully engineered artificial intelligence to cement their form of government and their values in perpetuity. Longtermism asserts that we all have the moral duty to try and predict the existential issues facing the future (as difficult as that may be) and to either mitigate these existential issues or give the future the tools to deal with them.

I absolutely loved What We Owe the Future. It manages both to explain some very complex concepts while at the same time being not only readable but engaging. Once I started reading this book, I didn’t want to put it down. Just as importantly I think MacAskill strikes a careful balance between optimism and pessimism towards the future. Often times discussions of humanity’s long-term future devolve into two camps either “All is folly” or “Everything will be splendid, and we have literally nothing to worry about,” (If I’m being honest, I gravitate more towards the former). I believe both attitudes are dangerous for different reasons. Pessimism can quickly turn to apathy, with a pessimist asking themselves why they should bother to help make the future better if everything is pointless anyway. Optimism on the other hand could engender complacency, an optimist could think to themselves “I don’t have to do anything because everything will work itself out in the long run.”

                The longtermist philosophy reminds me of the name of a political organization in France in the 1820s, it was called “Help Yourself, and Heaven will Help You Club.” I think that in a nutshell is what longtermism is about, if you want the future to be better, then you need to work to make is so.

                What We Owe the Future also reminds us how much our actions will impact the long-term future. People fail to grasp just how much events in the present will send aftershocks long into the future. And I’m not just talking about carbon dioxide emissions lingering in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. We are living in the present moment neck deep in the consequences of decisions made by people in the past. The book The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, & Politics had a great quote from a Guatemalan author that captures this idea in a cynical (but I think accurate) way, “The future is the past’s garbage.” If we follow the advice of What We Owe the Future, then we should work to make sure that the future isn’t garbage.

If You’re Interested in the book here are some links for it:

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https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/59802037-what-we-owe-the-futurehttps://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-we-owe-the-future-william-macaskill/1140658116

Part 1:

            In one of the essays for my book, “Price of History,” I asked the question: What does it take for a society to change? How difficult is it to get an entire society to change their behavior, especially when those behaviors are deeply embedded into cultural norms and expectations?

            I have been thinking about these questions when it comes to America and the worsening climate crisis. Obviously, the United States is not the only contributor to the climate crisis, and the changing climate poses an existential threat to all of humanity. With that being said, however, I do believe that the US faces a unique challenge when it comes to reducing our carbon footprint. America has a culture built around conspicuous consumption, excess, and wastefulness. The stereotypical dream that the average person or family should live in a large house in the suburbs with 2 or 3 four-thousand-pound cars sitting in the driveway and spend their weekends constantly shopping for new things has been an image that has shaped the hopes, aspirations, and behavior of Americans for decades. But how sustainable is this dream? Can this level of consumption continue to be justified, even in the face of worsening climate change? How difficult is it for America to change our entire culture of wastefulness? In my opinion, there are 3 major obstacles to meaningful change. The first is what I call “the inertia of tradition,” the second is infrastructure, and the third is vested interest. I will explain all of these in a nutshell below.

Part 2:

            What do I mean by the phrase “inertia of tradition?” Basically, when a culture develops certain patterns of behavior, there is always conservative resistance to changing those patterns of behavior. There are many people who take solace and comfort in tradition. They think that if they stubbornly maintain tradition that they can bring some semblance of order to the random chaos of life. It’s a false hope, but it’s a hope that is desirable enough to many people that change will have to overcome the inertia of tradition.

            The second major obstacle I mentioned is an extension of the inertia of tradition, and that’s infrastructure. A perfect example of this challenge in America is exemplified by cars and car culture. I was listening to an interview on the Tides of History podcast with Professor Shane Miller, and he explained the problem in a fantastic way. Professor Miller studies pre-history and he used the example of a pre-historic culture that specialized in a certain crop as their main food source. When a culture focuses so much on one crop, they can become very good at growing it. But what happens if there is a drought, or an insect or fungal plague destroys the harvest? Now this cultural specialization and dependency is a liability rather than an asset. Cars are similar in the United States. Look at how much our lives revolve around cars. Our cities are massive and spread far apart to accommodate all the space needed for the roads and the parking needed to accommodate everyone having a car. Public transportation is virtually non-existent in many parts of the country, and car ownership is often a requirement for anyone wanting to hold down a job. When so much of our infrastructure and society is built around and for one thing, it puts blinders on us. We can’t even imagine an America in which cars do not dominate our lives and our landscape.

The third major obstacle I see to the US changing its casual wastefulness is anyone with a vested interest in the current status quo. This isn’t unique to climate change or to the United States, this behavior is as old as humanity. Anyone whose fortune, influence, or power are tied to the way things are will always be the most resistant to change. The best example of this right now is fossil fuel companies. When your entire business model is built around extracting and refining fossil fuels, how likely are you to embrace a zero-emission future? But how can you swim against the tide of necessity? Well, you could work to undermine people’s conviction that change is actually necessary. Or you could engineer a propaganda campaign telling ordinary people that it’s their responsibility to fix climate change and move the conversation away from the parochial and greedy practices of fossil fuel companies.

Part 3:

I want to address this issue of culpability and responsibility. It’s pretty clear that fossil fuel corporations have known about the effects of climate change for at least half a century, and their industry’s massive contribution to it. It’s also clear that fossil fuel corporations tried to shift the responsibility to ordinary people and campaigned hard for practices such as individual recycling, so that they could continue to pollute the planet. This is obviously incredibly short-sighted and greedy, but I also want to caution people against using this as an excuse. Yes, fossil fuel companies need to be held accountable for the damage they have done to the planet. But this does not absolve the rest of us of our responsibility to the environment. If the discussion of what should be done to avert climate disaster devolves to solely blaming fossil fuel companies, that could engender a dangerous apathy among people. People might start to think that there is nothing that they can do, or maybe even more dangerously, that there is nothing that they should be expected to do to change our culture of wastefulness.

This idea reminds me of a concept in moral philosophy put forward by Immanuel Kant called the Categorical Imperative. To make a very complex idea very simple, the Categorical Imperative says that if society would fall apart if everyone engaged in a behavior, that means that you shouldn’t engage in that behavior. To give an example, imagine you are in a small family-owned shop. There are several things that you want to buy, but you don’t have the money to afford them all. You decide to steal a few of the items that you want, and you justify the theft by saying to yourself, “What’s the big deal its just a few things, they can afford that.” But what if everyone who went to that store did the exact same thing? If everyone was stealing a few items at a time, then there is no way that shop could stay in business. The Categorical Imperative is a way for people to assess and then improve their behavior.

There are so many ways in which the Categorical Imperative could help Americans reshape our attitudes about the environment and our casual wastefulness. How many millions of people litter every day and justify it by saying that just one person littering isn’t a big deal. How many Americans buy yet another massive and wasteful car and say that it’s someone else’s responsibility to change. How much microplastic poisoning in all of our bloodstreams is finally enough for us to realize that we need to change our culture?

Some might think that the Categorical Imperative is not applicable to climate change, that it should only apply to moral issues. But I disagree, because I think our worsening climate and our contribution to it is a moral issue. Are we really so selfish and short-sighted that we would doom our descendants to a ruined planet? Don’t we have a moral duty to leave the planet not only habitable, but beautiful for the future?

Something I read recently in Duke University Press’ book Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, & Politics really resonated with me as I was planning out this blog post. The passage below was from an interview with Yolanda Colom, who fought as a revolutionary during the Guatemalan Civil War and post war became a groundskeeper at a school. In this passage she is answering a question about her first impressions of the school. Now obviously she is speaking about Guatemala, but as you will see I think the quote could apply just as well, maybe even better to the United States.

“Well, like any other, this educational institution does not escape the more general social situation. The school has been a microcosm of a system of thinking and of organization with roots in the history of our country, in a ton of factors. Like all others, this institution has personified consumerism, the production of waste, the tendency to never recycle, or repair or search for creative means of giving more life-or many lives-to material resources…It’s classic Western Civilization and Capitalist Production. [emphasis added]”

“The one who deals the blow forgets, the one who carries the scar remembers.” Haitian Proverb

            Those were the opening words of one of my favorite books I have ever read, Gangsters of Capitalism by Jonathan Katz. Such a simple statement, yet one with such poignant meaning. Katz used this proverb to open his book on US imperialism during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The history retold in Gangsters of Capitalism is almost completely forgotten by most people in the United States. For this blog post, I wanted to extrapolate further on how this proverb can help us understand conflict in international relations. What fault lines and discord can be created when two countries remember different chapters of the same history?

            Let’s use a couple of examples from US history as a prism through which we can view this issue. How many Americans reading this are aware of the fact that the US maintained a military occupation of Haiti for nearly twenty years at the beginning of the 20^th century? How many Americans are aware that in 1953 the CIA helped orchestrate a coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran? If I had to guess almost no Americans reading this have any idea about either of these events. Additionally, I doubt most Americans are aware of so many other troubling chapters of American history. We in the United States like to paint a picture of ourselves as the good guys of the world and of history, and any events that contradict or complicate this picture tend to be swept under the rug.

            However, events such as those mentioned above are well remembered outside the United States. Sticking with the example of the coup in Iran, I will be using John Ghazvinian’s excellent book on US Iranian relations American and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present, as a source. An event that is much better remembered in the United States is when employees of the US embassy in Tehran were taken hostage during the Revolution in 1979. The reasons why the employees of the embassy were taken hostage are myriad and complex. But one of those reasons is that many feared that the United States was planning another coup. After twenty-five years many Iranians knew that much of the planning for the 1953 coup was done inside the US embassy. Those who believed that the US wanted to try again were further bolstered by one of those accidents or mistakes that history so often hinges upon. The Shah of Iran had been ill with cancer for some time and leading up to the embassy takeover was in the United States seeking medical treatment. However, the Shah’s poor health was a carefully guarded secret, so many ordinary Iranians thought that this was a ruse. Those who thought the Shah’s health problems were fake believed that the Shah was waiting in the United States until the CIA would bring him back on their coattails following yet another coup. This not entirely unjustified fear led many to believe that taking the embassy was a good way to safeguard Iran and the revolution.

            What might we be able to learn from these events? In my view the hostage crisis of 1979 perfectly illustrates that Haitian proverb used above. Many Americans well remember the hostage crisis and will cry foul about the injustice done to those captured. Americans remember what happened, while at the same time they fail to learn or appreciate the deeper context as to why it happened. They fail to learn reasons why those who captured the embassy felt like it was necessary. We don’t have to support or condone capturing embassies and taking hostages. But learning the greater context of US and Iranian history does give us a more nuanced perspective.

            Imagine something similar to the 1953 coup in Iran was done in the United States. Imagine that sometime in US history a foreign power’s security services, with the blessing of their political leadership, orchestrated a coup that overthrew an elected US president. How would Americans feel if this information became widely known? Would Americans feel angry that the integrity of our elections, and our basic sovereignty, had been violated by a foreign power playing puppet master? Would this event leave a lasting wound on our national psyche? Would politicians be able to use this event to create nationalistic anger whenever they needed more domestic support?

            This is the core of what this piece is about. If nations were people, they would all be pointing accusatory fingers at one another decrying the crimes committed against them, while at the same time everyone ignores the crimes they committed against everyone else. This leads to constant misunderstandings. A nation might be able to successfully close its eyes and ears and ignore parts of its history that it doesn’t want to confront. But even the most powerful nations on earth would be hard pressed to silence criticism everywhere.

            This is a continuation of a point I was trying to make in one of the essays of my book, creating a strictly positive national myth has far-reaching real-world consequences. Reality is complex and nuanced. Part of being a mature adult is being willing to do the work of navigating this complex and nuanced reality. When we refuse to confront this complexity and instead manufacture convenient stories to tell ourselves, we are creating an inherently warped and false reality. This can happen on both a national and a personal level.

            If nations want to better understand one another, then they have to be willing to confront the difficult or dishonorable moments in their own history. When two countries remember entirely different moments of the same history, then they are bound to create impasses in their relations with one another. If a country refuses to see the blows it deals out, someone else will remember for them.

Part 1:

This is the first post of my new blog, A lot More Questions, with No Answers. For those who have read my book, A lot of Questions, with No Answers? this first blog post and many others will expand upon the questions and themes explored in the book. You could consider this and many future offerings to be post publication addendums, much like the first essay in the book had an addendum to it. This piece will be a continuation of the questions asked in the final essay of the book, Written by the Victor. Before beginning, I want to point out as with everything in life, the issues being raised in this blog are multifaceted, nuanced, and complicated. A short essay or blog post is by no means comprehensive enough to cover every variable or explore every view. As I said in my book, I do not intend the following to be the end of discussion, but the beginning of it.

Recent events in the United States and around the world have left me wishing I knew more about the history of education. More specifically, they have left me wondering how schools and universities cope and then adjust when faced with tumultuous events, particularly tumult in the social or political order. How quickly does educational curriculum dealing with history and politics change in school institutions, and how do these changes effect societies? Can school education systems and the way they portray events have an effect on those events, for good or ill?

            These questions are rather abstract so let me clarify with a quick hypothetical example so this makes more sense. Imagine an early modern absolutist monarchy. There is no universal education in this country. What schools do exist however, are strongly pro-monarchy and preach to their students this heavily biased view. Unfortunately for the monarchy however, a confluence of dozens of factors has created the perfect storm for a revolution to break out. Eventually, the old monarchy is overthrown, and a representative republic is created in the country. One of the many changes the republic institutes is a system of universal education.

            When it comes time to instruct new students about recent events, what would one expect the republican government to do? Unsurprisingly, those who seized power in the revolution want to find every way possible to enshrine their system of values into the nation, so that the republic can become a permanent institution and not just a historical flash in the pan. One obvious way to disseminate propaganda is through the new universal education system. In a nutshell, when it comes time to teach younger generations about the revolution the school curriculum paints the overthrown monarchy with the blackest brush possible, and every teacher is quick to tell all the students that they should be overwhelmed with gratitude toward the republic for freeing them in the glorious revolution.

            Now let us imagine that there are private schools run by a religion that were supportive of the deposed monarchy. Naturally, they have a different opinion about the revolution and the creation of the republic, and they aren’t afraid to voice that opinion loudly to their students. This, among other factors, leads to covert and overt conflict between supporters of the deposed monarchy and the new republican government. This conflict is threatening and continuous enough that republic is finally forced to offer concessions as a way to ratchet down tensions. One of these concessions is an adjustment to the education system. Conflicting sides agree that both public and private schools will implement new curriculum to teach students about the country’s history, a curriculum that is scrupulously neutral.

Part 2:

            This idea, political neutrality in schools, is the subject I want to examine for the rest of the piece. Specifically, I want to examine political neutrality in schools in the United States. What are the benefits and downsides to neutrality and is neutrality even attainable?  

            What are the benefits of political neutrality? These are rather obvious, as a historian might tell you, trying to view events without bias can help one gain a more objective and clear view of events being studied. In addition, a politically neutral stance allows a school system to avoid both public and interpersonal conflicts between staff who might have differing political views. In this way, a school institution can maintain a certain interrelation harmony, even if it merely papers over divisions rather than confronting them.

            I will save discussion on the potential downsides for just a moment, and instead focus on the question, is neutrality even possible? My answer would be no, not entirely, even if there is scrupulous enforcement (which I doubt there often is). I believe the ideal of perfect political and social neutrality dies under the double barrels of overt pressure and innate bias.

            Overt pressure refers to when an institution is faced with insistent prodding to take a non-neutral stance toward some issue. For example, look at the widescale outrage when schools were first racially integrated in the United States, or the protests that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic to masks and social distancing. Both of those examples involve social issues that also became (and remain) hot button political topics. In the case of the pandemic, the issue should have been one entirely in the purview of public health. But how many school boards across the country caved in an eased public health measures when faced with growing political pressure? How many people died because school districts across the country wanted to avoid a political fight rather than listen to the advice of public health experts?

            The second and more insidious way that any potential neutrality is undermined is through every person’s own innate biases. I’ll give a quick example of what I mean. I once overheard a conversation between two public school teachers discussing a social studies unit that was upcoming concerning different religions of the past. The teachers weren’t sure how well their young students would understand the subject matter, which is fair. But what one teacher said next perfectly encapsulates the issue of bias. I’m paraphrasing but this teacher’s point was basically: “How do we make it clear to our students that this is what people believed in the past because they didn’t know any better” (this was said in a strongly Protestant Christian area of the US). The obvious implication being that people of the past were wrong in their religious beliefs (especially in relation to polytheistic religions). For me the very notion that one can know definitively that their religion is the correct one opens up a whole philosophical can of worms, and if readers are interested the idea of the “correct religion” is the subject of the first essay of my book. Even ignoring that, however, imagine that a teacher with this mindset has several students that are polytheistic Hindus. How might this bias of seeing past polytheistic religions as wrong affect the way they teach and the way they talk about the subject? What effects could this have on their polytheistic students? How scrupulously can a person mitigate their own unconscious biases (especially if they are blissfully unaware of these biases)?

            Let us move on to the question set aside earlier, what are the potential downsides of trying to maintain a neutral stance towards politics and social issues in a school setting? My argument would be that at a certain point “neutrality” can easily become “refusing to speak out against injustice.” Anyone watching contemporary events in the United States has certainly noticed that our democratic republic is facing threats from the far-right that could topple democracy in the US. Far-right political organizations and sentiments have been growing in power and influence in other countries around the world as well, potentially calling the whole concept of western liberal democracy into question. Should US public schools remain out of this fight for representative government? It would certainly be much easier. But would that make it right or just?

            Once again, we need to return to an earlier idea, are school curriculums neutral in the first place? Countries throughout history have had their own set of national myths to tell themselves how great they are, and they hold up certain values that they believe represent their society or culture. As I mentioned in the hypothetical above, when nations have compulsory public education, they expend a lot of effort trying to instill these national myths and values in the minds of younger generations. The US is no different. The US education system mythologizes the founding fathers to such an extent that they become one-dimensional caricatures representing certain national values, like liberty and justice for all. This isn’t a neutral position; this sort of mythmaking clearly supports one set of political ideals over any other. Now how much the reality actual fits the one-dimensional myths and propaganda is beside the point. If US public schools assert that the revolutionary war and democracy and the founding fathers and everything else are laudable and righteous, that is a political stance. What happens when a neo-fascist movement gains popularity in the United States? Should this just be ignored as if it isn’t happening, should public schools remain “neutral?” Will US schools ignore the fact that they have been pushing politically charged propaganda this whole time? Do US schools and the people who work in them actually support the ideals of freedom and democracy?

What if US democracy falls to an authoritarian coup, how long before public schools pivot to a new “neutral” stance that says that democracy is overrated anyway and aren’t we happy that it was gotten rid of by our new authoritarian overlords. This line of inquiry leads us to ask just how strong the average person’s principles and convictions really are. Is the average person like a strong tree, rooted firmly enough that they can withstand powerful storms or choking droughts, or are most people like a leaf on the wind, blowing here and there to wherever the wind takes them? That could be the subject of future discussion.

Hello everyone, this is the first post for my new blog. I’m excited to be doing some more active writing, but I am also a total novice when it comes to creating a blog and managing a website, so I hope everyone will bear with me as I figure things out.

For the first post of my blog, I thought I would start with something simple. The website sheperd.com just posted their listing for my book today, and I wanted to share it. Sheperd.com is a great website, each listing allows authors to talk about the books they wrote, while at the same time they support other books in their genre, or books that inspired them to write in the first place. I am excited to see my book mentioned on their website, and I hope you enjoy reading this listing as much as I enjoyed writing it.

If there is any news about my book I will post it here. Also, the first piece I have written for this blog is ready, and I plan to publish it by the end of November. The plan is to post a small essay, probably a few pages long, as a short but hopefully engaging food for thought once a month.

https://shepherd.com/best-books/thinking-about-history-and-how-we-understand-it