Guardians of the Future

I’ve got a proposal to end the chronic culture of short-termism that we have in our politics, our electoral cycles, our business and economics.  Because when one is trying to think on a timescale of hundreds of years or thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years – which is the timescale for nuclear waste, and the scale on which most severe environmental changes happen – then those kind of short-term cycles don’t make a lot of sense.

One starting point from which to think about the consequences of short-term thinking is the idea of “democracy” itself. What does it mean? Etymologically, democracy means ‘the people rule’ or ‘the people govern’.  I am sure that most occupiers would agree that at the present time it is inaccurate to say – in any meaningful sense – that “the people govern” in our society.  We don’t even have the alternative vote, let alone proportional representation; we’re still waiting for the upper house to be democratically reformed. And beyond those electoral reforms, we need also participatory democracy, economic democracy, and a serious re-localisation. Let there be no doubt: If we want real democracy, we have to be willing to accept vast changes in our society.

But even if all those changes occured, we would still be in a society which ran the risk of being chronically short-termist. Why?  Even if we make far-reaching changes to our institutions, the laws that would result from such changes still focus on the interests and wishes of present people – of people who are alive today.  They are the people who vote, and they are the ones whose votes alone would count even in an improved and enhanced democracy.

But a people, I want to suggest to you, is not something that exists as a time-slice; a people is something that exists over time. It begins in the past and goes on indefinitely far into the future.

And while people in the past are hard to harm (because they’ve had their time) people in the future are extremely vulnerable to harm. Indeed, they are vulnerable to policies that prevent them from existing at all. But their precariousness is also a source of great hope. If we get things right, people in the future could have the chance to have a great existence and to go on indefinitely longer into the future having that existence.  We need to find a way of making democracy actually include future people.  We need to find a way of representing them in our political system.

How could that be accomplished?  Can you give future people a vote?  Well, obviously, that’s not very feasible… So we need to find some form of proxy representation for them. The people of the future need to have something like a proxy vote.

If we don’t screw up so badly that we stop them from existing altogether, over time there will be far more future people than there are present people. While “present people” includes everyone alive today, the concept of future people would include the next generation, and the generation thereafter, and thereafter, and so on. Pretty quickly, the number grows incredibly large.

This leads to a curious paradox: In a democracy, they would out-vote us every time. They would be the vast majority.  So, in order to express their proxy ‘vote’, I suggest that what we need to give them is a proxy veto. I want to suggest that we need proxy representatives for future people empowered in and by our political system to veto things that we might want to do but that they don’t want us to do.  And the people who are going to be these proxies I’m calling “Guardians for Future Generations”, guardians to represent the interests of these future people to us.

So, who should these guardians be?  How should they be selected? It doesn’t make any sense for us to vote for them, because they are proxies for future people – they’re there to express the votes that future people would cast if they could cast those votes.

I suggest that actually all of us and none of us are equally well positioned to be these proxy representatives for future people. We need, plainly, to draw these proxy representatives from across the entire population. I suggest that the only fair, reasonable and democratic way of doing this is through the same principle that animates the jury system: random selection. Anyone and everyone should have an equal chance to be one of the guardians for future people.

This is the idea: Guardians for the fundamental interests – and for the basic needs! – of future generations, to be selected at random, as jurors are, to form a super-jury. This body would sit above our existing political institutions and have the power to veto proposed legislation or to force a review of existing legislation that they (the guardians) adjudged – based on their own deliberations, based on their seeking to uphold the basic interests and needs of future people, and based on the absolute best expert advice available – would be adversely affecting the fundamental interests and needs of future people.

Rupert Read is a Green Party politician, head of the “Green House” think tank and philosophy reader at the University of East Anglia. Read has lectured at Tent City University on the impossibility of perpetual growth.