LISTEN. We finish Naomi Klein's latest "impassioned manifesto" today in Environmental Ethics. She really is, as the blurb for On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal says, "at her most prophetic and philosophical" here.
Being philosophical about climate change in this moment means more than just being pensive and reflective about our place in nature. It could (but for Klein does not) mean being an Ecopragmatist like Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. He "sees everything in terms of solvable design problems" and thinks environmentalists "should take up the tools and discipline of engineering" and "learn how to manage the planet's global-scale natural infrastructure." Klein is rightly skeptical of our ability to geo-engineer and "manage" without incurring devastating unforeseen disruptions of natural systems.
But Klein is on Brand's Long Now Foundation wavelength, in her contempt for our culture's blithe disdain for the future in our perpetual now of personal (pardon the pun) branding and consumerism. A broader view might liberate us from the "never-ending present" of social media and shopping.
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years...Speaking of shopping...
Guess who's bankrolling the Clock?
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. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis :
"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."
Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should 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. Such icons reframe the way people think.
And that's Klein's message too: if we can really reframe the way people think, we can have a Green New Deal. Happy Days can be here again. Her "seven minute postcard from the future" and its sequel give a glimpse of what a reframed world might look like. In AOC's narration, "we didn't just change the infrastructure. We changed how we did things... we stopped being so scared of the future. We stopped being scared of each other..." What did someone say about having nothing to fear but fear itself?
The power of art in the old New Deal to reframe the way people thought about a vigorous public response to the crisis of their time, under the auspices of the WPA, offers inspiration to ours. We too have an opportunity to "go bold rather than give up."
So perhaps, class, we'd like to take a look next week at Brand's Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World's Slowest Computer and Michael Chabon's "The Omega Glory"?
When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now, he listened very carefully, and we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But in having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free.
Is it any wonder that the acclaimed litterateur Chabon became the first showrunner for Picard?
Engage!
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