ROMAN KRZNARIC IS A GOOD ANCESTOR
SUBJECT
Roman Krznaric
OCCUPATION
Author, public philosopher
LOCATION
Oxford, UK
DATE
July, 2020
I have a tattoo on the inside on my left wrist that is so small the tattoo artist apologised for charging me at all. “There’s a minimum price, ay,” he said in a beautiful Maori accent, as the needle turned on and off just once, leaving me with an indelible pale blue dot. He asked what it was for and we hunched together over my phone watching a YouTube clip of outer space while listening to Carl Sagan read from his essay, “The Pale Blue Dot,” about the picture of Earth taken from so far away that in our vast solar system it appears simply “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Sagan explains that “there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world…. it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” The artist nodded grimly and I left, miraculously unaltered and still many years away from being able to express to him – or myself – that I was chasing a notion of Deep Time, of cosmic thinking, and of trying to see myself as an ancestor rather than a starring player in my own lifetime.
I wish I’d had Roman Kznaric to explain it for me. Roman is a good ancestor. A good ancestor tries, as best they can, to think as far as they can beyond their own lifespan, to the time when their children’s children will be living in a world filled with systems and objects and meanings perhaps as unrecognisable to us now as the ones “discovered” in past centuries on continents outside of Europe. A good ancestor wonders what it will be like to breath the air of this distant place, to drink the water there, to build friendships, to work, to relax, to birth, to commute, to eat. A good ancestor lives as if they would be happy to move to this place and could expect to thrive in its conditions. A good ancestor doesn’t hide, doesn’t shirk, doesn’t kick the can of spent plutonium down the road. A good ancestor, as we say in this time, shows up and does the work, even when exhausted by fires and pandemics and hanging out the washing and making sense of their own brief lives. This is what Roman has been doing for the past few years while researching and writing The Good Ancestor, a book that gathers the ideas of social, economic and environmental stewardship currently coming from all directions through which we can hope, through gritted teeth, to achieve some progress in the direction of becoming the kind of ancestors remembered for things like peace and penicillin rather than short-sighted catastrophe and selfish bungling. I’ve learned that it’s going to take a lot more than tiny tattoos.
SARAH DARMODY: Back in 2018 I was in San Francisco with my husband who was on this whirlwind tour as part of his studies of all the companies that you “have to see” in Silicon Valley. And one day he came back with shining eyes and said, “We went to the most incredible place. It’s the home of the Long Now.” I was like, “What is the Long Now?” I was jet-lagged at the time and postpartum with a tiny baby, but we nevertheless stayed up all night talking about The Long Now Foundation and this notion of being a “good ancestor.” It was very new to us 18 months ago, but since then I’ve seen it come up in many places, most recently through. She works on anti-racism and frames being a good ancestor in that context. But it was back in the 1970s, as you point out, that we first heard this term “good ancestors” from Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine. Salk coined a term worth hanging on to, and yet it seems not to have found its place until quite recently.
