Now that I’m old
Three books by Tim Mulgan, a future-minded philosopher before “longtermism” was in vogue:
(1) Future People: A Moderate Consequentialist Account of Our Obligations to Future Generations (2006)
(2) Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy after Catastrophe (2011)
(3) Philosophy for an Ending World (2024)
The trajectory is not encouraging.
About a decade ago, I read and enjoyed several chapters of the middle book, Ethics for a Broken World. I would read that book again. I wish I could teach it to students of the past. I’m less sure about today’s and tomorrow’s students. The book is a series of “lectures” about late-20th- and early-21st-century moral-and-political philosophy, delivered to university students in a (ravaged) future three or four generations hence. Even this bleak scenario now seems blissful in its optimism. It assumes that there will be students in the (ravaged) future.
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E. H. Carr, in What Is History?, says:
(1) Future People: A Moderate Consequentialist Account of Our Obligations to Future Generations (2006)
(2) Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy after Catastrophe (2011)
(3) Philosophy for an Ending World (2024)
The trajectory is not encouraging.
About a decade ago, I read and enjoyed several chapters of the middle book, Ethics for a Broken World. I would read that book again. I wish I could teach it to students of the past. I’m less sure about today’s and tomorrow’s students. The book is a series of “lectures” about late-20th- and early-21st-century moral-and-political philosophy, delivered to university students in a (ravaged) future three or four generations hence. Even this bleak scenario now seems blissful in its optimism. It assumes that there will be students in the (ravaged) future.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
E. H. Carr, in What Is History?, says:
The historian belongs not to the past but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian “ought to love the past.” This is a dubius injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future. Cliché for cliché, I should prefer the one about freeing oneself from “the dead hand of the past.” The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.Now that I’m an old man of forty-four, not hopeful for the (this-worldly) future or much enjoying or understanding the present – at least as it exists outside my household – the past does seem more lovely. The picturesque past, that is. If this makes me an unfit historian, so be it.