Have I Got a Read For You

 

If you're wondering why everything has gone haywire you might be interested in this, the October 2020  MIT Technology Review, The Long-Term Issue.

Editor-in-Chief Gideon Lichfield offers a hell of a teaser in the forward:

"If our descendants were to diagnose the ills of 21st-century civilization,” writes Richard Fisher in our opening essay on page 8, “they would observe a dangerous short-termism: a collective failure to escape the present moment and look further ahead.” This condition is neither permanent nor new, Fisher says: human thinking becomes more blinkered in times of turmoil and more expansive in periods of prosperity and calm. But it’s particularly extreme right now, especially for Americans, thanks to the covid-19 pandemic and the bitterly contested US election.

This issue of MIT Technology Review is meant as an antidote. It looks at things that may happen in the years, decades, centuries, and even millennia hence, and what needs to change now to make the future better than it looks from this precarious moment.

...As David Rotman writes on page 14, the economic doctrine of high GDP growth, once challenged only by people on the radical fringe, is now being questioned by Nobel-winning economists.

...One of the biggest challenges we face is a meta-problem that makes all the others harder to tackle: the breakdown of shared systems of understanding. Matthew Hutson (page 74) uses the LIGO gravitational-wave detector to show just how much of what we know is contingent on trusting other humans’ knowledge, and what happens if this “epistemic dependence” is undermined. And Abby Ohlheiser (page 30) writes about the scholars and activists, overwhelmingly women and people of color, whose warnings about the attacks on truth through online abuse and conspiracy movements were ignored for years. The war on truth is one of many catastrophic threats that will require long-term thinking to avert. Tate Ryan-Mosley enumerates a host of others (page 18), and notes that most of them are, at least in theory, within our control. But this issue is intended to be not just a diagnosis of short-termism, but an antidote to the despair many feel—and there is plenty in here about solutions.

Like so many other countries, Canada has succumbed to the dysfunction of "short-termism." We live in chunks of years defined by electoral cycles.  The future is either ignored or treated with contempt. British Columbia's broken highways and railways are a glaring example. This refusal to acknowledge the future and the plight we're crafting for our youngest people could destroy this country. Conservatives and Liberals alike menace the future.

Unlike other animals, we have minds capable of imagining a deep future, and we can conceive the daunting truth that our lifetime is a mere flash in an unfathomable chronology. 

Yet while we may have this ability, it is rarely deployed in daily life. If our descendants were to diagnose the ills of 21st-century civilization, they would observe a dangerous short-termism: a collective failure to escape the present moment and look further ahead. The world is saturated in information, and standards of living have never been higher, but so often it’s a struggle to see beyond the next news cycle, political term, or business quarter. 

How to explain this contradiction? Why have we come to be so stuck in the “now”? 

A Shortening of Outlook.

According to historian François Hartog, the author of Regimes of Historicity, we are in the midst of another shortening right now. He argues that at some point between the late 1980s and the turn of the century, a convergence of societal trends took us into a new regime of time that he calls “presentism.” He defines it as “the sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now.” In the 21st century, he writes, “the future is not a radiant horizon guiding our advancing steps, but rather a line of shadow drawing closer.” 

On the scale of civilization, it is difficult to test empirically the assertions of those who say we are living in a short-termist age. Future historians may have a clearer view. But we can still perceive the lack of longer-term thinking from which our society suffers.

You can see it in business, where quarterly reporting encourages CEOs to prioritize short-term investor satisfaction over long-term prosperity. You can see it in populist politics, where leaders are more focused on the next election and the desires of their base than the long-term health of the nation. And you can see it in our collective failure to tackle long-term risks: climate change, pandemics, nuclear war, or antibiotic resistance.

...Some suggest we may be living at the “hinge of history,” a time uniquely influential for the future of humanity. We have never had so many ways to destroy ourselves through self-made dangers, from nuclear weapons to bioterror pathogens. But if we can plot a way through this period by embracing the long term, goes the argument, then our species—like other mammals—has the potential to survive for millions of years.  Perhaps we are merely in a tumultuous period of adolescence, and age will bring a sense of a deeper future. Like teenagers confronted suddenly with the consequences of their actions, we are facing a crisis brought on by our short-termism. Let’s hope it turns out to be merely the shock we need in order to grow up. 

I hope this is enough to whet your interest in the Long-Term Issue. It's sufficiently mature that you can access all the articles and there are many gems to be had. Definitely worth a read.