Dispatches from the Empire


Currently reading: What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill 📚

To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout. The first is of humanity as an imprudent teenager. Most of a teenager’s life is still ahead of them, and their decisions can have lifelong impacts. In choosing how much to study, what career to pursue, or which risks are too risky, they should think not just about short-term thrills but also about the whole course of the life ahead of them.

A friend — one of the rarified few that doesn’t shy away from a debate about big ideas — recently sent me this book in response to one I had sent him. If only because it’ll test the tensile strength of my own beliefs, I’m excited to read it. (Though that’s not the only reason.) Yet I can already feel myself chomping at the bit and chafing at some of the premises of the book.

Given that I don’t sosh meed, I thought I might use this space to work through some of my thoughts in close-to-real time.

Matt, if you happen to see this, thank you, and my first quibble is with that first metaphor: tell me why, given what is happening to our planet, is most of humanity ahead of us? That presumes a lot, no? It presumes that human nature will change from what it’s always been to…something else, something less consumptive.

Maybe that’s the premise of the book (I’m only on page 9, after all) — that what I call ‘fundamental human nature’ isn’t fundamental…and thus perhaps not human nature?