The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time

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We have the innate ability, then, to imagine the consequences of our actions in deeper time, but sadly not always the will or the motivation to escape the salience of the present. The music producer Brian Eno was in a run-down corner of New York, on the way to a glamorous dinner party. David Farrier, author of Footprints 'Philosophical, insightful and entertaining. In a world of short sightedness, The Long View is a helpful guide to understand and connect us to the future. In the light of the climate emergency, long term thinking is more urgent than ever.'

I’m troubled by all this. It’s possible that we are at one of the most precarious points of human history. Yet I worry that our power to destroy ourselves is radically outstripping our wisdom and foresight. A soaring hymn to all that might lie in the future; alongside the diverse and beautiful ways to think about it. Overflowing with wisdom and insight.' Thomas Moynihan, author of X-Risk Few books can claim to shake your perspective on life, but The Long View does exactly that ... a landmark book that could help to build a much brighter future for many generations to come.' David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect A wide-ranging and intelligent exploration of the importance of long-term thinking in politics, science, business and culture by a senior BBC Future journalist.For me, this begins with my daughter, Grace, imagining her path to the next century. She will be 86 years old in 2100. I find it remarkable to consider that there are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us – and when I do so, my sense of time and possibility opens up a little more. There are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us And as one group of researchers warned recently, acts of neglect or stupidity in the present day could possibly even threaten civilisation itself.

Humans are unique in our ability to understand time, able to comprehend the past and future like no other species. Yet modern-day technology and capitalism have supercharged our short-termist tendencies and trapped us in the present, at the mercy of reactive politics, quarterly business targets and 24-hour news cycles. It’s early days though, and while these examples are encouraging, they are also isolated. Unless we get better at ditching our short-termist ways on a global scale, the decisions we make in the early 21st Century could shape the future of our species in far more profound – and chilling – ways than we might realise.

Meanwhile, Wales appointed Sophie Howe in 2016 – a former senior leader in the police – to be a “future generations commissioner”, charged with ensuring Welsh public bodies think about the long-term in their decisions. “This isn’t just through some aspirational policy document, it’s actually written into law through the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act,” Howe explained recently on BBC Radio 4. “All decisions taken by the public sector in Wales, including our government, must demonstrate how they are meeting today’s needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own.” In the West, Christian eschatology is central to psychology and politics. Jesus and Paul both expected this world to end imminently. As time passed and the world continued, the daily expectation of apocalypse was cautiously revised. The revision is apparent in the great, confident religious monuments of Christendom. Work began on Wells Cathedral around 1175 and continued until 1490. Its architects and craftsmen trusted in and worked for a future they knew they would never see. Time in the ecclesiastical world had always been linear, and the line looked as if it would go on for a while yet. Extrapolating these patterns and behaviours into the future allowed them to map out four possible long-term trajectories for our species:

Or there's Longplayer, a musical score that will play for 1,000 years. It is an eerie, but calming, composition seemingly intended to evoke a feeling of religiosity in its listeners. The installation can be heard at a lighthouse in London where you’ll also find 234 Tibetan singing bowls used in live concerts to accompany the score. There are also listening posts across the world and an online stream. Curious, he asked the hostess during dinner if she liked living where she did. “Oh sure,” she replied, “this is the loveliest place I have ever lived.” Following their discussions in Sweden and afterwards, the Trajectories group concluded that the ‘status quo’ path would be a pretty unlikely scenario once you get to longer-term timescales. “Instead, civilisation is likely to either end catastrophically or expand dramatically,” they write. Thomas Moynihan, author of X-Risk ‘Few books can claim to shake your perspective on life, but The Long View does exactly that … a landmark book that could help to build a much brighter future for many generations to come.’ This tendency to entwine physical dimensions with temporal distance – called construal level theory – means that, in practice, people tend to place greater emotional weight on events that are visible, clearly in view, while feeling relatively indifferent to events “far” from now. The upshot is that events presented within the daily or hourly cadence of news gain disproportionate attention. Take the climate. Because many of its impacts won’t be seen for years and decades, it’s hard for some to register that the world is heating up until something serious happens, like weird weather, a flood or wildfire.

First night reviews

It wasn't always so. In medieval times, craftsmen worked on cathedrals that would be unfinished in their lifetime. Indigenous leaders fostered intergenerational reciprocity. And in the early twentieth century, writers dreamed of worlds thousands of years hence. Now, as we face long-term challenges on an unprecedented scale, how do we recapture that far-sighted vision? Prof. Thomas Suddendorf, co-author of The Invention of Tomorrow 'This is a war book. It’s about the struggle for a view of time that gives us a chance of survival. It’s immaculately researched, splendidly written and an antidote to despair.' Prof. Lewis Dartnell, author of The Knowledge ‘Hope-filled and revelatory … Beautifully readable and scholarly, rich and personal, this book shows how, to leave a robust legacy for the future, we need to overcome our bias for the present.’

As a journalist, I often encounter and deploy the date 2100. It’s a milestone year frequently cited in climate change news reports, stories about future technologies and science fiction. But it’s so far ahead, clouded with so many possibilities, that the route we will take to get there is difficult to see. I rarely consider that, like my daughter, millions of people alive today will be there as 2100 arrives, inheriting the century my generation will leave behind. All the decisions we make, for better and worse, will be theirs to live with. And these descendants will have their own families: hundreds of millions of people not yet born, most of whom you or I will never meet.

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For example, in 2014 the artist Katie Paterson began building The Future Library. Once a year, authors such as Margaret Atwood submit manuscripts to the Library that will not be read until the year 2114. Their books will be printed on paper made from 1,000 trees growing in a special forest called Nordmaka, near Oslo in Norway. The philosophical argument for investing in measures to protect the wellbeing of future generations can also be framed, simplistically, by imagining a set of scales, with everybody alive today on one side, and every unborn person on the other. Today’s population of 7.7 billion is a lot – but it is small when you weigh it against everybody on Earth who will ever call themselves human, along with all their achievements. If Homo sapiens (or the species we evolve into) endures for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, that becomes a humongous number of lives to consider. Trillions of families, relationships, births; countless moments of potential joy, love, friendship and tenderness. However, that does not mean our timeviews cannot be coloured, swayed or even diminished. Every day, we are exposed to a barrage of temporal stresses: shortsighted targets, salient distractions and near-term temptations. When these combine with the psychological habits we inherited from our ancestors, a longer perspective can recede from view. Every day, we are exposed to a barrage of temporal stresses What these thinkers from myriad fields share is a simple idea: that the longevity of civilisation depends on us extending our frame of reference in time – considering the world and our descendants through a much longer lens. What if we could be altruistic enough to care about people we might never live to see? And if so, what will it take to break out of our short-termist ways?