Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His books include The Good Ancestor and Empathy. This conversation with Sarah Darmody originally featured in issue 64 of Dumbo Feather magazine.
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 the writer and thinker Layla Saad who wrote Me and White Supremacy. 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 onto, and yet it seems not to have found its place until quite recently.
ROMAN KRZNARIC: Yeah, I think that’s a fair point actually. The first inkling of that concept that I ever came across was in this speech that Salk gave in 1977. He said, “Are we being good ancestors?” Then when I came across it myself through the Long Now Foundation like you and your husband, I started looking around and saw quite a few people were talking about the good ancestor in various ways. But it hadn’t really taken off as a concept. Now that might be for lots of reasons. One is that the time since Salk said that has been the time of neoliberal hyper-individualism. I mean, neoliberal economic thought has no sense of time, no sense of long-term. It’s the opposite of being a good ancestor. It’s about now, it’s about deregulating the markets now, making the quick money now.
It’s about the Now Now. Not the Long Now [laughs].
Exactly. Or what Brian Eno called the Short Now as opposed to the Long Now. So I think that’s probably the fundamental reason why that concept has taken time to grab hold. And then what’s happened in the meantime are three really important developments I think. One is the rise of climate science, which has extended our sense of time. So now we open a newspaper and we see reports about how there’s going to be carbon staying in the atmosphere for 200 years or a projection from the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change about rising sea levels for a century, even five centuries from today. So that one thing has extended our time horizons. The second has been the rise of new technologies, particularly the potential long-term risks from AI, genetically engineered pandemics, automation to a certain extent. These things are making us think about our longer term impacts and prospects. Who are we going to be as humans? Or the rise of artificially-enhanced humans, cyborgs, all this kind of stuff that’s making us think of a longer now. And then the third is more recent and is connected with Layla Saad which is a recognition that so many of the inequalities, prejudices, racisms of our contemporary societies have very deep roots in long histories of slavery-era prejudice and colonial-era racism and these will stay embedded in our public institutions, culture and criminal justice systems unless we act. They are deeply embedded in problems of intergenerational justice. That’s why Layla Saad on the first page of her book says, “This is about being a good ancestor.” So I think those different forces are bringing the long now to the fore. And then they get manifested through someone like Greta Thunberg saying, “We can only tackle the climate crisis with cathedral thinking.” This is a major shift in human thought really.
I really hope the notion of being a good ancestor becomes the operating paradigm of the next 50 years, which is as far as I’m willing to forecast at the moment. That’s my short long now. I think in the opening of your book, which you penned in March 2020, you say something like, “Geez, this coronavirus looks like it might have something to say about time.” And lo! [Laughs]. Here we are! Many months later. And time has become incredibly elastic for people, I think. Our instant gratification systems have been sorely disrupted and we’ve been pushed back into different modes of time and ways of being. It’s slowed things down in a way that has been uncomfortable for a lot of people and a lot of institutions. I guess that’s the difference between this pandemic and something like climate change that doesn’t feel like a clear and present danger to a great many people. If it felt like they might catch it on the tram then I’m pretty sure they would stay home! They would want action.
Yeah. I think we all have the hope, certainly me, that when you have a shared threat we might all learn something from it, as you’re saying with coronavirus. Certainly we know it was the case with the Second World War, the sense of a shared threat here in Britain where I live. That the Nazis might invade and drop their bombs everywhere. The extraordinary changes like the evacuation of a million children from the countryside had all sorts of social consequences like the rise of heightened welfare provision for children because suddenly people in rural areas saw the urban poor, saw that these poor kids have lice and rickets and were malnourished and so on. And yes. That may be the hope. But of course the problem with these shared experiences and also moments of crisis is that they can take us in very different directions. There’s a very interesting Chinese sci fi novel called The Three-Body Problem that tells the story of a planet Earth where scientists find out that aliens are coming. But it’s going to be about 450 years before they arrive. And actually what happens is that humankind does not suddenly unite. They actually split. Some people want to fight the aliens, some people turn it into a religion. Others don’t give a shit. There’s also this research about near-death experiences which is really fascinating, which I talked about in my last book Carpe Diem Regained, where people who’ve had near-death experiences have very different reactions to it. About a third of the people, it transforms their life. They want to seize the day, they change their jobs, they travel with their kids around the world. Another third have a traumatic response. They become depressed, anxious and so on. And for about a third of people there’s no change at all. They just get on with life. I think we will see that with coronavirus too. Some countries or cities will kickstart into very progressive change like the city of Amsterdam, which adopted my partner Kate Raworth’s “doughnut” as the sort of model for its post-COVID, post-growth recovery. And some places will just be going on to business as usual. I don’t know how it’s all going to play out. It makes me think a bit of the way the fires in Australia played out at the beginning of this year, you know, I wasn’t there, but I’m from Sydney and my dad had a fire half a kilometre from his house. And I had to scream at him down the phone to please leave. In the end I had to get my kids to say to him, “Grandpa, you have to leave.” And you know for some people, maybe for a lot of Australians, it seems that whole period of bushfires is almost forgotten. Or maybe it didn’t have any deep effect. For some it did, some it didn’t. Coronavirus may be a little bit like that. The irony with my dad was that back in December I was saying to him, “You must leave the house,” and then coronavirus comes along, and I’m saying, “Dad, don’t leave the house!” That’s the kind of world we’re in. Full of these incredible tensions.
Yeah, and if you understand that we live in an increasingly fragile ecosystem that is under enormous pressure and that we will start to see climate events like we did in January, that threaten lives, livelihoods, national identity, then we might start to get a crisis response that is genuinely unifying or sticks around a little longer instead of just ricocheting from one disaster to another. I want to talk to some of the social problems we have at the moment – that are inherited from the past 500 years. In one of your examples you talked about the QWERTY keyboard and how that was invented to keep the most popular keys away from each other to prevent technical issues with early typewriters. It’s not a great system and yet here we are still using it 150 years later simply because, “Oh, that’s the way it’s always been.” I’d love to see a long list of things like the QWERTY keyboard where we just sit down and go, “Is this still something we need?” Racism. Still something we need? And there was an example of this that you brought up that gave me a fair amount of hope, which was the citizens assemblies; representatives drawn out of a hat-like jury to think about some of the problems and issues facing them.
Well there’s lots of interesting things you were just talking about there. I mean the whole QWERTY keyboard thing is really powerful. I think you’re right. Wouldn’t it be great to have a panel almost like a Royal Commission into the obsolete institutions, practices, technologies which we’re still holding onto? These colonial era kind of attitudes. Of course when you start doing that the tricky thing is it’s a bit of a can of worms. Like representative democracy, basically the dominant political system certainly in western countries. If you think that is defunct like I do because it gives no rights or voice or representation to future generations and it’s dominated by short-term electoral cycles and politicians who get caught up in corporate funding and all that kind of stuff, if you start questioning that you have to start questioning a lot of things. If you start questioning consumer capitalism then you have to start thinking of serious system change. Certainly when it comes to politics I’ve got great faith in the citizen assembly model as one of the ways that we can revive democracy. I used to be a political scientist particularly in the 1990s and I was apparently an expert in democratic governance. I used to teach it in universities, wrote a PhD about it. And during that time it never once occurred to me that we do disenfranchise future generations in the same way that women and slaves have been systematically disenfranchised throughout history. And yet that is the reality. So we need to ask how do we reinvent democracy for this era where we need to be good ancestors? And equally we’ve seen the rise of far-right populism. Australia, Hungary, US. There’s a declining faith in traditional political institutions and political parties and electoral systems. So what are we going to do? The citizen assembly model is an important way to rethink what democracy looks like in two ways. One, through making people have more stake in it by being participants. So for example in Ireland they had a citizen assembly whose job was to look at several issues including climate change, but particularly abortion, and it led to the great recent referendum on abortion. A massive constitutional change.
Which politically would not have been possible, I don’t think, in their traditional system.
No. I mean there were social movements working on those issues for decades so it wasn’t just the citizen assembly. There still needs to be a lot of grassroots organising and consciousness raising along with it. Citizen assemblies are very fundamental. In Spain and Belgium they’re used in municipal government. So I think there’s a lot to be done there. It gets people involved. The other thing which is really amazing about citizen assemblies is that the evidence tends to show they are better at long-term thinking than your regular politicians.
I wondered about that. I certainly have the feeling in Australia that your local council is the model of government that seems most responsive and most invested in the constituents that it serves. And I’m not sure if that’s because it is so immediate and practical and we’ve got a lot more in common with each other in a smaller community, but it seems like people can make bolder plans and also hold each other to account. And dream more. I was living in America for a couple of years. We came home in March because of coronavirus. And I got to watch the governors of each state take back some control and authority because the US I guess is so large and splintered in terms of caring for a group of people or making a bold plan and getting everyone to stick together. It seems like going local is really a place where that kind of dreaming and hope can be accomplished more readily. Do you think that?
Yeah I do. I mean the US is a really interesting example. For example after Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords, 279 US mayors declared that they were going to stick with the Paris Agreements, stay below one point five degrees of global heating. They represented about one in five Americans. Big cities. Miami, Boston. That’s extraordinary. And it shows I think a global shift that’s going on towards devolution. That devolution is becoming destiny. And nation states are gradually losing power partly because cities and towns are more responsive as a rule of thumb. Of course cities can have their corrupt mayors and be captured by businesses and so on. But I think in general they’re close to people, they’re good at dealing with practical problems, getting water into people’s houses, dealing with housing crises and inequalities and migration issues and so on. People care about their local areas. The streets they walk in, the parks their kids play in. But I think so much more could be done at the local level. I’m really inspired by this Japanese model called Future Design, which I talk about in the book, which is a form of town and city decision-making that is expanding across Japan. And what they do is they invite people from local residence, a bit like a citizens’ assembly, but they split them into two groups. One group are told they’re citizens from the present and the other are told they’re citizens from the year 2060 and they’re given these ceremonial robes to wear to aid their imaginative journey. It turns out that the citizens from 2060 systematically come up with more radical plans in areas of healthcare and environment and transport and so on. There are towns in Japan who’ve now adopted this Future Design methodology and there’s some really incredible results. I was in a meeting not long ago with a prospective mayoral candidate for London. Because an election for the mayor of London was coming up. And this person was saying, “Oh look, people don’t want to pay for climate change. They don’t want to pay higher taxes.” Well in Japan where they did this Future Design, one of their studies was showing in multiple towns, that if you ask the people at the present whether they want to pay higher water rates to improve the water system, people didn’t want to pay. But when you asked the group who were imagining themselves in 2060, they were willing to pay higher water rates to improve the long-term water infrastructure. Now it’s a very basic nuts and bolts thing, the plumbing that makes the city work. But those people recognised that they want their children, their grandchildren to have water. People will invest when they feel connected. And this is the trick to it all as it were. How do you get people to make that empathic leap into the future? How do you step into the shoes of someone in the year 2100? There’s a lot of imaginative work we need to do here.
That’s right. I noted one of your examples from the UAE where decision-makers in the United Arab Emirates were asked to breathe the air-mix of the future if the current pace of air pollution increased. Having them actually breathe that air so that they could understand what their children would be breathing, I love those sorts of experiments. We humans do have big imaginations. We’re imaginative creatures. But we can be incredibly self-centred and very concerned with our own immediate needs. So thinking of our own grandchildren, asking what kind of jobs might they have, what kind of housing market might they go into, these are common western middle class concerns. And the idea that these things are scarce or under threat makes us want to gather those things together and protect our own kids first.
What I find really fascinating is that at first sight it seems that being a good ancestor, thinking about the universal strangers of the future - future generations beyond our own kin - it seems like it might be a privileged act. That if you are dealing with struggles in the immediate present like the world’s 250 million refugees and migrants, who are projected to go up to 400 million by 2050, of course you’re just trying to put food on the table, just trying to deal with the now. Like when my dad came as a refugee to Australia in the early 1950s, from Poland, he was just trying to live. I mean there was a housing crisis, there was racism, it was tough. So who are we to ask people to think beyond the long term? But here’s what I think is really amazing. It seems it’s those people who are on the social margins and in positions of powerlessness who are more engaged in long-term thinking than some of those who are really better off. So you’ve got the idea of the aristocrat who’s just worried about the legacy of passing on their own manor house or their property to their kids and not caring about anybody else, and then you’ve got people like Layla Saad talking about intergenerational injustices. Black Lives Matter I think is infused with a sense of time. I sat on the streets of Oxford where I live protesting to bring down a statue of Cecil Rhodes that’s a symbol of apartheid and slavery, a history going back 200 years at least. These protests are a recognition that if we don’t do something now we are burdening generations to come. Equally you find native American peoples, for example some Iroquois peoples, they’re the ones who are talking about seventh generation thinking. They’re the ones carrying a culture of ecological stewardship for the long term more than people who are much better off, at least materially better off. Or in Māori culture there’s the concept of whakapapa, the idea of lineage, that we’re all connected in a long chain of existence going far in the past and long into the future. The light happens to be shining on the here and now so how are we going to shine the light more widely?
We need to be dreaming as well. We need to be ambitious in our planning. Something that I found startling reading your book was your description of the turgid lecture given in 1785 by a pair of geologists about how old the planet might in fact be. Answer being very, very, very unfathomably old. And up until that point, someone in Cambridge had used the Bible to date the earth at no more than 6000 years or so. That was what Western thought was operating on. That massive but recent shift in thinking of the earth as being so unfathomably ancient wasn’t something I’d actually considered front-of-mind before.
I’ve always looked at those geological tables with all the cretaceous and jurassic periods and so on, they’ve never done anything for me really. But then I discovered that it is, as you say, only in the last couple of hundred years that western culture discovered that the age of the earth is more than 6000 years old, and that our concept of time comes out of an invented kind of world, an invented short-term-ism which has nothing to do with the ecological choreography of the planet, which we have lost touch with and which of course so many indigenous peoples have stayed in touch with. For most of us it’s the electoral cycle, not the carbon cycle. We’re out of touch with the seasons. We’re more worried about the tax year than the lunar calendar. We need to find ways to get back in touch and certainly I find the idea that we have wrought such damage in such a short period of time very motivating. ’Cause I think it is hard to get your head around deep time. Certainly going so far back, billions of years. But to recognise that however far long it goes back to we have jeopardised the living world with our ecological blindness and deadly technologies in just an eyeblink of cosmic time. Who the hell are we to do this? I mean what arrogance is that? It’s extraordinary. The problem with deep time of course, a bit like the first question we spoke about, is that the idea of the earth as very old emerged just when the short high speed time of the industrial revolution was ramping up. These things were developing in parallel. And it was the iPhone that won over the geologist’s hammer. It was this short-term-ism, the digital distraction which has become much more powerful than our potential knowledge of the eons which encompass our planetary life.
For me, it wasn’t until I read your notion that we are effectively going to be colonising the future that I felt very personally motivated and affronted. Because I can look back and feel miserable that my ancestors were colonisers and that they had disregard for other countries and peoples, that they saw it all as opportunities to enrich themselves and exert their power and have a better now at the expense of somebody else’s future. Some say, “Well, they didn’t know.” But some knew, I think [laughs]. And they could have been better ancestors. They could have spoken up. But we know now, collectively, that that’s not a way to be. So if we’re not into being colonisers anymore, can we imagine the future as a country and the people who live in that country as people who are not like us? We can’t interact with them, but they’re still people; they have lives and hopes and dreams and children. And yet we’re happy with polluting their country, with dumping our toxic waste on them, with shortening their life spans, with raising their temperatures, with leaving nuclear waste for them to discover. You couldn’t come across an extra land mass on the earth now and start doing that, I hope, without terrible outrage. And yet that’s exactly what we’re doing isn’t it? We’re colonising the country of the future.
You put it incredibly powerfully. Actually I’ve just been working with these cartoonists from the New Yorker and they’d been doing some cartoons based on my book, and they’ve done some really brilliant ones of colonising the future. You can imagine it, it is a sort of a territory where we are dumping our stuff from the present. That whole idea of using a colonial metaphor to try and understand our relationship with the future is partly because I grew up in Australia. I’ve gradually come to understand the history of colonialism, especially the legal doctrine now known as terra nullius – that this land was captured and treated as if there was nobody there. Now we are in an age also of tempus nullius where the future is seen as nobody’s time. And we have a similarly colonial attitude to it. Just as the struggle against terra nullius still goes on, there is also a struggle which we have against tempus nullius. How are we going to decolonise the future? Now the anti-colonial movements of the 20th century, a lot of them were fought with guns. With arms. I think this one will be fought with ideas. In the struggle against the colonisation of the future, the first step really is certainly to recognise that we are the future eaters as the great Tim Flannery said. We are literally consuming their resources. We’re consuming their lives. Now trying to communicate that to people is really difficult. If I’m honest what I recognise is that different things work for different people. And that’s what I’ve tried to do in my book when I talk about six different approaches to long-term thinking. For some people, deep time, that really touches them. For other people the idea of thinking about their personal legacies and the kind of world they want their children to live in really works. But ultimately, at least the way I think about it, at its deepest level it goes to an understanding of what we can learn from 3.8 billion years of R and D on planet earth by nature herself. And I’ve been very inspired by the biomimicry thinker Janine Benyus. She talks about raising the question, “Well what does success look like in nature?” And she says success is about keeping yourself alive and your offspring alive. But not just for this generation and the next. But for ten thousand generations. But the conundrum is that you’re not going to be around ten thousand generations from now to care for your offspring. So how have bears and beavers and birds learnt to survive for the long term? Well what she says is they’ve learned to take care of the place that will take care of their offspring. In other words they don’t foul the nest. Life creates conditions conducive to life. These are all of her phrases, not mine. She’s poetic, she’s beautiful how she speaks. And I think if you recognise that, that to me is the ultimate long-term lesson. Living creatures, humans, animals, will need air to breathe and food to eat. They’ll need an ecosystem in which to embed themselves and survive. And we know that depending how you measure it, we’re using 1.6 planet earths every year. We’re using more resources than we can naturally regenerate and create more waste that can be naturally absorbed in a carbon sinks and so on. That’s the basis of ecological economics which I was never taught when I studied economics in the late 80s and early 90s. Now finally I’ve learnt about it. And it is about staying within planetary boundaries, which is what my partner Kate’s work is based upon. I’ve learnt a lot of this from her through the discipline of system thinking. That if we are going to survive for the long term that’s the kind of thinking we need. It has to be in education systems. It needs to be infused through businesses. It’s got to be in our community centres. Religions need to be spreading this idea. It’s how life works. You don’t foul the nest.
And it’s amazing what we’ve been trained to put up with as acceptable in terms of progress, and the idea that technology will also save us all somehow. That we’ll find a way to get better sources of fuel that are greener. We’ll find less polluting options. I’m wondering what you think it takes for significant long term thinking to take place in terms of our leadership? A few hundred years ago when colonial explorers were setting off, were they thinking they were being good ancestors by enriching their own nations? How do we know when we’re being good ancestors? Or when we’re being self-serving in some way? Is that something you’ve given thought to?
I have. But it’s an incredibly brilliant and difficult question. So thanks for that. I think it’s really important to, I hate this word, “problematise” concepts. I love the idea of the good ancestor too. That’s why I wrote a book about it. But I recognise that there have been bad ancestors in the past. Also not all forms of long term thinking, which is really one of the key ideas behind being a good ancestor, not all forms are good. Hitler wanted a Thousand Year Reich. The dictatorship in North Korea wants to preserve itself through the generations and pass on power and privilege. One of the former heads of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, Gus Levy, once said, “We’re greedy but long term greedy, not short term greedy.” So there’s a real question there of who are you being an ancestor for? All of those examples are very narrow examples. With Hitler it’s for the white Germans. And that’s a very live issue now even amongst those countries and places which believe they’re being good ancestors. So, you know, people say, “oh look at Norway. Isn’t Norway wonderful?” Norway, they do things like they funded the Svalbard seed vault which is this seeed vault containing the world’s plant biodiversity. It’s a rock bunker in the Arctic that’s been designed to last for a thousand years. It’s got over a million seeds from 6000 species. Isn’t that amazing long-term thinking? Or look at the incredible investment in renewables that they’re doing in Norway. And they’ve got a sovereign wealth fund. They’ve got all this money that they’re putting aside for future generations, investment in healthcare and education and so on.But the Norwegians are drugs dealers. Right? The drug they deal is oil and gas. They’re one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers. Britain gets a third of its gas from Norway. So they are only caring about the future generations within their borders. Not outside their borders. Their sense of intergenerational solidarity is limited by the boundaries of the nation state. Actually not even that. Because of course the carbon emissions they’re enabling the world to create are going to hit their own populations, they’re going to need to use their own sovereign wealth fund to deal with the problems that they’re creating. So there’s a need to universalise the idea of the good ancestor. Make sure that we’re thinking of it in as broad a way as possible. And then the question, well how do you do that? How do you really develop an expansive sense of good ancestry? And I think there’s ways of bridging from the personal to the universal here. So certainly when I think about my own children, I’ve got twins, a boy and a girl who are 11. If I think of my daughter getting older, I picture her when she’s 30. I then close my eyes and try to picture her when she’s 90. I look at her face. I imagine her at her 90th birthday party as a thought experiment. I look around at her family and friends. I walk over to the window and I look at what’s happening in the world outside her room. And then I imagine that someone comes over to her and puts a tiny baby in her arms and it’s her first great-grandchild. And I imagine her looking down at that child and thinking, “Well what would this baby need to survive and thrive into the years and decades ahead?” When I do that kind of thought experiment what I see is that my daughter or her great grandchild are not alone. They are in a web of relationships with people, with community, but they’re also in the web of the living world. They need air to breathe and food to eat. They need a living world in which to live out their lives. And so for me that kind of thought experiment is a bridge from the personal to the transcendental. So it’s a shift from personal legacy to transcendent legacy. And I think that’s the kind of thing we need to inculcate. I mean ultimately it’s not rocket science here right? It’s about ideas of interdependence which you find in many cultures, just not very much in highly individualistic western culture. The idea that we cannot exist without each other and without that world around us, most of us just don’t feel, do we? At least I don’t. And I struggle with it. In a way we need to feel incredibly interdependent and reliant on others and I think that’s been the beauty in the tragedy of COVID-19. That here I am on my street where people don’t talk to each other very much and as soon as COVID-19 happens we’ve got a street WhatsApp group, we’re delivering food to people who can’t go outside and who are vulnerable. We’re sharing recipes for soda bread. I wanted to do a calligraphy class with my kids while I was homeschooling and in five minutes I had three sets of Chinese paintbrushes on the doorstep people had given. That’s interdependence. And it’s beautiful.
And that’s my hope for it, you know. When people get frustrated and it brings out the worst in them too, we’re watching each other’s trajectories of behaving poorly, of grieving the world, of bargaining against a disease, of having to come to the table with people who they don’t want to eat with, no one can escape it. Yet I’ve noticed there’s a real shift in my community of when you’re at the supermarket with your mask on you say to someone, just reflexively, people have started to say, “Stay safe.” “Stay well.” And to really mean it. Because we like never before have something in common that is very democratic in the way that it can affect us. That just hasn’t been the case for so many other things that we face.
Yeah, I think it’s really important you say that because of the thing about the common threat we were talking about at the beginning. When you see that it does breed a kind of interdependence, a reliance on each other, the “stay safe” thing, it is real. And I don’t want to be too negative about that. I do think it really can galvanise and inspire people to change. I mean, not a lot of other things will. So I think there is hope but not optimism in the sense that I don’t think this is going to be easy, and that all our problems will necessarily be solved. But there is the possibility. What we’re seeing in the world now is what transformative change looks like. I was very struck once by reading how in the industrial revolution not even people like Adam Smith thought there was an industrial revolution going on. They didn’t see it before their eyes. I think that’s what’s happening now with a lot of the stuff around the emerging next economy, ideas like doughnut economics, post-growth, de-growth, which are helping us get beyond our obsession with ever-rising GDP. We’re seeing it in politics with the movements for intergenerational rights and that Japanese Future Design example. This is what it looks like. It’s fragmented. It’s contingent. But we may well be in the midst of a shift as big as the shift from feudalism to industrialisation. We can’t quite see it, we don’t quite believe it, but it might actually be happening.
