If the Library Isn't Your Thing at the Moment, Here's Something.
Make some time, grab a cocoa, settle into your favourite chair and check out the December issue of the MIT Technology Review. That's December, 2020.
It's jam packed with ideas about the perils we're facing and how we might be able to handle them. Helps to sweep away some of the doom and gloom.
The opening essay by Richard Fisher deals with the trap of short-termism so many of our leaders and planners have fallen into. Many countries, ours included, are languishing in a deficiency of vision. Trudeau's damned pipeline is a perfect example. These people are on a cycle, an electoral cycle. Preparing the nation for what may be coming 20 or 50 years from now is not their priority. That is a dereliction of duty that invariably goes unpunished.
Like toddlers, our pre-human ancestors had no sense of a distant future. They lived only in the present. Humanity’s trajectory from tool-wielding hominins to the architects of grand metropolises has been interwoven with our ever-expanding sense of time. 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.
Our awareness of deep time was here to stay, but that’s not the same as paying attention to it. The 18th-century European contemplation of a long, bright future was not to last. Periodically, perspectives would shorten, often through crises such as the French Revolution. Hölscher argues that you can see this transformation in writing from the late 1700s into the dawn of the 1800s: optimistic, far reaching predictions about the world gave way to more circumspect descriptions of the future, focused on next steps and nearer-term improvements in standards of living. A similar contraction, he contends, took place with World War I, following the hopeful future-gazing of the early 20th century.
...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.”
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. These risks make it increasingly important to extend our perspective beyond our own lifetimes; our actions are rippling further into the future than ever before. But as the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord has argued, this power to shape the future is not yet matched by foresight or wisdom.
Fisher goes on the explore five causes contributing to our plague of short-termism. The mosts damaging, he suggests, is "targets."
The sociologist Robert Jackall described one scenario in which this happens regularly. He called it “milking the plant”: a manager would arrive at a plant or factory with an ambitious set of targets from the board, and immediately crack the whip. Productivity would rise accordingly. Months later, the targets would be hit, and the manager would be promoted or move on. Left behind, however, would be a mess: unhappy workers and machinery run into the ground. The next manager would have to pick up the pieces with a new set of short-term targets—and the cycle would repeat.
The problem with metrics is captured by Goodhart’s Law, named after a British economist, which is often phrased as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” To escape short-termism, we must reassess the targets by which we gauge success. Do they encourage longer-term thinking, or do they prioritize only present-day gains?
Our greatest challenge this century is to transform our relationship with time. History suggests that our horizons have shortened before—but they can expand again. During the pandemic, our “presentism” has become even more extreme, but cultural norms have been challenged too. There may never be a better time to ask what future we actually want.
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.
If humanity’s evolving time perception does mirror that of a child like my daughter, then our temporal maturity as a species could be yet to come. 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
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