The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

The Europe-America dialogue is not a problem; it is one form of solution. While Europe specializes in deep continuity with occasional equally deep discontinuity, America specializes in perpetual petty turmoil. America provides the stimulation in the arrangement, Europe provides the wisdom. America is comic, Europe tragic. Together they make great t

Mechanical clocks were first invented for monasteries in the late thirteenth century and only later ordered the life of towns. The miniature clock strapped to your wrist is the direct descendent of European monastic practice. It was the monks who taught us to keep time.

The difference between the two examples—dirigible ports versus ecological conservation—is a great demonstration of the difference between long-term planning and long-term responsibility. I agree that the former is futile, but that’s no excuse to give up on the latter. The difference is between trying to control the future and trying to give it the

You need the space of continuity to have the confidence not to be afraid of revolutions. You can always improve things as long as you’re prepared to wait.

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It would be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment.

At any time the several “probable” things that might occur in the future are vastly outnumbered by the countless near-impossible eventualities, which are so many and individually so unlikely that it is not worth the effort of futurists or futurismists to examine and prepare for even a fraction of them. Yet one of those innumerable near-impossibilit

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.”

Burning libraries is a profound form of murder, or if self-inflicted, suicide. It does to cultural continuity—and hence safety—what destroying species and habitats does to nature’s continuity, and hence safety. Burning the Amazon rain forest burns the world’s richest library of species. The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation .

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.

The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with the way the differently paced parts affect each other. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls s