Utdrag från Roman Krznaric: The Good Ancestor (2020), s. 164-168
"'The origin of civil government,' wrote David Hume in 1739, is that 'men are not able to radically cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul, which makes them prefer the present to the remote'. [1] The Scottish philosopher was convinced that the institutions of government, such as elected representatives and parliamentary debates, were needed to temper our impulsive and selfish desires and foster society's long-term interests and welfare.
"If only.
"Today, Hume's view appears to be wishful thinking, since it is so startlingly clear that politicians and the political system itself have become a cause of rampant short-termism rather than a cure or it. While representative democracies in the Western world have evolved long-lasting institutions such as civil services, police forces and judiciaries, they equally exhibit what can be called 'political presentism': a bias towards prioritising short-term political interests and decisions, and in favour of current over future generations. [2] When the Czech prime minister Andrej Babis was asked in June 2019 why he had blocked an agreement to commit EU member states to reducing their carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, he replied, 'Why should we decide 31 years ahead of time what will happen in 2050?' [3] The ruling political class typically refuse to see the future as their responsibility.
"The affliction of political presentism has roots in five factors that pervade the nature of democracy itself. First is the temporal trap of electoral cycles, an inherent design limitation of democratic government that produces short political time horizons. [4] Time itself has been cycled into the ballot box, with politicians and their parties focusing with blinkered attention on whatever it will take to entice voters at the next election. Back in the 1970's, the economist William Nordhaus identified this problem as the 'political business cycle', noticing that governments would repeatedly expand their spending in the run up to elections and then introduce austerity measures once they had gained office to rein in their now overheating economies. His concern was that this could generate 'purely myopic policy, where future generations are ignored'. [5] The result is that long-term issues from which politicians can make little immediate political capital, such as dealing with ecological breakdown or pension reform, are often kept on the back-burner.
"A second factor is the power of special interest groups, and especially corporations, to secure near-term political favours for themselves, while passing the longer-term costs onto the rest of society. [6] This is hardly a new problem: in 1913 an exasperated Woodrow Wilson declared that 'the government of the United States is the foster child of special interests ... the big bankers, the big manufacturers, the big masters of commerce. [7] More recently, Al Gore announced that 'American democracy has been hacked - and the hack is campaign finance.' [8] When fossil fuel companies successfully lobby governments for the right to drill and frack on public land or to manage to block carbon-cutting legislation, they are holding the future to ransom in the name of shareholder returns. Similarly, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, US and UK banks that were responsible for the crash used their political influence to secure massive taxpayer-funded bailouts that amounted to a short-term fix rather than a long-term reform. According to Jared Diamond, one of the key causes of the collapse of civilisations is when 'the interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions'. [9] We should be wise to take note.
"The deepest cause of political presentism is that representative democracy systematically ignores the interests of future people. The citizens of tomorrow are granted no rights, nor - in the vast majority of countries - are there public bodies to represent their interests or potential views on decisions taken today that will undoubtedly affect their lives. [10] This is a blind spot so enormous that we barely notice it: in the decade I spent researching democratic governance as a political scientist, it simply never occurred to me that future generations are disenfranchised in the same way that slaves and women were in the past. But that is the reality, and that is why hundreds of thousands of school students around the world have been striking to get rich countries to reduce their carbon emissions: they have had enough of democratic systems that render them voiceless and powerless. It is also why so many young people in the UK - especially those below the voting age - felt betrayed by the result of the Brexit referendum: since over-65s were more than twice as likely as under-25s to vote to leave the European Union, older voters had a major impact on a decision with long-term consequences that they would scarcely have to live with themselves. [11]
"Digital drivers, such as social media and 24/7 news cycles, have magnified the problem of political presentism. While the growth television as a medium of mass communication from the 1950s helped launch a new age of sound bites and political spin, we now find ourselves living in 'Twitterocracies,' where our political representatives spend much of their time giving instant opinions on social media and cable news-channels, and engaging in constant reputational warfare to ensure they are trending. [12] A single tweet from Donald Trump can quickly cascade into a full-blown political drama that occupies politicians and the media for days. The result is to foreshorten political time by distracting public attention from longer-term and less sweet-worthy 'slow news', whether an intensifying drought in sub-Saharan Africa or a new intergovernmental report on the growing resistance of common diseases to antibiotics. [13]
"A final political challenge lies not with democratic government directly but with the larger body in which it exists: the nation state. When nation states first emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and replaced the old order of empires and principalities, they were not an especially dangerous source of short-termism. Italy and France, for instance, had long-term visions to create a strong sense of national identity, along with public institutions including civil services and education systems. [14] But times have changed. Many of today's most acute long-term concerns, such as the climate crisis, are global in nature and require global solutions. There may be no greater problem of collective action than trying to get scores of countries, which often have vastly different cultures, histories, economies and priorities, to overcome their differences and find common ground. On rare occasions cooperation takes place, as with the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer in 1987, but more typically, individual nation states focus on their particular interests rather than on shared long-term risks. A country like the US or Australia might refuse to ratify a global agreement on carbon reductions because it threatens its mining industry or a slowdown of its economy. Another (think India, Pakistan or Israel) might opt out of a nuclear non-proliferation treaty if it wants to develop its own nuclear weapons. Even relatively homogeneous regions, such as the European Union, have trouble reaching agreements on issues like the number of refugees each member state should take or how many fish they are allowed to catch.
"Just like my 11-year-old twins, nation states are constantly bickering, always wanting the largest slice of the cake, and doing their best to avoid their share of the housework. Unlike my twins, nation states show no sign of growing out of it."
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[1] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (John Noon, 1739), Book 3, Section 7.
[2] Dennis Thompson, 'Representing Future Generations: Political Presentism and Democratic Trusteeship', Critical Review of International and Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2010): p. 17; Boston, p. xxvii.
[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/climate-change-2050-eu-eastern-europe-carbon-neutral-summit-countries-a8968141.html
[4] Michael K. MacKenzie, 'Institutional Design and Sources of Short-Termism', in Iñigo González-Ricoy and Axel Grosseries (eds.), Institutions for Future Generations (Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 27.
[5] William Nordhaus, 'The Political Business Cycle', Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2 (1975): p. 177, p. 179, p. 184.
[6] MacKenzie, pp. 28-9
[7] Quoted in Mark Green (ed.), The Big Business Reader on Corporate America (Pilgrim Press, 1983), p. 179.
[8] https://222.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/317.
[9] Diamond, Collapse, p. 430
[10] MacKenzie, pp. 29-30; Barbara Adam, Time (Polity Press, 2004), pp. 136-43; Sabine Pahl, Stephen Sheppard, Christine Boomsma and Christopher Groves, 'Perceptions of Time in Relation to Climate Change', WIRESs Climate Change, Vol. 5 (May/June 2014): p. 378; Ivor Crewe and Anthony King, The Blunders of our Government (Oneworld, 2014), p. 365; Simon Caney, 'Political Institutions and the Future', in Iñigo González-Ricoy and Axel Grosseries (eds.), Institutions for Future Generations (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 137-8.
[11] http://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/06/27/how-britain-voted.
[12] Oxford Martin Commission, 'Now for the Long-Term: The Report of the Oxford Martin Commission for Future Generations', Oxford Martin School, Oxford University (2013), pp. 45-6.
[13] https://www.who.int/antimicrobial-resistance/interagency-coordination-group/IACG_final_report_EN.pdf.
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