Short-Term Goals: Human-beings have always suffered from its tightly constrained time horizons. We are extremely good at working out how to hunt and kill the next mammoth, but not at asking ourselves what will happen when the last mammoth is killed.
WHY IS IT that nothing seems to work anymore? Problems
assail us at both the local and the global level but there are no solutions.
Politicians talk. World leaders gather – as they did last week in Brisbane for
the G20 meeting – and , still, we are no better off.
How is that human ingenuity can place an object on a comet
travelling faster than a bullet half-a-billion kilometres from Planet Earth,
but is unable to protect the helpless populations of West Africa from the Ebola
virus?
Human-beings obviously possess the smarts to solve their
problems. Why, then, do they not possess the will?
The anthropologists tell us that the answer lies in the
human species’ tightly constrained time horizons. We’re extremely good at
working out how to hunt and kill the next mammoth, but not at asking ourselves
what will happen when the last mammoth is killed.
Despite its obvious shortcomings, humanity’s short-term
thinking remains deeply imbedded. Indeed, the idea of living in the moment has
been identified by humanity’s greatest religious teachers as the only sensible
response to the reality of our mortality.
“Consider the lilies of the field,” said Jesus of Nazareth,
“how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you,
that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these ….. Take
therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the
things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Of course, in 30AD neither Jesus, his disciples, the
Mediterranean world, nor even the planet itself, was faced with the twin
threats of anthropogenic global warming and imminent resource depletion.
Galilee and Judea were famed for their bountiful harvests. So long as the sun
rose, the rain fell and the Jordan flowed, what need had men to take thought
for the things of the morrow?
There is much to be said for this approach, because when set
against the impossibly long perspectives of geological time our lives are,
indeed, ridiculously short. In the planet’s gaze, the entire span of the human
species’ existence is no more than the flutter of an eyelid. Were we, through
our invincible short-termism, to engineer our own extinction, Mother Earth
would barely stir. (Other than to breathe a sigh of relief!)
And yet, even within the scope of their own brief lifespans,
our forebears displayed considerably more perspicacity than the cluster of
generations inhabiting the world of today.
The evidence of these previous generations’ future focus
lies all around us. How else should we describe the parks and botanical gardens
of our towns and cities which our great-grandparents bequeathed to us, if not
in the felicitous phrases of Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar? All these things “hath left them you, and to your heirs for ever;
common pleasures, to walk abroad and recreate yourselves.”
And should we not, likewise, give thanks to the politicians
and planners who made possible the great hydro-electric schemes of the
twentieth century? Without their faith in the future of this little nation, the
skies of its major cities would be as befouled with the smog of fossil-fuelled
power generation as Beijing’s.
And all those streets of sturdy state houses? How was it
possible for a country laid prostrate by the most savage economic depression in
the history of Capitalism to somehow summon up the resources to build houses
for its homeless citizens? And why, if it was possible for the politicians of
the 1930s to make housing affordable, is it impossible for today’s politicians
to do the same?
Something has gone out of us. Some vital quality that the
human-beings who built the Parthenon, the Coliseum, Chartres Cathedral,
Brooklyn Bridge, and even our own Benmore Dam, possessed in abundance.
Yes, their eyes were fixed upon the future; but that was
only the necessary first step. To look ahead at all, the inhabitants of the
present must first believe that what they value most about their society –
their civilisation – will not die with them; that it will go on into the
future. Believing that, who would not hasten to construct the economic and
cultural infrastructure that gives their most cherished values life? Why else
would anyone build the Parthenon? Or the Benmore Dam?
The Course Of Empire - Desolation. Painting by Thomas Cole, 1836.
Which can only mean that, if nothing works, and if our
problems have become insoluble, then humanity’s ‘civilisation gene’ has somehow
been switched off. Whatever peculiar mutation it was that rendered human-beings
capable of thinking beyond the next mammoth, is fast becoming singularly
maladaptive to the life-world of twenty-first century homo-sapiens.
Perhaps it’s our technology that’s undone us? Perhaps the
emerging cyber-human has no need for pasts or futures? Perhaps, finally, we are
approaching Nirvana – that concluding moment of human evolution when sufficient
unto the day is the selfie thereof.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
18 November 2014.
