The Examined Life
The Examined Life podcast explores the questions we should be asking ourselves with a range of leading thinkers. Each episode features a different interview, and appeals to those interested in wisdom, personal development, and what it might mean to live a good life. Topics vary from discussing the role of dopamine mining and status anxiety, to exploring the science of awe and attention.
The Examined Life
Tim Ingold - How do we think differently about generations?
Tim Ingold is a professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and is one of the most influential anthropologists in the field today. This conversation explores the way we have come to think about the passage of human generations, and why there is a need to think differently in order to live sustainably.
I mean education is the way in which a society produces its own future. And that's that's what exists. And every every society has to have some form of education in that sense if it's going to if it's going to continue. So it's it is a so what kind of education we have depends on how we understand the future or what kind of future uh we want.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to the Examined Life Podcast with me, Kenny Primrose. In this podcast, I speak to a range of leading thinkers about the question they think we should be asking ourselves. The resulting conversations aim to provide a fresh perspective on what it might mean to live well in this cultural moment. Today, that perspective comes from the noted anthropologist Professor Tim Ingold. In today's conversation, we discuss why the way we think about the passage of human generations has so much to do with our sense of perpetual crisis, with the problems in our education system, and why progress is the enemy of sustainability rather than the key to it. It may have come to me that over the last few decades the air has become increasingly thick with a sense of despair. News cycles have an apocalyptic tone as they circle around issues of catastrophic climate change, the failing economy, wars, and pandemics. From pharmaceuticals to space travel and AI, stories of progress and stories of catastrophe, bring out those who believe that we can save ourselves through human ingenuity, and those who think we're all going to hell in a hand cart. I feel like I might lean towards the latter, though, wherever you find yourself in the spectrum between bleak pessimism and technological optimism, the question of how we can learn to live more sustainably is absolutely key. This conversation with Tim Ingold explores why he thinks kinship and social relations are an integral part of how we learn to live sustainably. Professor Tim Ingold, thank you so much for being willing to come on the podcast today. It's a delight to have you here. As you know, the theme of the podcast is to ask an influential thinker like yourself what question you think we should be asking ourselves? And then we will explore and unpack that question through the course of this conversation. So if we could start there, what question, given your insights and experiences and preoccupations, is it that you think we should be considering and asking ourselves today?
SPEAKER_01:Well, the one that is presently at the top of my head concerns the way we think about the passage of human generations. Because I'm convinced that much of our anxiety about the future and our apparent inability to cope with it or address it in a hopeful way stems from the way in which we think about human generations and how they replace one another. And I'm trying to develop a different way of thinking about it, which is perhaps more in tune with the thinking of both people in our societies in the past and also very often of non-Western or indigenous societies around the world.
SPEAKER_00:So if the way we are thinking about generations now is problematic and requiring a rethink, can you begin by sketching out how do you think we are thinking about generations and why does that require a bit of attention?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And then when it's done, it gives way to another stratum, which is placed on top of it, and then another stratum that is placed on top of that. So we tend to think of every generation as a layer, each going on top of the other one so as to form a stack. So generations stack up, and then we tend to suppose that that the vertical dimension of that stack is progress. So I think that it will progress because every generation overwrites its predecessor and in that sense represents an improvement on it, with the implication, of course, that um the predecessors got it all wrong and the new generation gets it right, and that happens over and over again. And I'm trying to suggest that instead of thinking of the passage of generations as a stack, we draw on an analogy of a rope. Imagine that generations, rather than being layered on top of one another, uh, are lined longitudinally, like the overlapping fibers of a rope that twist around one another. And and that there this allows, rather than one generation replacing the previous one, this allows generations to work together in collectively forging the conditions of collective life in the future. And I do think, and that is usually, I mean, throughout most of history, that's how futures have been made. Uh older older people or younger people have worked together in co-creating a common future. And it's really only in modern times that we split the old from the young, uh, so that the uh old are supposed to be past it and the young are supposed to be being prepared for life in this generation, that the middle generations have decided what it's going to be. And and I think the splitting apart of the old from the young has contributed a lot to our contemporary sense of perpetual crisis.
SPEAKER_00:I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that. A sense of perpetual crisis is no doubt something we can relate to, but what what has that got to do with the passage of generations? What's the connection there?
SPEAKER_01:If if if any gener if any generation is going to have a future that it can call its own, then it has to displace whatever future had been designed for it by the preceding generation. I mean each each of these um generations, the succeeding one another, each of them is trying to, so to speak, put an end, make it make the future, to design what the future is going to be, to put it all up as a plan. And then for the generation that follows, that offers two alternatives. One is simply to fall into line with the plan and simply be a consumer of the history that the previous generation has already made for you, which means you've got nothing to do and you're it's sort of pointless. Or to say, well, no, actually they got it all wrong, and we're going to put a new one on top of the old one. So um so that which which is which is generally what happens, that that it it that that history proceeds, as in the history of science, through conjecture and refutation. You set something up, you you you you say that's no good, that's um obsolete, we set something else up, that's no good, it's obsolete. And each one is supposed to sort of set an end to history. So what we have, rather than the sort of perpetual beginning, a continual process of development and growth, we have a series of endpoints, of finalities, which are imposed one after the other. And this and the sense of continual crisis is the one that none of these actually offer a loose ends to follow, offer possible paths to pick up and carry on into the future. So we we continually think that the world is about to come to an end. And I think a lot of this extinction anxiety stems from that that way of thinking.
SPEAKER_00:So, where where do you think things changed historically? When did we start thinking of the world makers in that strat in the middle and everybody else at the margins?
SPEAKER_01:It has a lot to do with the disappearance of domestic modes of production with the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, and with that the transfer of educational functions from the family and the community to the state. Today it's assumed that education is res uh the education of of uh uh sorry, it's assumed that the state is responsible ultimately for the education of its citizens. Uh and and that uh has become part of the major planks of of the contemporary nation-state, that it has this responsibility of education. If you think in the past, or you think back to typical agrarian or peasant societies in the Middle Ages or whatever, um, you would find domestic units working together, uh producing very largely for their own subsistence, and children being educated within the context of that everyday productive life. What's happened now, of course, is that the household is a unit of consumption rather than production, that uh production happens somewhere outside the domestic unit, and the children go to be educated at school, which again is separated for the domestic unit. So there's been a separation of educational functions from the constitutive relations of the family. And uh that happened, I think, um, maybe from the 16th, 17th century onwards, uh, with the the rise of capitalism, the formation of nation states, the development of state education, all those things happening together. But if you think about the broad sweep of human history, this has been the exception rather than the rule.
SPEAKER_00:So does it follow from this that ideas of progress are at odds with sustainability, as you see it?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, what what one of the things that we've realized, I suppose, in the last decades, is that sustainability, we have to choose in a way between sustainability and progress. We can't have both. We used to think that the earth, or let us say, we uh that during the the the age, the great great age of colonization, the assumption was always that the earth's resources are infinite, population can grow, we'll always find more stuff, um, and therefore we can progress and progress and take more and more and more, and we can keep on doing it forever. Um and what we've realized now, of course, is that that's that's a dream. That's that that's impossible. Uh, and there are all sorts of attempts still to try and marry the idea of sustainability with the idea of um progress. A lot of um policies of sustainable development are still trying to have their cake and eat it in that respect. But in my understanding, sustainability doesn't mean reaching a balance or a steady state or some kind of final solution, but rather it means the possibility for life to carry on. And what seems to me very important is that we find an understanding of tradition that allows us to see it not as a way of living in the past, but a way of being able to carry life on into the future in continuity with the values of the past, not by breaking from them. So that's what I'm trying I'm trying to do.
SPEAKER_00:I suppose that there are people who would push back on that a little bit and say that while tradition might have value, there's been a real sense of moral progress over through through you know through history from human universal suffrage to abolition and so on. People like Stephen Pinker would say that you know we're we're doing pretty well, actually. How would you respond?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean my my response to Stephen Pinker would be very negative indeed. I I think he's uh uh he's a he's a uh very poor thinker, uh and and and also unrealistic thinker, in the sense that that that his idea that um that there's a always a drive towards a better world um simply doesn't stack up in terms of what what we know of of of history. Um but but more than that, I think the of of course it's right that uh that um every we we continually strive towards some some sense of freedom or some sense of emancipation, but but uh surely the important thing is that uh every that that new people as they come into the world are able to um to build a world that is their own, that each generation can be its own generation and do its own thing. Uh not that it's not our job to fix in advance what the finalities of those new people should be. But uh it's not Pinker's job or anybody else's job to say what is the ultimate good to which we should all be striving or anything like that. But um I I also think that that it's only if we introduce new people um into the world we know, in the world we have, on the grounds that we actually value this world, that those new people will then be able to um to renew uh the world for them in in their own way. I I was I was reading recently the uh or rereading an essay by Hannah Arendt on the crisis of education that she wrote, I think around about 1954. Anyway, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and of course she was talking about the situation then, and pretty awful things had happened, and which you would want to move away from. And you might say today, too, that there's some pretty awful things that we might want to move away from. But the one thing that Arendt Arendt says in that in that essay is that only if we love the world enough to take responsibility for it, is there hope for renewal in the future. And what she meant by that, by loving the world enough, is that is that we have to take a responsibility for the world we have. We have to introduce people into that world so that they can then engage in their own, be free to engage in their own projects of renewal. The opposite is the sort of situation we have very often now, it was as it was in Aaron's time, it still is now, that we tell students or children when they come to school that the existing world is crap, there's a lot wrong with it, but we have a design for a shiny new world in the future, and we are going to control the con we are going to tell you what it is, and we are going to control the conditions of your admission into it. And that's what education is about. Controlling the conditions of admission to a new world that has already been designed for you. And that says Arendt's propaganda, and I think she's right, that when you look at history and think what all of these uh kinds of propaganda-led education um they hold up uh a vision of a shiny new world order, which the young people have had no hand in creating. They say, here it is, if you're going to have a life, you have to get into this, and we'll set up we'll set ourselves up as gatekeepers, and we'll set the educational system up as a gatekeeper that controls the conditions of admission into it. And if you don't get in, get lost. And that that that is is is the way I think it is operating at the moment and why it's so wrong.
SPEAKER_00:Um and I think people like Pink are signed up to that. So education as we have it now is clearly part of the problem. And uh presumably is also therefore part of the solution. So I guess my question is um do you think education has a significant role to play in helping us attend to the world differently?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. I've been thinking a lot about the meaning of education, and and and I um as have a number of other people that I've been I've been sort of cor corresponding with. Uh and I mean education is the way in which a society produces its own future, and that's that's what exists. And every every society has to have some form of education in that sense if it's going to if it's going to continue. So it's it is a so what kind of education we have depends on how we understand the future or what kind of future uh we want. And um I'm I'm very attracted by the idea of education not as a way of instilling authorized knowledge into the empty minds of new people, but of education as a way of drawing people into the world in such a way that it can be made present to them and they can attend to it. In other words, it it and and so so so this word education it comes from ex meaning out and to care to lead. So education is a way of leading people, students out into the world so that they can attend to it and engage with it, and so that they can then develop voices of their own in response to it. Um this all goes back to the or much of it goes back to the thinking of John Dewey um a century ago, and I which I found very inspirational. And and I think um a a sort of um paraphase of um or prece of Dewey's argument would be that education is about learning to live together in difference. So it it's it's about how one can create a sense in which people can go along together, but as they go along together, also develop their own voices, their own particular experience, their own ways of being. Like a conversation. I mean, in a c a conversation is is a collective activity, there are lots of people involved in it, but everybody in the conversation has their own particular voice, and that voice develops in and through their conversing with others. And the conversation can proceed precisely because everybody's experience is not the same, and therefore everybody has something to contribute to it. I mean, if everybody thought exactly the same thing, had exactly the same experience, they'd have nothing to talk about. You'd have no conversation. So conversation is possible because it uh thrives on difference, not on division, but on difference. It's quite a different thing. And it's and it's differences that both bring people together and allow them to develop in their own ways. And and I that for Dewey, and also in my view, is what education should fundamentally be about. And that's quite different from supposing, no, that the point of education is to um is to instill a kind of universal rationality in everybody, which will lead that that that there are right answers to things, and the important thing is that everybody should understand what the right answer is. That that approach means that there's no possibility of um the voice of reason, you know, is completely regard uh indifferent to who happens to articulate it, to articulate it. So that's an approach to education that uh that wipes out any sense of of difference. Um so uh we do, I think, have to fundamentally uh reform or rethink um what education is about. But how we do that is beyond me. I I just don't know how we how we're going to do it in practical terms. Um but and I I think the the answer is we we it has to come from it has to come from the bottom up, so to speak. We can't impose a new a new state policy that will kind of reverse the objectives of education. It has to somehow emerge from the current of social life itself. But how that will happen, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:One of the things that comes to mind is the distinction you make in your book on lines between the traveller and the wayfarer. If I'm right, that the traveler is kind of going from A to B in as efficient a way as possible, whereas for the wayfarer, the the point is the journey, if that's a fair characterization of maybe the way we think about education as an efficient journey from A to B rather than the point being the experience itself.
SPEAKER_01:More or less, yes. Yeah, it is, I think. I think we we we are largely thinking in A to B terms. Um that education, we have a we have a child at point A, and the point of education is to get them to point B. Uh, they have to be learning outcomes and all the rest. And and and and certainly, yes, the the kind of education that I'm talking about instead would be uh would be a form of of wayfaring, which means there is um there is no final destination. It's more more a question of actually taking any destinations away for undestining things, so that you can actually pay attention to where you are and where you're going and what's around you as as you go. And you don't have to think that there's you're some kind of end or beginning to life, it just carries on. Uh but that's the beauty of it.
SPEAKER_00:So education done for its own sake, it's you know autotelic, if you like.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. I think Dewey sometimes said that you know the only end of education is more education.
SPEAKER_00:That's uh a lovely aim, and it's also strikingly different from the current system, which feels increasingly instrumental. Education is kind of justified as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Subjects are justified by what they can bring, you know, career prospects and so on. And this quest for efficiency and productivity and being able to measure everything seems to have kind of denatured the experience, both of being a teacher and of being a student.
SPEAKER_01:And and it it just seems to get worse and worse. Why and may maybe um maybe it's it's got wound up to such an extent now, the the whole instrumentalization of education that that eventually it will presumably all collapse. And and I'm thinking that the thing to do then is we have to start, we we have to start thinking already now, rather than waiting for the whole caboodle to to collapse, um uh we should start thinking now about what's a good way, alternative way to proceed. It's the same way I've been thinking about universities. I mean, rather than saying, well, the universities, the neoliberal university is unsustainable, it's bound to collapse, indeed it will, um, so we just wait for it to collapse and then scratch our heads and think, what do we do now? It will be a good idea to start thinking already now about what uh a university of the future based on quite different principles could be.
SPEAKER_00:In the second part of this conversation, Tim discusses what we can learn from indigenous cultures and how we might integrate the past into the present in order to forge a more sustainable future. So, Tim, your perspective, your the question we're discussing really on generations has been shaped by your work as an anthropologist and your experience with indigenous cultures. So, what have you kind of seen in these cultures and the ways of living and the ecologies that they traffic in that that we could learn from about sustainability and so on?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I suppose that most um indigenous people around the world would would say with fairly good reason that um their way of living is rather more sustainable than ours. They wouldn't use the word sustainable, it would would hardly be it would be kind of redundant, I think, in the in the context in which they would have traditionally operated, although perhaps not now when their lands have been taken away or under threat, but but um the the the the sort of philosophy that that lies behind um much of this indigenous thinking is um that that to live is to inhabit a world that includes you and lots of other kinds of beings, and that by looking after that world um you can and caring for it, uh you can ensure that it that it carries on. Uh and and of course by treating these other beings with a with a degree of respect. Uh so for example, um uh let me give you a couple of examples. I mean well one one is from from hunting people around the circumpolar north, which is an area that or region that I I I know best, these people are killing animals in order to live and to eat. But but in their understanding, um that killing of an animal is an act of love, it's an act of care, uh, which, if done properly, ensures that those animals will come around and become be regenerated in future generations, as indeed, on the whole, uh they do. Uh and um so in their understanding, uh uh a form of hunting that respects the ways of animals is actually also a form of sustainable living. Um just as another example, is there's a wonderful article I read years ago by a colleague, an anthropological colleague uh John Knight, who was working in among foresters in upland Japan. And um these foresters would build uh look after uh the trees and also live in wooden houses. And the principle was that you would look after one generation of trees, and once it had reached the right sort of age, you cut the trees and use them for your house. Uh and they called that the second life of the tree, when at first it's humans looking after trees, but then it's trees forming the house looking after its human inhabitants. And then after a generation has elapsed, that wood begins to rot, so you need new wood. But so during that time that the first lot of trees have been in your house, you're looking after the next generation, which you'll then cut and incorporate into your house. So that there are parallel life cycles of humans and houses and trees which go along together. Along came the conservationists and said, you can't cut down those trees. You must let them live. We must have old growth forests. And the result was that the trees couldn't enjoy a second life, the villagers didn't have timbers for their houses, so what did they do? They built their houses from concrete instead. So in that case, uh a deliberate policy of conservation had results which were clearly less sustainable. Than what had been going on before. So sustainability lies in this way of allowing generations to carry on together and correspond with one another as they go. And that's quite usual or usual way of thinking about it in Indigenous societies.
SPEAKER_00:That's really interesting and helpful and something I'd like to come back to. I wonder, would you make a connection between the uh kind of persistent sense of anxiety and loneliness and depression that is well documented in the West? That's often been called the kind of epidemic of uh mental health problems. And clearly it's multifactorial. There's lots of things that contribute to this. Would you make a connection between our loss of tradition, the way we think about generations, as you say, and our subjective sense of well-being?
SPEAKER_01:Up to a point, yes, I think so. I think that in trying to address this problem, we are rather fixated upon the future and what we think about the future, and not thinking enough about our understandings of the past and how the past creates the future. And because I think the way we have of thinking of generations in layers that I was talking about earlier leads us to the conclusion that to live a traditional life is to be living in the past. Because the the pastness of tradition is not something that is simply given, it's something we create by turning our backs on it and facing the future. And um if you were to ask again indigenous people who would say quite clearly that yes, we follow the tradition. Our lives are in the service of following the ancestors, they would say. And we turn around and say, Oh, you're just living in the past. And then they say, No, because our ancestors are actually the future. They're not the past. You've you've made tradition look like being in the past by turning your backs on it. And maybe we should turn around once again and join with the movement of tradition in creating a future for ourselves that is more in continuity with it. Um, it's why when we look at at previous generations or grandparents or old people, we should stop seeing them as being sort of past it, but actually as off as a light for the future. Maybe I could give one one other example I found very inspiring because a few a week or two ago uh there was a a long article in The Guardian on uh the island of Fiji and the problems it's facing because of rising sea levels. And the the article was about how uh coastal communities in Fiji that have been or are in danger of being flooded are being translocated to higher ground inland. And they're doing this in Fiji, they're really working on it. And um and the biggest problem they had in moving people to another spot was what to do about the bones of the ancestors. Because they'd say, you know, our our f our parents, our grandparents, our great-greatparents' parents, they're all buried here. And what do we do? If we leave them there, they'll get washed out to sea. If we don't, if we take them with us, we'll have to dig them up, and and that would be a pretty offensive thing to do and transfer them somewhere else. So this was a real problem. And I thought, does this mean that these villagers are somehow buried in the past, attached to old ways? No. What it means, although this is my inference, but what I read from the article, is that is that for the people, those ancestors are their future. I mean, they're the people who are before them, who are showing them the way to go, and to abandon them is basically to abandon any hope for the future. And that's why they would find it so very, very difficult. Uh, and and so that that that that tells you something. Tells you something about how ancestors are not just the past, they're also the future.
SPEAKER_00:That's an absolutely fascinating example. I'd never made that connection. This need that you've been discussing is quite cute to reconnect your ancestors and see them as the future and not the past and so on. How far back do we have to go generationally to to find that wisdom that we need from our ancestors?
SPEAKER_01:Well that that that that indeed is a is a is a real problem. I don't actually think you'd have to go back any distance at all because the people who are the people who are telling us to rip everything all up are not actually our own ancestors. They're institutions, uh, or they're mouthpieces of the state or something like that. But but they're not actually um the people to whom we would um whom we would count as um as significant significant ancestors. I'm not quite sure. I've I'm really not sure because I'm working on this now, and I'm not entirely sure how to how to answer the question. It's just that I feel that there is one of the th the the symptoms of of our modern condition is a kind of disjunct between our um our let's say familial life, the the the the life that we understand in terms of relations of kinship and descent and community and locality, the disjunct between that and the apparatus of the state and its formal institutions. We feel a great tension, I think, between the two, uh and you know a lot of the present politics, um the anger that people feel towards um towards liberal institutions, corporate power, and the rest of it, I think has has to do with with that, uh and and in a way rightly so. So um I I think it's a way of bringing back a sense of oh now starting, let me start again with another thought. I've been wondering why is it that when people when we worry and think about the future and what the future is going to be and how we might design it, we instantly reach for science and technology. We somehow the what's called the problem of the future is almost by default understood to be a scientific or technological one. Uh so there are solutions which which the experts will try and find. I think it's an issue, a very traditional anthropological issue about kinship and descent. That's really what the future is about. And we should be talking about kinship and descent, how it happens, who contributes to it, uh, even in areas of things like social care. You know, this is this is about the the the way in which kinship creates people through acts of nurturance and care. That is where the future lies. And it must lie thinking about the past. Well, who is it to whom do we owe our own existence? Who who provided the nurture and the care in the past that allow us now to be the people we are? And that that's the thing that matters. And I think that's what I'm when I'm talking about ancestry or tradition, that that's really what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_00:There's a sense in which this is a question of attention, it seems, like the kind of attention that we are paying to the environment and to our past and so on. And so I guess my question is how might we begin to attend differently to to our past, to generations? What do we need to do to re-kind of configure and reorientate the way that we're attending to the world around us?
SPEAKER_01:Maybe maybe one way to start is to is to address things to do with our understandings of heritage and memory and archives and things like that. Um we I'm thinking particularly about about memory um because um and and and how we how we can continue to bring the past into the present. Um at the moment I mean it's often said that that um one of the effects of the digital revolution, which purports to allow us to store unlimited quantities of information, of data, about ourselves. Uh the the one consequence of that is that we are actually losing um the memory of the past faster than at any other time in recorded history. Because um I I don't know, but the technicalities are that these kind of digital records actually have a very short shelf life, I mean maybe of a few decades, whereas uh uh a manuscript on parchment can can last thousands of years. So the result of the this electronic storage is that um is that the past is being lost faster than ever before, with the result that we experience this so-called space-time compression, that we find ourselves living in this narrow slice of the present. Again, which I think is the source of some of the anxiety that we were talking about earlier. So, what we have to do somehow is to find a way of thinking differently about how we can bring the past into the present and the present into the future. So that, for example, um we when we look to the future, we don't see a kind of ceiling coming down on our heads, as though the future is coming down at us, but rather we see um a world stretching out into the distance beyond the horizon, uh beyond anything imaginable. Which is how we we used to think of the future like that. You think the future is just stretches ahead as far as you can see and beyond. Uh it's limitless, it's it's just full of of possibility. And uh and a lot of the anxiety now comes with the feeling that no, the future is the future is already set, and it's and it's heading towards us at great speed. So that the gap between where we are and the future gets shorter and shorter and shorter, and this it's like a violin string that's getting uh tighter and tighter, and the and the and the the tighter it gets, the the the higher the note, and the pitch just needs to be going up and up and up to the to to breaking point. So that that that that's where the problem comes. And so if if if we could turn a turn things around from this sort of lateral way of thinking to a longitudinal way in which the um the past is a story that can be brought into the present in order to be carried on not towards any particular end, but simply to be able to keep on going, um then um that means um mean means a different way of of of thinking about the relationship between the past and the present. I don't know, I I I assume that's what what uh T. S. Eliot was getting at in the four quartets and all that stuff about the past, present, and future, which I never quite been able to understand, but I think that was his point.
SPEAKER_00:These solutions or ways of approaching this problem about you know thinking differently about generations, um are big and kind of challenging and uh maybe in some sense abstract, reforming education and reintegrating heritage into our into you know the present tense in some sense. Um I guess my question now, my final question really that I'd like to end with is how might we begin to address this personally, this question of um thinking differently about generations? What does that mean for um for you personally?
SPEAKER_01:I I can't see any other answer than to say that it's a sort of it's it's morally incumbent on each of us to live an exemplary life. And uh and and that is according to what you feel is is right and good and proper uh in relation to others and the world we live in. And and it's by being exemplary that means that you set an example for others to follow, uh a kind of light that others that others can follow. Um and um I I I think for example, I think that the role of um of a teacher, uh, in my experience a university teacher, but it could be a school teacher or at any level, is to be exemplary in that sense. Not not to tell students what they ought to be doing or to be simply transferring all the knowledge from their head into their heads, but to provide an exemplary model or that that that they can follow, that that that that gives and when you think about in one's own experience, people who've been great teachers, uh people who've really influenced you, people you admire, from just the teachers you had when you first went to school through to teachers at university or wherever, and you think what makes them really good teachers is because you f you feel you keep going back to them as giving you an example of of how to act, how to think, um, how to work things out. Uh and so um I guess the thing to do is is is in uh in whatever walk of life you are to to set a good example.
SPEAKER_00:It's uh it sounds very traditional, but it's a good thing to do. It is indeed, and it feels like a gentle challenge to us all, I think. I've really appreciated this conversation, Tim, and this feels like a good place to draw it to a close. It's not always easy to see and to articulate the ideas which shape us, which is why looking to other cultures as well as our own history can give us a background against which you can see the contours of underlying assumptions more clearly. So thank you for your insights, for picking those out, and for your willingness to speak to me about them today. I've really appreciated this question of how to think differently about generations as a lens through which uh we can explore the problems with education and progress and sustainability. So thank you so much for your time today, Tim. Well, okay, thanks. Well, it was fun talking to you. Thank you, listeners, for getting to the end of episode four of The Examined Life. I hope you've enjoyed listening to Tim Ingall today. To find out more about Tim, do look at his personal website, TimIngall.com, where there is biographical information as well as a long list of books he has written and contributed to. I've often found the work of anthropologists to be hugely insightful and interesting and worth paying attention to. And I hope you would agree that Tim did not disappoint today. If you've enjoyed listening to this episode, then please do let me know. I'd love to know about it. Please let other people know, share it, uh, like it. That's good for helping other people to find the podcast. And do sign up if you haven't to the mailing list at examined life.com, where every time I publish an episode, I also send out some musings with some links. Um, and it's always nice to be sending it to more people. Thank you once again. Do stay tuned for the next episode in a few weeks' time of the Examined Life Podcast.