Gambling away our future | Public Institutions

01 August 2022

In our time of multiple, complex and interacting crises – think for a moment about the following three opening sentences: “If all goes well, the history of mankind has only just begun. Mankind is about two hundred thousand years old. But the earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions of years to come – enough to end disease, poverty, and injustice forever, enough to create heights of flowering that are unthinkable today.”

This is what Oxford philosopher Toby Ord (2020) wrote in his extraordinarily interesting and thought-provoking book “The Precipice – Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity”- enough time – unless we trip ourselves up. Because humanity, according to Tony Ord, seems to belong to “a species that is worryingly close to its own annihilation.” In fact, he says, today we are balancing on the brink of a precipice.

But isn´t this pure alarmism? A depressing shot from a pessimistic philosopher?

A master plan for sustainable conversion

But more and more important stakeholders have actually realized the enormity and complexity of the challenges, and what would be needed to be done. Seven years ago, after many rounds of negotiations, all 193 member states of the United Nations succeeded in agreeing on a very ambitious master plan for sustainable change – the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a plan with 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 targets that was developed precisely in order to prevent such an annihilation. A unique, global, national and local investment in the Agenda’s three major dimensions – the social, the environmental, and the economic – with coordination, holistic approach and long-term perspective in decision-making and implementation (United Nations, 2015).

WHO´s programme “One Health” is a related approach to designing and implementing policies, legislation and research in which multiple sectors communicate and work together to achieve better public health outcomes (WHO, 2017).

Sweden’s then Prime Minister Stefan Löfvén explicitly promised that Sweden would be a leader in such preventive work. And the Swedish Parliament (Riksdagen, 2020) adapted the 17 SDGs as parliamentary goals – but also stated that “in many areas there is still a long way to go before the goals are achieved, and that strong multilateral measures and a transformation of society will be required to deal with the global and complex challenges.”

Breakdown or breakthrough?

UN Secretary-General António Guterres describes the current situation, with all its challenges, as a turning point in history: “Mankind is facing a sharp and urgent selection situation: a breakdown, or a breakthrough. Coronavirus disease is turning our world upside down, threatening our health, destroying economies and livelihoods, and deepening poverty and inequality. Conflicts continue to rage and worsen. The catastrophic effects of a changing climate – famine, floods, fires and extreme heat – threaten our existence” (United Nations, 2021). All countries must deal with all this in a coordinated package of measures for a better world.

With less than eight years left until 2030, the question must be asked whether most of all this will stop at ‘beautiful words’. The Swedish Government´s coordinator for Agenda 2030, former Cabinet Minister of Public Health Gabriel Wikström, states in his official report (2022) that things move slowly, even though our country had a much better starting position than most others. He called for a transformation of our society, adapted to the conditions of the future – and finds that politicians have not yet decided on one. “On the contrary, current developments indicate that, among other things, we will not achieve most of the national targets, that economic and social inequality will not decrease, and that we are far from consuming and producing sustainably.”

Our collective responsibility

Toby Ord emphasizes in his book that we do not only bear a collective responsibility for the almost 8 billion now living fellow human beings, but also in the face of the hundreds of billions that have lived before us, and that, together, developed the living conditions of humanity. It is up to us not to destroy everything that our ancestors and all generations before them have built up. And it is also our responsibility that trillions of not yet born, future generations are not denied the opportunity to live their lives – and to further develop humanity and its planet.

If man as a species had been unambiguously rational, we would not have exposed our existence to these threats, or we would at least be fully engaged in averting them according to Agenda 2030. But this is usually done inadequately and piecemeal, as Gabriel Wikström has pointed out. Some stakeholders

Do not see any need for them, being technology optimists, or skeptical of the Agenda;
Feel that they are already doing enough;
Are willing to act, but don´t know how;
Do not use the opportunity for action available;
Want to do everything themselves, without coordination with others; or
Don´t have time to look up from short-term or urgent tasks.

Or they are simply overwhelmed and have given up because of the size and complexity of the challenge. And what appears to many as an overwhelming complexity of the 17 SDGs, and a lack of understanding, instills the urgency required to trump the short-termism inherent in our brain.

According to Gabriel Wikström, the signals from the top political level are weak and unclear, and most societies are organized from a downspout perspective, the effect being that in several respects we will approach or risk passing a breaking point, after which some threats may be impossible to ward off. Toby Ord claims to be able to calculate that the risk of a global catastrophe sometime in the next 100 years is 1 in 6. That includes a considerable number of close calls (nuclear weapons) and notable laboratory escapes of highly pathogenic contagions - with one of whom going out of control. If he is right, it means that we literally are gambling away our future.

Contemplation and implementation

As a philosopher, Ord wants us to reflect deeply and continuously on the future goals for the good of humanity, something he calls “The Long Reflection”. I wholeheartedly agree and would argue that this requires educational systems (cf Karolinska institutet et al., 2019; Levi & Rothstein, 2021; International Association of Universities, 2019) that teach the next generation of decision makers (i.e., today´s students) to think and act

Critically (and not just based on wishful thinking); and
Ethically (and not just driven by profit motive); and
In systems (and not just focusing on one problem at a time); and
Ecologically (and not just governed by economism or any other ism).

Existential and complex problems may require the entire “package”. And added to this, basic knowledge as to how to overcome down-pipe thinking and singlemindedness (White et al., 2019). And utilizing existing support from the three major associations of universities - International Association of Universities (IAU), Francophone University Association (AUF), and The Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU), jointly representing more than 2,000 universities of the world

Ord has written a fascinating and important book, a must read, in the class of the American biologist Rachel Carson´s epoch-making “Silent Spring”, published 60 years ago. Both call for action on a global, national, local and individual level. When we begin to understand that we have steered our world to the brink of a precipice, we do not have time to wait for more warning signals. “Our world is in deep trouble – and so too are the Sustainable Development Goals”, as formulated by António Guterres (2022) when he addressed delegates during the HLPF´s high-level segment recently. Reading Toby Ord´s book may help you to think and act accordingly.

By Lennart Levi, MD, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Psychosocial Medicine, Karolinska institutet, Stockholm, Sweden