This essay suggests that the contemporary moment sees a crisis in the experience of temporality and sequentiality, that can be felt across the anglophone world. There are a set of emerging political and ecological conditions, that offer a serious challenge to the way that we have conceived of the passage of historical time.

It is difficult as a result, the essay argues, to generate clear pictures of the future, either of Europe, or of our wider planetary environment. The essay addresses this crisis, by examining the forms in which some contemporary British authors give poetic expression to the claims that the past has on our experience of time, and by suggesting how such pictures of the past yield new ways of imagining a European future.

Chapter seven has two tasks. First, it summarizes the argument and the broad themes of the book. Second, it discusses the character of modernity. My argument is that we should view modernity as a distinct civilization, rather than as a period. This civilization is caught in a complex interplay and tension between the confrontation with uncertainty and the strivings for certainty, unfortunately often conceptualized as ontological absolutes. Although ontologies of uncertainty and certainty are co-constitutive, our culture tends to see the world in either–or terms, which explains the tendency to oscillation between hubris and despair and the difficulty of pragmatic and balanced accounts to enter into mainstream world views. Third, I propose a modest remedy for these modernist tendencies: namely, drawing inspiration from non-dualist traditions and classical virtue ethics.

The conclusion compares Roman ideas about risk with their ideas about the future. It argues that they displayed a mixture of both basic and relatively sophisticated understanding. The areas where the greatest development can be found – in the military, financial and legal spheres – reflect a militaristic, legalistic and strongly hierarchical society where what mattered most were keeping control of great areas of territory, maintaining the social order that controlled the population and upholding the property rights of the few. There was no perceived need to develop the notion of risk outside of these areas.

Modern theorists have seen the development of the concept of risk as reflecting a profound shift away from a belief in the divine determination of human fate. Modernity, it is also argued, has seen the introduction of new mega-risks, which are far larger than those before. The chapter challenges these views and argues both that the Romans were not simply fatalistic about the future, and also that it is impossible to quantify whether the ancients faced less risk.

This short prologue provides an introduction to the main features of the English law for those readers who are new to the study of law. It introduces our narrator, the Man of Law, as he explains some of the curious features of the common law.

One answer to the questions posed at the end of the last chapter is to recognize that Christianity gives new and powerful and transformative impetus to the question, ‘What are you waiting for?’. That is this chapter’s subject.

The final chapter brings all the book’s threads together. It explores the similarities and differences between the Anthropocene defaunation and the ancient mass extinctions. It investigates how much time we have before we reach the extinction levels of the Big Five mass extinctions. It has been suggested that we should just let the defaunation run its course; but the consequences of that course of action appear dire. But all Is not lost. The fossil record shows that the Earth System is resilient, and if we quickly act to remove the climatic forcings we are creating, we have time to turn the situation around and avoid sliding into another full-blown mass extinction.

The concluding chapter provides some reflections on the values, visions and tensions that animate the transhumanist movement and technological imagination in the United States. It discusses the merits of approaching transhumanism from a comparative perspective and putting transhumanism in conversation with some classic disciplinary concerns. It considers what a posthuman future might mean for the discipline of cultural anthropology.

The introductory chapter provides a brief overview of transhumanism and argues that transhumanism can be better understood by approaching it from a comparative perspective and putting it in conversation with longstanding concerns within the discipline of cultural anthropology. It discusses how the book speaks to existing anthropological research on technology, the future, the technological imagination and transhumanism. It also provides a brief overview of the chapters and discusses the research methods I used.

Chapter 8 reflects on findings from the preceding chapters, concluding that parental migration profoundly changed children’s relationships with the adults in their families. The children were socialised to see their parents’ migration as generating an intergenerational debt for them to repay through study. Simultaneously, children’s perceptions of their families’ care for them were influenced by (1) a future-oriented striving ethos that valorised youth and cities over elders and rurality, and (2) social constructions of motherhood and fatherhood that shaped ideas about the kinds of care and investment necessary to prepare children for decent urban futures. In drawing on the cultural repertoires that people took for granted, striving struck at the heart of the rural family such that pathways to ‘recognition’ within and beyond the family cohered: failure at school or in the labour market was failure as a child, parent, or spouse. This chapter questions the inevitability of ceaseless multi-local family striving. Children, with their natural emphasis on reciprocity highlight the basic human need for social protection, intimacy, interdependence, affective wellbeing and shared time. China’s-policy makers see further urbanisation as the answer to the problem of left-behind children. But can their development plans ever heed a child-inspired ethic of care?

On the basis of scriptural themes, the Archbishop of Wales reflects on a century of activity in the life of the Church in Wales. He argues for a balanced and objective understanding of the history of the church since 1920. He finds much to celebrate in a wide range of areas of church life. It has been a century of both continuity and change. At the same time there have been painful episodes in the life of the church. The church faces in a secular world serious challenges in its ministry and mission, not least with the significant decline in church membership. Yet, there is hope for the future on the basis of its 2012 review and 2020 vision in the form of genuine renewal.