Time perspective
Today I am listening to music 247 years old. It is stored on vinyl 60 years old. The turntable and speakers are at least 50 years old. I’m reading poetry 168 years old by light 8 minutes old. At my elbow is a book about a language over 2500 years old. It’s a language that is the basis for many others, and is still in active use in a variety of fields. Latin has long-term success.
I recently re-read a Culture book by Iain M. Banks. His series of novels depict a society formed of various human species that have merged into a single Galaxy-spanning Culture. Their history spans thousands of years, and the novels span many hundreds. One of the reasons I read “Excession” again was to refresh my memory of the time perspective Banks implies.
Most of the time, most people only think about their immediate reality. This becomes painfully obvious when we notice the lack of planning and foresight which is destroying so much or our world. The First Nations talk about acting in the interests of the seventh generation. Most people don’t plan beyond the next seven months (years, if they are taking out a mortgage or car loan), let alone seven generations.
Much of this problem is abetted by corporations. Sure, they need to survive long-term, but their primary influencer is the need to have record profits to report in the next quarter. How do you make effective long-term plans when the incentives are short-term? You don’t.
Governments are little better. In nominal democracies, it’s all about winning (or claiming to win) the next election. I’m not sure what the drivers are in the governments that don’t pretend to be democratic. Perhaps it’s their leaders’ constant fear of falling out of a window in a tall building.
There are exceptions, in both the corporate and governmental worlds. Japanese companies are well-known for their long-term planning. But they still have to show a short-term profit. The Chinese government, whatever its’ manifold faults, is also known for planning beyond the next quarter - to at least five years.
Even some democracies attempt to plan for longer than the next election. I once asked the current Prime Minister of Canada if his Party are making any long-term plans. His response, very early in his mandate, was “Yes. We’re starting at ten years and working out from there.” I hope that was and is true. It’s really hard to tell, given wars and pandemics that arrive without the courtesy of an advance warning.
Can we force ourselves, as a society, to think beyond tomorrow or the next financial quarter? I suggest that we must learn, and learn soon. Nature and the world move in their own inexorable time scales. We either learn to work with and within those scales, or the Anthropocene will be the shortest geological epoch in our Earth’s ten or so billion years. We are probably about at the half-way mark in our Earth’s existence.
Humanity has proven we can succeed in a moderately long term. The pyramids were old in Cleopatra’s day. Latin is still critical to science and religion. Stonehenge is still popular with tourists. Matera has been continuously occupied for at least 3,000 years, and perhaps as long as 12,000. The First Nations of Australia have a spoken history that goes back about 60,000 years. We have prospered long term. We’ve proven we can do it.
Let’s continue to prosper and work on making “Our Epoch” at least a respectable fraction as long as that of the non-avian dinosaurs.