Longtermism

Lucía Muñoz-Sueiro

Related terms: Anthropocene, chronowashing, deep time, existential risks, future generations, geological time, intergenerational equity, Long Now, long-term, philanthropy, short-term, temporalities, timescapes.

Introduction

From everyday discourse to business marketing, public policy, and environmentalist rhetoric, the appeal of ‘the long term’ is increasingly evident: young people are often criticised for their presentism and advised to develop more long-term thinking. In the professional sphere, advisors and business and finance magazines encourage us to stop being “trapped in short-term thinking” (New Scientist 2023) and “become long-term thinkers,” which will improve our careers and investments (Forbes 2021). Some political analysts point to the idea of a necessary reinvention of democracy for the long term (BBC 2019), since this type of thinking is absent from the short-term electoral system (Green European Journal 2024). Environmentalists, for their part, emphasise the crucial need to take into account “future generations,” including Greta Thunberg, who snapped at world leaders that “the eyes of all future generations are upon you” (NPR 2019). Finally, a modern scientific and philosophical paradigm focuses on scaling historical time, including attention to geological time, the Anthropocene, and deep time (Chakrabarty 2021a, 2021b; Wood, 2019; Westermann and Höhler 2020).

These are all different ways in which ‘the long term’ is reclaimed. However, this piece focuses on the specific ideology of ‘longtermism’ linked to philanthropy. This constitutes a specific ideology of long-term thinking and responsibility towards the future with its own distinguishing characteristics regarding the type of actors who promote it, its content, the agenda and interests that underlie it, and its implications, which differ greatly from the uses and contexts of the previous examples. I suggest that it is essential for the environmental humanities, if they are to be a discipline committed to countering environmental degradation and global injustices, to recognise and distinguish general conceptions of ‘the long term’ from specific ideologies such as ‘longtermism’ that, as some have argued, reproduce hegemonic temporalities.

I begin with an ethnographic opening from my fieldwork, followed by an explanation of the ideology of ‘longtermism,’ to which I devote the central part of the article. I then present the main critiques of this ideology as well as alternative ways of approaching ‘the long-term’ in the face of the socio-ecological crisis, including relational, indigenous, and ecocentric temporalities.

Ethnographic Opening

“Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better” (MacAskill 2022a, 17), begins one of the greatest advocates of the ideology of ‘longtermism’, William MacAskill, Oxford professor and author of What We Owe the Future (2023).

I first heard about ‘longtermism’ at an annual gathering of basket weavers in Castilla La Mancha (Spain), which I attended as part of my PhD fieldwork. At this gathering, which is a benchmark for the artisan community, a series of talks is organised each year by people who, although not from the community, are considered to contribute valuable perspectives. That particular year, one of the speakers was a member of the Long Now Foundation, an American organisation started by Stewart Brand in 1996, headquartered in San Francisco, and dedicated to promoting ‘long-term thinking’ (LNF n.d.). 

A young man in a white shirt took the stage and, before the attentive gaze of the artisans, gave a presentation in which he defended the ideas of ‘longtermism.’ He used five digits to write the years: for example, “since 02017 I have been a member of the Long Now Foundation, an organisation created in 01996,” (see LNF n.d.). This is a linguistic choice promoted by the LNF to enhance the perception of deep time. His emphasis, gestures, and strategic pauses as he looked at the audience revealed he was a practised and eloquent speaker. Several statements were particularly striking: “No one is worrying about whether future archaeologists will understand us,” “We must ask ourselves how to be good ancestors, as were those who made the Rosetta Stone.”

The speaker illustrated his arguments with a wide range of examples of very different projects that he considered to be ‘longtermist.’ Among others, he presented: “The Future Library” project, dedicated to preserving significant books for future generations; “the biggest party in the history of humanity,” scheduled for June 6, 2269, for which he had already purchased a ticket intended to be passed down through generations until the event date; a project to “de-extinct” the woolly mammoth; and the Long Now Foundation’s flagship project: a monumental clock designed to keep time for the next 10,000 years. This clock, which tracks not seconds, minutes, and hours, but years, centuries, and millennia, is under construction within a mountain in Texas, purchased by Amazon founder and main financier of the Clock, Jeff Bezos, with an initial budget of $42 million. According to the Foundation’s website:

Ten thousand years is about the age of civilisation, so a 10K-year Clock would measure out a future of civilisation equal to its past. That assumes we are in the middle of whatever journey we are on – an implicit statement of optimism (LNF n.d.).

As Stewart Brand, founder of the Long Now Foundation, notes, “the ambition and folly of the Clock... is to reframe human endeavour, and to do so, not with a thesis, but with an object” (Brand 1999, 48). Brand further explains that the project's inspiration emerges from two core questions: “How to make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? How do we make the taking of long-term responsibility inevitable?” (Brand 1999, 2). The goal of this clock, then, according to the Long Now narrative, is to deepen our sense of responsibility by considering the repercussions of our actions over long periods of time.

The Ideology of Longtermism

Over the past two decades, a small group of researchers in the field of moral philosophy, mostly from Oxford University, have theorised a worldview they call ‘longtermism.’ Long-termists start from the assumption that humanity stands at a pivotal juncture in history, and today’s decisions will profoundly affect the long-term future of the universe, for hundreds, thousands, billions, and even trillions of years (Torres 2021; Karpf 2022). 

The main underlying idea of long-termism is that what really matters, ethically speaking, is the realisation of humanity’s long-term ‘potential.’ Humanity is seen as possessing a potential that transcends that of individual people. The failure to realise that potential is the greatest moral catastrophe we can face (Torres 2021). Specifically, the logic used is as follows: people who will live in the future have the same moral value as those in the present, but they are “disenfranchised,” being “the silent majority,” as longtermist MacAskill (2022b) writes. If humanity’s potential is realised, it is estimated that the Earth’s population will far exceed the current population. Therefore, if we want to do the “greatest good” possible, the interests of future generations must take priority over the interests of people in the present. Thus, humanity’s duty is to ensure that we can realise our potential in the future by preventing what they call “existential risks” (Karpf 2022).

Long-termists define “existential risks” and “existential catastrophes” as threats or events that could prematurely extinguish intelligent life on Earth or irreversibly curtail its capacity for “desirable future development” (Bostrom 2002). These risks notably include asteroid impacts, biological weapons, and particularly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Climate change is viewed by many longtermists as a lesser threat because it is believed technological advancements, primarily originating from the Global North, will adequately address it (Read 2022). While not outright climate denialism, longtermist ideology deprioritises climate change relative to more catastrophic existential threats (Hicks & Janus 2023, 139). Nick Bostrom argues, for example, that non-existential disasters causing global civilisation collapse would constitute only “a small misstep for humanity” from a long-term perspective (Bostrom 2009, 53). Oxford philosopher Toby Ord estimates the probability of climate-driven existential catastrophe over the next century at 1 in 1000, compared to 1 in 30 for artificial pandemics and 1 in 10 for AGI – although these assessments have been criticised for methodological flaws (Ord 2020, 295; Hicks & Janus 2023, 139; Torres 2021). Issues such as wealth inequality, racism, and sexism similarly are not considered existential threats by longtermists and are thus not prioritised (Karpf 2022).

But ‘longtermism’ is not just an academic theory of moral philosophy; it significantly influences ‘effective altruism,’ a utilitarian-inspired philanthropic approach aimed at maximising charitable outcomes per investment of time or money (Crary 2023). Initiated by Ord in 2011, effective altruism currently channels roughly $46 billion toward causes deemed “most effective” (Torres 2021). Proponents like MacAskill exemplify this utilitarian logic with scenarios such as choosing between saving a trapped child or rescuing a valuable painting from a burning museum. MacAskill argues that selling the painting for millions to save thousands of other children would represent the rational choice (Hicks & Janus 2023, 147).

Employing similar utilitarian reasoning, longtermists advocate that we should maximise our ability to do good using a utilitarian calculus and taking into account all the people who will live in the future for thousands of years to come (Greaves and MacAskill 2021). ‘Longtermism,’ strongly associated with effective altruism, has thus successfully mobilised significant funding. For instance, Elon Musk, who has cited and supported Bostrom’s work, has donated $1.5 million to the Future of Humanity Institute (Torres 2021).

Criticism of Longtermism

A small but important body of recent academic literature has begun to take a critical stance toward the postulates of ‘longtermism’ and the logic driving certain longtermist projects (Crary 2023; Hicks and Janus 2023; Tarsney 2023; Bastian 2024). Additionally, critical popular texts have also appeared in the last four years (Torres 2021; Read 2023; Karpf 2022).

In general, these authors consider the appropriation of a particular interpretation of long-term thinking by the ideology of ‘longtermism’ to be a major risk, connected to elite universities, billionaires interested in effective altruism, and Silicon Valley (Read 2022; Crary 2023). ‘Longtermism’ has even been defined by a self-described ‘ex-longtermist’ in one of the most widely read critical texts as “the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today” (Torres 2021), as well as “a recipe for cruelty, suffering, and social harm” (Karpf 2022).

The main criticisms can be summarized as follows: longtermists arbitrarily prioritize what they call “existential risks” such as super-intelligent AI, excluding other more immediate and tangible risks such as climate change; we cannot accurately predict what the needs of future generations will be, making it difficult to create a reliable strategy to meet them; the techno-utopian approach of longtermists will not necessarily benefit future generations, but in fact poses a significant danger to both present and future generations; the ‘fanatical’ emphasis (Torres 2021) on realizing humanity’s long-term potential may justify inaction in the face of climate change, as well as the suffering and death of millions of people for the sake of future generations, understood as a ‘greater cosmic good’ (Hicks and Janus 2023; Crary 2023; Tarsney 2023; Torres 2021).

For these reasons, philosopher Michelle Bastian argues that ‘longtermism’ may end up reinforcing hegemonic temporalities: “far from orienting us toward a solution, the logic of popular temporal counter-narratives may, on the contrary, reinforce the exclusionary and extractivist temporalities that sustain capitalism” (Bastian 2024, 405). Specifically, this author analyses the Long Now Foundation’s clock project, funded by Bezos, to argue that it is a strategy of ‘chronowashing.’ Just as large companies use ecological communication strategies to divert attention from the environmental damage they cause – a strategy known as ‘greenwashing’ –  some institutions and individuals are using projects with an air of transcendence – and for some, pretentious surrealism – backed by narratives of ‘longtermism,’ while concealing social and environmental inequalities, supporting forms of oppression, and avoiding discussion of the real roots of the problem (Bastian 2024). In response to the abstract temporality of the Long Now Clock, in which “time is flattened out into a clock that ticks longer and is evacuated of content,” Bastian proposes relational temporalities, refocusing time on the quality and diversity of the relationships, the bonds, and the kinds of care it fosters (Bastian 2024, 410).

Understanding the complexities of the ideology of ‘longtermism’ is crucial for the field of environmental humanities because, while long-term thinking can offer valuable perspectives, it can also, when co-opted by techno-utopian ideologies and utilitarian logics of maximisation, reinforce extractivist dynamics and obscure existing inequalities. In contrast, we will now briefly look at alternative ways of engaging with the long-term in response to the socio-ecological crisis.

Long-term Thinking in the Face of the Socio-ecological Crisis

As I mentioned in the introduction, ‘longtermism’ is part of a broader call for long-term thinking that has spread in recent decades. If environmental humanities aspire to be a field committed to countering global injustices and environmental degradation, then it is important to ask what kind of long-term thinking can contribute to systemic change rather than reproducing hegemonic temporalities.

In ecological thinking, the idea of ‘the long term’ has manifested itself in various ways that distance themselves from longtermist conceptions. Andreas Malm, for example, writes that climate change “overloads our moment with time” (Malm 2018, 10). Faced with an uncertain and deteriorating world marked by the social-ecological crisis, not only does the past that has brought us here become relevant, but the future also becomes more present. The past is sometimes seen as producing a future debt, an idea that is particularly evident in notions of “intergenerational equity” and the need to “take care of the future,” appealing to “future generations” (Harrison 2020, 30). Thus, the idea of the existence of certain moral obligations, both collective and individual, towards future generations has become a guiding principle for environmental movements such as Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future. In public policy, an interesting initiative is the 2015 Future Generations Act in Wales (UK), considered a pioneering example at the institutional level. This law provides for the appointment of a commissioner whose duty is to “act as a guardian for future generations” and “encourage public bodies to take greater account of the long-term impact of the things they do” (National Assembly for Wales 2015, 12, 19).

Barbara Adam has proposed, on the other hand, that we stop using a dualistic way of thinking about time, for example, between short-term and long-term, as it impoverishes our understanding of time, and instead explore multiple temporalities that are intertwined with each other (Adam 1994). Adams uses the notion of “timescapes” to suggest the interaction and temporal complexity between the cultural and the natural (Adam 1998).

In this sense, attention to indigenous temporalities and biocentric or eco-centric temporalities can displace the ethnocentric and anthropocentric biases of some Western temporalities. An example of the former, which involve an alternative view of time, would be that observed in the cultivation of ‘tinawon’ rice in the Ifugao culture of the Philippines, which embodies what Kolinjivadi et al. (2020) call “escape temporalities”: divergent time frames that operate independently of economic calculations and the hegemony of the clock, thus fostering forms of autonomy from dominant conceptions of time. In the same vein of escaping the hegemonic temporalities of the clock as a tool for anthropocentric synchronisation promising absolute commensurability and predictability, Bastian proposes exploring other types of clocks that are produced when we coordinate with other relationalities in the world, such as that of turtles (Bastian 2012). A final proposal could be to look at phenology, that is, the study of the life cycles and seasonal phenomena of plants and animals, which leads us to consider temporalities guided by temperature, light, water, and other abiotic elements of the environment (Bastian and Bayliss Hawitt 2023). All these examples show committed ways of approaching the long-term that are aligned with the environmental humanities, which can help move it away from its association with philanthropy and give it a truly radical meaning.

References

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Bastian, Michelle. 2024. “Is Long-Term Thinking a Trap?” Environmental Humanities 16 (2): 403–421.

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