Do we have any moral obligations to the future?
I have pondered this question a lot of late since starting my
current writing project and connecting with other folks working on similar ideas.
As mentioned in my previous blog post, we have reached a point in our daily
lives whereby we need to change our collective behaviour in order to retain
something positive for future generations; we need to drastically change our living
habits if we are to allow the world to continue in even a smidgen of a way that
it always has done. We know that we cannot keep consuming the earth’s resources
as we have done; we know that global warming is a real issue that is going
no-where; we know that hundreds of species and natural habitats are dying out
daily across the world – all because of us.
There is a vast amount of work to be done to change how we
live; a vast amount of thoughts to consider and an overwhelming amount of
ripple effects happening each day from our actions and our inertia.
There are, thankfully, some powerful drops falling into the ocean
across the globe that are prepared to answer the question at the top of this
post with a resounding "Yes".
Yet one of the frustrations that I consider time and again about
our need, as humans, to change how we are living, surrounds the inertia towards
mass collective action. Although there are many drops working hard in our ocean
to initiate change, there are so many puddles of apathy, it is hard to see
how significant change will ever come about. I have spoken with friends many times about the
futility of activism in the face of governmental torpor; how the collective
mass of a country so often looks to guidance from a government to instigate change,
yet so many governments are too concerned about retaining their popularity (and
vote) whilst in office, they are reluctant to be the one to inflict the Bad
News.
Growing alongside this reluctance to adopt change is the “Us
versus Them” response that western media so often channels towards
environmentalists, campaigners and environmental change-makers. On the one
hand, Humanitarian peace-keepers are heralded in the press and our psyches as
angelic saviours, and yet Environmental peace-keepers are so frequently demonized
as destructive pests. Why is this? Why on earth do we not see that, without the
earth to stand on, we won’t have any humans left to save?
My answer: the ostrich-effect.
In so many areas of life’s wider ocean, there is always the
option to take the head-in-the-sand approach; to turn a blind eye, as it were,
to some of the bigger pictures facing humanity, and to just stay focused on the
everyday. This, in essence, is not an action that anyone can blame; after all,
we have been programmed to desire a happy life and to focus our thinking onto
our own selves, our own small puddle of existence. It is sometimes far too
overwhelming to consider the ocean of issues surrounding us as a collective
mass, when we have so many little drops of angst to contend with in our every-day
lives. Thus, for many, we choose the ostrich approach as a means of survival and
just worry about the here and now and our immediate problems.
Understandable: yes, but futile, and very harmful for the
future.
I am driven by my concern about the inability to inflict the
sorts of life-changes that we all need to start adopting if we keep our heads stuck
in the sand and don’t look out to see the ocean of problems surrounding us.
There are, right now, many people living across the world in sustainable, harmonious
and unobtrusive ways; people whose ripple effects across the wider world are
little or non-existent in terms of negative damage. Yet, at the same time there
are billions of people living across the world in totally unsustainable, inharmonious
and utterly obtrusive ways, whose negative feedback to the world is monstrous
in its scope.
Here’s an example from my own life: my carbon footprint as an average UK is high (not as high as some other countries out there, but a very negative feedback onto the world). By the end of just two days, an average Brit will have emitted as much toxic carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through their every day actions as, for example, an average Tanzanian will emit in an entire year.
I (a statistical example of an industrialised British
citizen) am an energy guzzling, urbanised, high-impact consumer who brings a
lot of mess to the world. The average
Brit has a very high negative impact on the world and a future ahead of them of
sustained negativity if they continue on this path. My friends out here in
Tanzania (where I am presently living) currently have a very low carbon
footprint and very, very low negative impact on the planet; they don’t create
much metaphoric mess. And yet they too have a future ahead of them of growing
negativity, as they are encouraged to develop in the self-same way as the
industralised world without a global responsibility to act. They also ironically
already suffer the climate-changing effects of our years of mess; devastating crops
and homelands across the country.
For some reason (which I cannot quite understand) the
average industrialised citizen is not, in any way, made to feel guilty about the
negative lifestyle being lived out every day. If we choose, we can decide to
not even register that there is another way to live. No government initiatives
are instructing their citizens to change our ways; no life-style changes are
being inflicted upon the masses; no collective responsibility is being
encouraged. And so it is easy for all to
continue living this life; sticking heads into the sand and consuming on into
the future (plus, even more worrying, to go out to the non-industrialised world
and tell them to follow suit).
A wonderful writer, philosopher, activist, call him what you
will, Daniel Quinn, stated in his text, Beyond
Civilisation:
“Right now there are six billion
or so of us in what is deemed the culture of maximum harm. Only ten percent of
these six billion are being maximally harmful – are gobbling up resources at
top speed, contributing to global warming at top speed – and so on – but the
other ninety percent, having nothing better in sight, want only to be like the
ten percent.”
It seems that for most of us, until we are told and sold, collectively,
another way to live, people will chose to follow the masses and keep digging in
the sand. It is, by the looks of it, the nature of our beast.
Do we have a moral obligation to the future? Yes, we do. But
I feel, for many that it is so hard to contemplate the ocean of change that we
need to tackle in order to make a positive future because the ocean’s vastness
seems so far removed from our individual lives. It is perhaps too hard to see any
of this as a smaller picture to directly impact on our daily lives, as the
problems seem far beyond us. In order to inflict change, I think we need to
stop looking at the ocean as a mass of problems and start looking at the drops
that make up the mass. In particular, to motivate this change, we need to think
about our children.
When I think about the future, I know I have a moral obligation to change. Not for me and my sake; I’ll be long gone when the wake of our proverbial mess hits the fan; but for the sake of the children of the future. Whether it is the young innocents of our current generation, their children, or their grandchildren who have to face the brunt of what is to come, there is a wave of ignorant children who we are abandoning and leaving to deal with our problems. We are dumping upon them this mamouth task because of our current levels of inertia and apathy and because it is much easier to just stick our heads into the sand.
Children are not asked to be born; we decide to bring them
into the world and, as such, they are utterly reliant on us to lead the way for
them, to give them a good life, a good home on this earth and a positive start
towards their future. For the most part, they have no idea what sort of world
we are preparing for them; all they have is trust in us to do a good job and to
be giving them life for a reason. And yet, so many of us seem to think that if
we stick our heads in the sand, someone else will sort out the problems for our
children’s future. What we are not prepared to admit, yet, is that it is our children
themselves; the innocent masses of tomorrow’s world that will have to deal with
our mess. What a world, what a task and what a poor life we are preparing to hand over to them through our ostrich approach to life.
Do we have a moral obligation to the future? Of course we
do. If we care in the slightest about our children, about their innocent futures,
about keeping this world spinning for generations, then our moral obligation
should be at the forefront of our thinking. But, as I said, it is sometimes
hard to bring the bigger picture down into our everyday lives. How do you strip
away the ocean to see the drops? And how, whilst we’re thinking about it, could
this make us care more? Allow me to take some of the global happenings of this week
as an example of how an ocean can reveal its drops.
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Hundreds upon hundreds of innocent civilians, many of them
children and babies, have been killed across the world this week. Beyond the
fact that there have been three catastrophic aeroplane crashes in just eight
days, killing over four hundred and fifty innocents; there has also been a bombing of a UN shelter
in Gaza, shrouding hundreds of women and children and many more attacks across
Nigeria (to just name a few of this week’s global atrocities).
It is very hard sometimes to understand the devastation of such
loss on mass; we hear of hundreds killed in bombings in the Gaza strip; of
hundreds shot down in an aircraft; of hundreds being slaughtered across
Nigeria, of 300 schoolgirls, even, being kidnapped. Somehow, when the suffering
is so vast and incomprehensible, it somehow isn’t real, it is beyond our
understanding. It is only when we reduce it down to the individuals; when we start
to pick the drops out of the ocean and identify their resonance and meaning;
only then can we start to understand.
When the stories and the life histories of the individual victims
of those three plane crashes started to emerge, the horror struck. When the
images and family photographs of those children killed in the UN bombing
arrived, the disbelief grew. When the story came this week that eleven parents
of the kidnapped schoolchildren in Nigeria have died from bomb attacks and from
stress, the terror became real. When those three hundred young girls were
kidnapped months ago in Nigeria, it was perhaps hard to contemplate the devastation
and ripple effects of this loss upon their families. And yet, hearing that,
aside from parents killed through bomb attacks, four of the parents have died
from heart failure due to the stress of the loss of their girls, we can start
to relate this to ourselves. We can all, after all, fully understand the devastation
and ripple effects of the loss of one young girl from the UK, Madeline McCann,
as we have been given the opportunity time and again to understand her impact
as a drop in the ocean of her family’s loss.
The politics of the Ukraine and Russia; the landscapes of
Burkina Faso and Taiwan, the struggles of a divided Nigeria may seem like worlds
beyond most of our puddles of feeling, until of course, our own world was
brought down into theirs. Suddenly, this week, the ripple effects of the wider
ocean reached our own shores back home. And, through such tragedies, it is
times like these when we come together; when innocent lives have been taken and
destroyed; when we feel powerless to have stopped this suffering and angered by
the injustice of life. Why then, can we not all come together to prevent
suffering and injustice for our children in the future?
The children of the world unite in their equality. They are
all born innocent into this world; into a life of hope and opportunity. We have
a moral obligation to give them a world in which they can thrive, rather than a
world that we’ve thrown away and it is time we pulled our heads out of the sand
and started to work together to give them a world and a future that we would want
for them. It is, I believe, our moral obligation to do so.
I’ll leave this post with some beautiful photographs (sadly
none of them mine) of children playing across the world. The pictures are taken
of children from Russia, from the Ukraine, from Burkina Faso, Taiwan and Nigeria;
simple images to show just a few of the little drops of light floating blithely
in an ocean of possibilities, waiting for whatever future we chose to leave for
them on this earth.
From Russia
From the Ukraine
From Burkina Faso
From Taiwan
From Israel
and from Nigeria
Here's hoping we can leave them something to smile about.
