The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time

Product Information

Following their discussions in Sweden and afterwards, the Trajectories group concluded that the ‘status quo’ path would be a pretty unlikely scenario once you get to longer-term timescales. “Instead, civilisation is likely to either end catastrophically or expand dramatically,” they write. Richard Fisher takes us from the boardrooms of Japan – home to some of the world’s oldest businesses – to an Australian laboratory where an experiment started a century ago is still going strong. He examines the psychological biases that discourage the long view, and talks to the growing number of people from the worlds of philosophy, technology, science and the arts who are exploring smart ways to overcome them. How can we learn to widen our perception of time and honour our obligations to the lives of those not yet born? Marcia Bjornerud, author of Timefulness 'A compassionate, beautifully considered meditation on how we think about the future, and why that needs to change.' Extrapolating these patterns and behaviours into the future allowed them to map out four possible long-term trajectories for our species:

Michael Bond, author of Wayfinding 'Urgent and profound. Richard Fisher's The Long View shows how thinking differently about time can change the world. The future begins with how we imagine it. This is essential reading for anyone who wishes to be a good ancestor.' There’s also a growing body of psychological research showing techniques for achieving a longer view. One of the most promising is perspective-taking, where people are asked to step into the shoes of past or future generations to imagine their point of view. Researchers have found this is more effective than showing people data or abstract information, encouraging cross-generational empathy that can reduce psychological distance on issues such as future climate change.

Join our newsletter

It is daunting to contemplate how we as individuals might act with kindness and foresight for unborn people. To realise that we are just one in a chain of generations, and accept that while we will one day be forgotten, we owe an ethical obligation to our descendants to leave a better world than the one we inherited ourselves. I find it is difficult enough extrapolating how my small acts as an individual might affect the wider world and its population today, let alone hundreds of years into the future. A captivating guide... The Long View is simply crammed with interesting ideas. This is a beautifully turned, calmly persuasive but urgent book.’ And so, I thought, this is where I can start: as a parent. As my daughter grows up, what I am sure I can do is try my hardest to widen the horizons, empathy and potential of a little girl who can’t yet imagine a world beyond life as a 10-year-old. A girl who will become a teenager, an adult, a grandmother, my closest descendant in a chain of generations, who, just maybe, will live long enough to watch the start of the 22nd Century unfold. Or there's Longplayer, a musical score that will play for 1,000 years. It is an eerie, but calming, composition seemingly intended to evoke a feeling of religiosity in its listeners. The installation can be heard at a lighthouse in London where you’ll also find 234 Tibetan singing bowls used in live concerts to accompany the score. There are also listening posts across the world and an online stream.

The music producer Brian Eno was in a run-down corner of New York, on the way to a glamorous dinner party. More and more,” he would write in his notebook, “I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.” For me, this begins with my daughter, Grace, imagining her path to the next century. She will be 86 years old in 2100. I find it remarkable to consider that there are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us – and when I do so, my sense of time and possibility opens up a little more. There are tens of millions of citizens of the next century already living among us How do we avoid sleepwalking into acts that harm future generations, or even worse, precipitating a catastrophe that could threaten our existence as a species? How are enough minds changed to prioritise a longer-term view when so many present-day pressures nudge us towards short-termism?

Sponsored

Rowan Hooper, author of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars ‘A soaring hymn to all that might lie in the future; alongside the diverse and beautiful ways to think about it. Overflowing with wisdom and insight.’

But we also are almost certain to face serious existential risks along the way. Natural disasters have pruned life on Earth continually – this much we know. What worries the Trajectories researchers more is that in the 20th and early 21st Century we've added a whole host of additional human-made risks into the mix too – from nuclear armageddon to AI apocalypse to anthropogenic climate change. Outside the cloisters, daily life was mostly cyclical. The seasons turned; plants sprang up and fell down again, just like humans. But by the 17th century, says Fisher, change was in the air. Linear time started to become the commercial and cognitive norm. The old cycles were the preserve of farmers. The idea of progress made its way into life and thought, and a future that was different from the past became imaginable. The practice of statistical prognostication began. Life insurance was sold in Amsterdam. Hope-filled and revelatory … Beautifully readable and scholarly, rich and personal, this book shows how, to leave a robust legacy for the future, we need to overcome our bias for the present.’ Rowan Hooper, author of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

About the Speaker

Few books can claim to shake your perspective on life, but The Long View does exactly that … a landmark book that could help to build a much brighter future for many generations to come.’ David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect It is a tremendously powerful skill,” Suddendorf told BBC Future’s Claudia Hammond in 2016. “We can imagine situations like what we’re going to do tomorrow, next week, where we’re going to have a holiday, what career path to pursue, and we can imagine alternative versions of those. And we can evaluate each of them in terms of their likelihood and desirability.” A wise, humane book laced with curiosity and hope. It will open your mind and horizons – and leave you giddy at the prospect of all that we may yet become.’ Tom Chatfield, author of How to Think The philosophical argument for investing in measures to protect the wellbeing of future generations can also be framed, simplistically, by imagining a set of scales, with everybody alive today on one side, and every unborn person on the other. Today’s population of 7.7 billion is a lot – but it is small when you weigh it against everybody on Earth who will ever call themselves human, along with all their achievements. If Homo sapiens (or the species we evolve into) endures for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, that becomes a humongous number of lives to consider. Trillions of families, relationships, births; countless moments of potential joy, love, friendship and tenderness. 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. It is self-evident that most modern governments and corporations are short-termist and that this is dangerous. Read any newspaper.

Fisher discusses the root causes of short-termism, with a focus on capitalism and politics. In the case of capitalism, Fisher refers to quarterly reporting and misaligned personal targets as two contributing factors to the increased reliance of firms on short-term goals. Firms are guided by this three month timeframe to appease investors, sacrificing opportunities to pursue long term objectives such as R&D spending, advertising and patents. As well as diagnosing our temporal bias for short-term thinking, Fisher provides ways we can bring our ‘present’ and ‘future’ selves closer together, so we are less psychologically distant from the long view. This includes incorporating ‘perspective thinking’, which in short refers to viewing life in the mindset of a future being.

First night reviews

Richard Fisher takes us from the boardrooms of Japan - home to some of the world's oldest businesses - to an Australian laboratory where an experiment started a century ago is still going strong. He examines the psychological biases that discourage the long view, and talks to the growing number of people from the worlds of philosophy, technology, science and the arts who are exploring smart ways to overcome them. How can we learn to widen our perception of time and honour our obligations to the lives of those not yet born? Culture forms the operating system for our society,” they write. “It’s foundational to the way science, politics, economics and technology develop. It shapes how we feel, how we empathise and how we connect with each other. It provides the reflective space to navigate complexity and uncertainty.”