A moment to embrace the present + publication week updates
A moment to embrace the present + publication week updates
The book launch, new articles, podcasts and reviews.. plus a preview of Part I
You’re reading The Long View: A Field Guide, a newsletter about long-term thinking.
Hello,
We want to kick off this newsletter by giving a resounding thank you to all of the people who attended The Long View book launch in London last week.
One of the things I learnt while writing this book is that, perhaps counterintuitively, taking the long view is not necessarily about escaping the present. After all, if we spent all our mental time in the past or future, we’d miss out on life’s most enjoyable and meaningful moments. Last Thursday, celebrating with friends, family and colleagues, was one of those moments for me.
It was a wonderful evening, and I’m so grateful for the support from people who came along – as well as all of you who have been buying the book and telling others about it all over the world.
Feature in Big Think adapted from The Long View
This article, an extract from the book, explores the role of “existential hope” in the long view. It describes how existential hope is not about escapism, utopias or pipe dreams, but about preparing the ground: making sure that opportunities for a better world don’t pass us by.
However daunting and unknowable the future is, we do not press into it alone.
Review in Literary Review, by Charles Foster
“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. Richard Fisher dissects the reasons for our short-termism, concluding that a shift to long-termism is not only vital but possible as well.”
Article on BBC.com about The benefits of ‘deep time thinking’
The writer John McPhee, who popularised the term deep time in the 1980s, argued – perhaps pessimistically – that human beings may not be capable of grasping the concept of deep time to its full extent. "The human consciousness may have begun to leap and boil some sunny day in the Pleistocene, but the race by and large has retained the essence of its animal sense of time," he wrote in his influential book Basin and Range. "People think in five generations – two ahead, two behind – with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice."
However, while it is true that million-year chronologies may be beyond our direct sensory faculties, that doesn't mean we cannot try to extend the mind over thousands, millions or even billions of years. As the artist Katie Paterson told me: "It's a mind-bending concept thinking about things that happened millions, billions of years into the past. And I can understand that some people might find that pretty difficult. Oddly, I never have. I've always just been absolutely delighted by this idea that we've got the capacity to know and understand or imagine what's come before us. I find it really inspiring and eye-opening and moving, and it gives me a kind of rootedness."
Podcast conversation on New Scientist weekly
Richard speaks with Rowan Hooper…on the site of an ancient barrow
A flavour of The Long View: Part I
With The Long View now available for purchase we wanted to offer a preview what to expect from Part I. Hopefully, it will entice you to order the book, but regardless, we are eager to share some excerpts!
The goal of The Long View is to understand why the world is so blinkered to the long arc of time, and how we can change that perspective.
But the book opens with a more personal story:
This personal relationship with time is a thread that runs throughout The Long View. Through our generational ties – past, present and future – it’s possible to extend one’s perspective far beyond the moment, even beyond one’s own lifespan.
However, as the book explores in Part I, there are myriad external cultural influences that can shorten or lengthen our timeviews – and they are not always obvious.
To set the scene, the first chapter – “A Brief History of Long Time” – tours through some of the major milestones in humanity’s temporal history by posing and answering the question: How did our forebears think about time? Beginning in classical antiquity, we encounter how the ancients thought about past, present and future. They had the mental ability to remember the past and look ahead, but did so in different ways, often invoking mysticism or conferring with augurs to study bird behaviour, or auspices, for guidance. (In Latin, the word ‘auspices’ essentially means ‘looking for fortunate signs in birds’.)
Centuries later, many people’s timeviews arguably became cyclical, shaped by the rise and fall of kingdoms, or the seasons. Or they were influenced by the religious expectation of an imminent end of the world: an apocalyptic time perspective.
Closer to the present day, scientific discoveries would extend perspectives into the deep future and erode biblical accounts of the age of the Earth. A more linear view emerged. However, that wasn’t the end of the story.
One conclusion we can draw from looking at historic timeviews is that people’s temporal perspectives have stretched and contracted throughout the ages, due to external forces – responding to commerce, moments of crisis and conflict, and the spectre of authoritarianism.
And these forces have only grown stronger in the present: the time-blinkered age. To be time-blinkered is to be short-termist without awareness; the inability to see the pressures and habits that trap us in the moment.
Across the following chapters in Part I, the book explores how people’s timeviews are being shaped today by so-called temporal stresses – particularly in the worlds of business and economics, and governance and media. The pressures within these realms of modern life have supercharged short-termist tendencies and exacerbated risks far beyond those faced by our ancestors.
In sum, Part I of the book is about how we got to where we stand today – our current time crisis – taking in stories of hungry Romans, far-sighted business leaders, exploding cars, 1,000-year-old companies, and why snowstorms cause politicians so much grief. And it offers insights and guidance for how to spot the hidden time-shortening forces in your own life and work too.
Fortunately, we do not stop the story there… We’ll share previews of the rest of the book in future newsletters.
The Long View is finally available for purchase! You can look for a copy at your local book shop or you can get it here from other retailers, as well as the e-book and Audible version (read by Richard!) If you’d like 25% off the cover price and live in the UK, visit the Headline shop, and use this code at checkout: LONGVIEW25
+ That wooden version of the book in the picture? Here’s the story behind how it was made.
best wishes,
Richard & Xander - The Long View team
Previous editions of The Long View: A Field Guide
Microcenturies, Methuselahs and Musks: 35 new ways to measure time
Which living thing is the best 'mascot' for long-term thinking?