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A climate change protester holds a “Bank on the Future” sign at a demonstration in New York on Oct. 29, 2021. Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images
Climate activism in Europe or the United States is usually framed as SacrificeFor the sake of future generations, we must consume less now in order to extend the life span of human civilization as it is today. The New York Times diagnoses our failure to confront climate change as “the reluctance of people … to make the investments and sacrifices necessary to protect future generations.” Concerned novelists and literary critics We urge you to to “see other times as requiring something of us today.” Christian leaders, including Pope Francis, call for “meaningful sacrifices for the sake of the earth,” which requires “exercising self-restraint.” The European Commission’s deputy chiefThe plea was similar to one made by environmental scientists. The importance of this is backed up by evidenceWillingness to sacrifice for effective climate action.
Implicit in this refrain about our responsibility toward future generations is the reproach that we have preyed on our future through the sin of what economists call “time discounting”: our inveterate habit of caring less about a future consequence than the here and now.
The language of sacrifice for the sake of the future is actually very close to the mindset that brought us to this point. It was precisely by training their eyes on the future, with the help of the concept of time discounting and theories of how to overcome it that germinated in the era of European colonialism, that previous generations became profligate with the Earth’s resources—which should give us pause in reprising the language of sacrifice today.
A mass of abandoned cars can be seen in the Rocky Mountains of the United States, circa 2006. Avalon/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Economists date to the establishment of Intertemporal choice—decision-making that involves trade-offs among costs and benefits occurring at different times—as a distinct topic in the discipline to 1834, with the publication of the Scottish economist John Rae’s classic text, Sociological Theory of Capital.
Rae’s subject was “the effective desire of accumulation,” a psychological factor that helped explain why wealth differed among societies. His examination of the psychology of intertemporal choice deeply influenced his contemporary John Stuart Mill before it was rediscovered by economists theorizing capital at the turn of the 20th century, including Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, who added a chapter on Rae to the 1900 edition of his History and Critique of Interest Theory Theories. This renewed interest led to a reissue of Rae’s book in 1905he continued his influence well into the new century. Irving Fisher, a prominent neoclassical economist dedicated the 1930 Nobel Prize in Economics. The Theory of Interest to Rae’s memory. Today, Rae’s approach continues to inform 21st-century theoriesTime discounting
Rae framed his book as a critical response to Adam Smith’s 1776 The Wealth of Nations, but he shared Smith’s anxiety to allay the moral worry triggered by liberal political economics’ encouragement of the pursuit of self-interest, advocating self-regulation to insure against evil results. In the right settings, regard for “personal interest” would, he assured, induce individuals to overcome the universal aversion to delaying gratification and pursue “the paths of sober industry and frugality.” In short, we can be conditioned to exercise self-restraint in the present for the sake of future payoff.
The requisite setting for this path was a society that bred a desire for “family aggrandizement” and ranking “high in the estimation of the world.” By the same token, “envy of the superiority of other men” was an important stimulus, albeit held in check by “probity, and tenderness of the happiness of others.”
Smith and other Enlightenment philosophers had Already urgedStudying great historical figures can be a key to cultivating moral sentiments. Such study would inspire men to act with history’s prospective judgment of their own actions in mind—as George Washington pithily Reminds Alexander Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, to live as though “History has its eyes on you.” Thus, Rae himself was driven by the ambition “of being a lasting benefactor to man.”
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Theoretically, anyone can learn to act this way if given the right circumstances. The propensity to exercise self-restraint, Rae claimed, was lower in the East and West Indies, where “the expenditure of the inhabitants is profuse,” but he believed “[t]he same people, coming to reside in the healthy parts of Europe,” would “live economically.” They were profligate only because “[w]ar, and pestilence, have always waste, and luxury, among the other evils that follow in their train,” he explained—forgetting colonialism’s role in generating these ills. Rae was certain that increasing security through law and order—what the empire promised to do—would improve these regions’ prospects (though imperialism in fact drained wealth and created disorder).
Rae’s unwavering belief in the benefits of empire was one way he claimed to be dissident from Smith. Rae was writing in the 1830s, when slavery was abolished in the British West Indies, the heyday of the belief that British imperialism in the East Indies would produce Indians “English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect,” according to the historian and imperial policymaker Thomas Macaulay. The liberal project was not universal in its goals, but racist comparisons implied that the default human being was a white male.
Rae was himself a beneficiary of empire, emigrating to British Canada in 1822 after his father’s bankruptcy—an event that likely deepened his interest in the quality of foresight, in an era when Britons understood bankruptcy as the result of moral failure, a failure of self-regulation. While he was studying medicine in Edinburgh, he lost his anticipated inheritance which prevented him from following the scholarly path that he wanted. His extensive travels in Canada influenced the creation of his classic text. He published it in Boston during his 1834 visit to Boston. After losing his teaching job, he took up arms to defend Canada’s empire in the Canadian rebellion of1837. In 1848, he moved to the United States. He joined the flow of migrants to California via Panama in 1849 and then ventured to Hawaii in 1851. The theorists of accumulation failed to achieve financial stability. He worked variously as a physician and geologist, while attempting to assemble the “history of humanity” by studying the origins of the Polynesian “race,” as he confided to Mill in the 1860s (in a letter that he may not have sent).
His analysis was influenced by his North American experience and fascination for race. From its first pages, his book frequently invoked what he saw as Native Americans’ disregard for futurity as a counterpoint illustrating the importance of the right conditioning—a disregard Rae attributed to collective values and relations with land, animal, and water resources. “[T]he Indian,” he wrote, thinks “little of refraining from the pleasures [the course of events] may offer him … and indulges … without restraint, in the enjoyments of the hour.” He praised the Jesuits for turning Indigenous Paraguayans into “docile disciples” in European arts of self-restraint, keeping them “from barbarism and idolatry”—at least while closely supervised, given their persistent “defects” of “improvidence, indolence, and want of economy.
For Rae, regard for futurity was what distinguished man from “the inferior animals, and the degree in which he possesses it marks his rank in the scale of civilization.”
The racial barriers built into his seemingly universalist theory are transparent in his insistence that “[o]ur own barbarian ancestors” in Europe were not a good comparison to “the savage aborigenes of North America,” since, even as “shepherd warriors” in the Roman era, a sense of “foresight” had governed their consumption habits. Hence the “European race” “naturally” had a “a much higher effective desire of accumulation” than others. He saw Asians, too, through damning Orientalist glasses: Despotic tendencies, he claimed, prevented Chinese society from rising above the pull of “sensual gratifications and selfish feelings” (though their effective desire of accumulation was greater than among “other Asiatics”).
An engraving depicts a Native American looking at the industrial landscape of the Great Plains, where buffalo and Indians were able to freely move across the landscape, circa 1850-1900. Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Photos
Today’s economists understand time discounting, or caring more about the present, as fundamentally human, a psychological trait at the heart of DebatesAbout how to combat climate change. However, the concept originated from colonial-era cultural racial assumptions. Rae said that climate had partly contributed to Rae’s belief in futurity. The very land-use practices, such as clearing and enclosing ever more expanses, that he held up as evidence of Europeans’ exemplary regard for futurity mortgaged our collective future.
And Rae knew those practices had destructive effects, acknowledging even as he berated Native American cultural failure that “[t]he white man robs their woods and waters of the stores with which nature had replenished them” and “may be truly said to have been the greatest enemy of the Indian.” He knew that “[t]he settlement of their country by the European race, has … gradually diminished, or entirely destroyed, the political importance of their tribes.” He grasped that white men had been “the bearers of unspeakable calamities or utter ruin” for Indigenous Paraguayans.
But this awareness did not diminish his exasperation with Native peoples’ refusal to learn from “the white man,” whose colonial, land-transforming concern to “provide for … some remote and uncertain futurity” they saw as the result of a “selfish spirit.” For in Rae’s theory, this destruction was defensible as part of a providential civilizing process: A high level of security and abundance, he argued, had stunted Native Americans’ regard for futurity, and by creating a situation of scarcity, white men helped them develop the arts of self-governance history demanded. The serious student of history, Rae wrote in 1849, grasped the “comparative insignificance of the immediate present” before “the real government of an Omnipotent hand whose workings pass his ken.”
Colonizing Europeans saw destruction of Native ways of life as necessary in a providential historical narrative headed toward universal civilization—where “civilization” was defined by material attainments. Rae saw European foresight and management of resources as part of a future-oriented view of history as a story that was about continual improvement in which Britain had a providential function. This idea encouraged Britons, starting with John Locke (17th century philosopher), to claim that anyone who didn’t show evidence of enclosing was guilty. OptimisingThe land was forfeited to it and to human fellowship.
John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, assured that settlers could take land freely on these very grounds, concluding from the decimation of Native people after the smallpox epidemic in 1634, “The Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess.” By the 18th century, the spread of Pathogens were integralcolonial biopolitical warfare against Native Americans. War itself, in this view, was only an “apparent evil,” ultimately bringing progress and “much of real good,” as Rae put it.
Indeed, the idea of necessary evil was central to this historical imagination; hence the need for continual reassurance as Europeans’ ordinary ethical compasses rebelled. Liberal philosophy encouraged tolerance of moral discomfort in the face destruction and promised future vindication by history. Thus, the imperial bureaucrat John Kaye’s expiatory history of the brutal crushing of the massive Indian rebellion of 1857 explained British “errors”—Britons’ “reign of terror,” “wholesale confiscation” of land, and “great war of extermination”—as the result of “strivings after good” and “over-eager pursuit of Humanity and Civilisation” (while also denouncing the “heap of platitudes about Humanity and Civilisation” that sustained empire!).
A poster showing the portraits of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill with the title “Liberators of The World” from the World War II era. David J. Frent/Janice L. Frent/Corbis/Getty Images
After that epochal conflict, protests of paternalistic motives yielded to stoic admissions that history demanded that “the cheaper peoples” (such as “American Indians”) be destroyed by “the dearer,” as the Liberal politician Charles Dilke put it in 1868. Extinction of the “inferior races” was “not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind.” In 1937, as an imperial policymaker and historian, Winston Churchill insistent that no “great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America … by the fact that a stronger … more worldly-wise race … has come in and taken their place.”
The racism that underpinned the economics concept for regard for futurity was based upon a future-oriented history in which the destruction this regard entails in the present was itself an essential sacrifice for the future.
Europeans sacrificed their consciences for the sake of the present. They destroyed landscapes and ways of living, as well as entire peoples, in search of future vindication. Earth’s bewildering variety was designed to drive man over time to find utility in it all, according to Rae, so that “[e]ven the barren deserts of Africa may, in after ages, be fertilized,” and water may “in time” be drawn “from the depths of the earth.” He held up as proof of Europeans’ particular regard for futurity the very ecologically and humanly devastating practices aimed at transforming the land—what the anthropologist and novelist Amitav Ghosh helpfully identifies as “terraforming”—that we now realize put the very future of life at risk.
What Europeans saw as Indigenous peoples’ careless use of “wild” terrain was in fact deeply knowledgeable and careful husbandry of land, forests, and water resources oriented toward PermanentMutual preservation of land and lives. Climate and environmental experts today recommend policies based on such sustaining ecological practices, as we confront a situation that the global north is, in accordance with a 2020 study, responsible for 92 percent of all “excess global carbon dioxide emissions” and “have effectively colonized the global atmospheric commons.”
Protesters hold a banner at the Climate Justice March in New York, Nov. 13, 2021. KENA BETANCUR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A redeemed attitude toward the land and the nonhuman beings we live alongside requires abandoning the notion of future-oriented sacrifice in a consumption-centering paradigm of “civilization.” “Sacrifice” implies giving up something to which we are objectively entitled, something actually desirable; it’s about martyring our needs for the future. But this is a time to question our assumptions about what is desirable, to recover from a consumption-driven, hyper-individualistic way of life to which we were never entitled and that has depended, from the first, on enslavement, genocide, ecological destruction, and alienation from ourselves, the land, and other beings. It is not a way to live that will be beneficial for future generations. Even if the climate was not at stake.
The climate crisis is not about sacrificing the consumption we would prefer, but rather offering an opportunity to let go of what we did not have the right to. Not sacrifice, but redemption from a way we know has been destructive to the Earth, but also to our humanity.
The crisis is real It isMore about our humanity than the Earth. Since historians Dipesh Chakrabarty’s helpful phrasing, “There is no ideal form for the earth as a planet.” The Earth is indifferent to our existence; it will go on, on its own timescale, beyond human history, and likely recover from the damage we have wrought. There is nothing morally at stake in our continued existence—other than to ourselves.
While economists continue to believe in a universal tendency to underestimate future needs, others suggest that our ability to see the future and how we evaluate intertemporal tradeoffs is a different factor. We might be able to question the meaning of consumption if we find ourselves in a situation where we have to imagine the future and our human nature differently. Liberal political economy was founded on the assumptions of selfish, morbidly independent, and time-discounting human nature. Hypotheses, which were propagated so vigorously in liberal economists’ modern literature that they became a common misconception and we now consider them to be true.
But history is littered by evidence of empathy and cooperative human nature. The Nutmeg’s Curse, today’s writers and artists might help us anchor human existence in such values instead.
This is exactly the recovery from colonial thinking that anti-colonial thinkers long argued was necessary to prevent colonialism becoming ever more nebulous. Thinkers as varied as Mahatma Gandhi and Frantz Fanon warned that the mere transfer of power was not enough; decolonization of the mind was necessary for both former colonizers and the colonized—a shift in consciousness, a recovery of ethical (as opposed to instrumental) ways of thinking about our relations with one another and the world.
Gandhi believed that colonialism’s problem was primarily its establishment a civilization that saw material desire as the key for progress. Therefore, freedom was not about removing the British but about restoring mutual values. An India free of British rule but persisting on the same political-economic path would remain unfree precisely because such a path precluded the ethical outlook demanded by planetary habitation: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West,” he wrote in 1928. “If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
The coming of the locusts today demands a more radical shift in outlook than that implied by “sacrifice” of some consumption. Because it is compatible with liberalism’s default morality (which keeps even Western leftists prey on an individualistic culture that virtue-signals), such language attracts people who can accept radical change.
But it is time to recognize how much we have already sacrificed in the relentless striving after material progress and to stop sacrificing moral peace in the present for some exalted but chimerical historical end: to allow ourselves to see one another and our kinship as part of Earth’s abundance; to experience the intersubjective solidarities central to existence rather than valorize, in Fanon’s words, “a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity”; to indulge sustaining quotidian practices of love heedless of supposed laws of nature, history, market, nation, or any other illusion.
It is time to stop sacrificing humanity. This perspective shows that consuming less is not a sacrifice, but a deeply self-loving act. Human civilization As we know itshould be canceled. History is a nightmare that we all must wake up from.
Our past, with its wildfires and cyclones, has been destroyed by our predecessors. However, this does not mean that we are doomed. We can continue as they did, but try to slow down the pace. Our values may change just as the Earth has. We continue to hold on to the framework of sacrifice and the instrumental attitude we have toward the Earth’s resources that has been ingrained in liberal political economy. Instead, we could embrace the everyday ethics of mutual caring, whose inexpressible ghost made European colonialism such an unrelenting guilt-ridden enterprise.
