Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

Around the world there are hundreds of thousands of grass-roots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which have been formed to help on thousands of issues, to, as environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken put it, restore grace, beauty and justice to the world. These organizations are elevating the consciousness of people in all walks of life. They are helping us learn and they are helping us remember. They are speaking out for minorities, for clean rivers, for safe food, for fair opportunities, for endangered animals, for local economies, for sustainability, for justice. They are decidedly not speaking for corporate interests or for governments or for those with narrow, profit-driven interests. You may be a member, or you may have contributed money or time to one or more of these organizations. If so, you are on the leading edge of a social change in consciousness that is building momentum as you read this.

One of these NGOs has been formed for the simple purpose of helping us to expand our long-term thinking skills, putting forth the core tenet that for us to survive and thrive into the future, we must learn to think in the long term. The Long Now Foundation, based in San Francisco, was established in 01996 (The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates; the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years). One of their purposes, according to their Web site, is to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. And when The Long Now talks about the long term they mean the really long term. These guys aren’t just trying to get ready for the next quarter or working on a five-year plan; The Long Now Foundation hopes to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years, roughly the same amount of time that has passed since humans began using agriculture and developing modern technology. Their guidelines are simple: Serve the long view (and the long viewer), foster responsibility, reward patience, mind mythic depth, ally with competition, take no sides, and leverage longevity.

Author Stewart Brand, co-founder and co-chairman of the Long Now’s board of directors, says this: “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where “long-term” is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth.”

In 01997 The Long Now Foundation began work on an epic project. As an icon to their cause they began designing a clock intended to run for 10,000 years with little or no human intervention. Conceived by Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis, the clock will tick once a year, have a century hand that moves once every hundred years and a cuckoo that comes out every thousand years. An eight-foot high prototype of what was named The Clock of the Long Now was completed in 01999 and is now in the Science museum in London.

Where do you put such a clock? No one city or civilization in history has lasted anywhere near 10,000 years. One can’t assume that a society will be stable or capable or interested enough over that amount of time to sustain and protect the project. Natural catastrophes—earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires—happen with alarming regularity all over the world. Wars break out. Societies come and go. The Long Now found what may be the perfect spot. They have purchased desert mountain land near Great Basin National Park in easternmost Nevada, land described as “a timeless landscape.” The plan is to install the clock inside the limestone cliffs on the west side of Snake Mountain at 10,000 feet elevation, in a landscape appropriately full of bristlecone pine trees, some of the oldest living organisms on Earth.

Visitors standing before such a clock will, presumably, be awestruck to be in the presence of something intended to run for a period of time approaching four-hundred human life spans. It will act as a sort of mild shock therapy to help us grasp time—past and future—beyond our ordinary awareness and to help us understand that our lives are an infinitesimal part of something stunningly huge. It will help teach us to not take ourselves so seriously, and to perhaps rethink our priorities in the context of our new awareness. It will impart humbleness. As Stewart Brand said, “The trick is learning how to treat the last ten thousand years as if it were last week, and the next ten thousand as if it were next week. Such tricks confer advantages.”

 You can read more about The Clock of The Long Now in Stewart Brand's book of the same name. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465007805/ref=sr_11_1/103-7215024-7011062?ie=UTF8