The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

(The world’s best in science fiction is the Eaton Collection of some four hundred thousand volumes at the University of California Riverside Library.)

Now that we have progress so rapid that it can be observed from year to year, no one calls it progress. People call it change, and rather than yearn for it, they brace themselves against its force.

How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? How do we make the taking of long-term responsibility inevitable?

One canon I would like to see established is that of the great textbooks. Just knowing the current list—The Cell in microbiology, The Art of Computer Programming, Renfrew’s Archaeology—would enable anyone to pursue top-level education on their own. All the best textbooks in combination would nearly add up to Lovelock’s primer of civilization.

There are two ways to make systems fault-tolerant: One is to make them small, so that correction is local and quick; the other is to make them slow, so that correction has time to permeate the system. When you proceed too rapidly with something mistakes cascade, whereas when you proceed slowly the mistakes instruct. Gradual, incremental projects en

The ambition and folly of the Clock/Library is to reframe human endeavor, and to do so not with a thesis but with a thing. All this thing can do is give permission to think long term.

From the perspective of the sacred, history is just one damned thing after another. At best it consists almost entirely of bad news. At worst it is sin. In any case it is illusion. The only good news, the only redemption, the only reality abides in transcendent timelessness, in the eternal. Eternity is the opposite of a long time.

While we discount on a sliding scale both the future and the past, the Clock does neither. Far future and near future are the same; distant past and recent past have equal value. In times of turbulence the Clock emanates calm. In calm times it reminds us that no equilibrium is stable for long.

Education is intellectual infrastructure; so is science. Very high yield, but delayed payback. Hasty societies that cannot span these delays will lose out over time to societies that can. On the other hand, cultures too hidebound to allow education to advance at infrastructural pace also lose out.

Judaism says, “The Messiah is going to come, and that’s the end of history”; Christianity says, “The Messiah is going to come back, and that’s the end of history”; Islam says, “The Messiah came; history is irrelevant.”