1 April 2023. Time | Science books
Long-mindedness: stepping back to look at time’s arc // Five of the best literary science books
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1: Long-mindedness: stepping back to look at time’s arc
Richard Fisher’s book The Long View: A Field Guide was published this week—my copy seems still to be in the post—but to mark the occasion Richard published on his blog an interesting lexicon of phrases about what he calls “long-terminology”. Well, you can see what he just did there.
This isn’t just about neologisms for their own sake. The argument for why we need such a lexicon is pretty straightforward:
After all, if we lack the language to talk about the long-term, then we’re less likely to think about it.
(Wood engraving by Luke Blades and Jenna Peters. Photo via Richard Fisher. Story here)
The four examples in the post are ‘time-blinkered’, ‘temporal stresses’, ‘temporal habits’, and ‘long-minded’. The first and last of these seem most interesting to me in terms of their effects, one negative, one positive.
'Time-blinkered’ refers to
unwitting, invisible short-termism: a lack of awareness of long-term consequences and responsibilities that’s so hidden from view that it barely gets mentioned... It is a trait that has become so embedded in modern life that people are not even aware it’s there. Identifying the causes is, I believe, crucial if we want to discover a longer view.
Reading this I was struck by a couple of connections. The first was to the idea of ‘slow violence’, Rob Nixon’s idea which speaks to environmental damage or social damage done by the slow accretion of change. (Someone seems to have uploaded his whole book online).
The second was Peter Drucker’s idea of ‘the future that has already happened’—changes that are already in motion that will have effects sooner or later. (From memory he uses the example of the doubling of the income of black American households between 1946 and 1961, which then shaped political, cultural, and economic change).1
'Long-minded’ is the antithesis of this.
Long-mindedness, to me, means stepping back and seeing where we sit on time’s long arc: learning from the deep lessons of history, as well as nurturing and maintaining an awareness of the impacts of actions on the future.
It also complements present-mindedness: which means to consciously and mindfully focus on the moment when it matters, whether that is to tackle urgent crises or simply enjoy life’s pleasures. Unlike time-blinkered thinking, this is a positive form of short-termism. After all, if we thought long-term all the time, we’d miss out on what matters now.
As he says in the piece, he used to use ‘long-termist’ to describe what he now calls ‘long-mindedness’. But unfortunately the world ‘long-termist’ has been captured by the ‘effective altruists’, a group with a very particular group with a very ideological view of how we should approach our orientation to the future.
(Even the name is loaded, of course, distinguishing the smart and well-considered “effective” altruists from all of us other poor saps who are completely “ineffective” in our altruism. It’s enough to make you stop giving at all.)
As it happens, Fisher also has a long article in Vox taking the effective altruists to task for one of the fundamental tenets of their worldview: that we can’t help future generations if we’re busy helping present generations. Not to gloss his argument, but he’s not impressed.
EA longtermists propose that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time — and in its strongest form , it becomes the key moral priority. This apparently zero-sum framing — present needs versus future needs — may go some way to explain why longtermism has attracted so much controversyin recent months… In the eyes of critics, longtermist philosophy would seem to prioritize the aggregate well-being of 100 trillion-plus hypothetical people in the future over the actual living, breathing 8 billion people alive today.
It’s a rich article, and looks to me as if it brings to life some of the range of ideas that I’m expecting to see in the book when it does arrive. One of the most interesting aspects to me is that he’s taken time to explore futures thinking—long mindedness, if you like, in a range of cultures. It turns out that there’s not an either/or tradeoff between the future and the present:
Encountering all these different perspectives has shown me that taking the long view can and should be plural and democratic. And crucially, they demonstrate that extending one’s circle of concern to tomorrow’s generations needn’t mean prioritizing the future above all. If anything, I’ve discovered that taking a longer view can often lend greater meaning to life in the present: offering perspective and hope amid crisis and difficulty, and a source of energy, autonomy, and guidance when it’s needed.
Fisher has been releasing a whole lexicon of words on time into the wilds on Twitter, one a day, at the hashtag #longterminology. Each has come with a few words about their origin. Over the last few days, these have included ‘deep time’, ‘industrial time’, ‘environmental time’, ‘timescapes’ and ‘future fossils’.
Here’s the tweet for the last of these:
2: Five of the best literary science books
The Five Books site has a piece about the finalists in this year’s E.O. Wilson/PEN Literary Science awards. Fortunately for them, there were five finalists. Taken together I think they say something about the sorts of questions that we’re asking ourselves as a society at the moment. So I’m just going to add a short description of each book and then pull out some of the comments about each from the interview that Five Books’ Deputy Editor Cal Flynn did with the chair of the judging panel, David Hu.
Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey by Florence Williams
Heartbreak won the award, and Hu describes it as an “amazing book”, partly because it is a personal book about going through a divorce, which doesn’t seem like a subject for science—even when put as “falling in and out of love”. But there’s lots of science in it:
She cites some really amazing studies of hormones, psychological tests, the science of why it hurts so much to be broken up with, and how evolution has made this happen. We’re meant to stay together long enough to make the next generation... And some of the science stories are really memorable. She talks about ‘the hot sauce test’, which gauges how vindictive people can be to each other.
This is a real study, by the way, and it turns out (who knew?) that men tend to be much more vindictive than women. Unlike many science books, it also has a clear narrative, and is hilarious in parts. And also short, which is usually a virtue in a book.
Vagina Obscura, by Rachel E. Gross
Unsurprisingly, Vagina Obscura is about female reproduction, and about some of the unsung women who opened issues of female health. She also discusses the inherent sexism in accounts of reproduction:
Well, if you were educated the way I was, you learn that sperm are on this voyage to meet the egg. It’s like a Western cowboy. There’s a damsel in distress and it goes to find her. This book turns that on its head. It says, actually, the vagina came first. Males are just trying to keep up. It’s like: which came first, the chicken or the egg? The penis or the vagina? Well, the vagina definitely came first.
Sounds Wild and Broken, by David George Haskell
Sounds Wild and Broken is about aural landscapes. Many animal communicate by sound, often in frequencies that humans can’t hear. The oceans are also connected by sound conduits—Haskell calls them ‘deep sound channels’. Whales can communicate for hundreds of miles by singing in these channels:
One part that really stuck with me was how sound and human health are related. If you hear sounds above a certain level, your heartbeat will go up and your stress levels will go up. Some of this is unconscious. So it made me think about the sound levels around me, and how a lot of underrepresented communities often have highways built right next to them... The use of sound to oppress under-represented groups was sobering and eye-opening.
An Immense World, by Ed Yong
An Immense World has a related theme, of the “sensory bubble” that all creatures have—the umwelt. Different animals have different umwelts: humans can only see a particular set of light frequencies, and can’t see ultraviolet or infrared, but other animals can:
There are other senses too that we don’t have. Like some animals are able to sense electromagnetic fields. That’s how they can migrate long distances. It’s why hammerhead sharks have that hammerhead, it’s a bit like a metal detector... We sometimes see animals as being lower down on the evolutionary tree, but the reality is that animals have evolved to the exact state that they need. That might be being able to see and hear only a very small number of things is enough so that they can propagate their species.
Big Bang of Numbers, by Manil Suri
Big Bang of Numbers is a maths book which explains why we have the numbers and the maths that we have. All cultures have simple number sets (one, two, three, four etc) but it took a while to invent zero, which is a bit abstract. But once you start adding or subtracting numbers you need to have zero:
There’s this question: is math invented or discovered? I think from this book, you get that it is discovered. It’s natural that we are going to come up with this system; it’s like carbon or oxygen, waiting to be discovered, one of the periodic table of elements. For example, if you have zero, you then have negative numbers. Once you invent multiplication, division follows, and you naturally have fractions.
There’s much more in the whole piece. I learned quite a lot of quirky science snippets from it.
Other writing: Music and Spies
I’ve been writing a series of posts at the Salut! Live blog looking back at this year’s Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow. I mentioned the first one, on the violinist Duncan Chisholm, a few weeks ago. The others cover Transatlantic Sessions, the Glaswegian songwriter Jim McLean, some of the new voices (new to me), and the American band Bonny Light Horseman.
You can dip into the whole series here.
And here’s a track by the Bonny Light Horseman.
I also posted a piece on Mick Herron’s novel Slow Horses on my Around the Edges blog, even though I’m probably the last person in Britain to read the book:
Herron’s books are often compared to those of John Le Carre, although I don’t see much evidence that he has Le Carre’s inside knowledge of the spy services. But you don’t really need that any more, now that Five and Six are part of the elaborate and performative security theatre that has enveloped Western democracies since the end of the Cold War... What Herron does have is a sharp eye for the way that large organisations work, or don’t work—part of the plot here turns on an HR file that should have been destroyed.
My friend and former colleague Chad Wollen sent me a sharp comment on LinkedIn after I’d posted it: that the spy genre normally trades on betrayal, but that Mick Herron’s series was about loyalty.
j2t#441
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Of course, even after this had happened, average household incomes for black American families were still some way short of those of white American families.